Southern California
Marina del Rey through San Diego
After we rounded Point Conception, spent a night in Santa Barbara, and moved on to Marina del Rey, we felt like the pressure to get south had lessened somewhat. With the last major cape on the California coast behind us, we expected the weather to improve, being balmier, less windy, and with significantly reduced wave heights. We still had significant distance to go though, before arriving in San Diego.
The main hurdle sailing south from Marina del Rey to Newport Beach is getting past Long Beach. Long Beach is one of the busiest shipping ports in the country, and in order to cross it north to south, you must cross the shipping lanes that the massive container ships and tankers use to get in and out of the harbor.
Sailing in San Francisco, especially in the South Bay, we had lots of experience dealing with container ships. In fact, during one of our first classes, Donna was doing person overboard drills (POB) in the tiny Andrews 21 we were sailing, just the instructor and I the only other people in the boat. During a POB drill, the instructor throws something into the water at random — a life jacket or a floating cushion — and the person driving the boat has to work out how to get back around to pick it up. On this day, he had just thrown the cushion overboard, when a containership that had been at anchor started to steam out under the bridge. After missing the first attempt, we went around to make a second, heading straight towards (but not crossing) the path of the container ship to pick up our hapless “victim.” The container ship continued to pick up speed, and by the time we grabbed the cushion from the water and turned around, we were only some fifty yards from the ship, which towered over us as it slid by, noiseless except for the steady deep bass thrum of its engines.
We had no such close encounters in Long Beach though, as all the commercial traffic was either anchored, or simply drifting in the bay.
Eventually, we made our way past Huntington Beach, and into Newport Beach Harbor, arriving at sunset as we slid slowly back through the long harbor channel to the free overnight anchorage. As we entered from sea, a pair of birds of prey landed on our spreaders, apparently enjoying the view and the ride from their high perch.
By the time we reached our anchorage, it was fully night, and very dark. The harbor was full of little Duffies and other small pleasure craft. There must have been at least five we passed that looked like bachelorette parties, full of young women drinking and yelling “Woooooo!” as they went past. We dropped our anchor, and had to pull it up and drop a second time, because the unlit buoys marking the anchorage were a bit hard to see in the dark.
In the morning, after breakfast, we pulled up anchor again, and headed off for San Diego immediately, not quite sure where we would land. We’ve been wanting to visit our friends Safy and Marina since we planned to leave San Francisco, and the closest harbor to their house is in Oceanside. We were being pushed by the weather again, though, as a “bomb cyclone” and an atmospheric river were currently pummeling Northern California, threatening to send heavy rain and gale-force winds south, which always push up large seas.
After calling Oceanside on the VHF, and verifying that they did have a berth for us for the night, we also found out that we’d need to clear out in a day, and given the weather, we chose to pass on to San Diego, to avoid needing to head out into heavy waves after the storm had passed.
After rounding Point Loma, which stands guard over the San Diego Harbor entrance, we slowly picked our way down the channel into San Diego in the dark, trying to distinguish the lights on the navigational buoys from the background of city lights. We also had to avoid the many military installations lining the channel, each of which is patrolled by small gunboats.
As we headed down towards the first major turn to starboard, a big commercial ship loomed up out of the darkness, its lights suddenly popping out of the background of city lights, much closer than you would expect. As we didn’t have time to cross the channel in front of this ship, we slowly headed just out of the channel into the patrolled military waters, allowing the ship to pass, then slowly sliding right back to our favored track on the edge of the channel. The patrol boats slowly paced us, poised to come wave us off, but apparently satisfied that we were just doing our best to both avoid a collision, and stay out of their territorial waters.
Once we arrived at our designated anchorage, tired from a dawn-to-much-after-dusk day, we dropped our anchor, flubbing the first attempt, and almost missing the second, as our anchor refused to grab as it slid across the bottom, until I threatened to bring it up again. Feeling a bit embarrassed by our performance, we went to bed.
In the morning, while chatting with the boat next to us, we found out that they had to drop four times to get their anchor to hold! Maybe we didn’t do so badly after all. We inflated the dingy, and went into town for lunch, signing up at the local yacht club to use their laundry and dinghy dock.
Life in the anchorage has been low key, or at least, it would be if we didn’t have so much to do to get ready to leave for Mexico. Small boat chores, maintenance, laundry, provisioning, getting final Covid booster shots, and of course socializing with our neighbors takes up most of our time. Donna is still working a bit, with a few remaining clients.
This coming weekend will be busy, as we get through our final preparations for departure to Mexico. We have two crew arriving on Sunday, and we plan to head out on Monday, expecting to take about two weeks to arrive in Cabo San Lucas.
Thanks for reading this far! We’re off for Mexico tomorrow!
We’re likely not going to be in range for cell phone / internet reception again until we hit Cabo San Lucas, at the tip of the Baja peninsula, so this post will have to hold you over until then!
The Baja Ha Ha starts tomorrow at about 10AM Pacific, and we’ll be off then! Follow along on the trackers!
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Want to keep track of us?
We’ve added a couple of tracking links to the website, so now you can see where we are, pretty much up-to-the-minute! There are two links, one for a satellite tracking device we’ve set up through PredictWind, and the other a link to Marine Traffic, which posts transmissions from AIS, an automated system ships at sea use to notify others of where they are, to help avoid collisions.
You can always find the links at http://enchantedvoyage.substack.com/
Yew!!!!!!!!
Life is for living - ... and you (plural) are looking like you are doing a good job at it. ...It's seemingly amazing (in the beginning) how many things can go sideways - but there are generally a handful of tasks that once mastered and rehearsed will cover all but the 'Acts of God' which we are all / always subject to. ... like a dance or a musical piece - practice practice practice. ... eventually we successfully make all the possible mistakes and can move on from there (!!) .... and in the (mean) meantime it looks like the rewards are sufficient to keep you engaged - Peter's smile says it all. You (pl) look great. Carry on.