Uphill migration -- leg #1

Koan has begun her trek North. Motivated by NWS LOX's promise of glassy seas and complete lack of breeze, we made a mid-week bum rush W-NW towards Morro Bay. After a morning of hauling gas cans until my shoulders burned, and at least 4 copies of the same checklist floating around on the kitchen table, Kitty and I departed on time, noon sharp on Tuesday. Not a minute too soon, as Harbor Patrol would have been there to kick us out for slip fee non-payment if we'd stayed a minute longer!

We motored the whole way, at probably 2/3 throttle on our little Honda 5 hp, and did chores and generally got the boat ready for the night passage. We had some breeze, probably around 10 kts, in the mid-afternoon, then everything quieted down as we approached Point Conception. We rounded at 7:45pm, and continued on a straight line to Pt. Arguello. Half-way between the two we noticed what seemed like an unusually high concentration of boats (2!) around what looked to me like a workboat mooring. We turned on the VHF as we were passing abreast, only to be greeted by a Coast Guard notice to mariners informing us that what we were witnessing was in fact a barge in the process of sinking. Too cool! Kitty claims it changed shape as we went by. I'm not so sure, but in any case, very interesting. And *no* mention of it anywhere in the CG news today...



It got dark shortly after that, and we found ourselves wondering what was causing the eerie glow behind Pt Arguello. As we rounded we were treated to the otherworldly view of a Vandenberg vehicle assembly building fully lit up, with a perimeter of extremely bright lights, in the fog. As we rounded the point we had some, ahem, navigational doubts, so we switched to waypoint (instead of eyeball) navigation for the night. We left platform Irene to port, and then everything was completely dark. Our biggest worry was the possibility of snagging a crab pot and burning the engine or mangling the prop in the process, but we seemed to miss the ones we came to see by a good 10 feet every time. We eventually had dinner and switched to our night-time tethered-to-jacklines-when-on-deck system. We started 2-hour watch rotation at 11pm, with me on 11-1, 3-5, and Kitty 1-3, 3-7. By my 3am watch I was seriously sore from helming against the big rolly swell, so I brought out Otto, the Raymarine ST1000 autopilot, who basically helmed for the whole rest of the trip.

By 7am, when I came back on deck, we were close enough to Pt Buchon to see the shoreline, and Kitty said she'd seen all kinds of marine life during dawn. We had breakfast, I saw a whale, and we saw a bunch of sea otters as we approached Morro Bay, where we docked at MBYC around 9am Wednesday morning. We took empty tanks and a bunch of personal gear off the boat, and put her on a mooring, where she awaits us for the leg further North. All in all, we made it look easy :)

Weekend trip to Diablo anchorage

This weekend Kitty and I went for a short trip to Santa Cruz Island and back. The forecast had been for  not a lot of wind, so we had planned to arrive at the west end of the island, then sail east along the coast checking out the various anchorages. I was hoping to anchor at Lady's cove. It turned out that there was actually quite a lot of wind once we got within 5 miles of the island, probably close to 18 kts with 4 ft swells. We made landfall a bit east of the west end, then sailed wing-on-wing, past Cueva Valdez, which only had one boat, to Lady's, which was occupied by two large sailboats and a fishing boat, leaving no room for us. So we continued east to Diablo anchorage, which only had one other small boat anchored at one end, and stayed there.

On the first part of the sail to the island we only had about 10 kts of wind, so Kitty took the opportunity to test her aerial photography kite. The kite looks like this:

and then she added the camera on a rotating base, which looks like this:

We got lots of photos of the surface of the ocean, and a few cool ones of Koan, like these:

The anchoring was uneventful, and we had a very nice dinner. Unfortunately there was a lot of surge in the anchorage, and I didn't sleep very well in the rolling boat. But I woke up happy that we had not had any anchor alarms during the night.

The Sunday morning project was to test the launching of the dinghy from the foredeck. That wasn't a problem, and I paddled it around the cove to make sure it didn't take on any water.

I took some photos of Koan anchored:

Then Kitty took over the dinghy and I went snorkeling, and out on the beach to explore it, and to meet our neighbors:

After we dried off, we read a little, and then, when the wind really picked up (because we like maximum difficulty) we planned our de-anchoring and exit. We had lots of wind on the way back, so we kept the main reefed most of the time and still made 7 kts over ground. We made it back in 4 hrs, which is my personal best record so far!

Time lapse videos from the trip

During our recent sailing trip to Santa Cruz Island we had the use of Dan's Hero HD camera with a waterproof enclosure, so we took some time lapse photography series. The settings were for 720p every 30 seconds, and I compiled them at 1 frame per second at lower resolution.

The first time lapse is of our first morning at anchor. We're having breakfast and doodling around. The water's too cold to go snorkeling, so we're kind of boat-bound. I think that in these circumstances the boat is very much like a super comfy portaledge.



The second time lapse is of us motoring towards our next anchorage that afternoon. The island is to our left and we're checking out all the cool caves we're motoring by. A bit after the battery ran out things got interesting, as the wind kicked up right on our nose.



The third is of us sailing away from the island the day after, but after all the excitement of putting away the anchors and sailing through the windiest bit is done for. At some point in this time lapse we shake out the reef in the sail, as the wind drops, then switch to motoring when the wind dies completely.



The final video is on that same leg, when the wind comes back up, from the opposite direction, when we're about 5 miles offshore of Santa Barbara. At this point we have water or some other kind of gunk on the camera's enclosure, so the view is a little blurry.



This was my first experiment with time lapse, and I had a lot of fun. It saves battery power compared to video (i.e. you can get a longer time lapse series than you can shoot continuous video on the same amount of battery power) and it's better at showing the motion of the boat through the seascape around it. Since the Hero is mounted on a fixed point in the boat you lose all sense of the boat's side-to-side motion, which is considerable, but you can get that back by focusing on any object on the boat that's hanging, e.g. the gloves or a mug on the lifelines, or a line off the spreaders in the first video. Of course, unlike in video, there is no sound. I could've stuck a sound track on these, but I wanted to try them out on you raw first. What do you think? What stands out? Does it look like what you thought things would look like on a small boat?

Gear abuse

Because this was the Origo stove's first trip, I wanted to have a backup stove in case that didn't work. Also I was imagining an outside stove and an inside stove situation, so that if we felt like hanging out in the cockpit we wouldn't have to, you know, commute five feet into the cabin to check if the water's boiling. I don't know, explain it however you like! I was just over-prepared, as usual.

So I brought along my beloved pocket rocket, plus a hanging kit for a jetboil that I found on sale at some point. The hanging kit doesn't work properly for the pocket rocket, but, well, we're equipped with all sorts of fun things on board, including fancy $10/roll Monel bailing wire, essentially. So I wired the stove to the hanging bracket. The plan was to suspend it from the backstay like so:

So I did and I put a pot of water on it, and lit it and let it do its thing, until the pot came crashing down, and when I looked up at the stove I found that the skeleton had bent.

I think the way I suspended it had the skeleton a bit too close to the flame, and as it warmed up it became softer and it eventually warped. The good news is that I'm so strrrrong that I was able to bend it all back into shape. For what? The next experiment in gear abuse, I'm sure.

Thumbs up gear

Some of the new gear on the trip proved to be worth their weight in gold.

For example, the Origo 1500, equipped with potholders and sitting in a custom cabinet that I built for it, was a smashing success. People had warned me that alcohol stoves burn too cool and too sooty, propane is better, etc etc. Aside from filling the alcohol canister from a jerry can of alcohol, which was difficult and wasteful, we had no problems with the stove. We used a long-nosed lighter to start it, and it started and ran reliably, quietly and effectively. We had one $25 aluminum pressure cooker and a $10 aluminum percolator kettle, minus the percolator. The pressure cooker fit with the pot holders at max and the kettle with the pot holders at the minimum of their expansion range. Both worked beautifully, and we had no hesitation using the stove whenever we needed it -- partly a safety concern in a cold environment.

We had no problem using the iPad in all conditions with
the CaseLogic case.

One of our tech toys, the CaseLogic water resistant iPad case, got put through its paces and worked really well. Aside from paper charts, we wanted to use the iPad with iSailGPS to automatically plot our location on scanned charts. This setup worked really really well. The iPad acquires a satellite signal faster than any other GPS I've ever used, so it was really easy to pull it up to the cockpit and do our work on it without worrying about how much spray we had coming in at the time. The touch screen works well right through the case and the clarity is quite good. As a bonus, the case protects the iPad from scratches and also pads it a little, for when it gets knocked around.

Finally, we only had one chance to use the GoalZero Nomad 7 solar panel to charge the Hero HD's camera, and that was in cloudy conditions. The charging light stayed on, and indeed the battery got some charge, but we had low expectations in those conditions and we didn't log how long we charged it or how far it charged.

Thumbs down gear

Woohoo! We're back! We had an awesome time!

First off, some of what didn't work. We had two "exciting" gear failures and one that didn't surprise us at all.

The unsurprising one was a part failure on the new tiller. The old tiller has a metal "knee" that braces it against the rudder. It's for convenience, rather than necessary, since the tiller works just fine without it, but can chafe on a coaming. So the knee just keeps it off that coaming. I didn't want to remove the part from the old tiller and put it on the new, since I want to keep the old tiller as a backup. I don't know how to mill a metal one (that's the new project as a result of this), so I made one out of walnut wood impregnated with penetrating epoxy. It broke within minutes of sailing. Oh well! So Kitty taught me how to make some chafing gear to protect the tiller where it rubs on the coaming, and here it is:

The new chafing gear.

Otherwise, the new tiller was a huge thumbs up!

The other two gear failures were annoying and scary, respectively.

The most annoying one concerned WAG bags. These are a double-bag human waste disposal system, in which you pee and poop into an inner bag that contains a gelling powder, then wrap it all up in a leak-proof outer bag for packing out and disposal. We were planning to use these over a bucket for the trip, so we wouldn't have to have liquid waste on board, which can be tricky on a small boat that pitches around a lot. We had a dozen WAG bags that came with the boat, among which one had already been opened, presumably for inspection by the former owner. We used that one first and everything was fine. On the second day, when it came time to use a second, I discovered that the unopened WAG bag packages were a little different from the opened one. Those contained a biodegradable inner bag. However, their packaging, which was heat-sealed plastic, was not sealed all the way on all of them. So all of the inner bags had biodegraded from exposure to humidity. We had no inner bags, and the outer leak-proof bags were too small to use directly! Boo! We had to bucket and chuck it from that point on, which made us sad. So don't store WAG bags in humid places! WAG bag company, listen up: heat seal those packages! Quality control, baby!

The other gear failure was a little more disconcerting, rather than inconvenient. When we left the islands for the mainland it was blowing 20ish kts, with a big swell and we hadn't slept that night, so I thought tethering up to the boat was a good idea. When I got done cleaning up anchors after our departure I went back to the cockpit, and, as I was stretching and kind of re-arranging my chest harness, rrrrriiiip, it tore! I knew that chest harness was old, it looked pretty tired, but I was so mad at myself for not putting it to a serious test before trusting it. These chest harnesses are made of white nylon webbing, sewn around stainless steel hardware. The construction is very similar to that of a simple climbing harness without padding. But, where climbing harnesses are subject to abrasion and sunlight damage, sailing harnesses are subject to saltwater and sunlight damage. Well, apparently, this one was toast. I should point out that this is not the fault of the manufacturer, but squarely on my shoulders. I do not even remember where this harness came from, and I knew it was suspect, but, like I pull-test my climbing gear placements when the stance permits, I should have pull-tested this harness before trusting it. I switched to wearing a life jacket after that.

Taking off the torn harness.

Of the newly purchased gear we wanted to use on this trip, only one thing didn't work out. The DicaPac WP310 for my Canon S95 was ill-fitting, in spite of being the size recommended on the company's fitting guide. This resulted in a black halo around the pictures I took with it. Also, the silica pack they included was useless for keeping the interior from eventually fogging up. Thumbs down!

You can see the black halo from the ill-fitting lens barrel on
the DicaPac PW310 used with a Canon S95.

A bit about what worked well in the next post!

Back in SB with a clean bottom

This past week was incredibly stressful, and I think I'm paying handsomely for it with a peptic ulcer. I wanted to bring Koan back up to SB before Memorial day, but we've had the most incredibly windy weather. I was watching the wind patterns like a hawk on Wednesday and Thursday, planning to sail or motor up on Friday. I decided that I needed some flexibility in my departure time, so I planned it as another solo trip (I'm up to 125 nm solo now!) Wed. and Thursday's predictions were for really high winds, but the pattern was very spatially variable, and there were also times when SB was in a wind hole. On Wednesday, unbelievably, the race was a light air race. On Thursday there was a hole in the morning, with the models predicting > 20 kts but actual being < 5 kts. Hoping that Friday would follow Thursday's pattern I went to Ventura on Thursday night and slept on the boat, planning for an early departure. I was hoping that I could make it to SB before the howling winds picked up.

I took off at 6:30 and arrived at 11:30, motoring the whole way, in a very uneventful trip. Sure enough, the wind picked up around noon and howled a stead 25 kts for the rest of the day, so my calculation was correct. The swell was actually really bad the whole way, and especially unpleasant near the SB harbor entrance, where I had to go beam-to-swell to drop my sails, and almost got bucked off the boat.

So Koan now has nicely buffed topsides, a clean baby bottom and new zincs. Time to get on with other projects, and hire a diver for monthly maintenance.

New Home

Big news in Koan-land! We've found a slip in Santa Barbara, and moved there from Channel Islands Harbor. In a big way, Koan has come home!

I didn't know whether there was an inspection coming up during this move. CIH Patrol did inspect Shadow Line when I put her into one of their slips, so I considered it a distinct possibility. Thus I decided I'd better be prepared and scrambled to make a necessary, but very frustrating repair: the steaming light. Both the deck connection for getting power to it was missing and the existing light was hopelessly corroded and disgusting. After trying out a Hella and a straight up replacement of the classic Perko that I'd just removed, I settled on an Aqua Signal 25 series. This has a deck lamp, as well, but the separate wiring for that wasn't run, so it's not operational. On Friday I did the deck wiring, which took a little creativity, because there are separate ground and hot wires running and it's tougher to insulate the entry of two wires into the connector. I ended up using a bead of polysulfide instead of the existing rubber gasket. On Tuesday morning I went up the mast and tapped two #29 holes for 8-32 machine screws, and installed the fixture. I've just received an LED replacement for the bulb, and once I ascertain that that doesn't nullify the light's USCG rating, I'll install that too. 

After that job was finished on Tuesday I got the boat ready and headed up to SB. There wasn't much wind to begin with, so I attempted to sail, but at 2.5 kts I thought it was impractical. I motored on up until a nice 16 kt breeze kicked up, then close reached in that for an hour and a half or so. The visibility dropped to maybe 1/4 of a mile at some point and I got quite nervous, because I knew there were oil rigs coming up in a mile or two. But the breeze slowly dropped and the visibility improved, so I put the motor back on for another hour. Then within 6 miles of SB another nice breeze kicked in, maybe 14 kts or so. This time I was close hauled and making 4.5 kts, but it was still worth it to sail instead of beating into the wind with the motor on, so I did it. I did a horrendous douse right outside the harbor, then motored in amongst a class of CFJs. I was dying to pee! I went up and got my slip assignment, and we were home. The next morning we did the paperwork for the slip and the rest is history. 

During the previous solo trip up to SB I had recognized the problem with the mainsheet fiddle block and cam. During this trip I discovered a more minor, but still important to solve, problem: the running backstay adjustment mechanism is really jammed. I've actually never successfully operated that thing, but when it's blowing quite a bit, it's absolutely necessary, both to give the boat a little more weather helm, and to tension the forestay and jib luff. I'm fairly sure the boat would point higher and handle better if I could work the backstay, and the reefer assembly would also have fewer problems. So, here's an attempt to list that and other projects I plan to play with next. 

Slip-related: 

• install bumpers
• figure out outboard storage

Rigging:

• fix running backstay tensioning
• put spacers in reefer assembly
• install outhaul
• buy spinnaker sheets

Interior

• Redo electrics
• make v-berth window cushion
• make window shades
• buy stove

• And finally we need a haul pretty badly!