The first long(ish) journey that I took on the boat was a weekend out to Catalina Island. It’s about 30 nm from Marina del Rey, so the plan was to take a day to get out there and a day to get back and hopefully have some time to play around the island in the few hours in between. Prior to this trip, the longest I had been out sailing was about 3 hours, and this was my first trip where I was the only one with any sailing experience (which is probably a lofty way of describing the 4 times that I had been out so far). So, this was one small steps for boats in general, but one giant leap for Christina and Duck Sloop. What could possibly go wrong?
Before leaving, I whittled my gigantic boat to do list down to just a couple that I thought were absolutely essential before I could welcome overnight guests onto the boat. The first was cleaning out the sleeping areas so there would be space for people and the second was getting a working head.
Turns out even my list of two items was too ambitious. After spelunking in the bowels of my boat and discovering how the head on my boat was all set up, I also discovered that there was a lot more wrong with it than just replacing a valve like I had first thought. So, I settled for cleaning up and getting a temporary solution for the head, and was glad that only two people had decided to come with me on the trip, instead of the 5 that I had originally thought there may be.
The trip got off to a great start when we started the motor and got about halfway out of the slip before it died. We then proceeded to spend the next hour and a half attempting to get it to start again. On the bright side, I now know what it means to flood an engine and hopefully won’t make that mistake again.
So, then we were off for real. We picked the one weekend that the wind was coming from directly south rather than its normal westerly direction, which meant that we couldn’t sail directly toward Catalina and instead got lots of opportunities to practice tacking (and only went round in circles once or twice in the process). Here is a photo of our track (the red line going mostly north-south). You can probably guess at which point we decided that we weren’t going to make it before dark and turned on the engine.
This time the engine behaved itself and we made it to our mooring ball in Two Harbors with enough time to get a ride to shore and walk to the other side of the island for sunset.
The next morning we paddled over to the shore rather than paying for a ride from the harbormasters, and in the process Matt discovered that my pack raft might not be the most efficient form of transport. Jeanette and I fared better in the kayak.
The way back was uneventful until we got into the marina and the engine once again decided that it didn’t like us. Fortunately, we were able to futz with it for a bit and get it to run once we discovered the choke. Might need to have that looked at some more before setting out for real. Minor motor issues aside, though, the trip was quite successful.
Side note: as you can tell, I have taken more than the original 4 weeks that I thought I would have between getting back from Alaska and having to sail off down to Mexico. That is because the marina where my boat currently lives has graciously decided (after encouragement from the Harbor Commission) that they won’t evict all the boats at once in order to perform renovations, and will instead perform the updates in stages that allow the boats to be shuffled around and not have to find a new home. I still don’t plan to keep my slip long term, but I’m happy to have the extra time to work on things and practice sailing. I’m now thinking I’ll spend another few months in Marina del Rey before heading out.