Well, I saw that going better in my head…
I love visiting National Parks, so it seemed serendipitous that there is an island park just one day sailing away from Marina del Rey. How wonderful to be able to visit the park on my own boat, anchoring in out the way places that other visitors can’t reach and taking my blow-up kayak into remote sea caves.
I decided to go over Labor day so we would have plenty of time for exploring, and invited a bunch of friends, thinking this would be a great trip for more people since we would have time to do things other than just sailing. I had even tried to get camping reservations on the island so that we could bring more people than can sleep on the boat. (Wishful thinking on Labor Day weekend.)
I was disappointed when only one other person decided to come with me, but that was enough, so Matt and I headed out on Saturday morning. Fortunately this time the motor started right up, and after a bit of difficulty with trying to get out of the slip (I only hit the boat next to me a little bit) and probably waking up everyone around, we were off. From there is was mostly smooth, enjoyable sailing other than the fact that even with a lot of motor sailing, we were not going fast enough to make it to the island where we were originally thinking we would head to anchor. Fortunately, there was a closer island, but unfortunately, it didn’t have any great anchorages. However, since we didn’t want to try to anchor my boat for the first time ever after dark, we opted to stop there anyway. The situation was further complicated by the fact that my phone, which is also my electronic charts ran out of batteries right as we were getting to the islands. It was at that point that I realized that I should have gotten the solar panel out earlier in the day to charge it. Oops. So, we proceeded to look for a good place to anchor by memory. (And, before you ask: yes, I’m going to have paper charts as a backup when I go to Mexico.)
Once we found a spot that seemed at least a bit sheltered, we dropped 2 anchors for good measure. That went much smoother than expected considering neither of us had ever anchored a boat before. Then, we went down underneath to get ready to make dinner and realized that there was about 2 inches of water inside the boat. Not good. So, we proceeded to spend the next hour taking turns manually pumping out the bilge and trying to make sure that nothing too important was on the ground and got wet. Fortunately, it didn’t seem like more water was actively entering so we were able to get the bilge emptied and it seemed like we would be ok for the night. However, the boat was swinging and swaying and rolling all over the place and we were seasick so we opted to skip dinner and just try to go to sleep. It was a restless night, though, with lots of rock and roll accompanied by the sound of all the stuff clinking around that I didn’t realize was so poorly secured. And through this, we were listening for any sounds that would indicate that we didn’t do as good of a job as we thought at anchoring and the boat was actually about to crash against the rocks. Needless to say we didn’t get as much sleep as we would have liked.
The next morning we were happy to note that the boat was no closer to the rocks than where we had left it the night before. But, after the rough night and the water ingress, we decided to not stay another day at the islands and instead just head straight back to Marina del Rey. We had to pump the bilge out twice on the way back and I added automatic bilge pump to my list of required projects before heading south. Thank goodness no one else decided to come on this adventure or they probably never would have gone sailing with me again. Fortunately Matt is crazy adventurous enough that he probably still will.
So yeah, I saw that going better in my head, but I learned some valuable things and added some things to my to-do list before heading out.