So, I’ve been a bit delinquent about posting on here lately, but it’s not for lack of progress. Quite the opposite in fact: I made it to Mexico! And the boat made it too (in case you were thinking I cheated and just flew here or something).
Matt sailed the first leg with me from LA to San Diego, which took 3 days. We first sailed to Avalon harbor on Catalina island. It was a beautiful day, but the wind was pretty calm, so we ended up motor sailing a lot.
We arrived close to sunset and got situated on a mooring ball before heading into town to have dinner. We didn’t stay out too late, though, because we wanted to head out early the next day to head to Oceanside.
The most eventful part of getting to Oceanside was when we managed to get the jib halyard all tangled up on the winch, and in doing so learned why all the lines are fed through the cleats first before being put on the winch (so that they will always feed from the bottom to the top and not cross back over themselves – lesson learned).
From Oceanside, we were only a quick hop down to San Diego harbor where I had reserved a guest slip. After taking a detour to play in some kelp fields outside the entrance to the harbor, we made it by early afternoon, and had enough time to visit a couple of San Diego’s wonderful breweries before Matt had to be at the airport to catch his flight out.
The next day, Dima came to San Diego to hang out for a few days and then head with me on the second half of the journey down to Ensenada. While we were there, we decided to go for a short day trip over to Coronado Island to have lunch there. I had been tracking that there was a leak in the engine compartment that was mostly above the waterline, but if we pushed the motor a lot then it would cause the compartment to fill up. We had investigated and learned that the water was coming in from where the shaft for the inboard engine used to go. The leak wasn’t bad if we went slow, though, so I wanted to fix it, but didn’t think it was required. When we got back to the boat after lunch on Coronado, Dima noted that it seemed like there was more water than usual in the engine compartment, but it seemed like it was still only in the shaft area, so we made our way back to the slip without worrying about it. The next day, though, I took another look in there and realized that what Dima had seen was not more water in the compartment; you could now just look down into the ocean directly. The board that had been covering the previous shaft somehow came loose while we were tied to the dock at Coronado and now was at the bottom of the ocean somewhere and the engine compartment now had a giant hole, which we affectionately started calling the ventilation shaft.
So, giant hole in the boat: not good. Also, my plans for how to epoxy and fiberglass the leak in the area were definitely no longer going to be sufficient. But, the silver lining was that the compartment no longer filled with water because it all just flowed right back out. Due to this silver lining and the fact that we couldn’t extend the slip any more because the Baja Haha was leaving in a couple of days and all the guests slips were taken, we decided that we could still continue on to Ensenada in this condition. What could possibly go wrong?
The next part of the trip was only a day and a half of mostly motor sailing, with a little full sailing when the wind picked up enough. We spent the night at an anchorage in Islas Coronado, just off the coast of Tijuana, but in Mexican waters.
As I was trying to drop the anchor, Dima was in the back steering and managing the engine. At one point he started saying something to me that I couldn’t hear, and so I finished dropping the anchor before coming back to find out what he was going on about. Turns out it was a bit important: the tiller had broken. Or rather, was breaking. It still sort of worked as long as you didn’t try to move it up or down, but was delaminating and coming off. Not good. It would be very difficult to make it to Ensenada if we couldn’t steer. Oh, and also, the engine was starting to act up again and didn’t want to run at idle, so we had to go faster than we wanted.
We decided to get up and leave at dawn the next morning so that we could arrive in Ensenada with enough time to make it through customs that same day. When we awoke, we couldn’t see any light on the horizon and there was a thick fog over everything. So, we picked our way slowly east back toward land, trying to avoid a area on the chart south of us that was marked as having fish pens. Unfortunately, we did not succeed. We ended up almost hitting one that appeared out of the fog about ten feet ahead of us. So, I went to the bow to try to look out for more, and Dima stayed in the cockpit steering. We had installed a brand new, beautiful compass in San Diego since my old one was cracked and impossible to see. Unfortunately we didn’t get the light connected. So, Dima was trying to watch ahead and squint at the compass, and we kept getting turned around and heading southwest back into the thick of the fish pens. Not good. It took us about an hour and a few more close calls to finally get clear of them, but we finally made it to clear waters.
From there is was smooth sailing, or actually smooth motoring because there was no wind, all the way to Ensenada. We pulled in to Baja Naval a little before 4pm, happy to be in a slip and with a longer project list than when we started the trip. But, we had made it to Mexico! Actually being there legally is a whole different story that will probably be a different post…
Now, it’s a month later and I am back in Ensenada after leaving to sail with friends in the Atlantic Ocean, getting ready for the next step of my journey on this coast: Cabo. Wish me luck.