Hurry Up to Go Nowhere

9-19-12 - Port San Louis, CA - Day 79

The title "Hurry up to go nowhere" sounds a little negative, but in reality it is how the world of cruising on a sailboat works.  You wait, wait, wait and then when everything is right, you haul ass to where you are going.  The hope being that you avoid bad weather, darkness and other undesirable stuff.  In a nutshell, that would describe the last hop we took down the coast.

From Santa Cruz we left the next morning for a pleasant sail across Monterey Bay to Monterey.  The weather all that week was forecasted to be great for our south bound desires and we could have made some big miles Southbound if desired.  Maybe we should have heeded that when we decided to spend three nights in Monterey.  But we didn't and spent three nights in Monterey to do some provisioning, see the aquarium and generally relax.  Because, really, where do we need to be in such a big hurry?  So in review we went from Half Moon Bay to Santa Cruz and then on to Monterey in just two days, then spent three days going nowhere.

The tail end of the good weather was starting to approach and we had hoped to be around Pt. Conception, "The Cape Horn of North America", by the time it turned.  We headed into the big blue for San Simeon, then Port San Louis and then Cojo anchorage around Pt. Conception.  The hop to San Simeon was no small trip in itself as it was some 85 miles.  This is where I will start.

Early Morning Departure from Monterey

It's 3:30 AM and the alarm goes off, I wake up, pull on my boots headed to another ridiculously early safety meeting.  Who in their right mind would need to be at work at five in the morning I think.  And why am I going to work this early.  Ohh that's right I'm getting paid to do this and it's my responsibility.  On I go into the night....  but wait, I'm not at work, I don't need to do this and I'm not getting paid.  I'm doing this because I want to.  In this case in order to arrive at San Simeon during daylight, you need to leave in the middle of the night and make good time, so that's what we are doing up at 3:30 in the morning.  On goes all of our ski gear, I mean foul weather gear.  I actually wear less clothing when going snow skiing on most days than when we sail on the ocean in Northern California.  Once again, it sort of makes you wonder why one does these things?  We head out into the night/morning motoring away from the safety of Monterey, but also away from the pricey boardwalks and not so awesome dock we were paying for.  In some ways we are heading into the world of more freedom for a couple of days, relying on ourselves and the boat, anchoring out for free and being sailors, not tourists. 

Elizabeth ready to go skiing

The Big Sur Coast

We can officially use the Southern California
chart book now - Goodbye Northern California

Can you count how many different hats Elizabeth
wore during this trip?

Flash forward 14 hours.  We have done very little sailing as we are seeing 3 to 5 knots of wind and are trying to reach San Simeon by sundown.  The California coast has been incredible to watch slowly, ever so slowly, pass us by.  There's San Simeon ten miles distant and the wind has come up a little making for a nice sail.  The forecast around Pt. Conception, two days out, is looking slightly dicey for newbies like us.  Maybe we should just go for it, all night and into the next day, round the point and be officially in Southern California water?   Elizabeth agrees knowing a night sail would be a good experience for us.  We head into the night once again in the same trip, this time with sails up.  Somewhere in the middle of the night we realize that rounding Pt. Conception will take us well into the next day and we are not prepared for that after out 3:30 Am wake up call, so we divert to Port San Louis.  There's really not much to say about sailing all night except that it's really dark and really cold.  We talked to one fishing boat to make sure he saw us and he made it clear that he had seen us long before we picked him up on our instruments. 

Night sailing Rocks! says Elizabeth

I agree!

We traded shifts, tried to sleep, drank some hot tea and against our best efforts to slow the boat down made it to Port San Louis well before sun up.  That is after we mistakenly thought we were there earlier when spotting the incredibly brightly lit up Mt. Diablo nuclear power plant far in the distance and believing it was the port.  We spent an hour purposely going nowhere about 5 miles offshore of P.S.L. until the sun came up and then conveniently after sailing for the last 12 hours the wind died and we motored into the port, dropped anchor, celebrated a new experience and passed out.  But not before the seals and porpoises greeted us by swimming through the anchorage only 20 yards from the boat.  So we didn't make it around Pt. Conception and the weather looks a like it is heavier than we would like for our rounding of North America's Cape Horn so we are here, in Port San Louis until Saturday night/Sunday morning when it calms down again.  Like I said hurry up to go nowhere.  We had a 27 hour marathon down the coast and now we have four days to kill waiting for good weather.

We made it to Port San Louis!

 What we have discovered is that there is no better place to spend four days than here.  It wasn't a place on our must see list, but now that we are here we have already delayed our departure a day to take advantage of the farmers market and free shuttle rides into town on Saturday.  We no longer need to go to Sea World after seeing all the wildlife in the bay here.  (we actually found a sea urchin deposited in our dinghy this afternoon.  How did that get there?)  The harbor patrol was super nice as has everyone else we have met, and I'm sitting in an open air bar looking out over the anchorage while using the free wifi.  Needless to say this has already been a great place to do nothing for four days.  So as everyone is preparing to rake leaves we are cruising the surf shops looking for swim trunks and tank tops as the weather gets warmer on our way South.

Not a bad anchorage to spend a few days