SV Luna Moth

On October 18th we finally got a weather window for leaving Morro Bay that we liked. As the next stretch of the California Coast can be treacherous in even moderate weather, we picked a time when there was little wind and a relatively benign sea state forecast.

The big hump to get over was what’s referred to as “Rounding Point Conception”, which some people refer to as the Cape Horn of the Pacific (we highly doubt that anyone who’s rounded Cape Horn calls it that though). This actually is not just a single point of land you round, but a ten nautical mile stretch between Point Arguello and Point Conception where three different currents meet, creating confused seas (waves coming from multiple directions and crashing into each other) that can build to be dangerous in high winds. Our plan was to leave Morro Bay in the afternoon and get around the points at night on what was forecast to be a calm time.

What we plan and what happens isn’t exactly always similar.

The Captain had a bit of a boo boo on exiting the bay and we spent a couple hours enjoying the fog sitting on a sand bar waiting for the tide to come up. This was followed by a bit of rolling in the fog as the Captain cleaned out all the eel grass that was sucked into the engine cooling strainer while trying to get off said sandbar. Sigh. There’s an old adage that there are three types of sailors, those that have run aground, those that will soon be running aground, and those that lie about having never run aground. We’re solidly in the first group.

With the late start, we ended up with a long extended day. We hit the points a lot later planned and got slammed around for a few hours as waves broke around us. It was cold, slow going (slamming into waves tends to slow the boat), and not fun, but not dangerous.

Once past the points the next hurdle was crossing the busy shipping lanes in the Santa Barbara Channel. At this point the wind was blowing, the sails were up and we flew across in an easy gap between ships. People talk about sailing south of Point Conception as being when you can strip off your foul weather gear and sail in bathing suits. This wasn’t our experience. It was sunny though and several pods of dolphins joined us along the way.

At 3:30 in the afternoon we dropped anchor in Cuyler Cove off of San Miguel Island, the western most of California’s Channel Islands. If your not familiar with the chain of islands, they’re a chain of eight islands off the California Coast stretching from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. Much of the land, including all of San Miguel, is part of a National Park. The fabulous children’s book Island of the Blue Dolphins is set on one of the Channel Islands, San Nicholas Island, and was the Captain’s reading the nights before our departure.

We spent two nights anchored off of San Miguel Island, then decided to move as the anchorage wasn’t as well protected as we had hoped and there was a gale forecast for later in the week. While we would have like to stay another day, and/or visit the next island, Santa Rosa Island, a planned Space X launch the following day made the stretch of water around Santa Rosa off limits, so we sadly could only look at the island as we went past.

We next anchored in Smuggler’s Cove off of Santa Cruz Island, where we would be just at the edge of the gale, and well protected from the rough waves that were forecast. While beautiful, we were warned off attempting a beach landing by friends and stayed on board.

We spent three nights anchored off of Santa Cruz Island before heading off to Santa Catalina Island…