SV Luna Moth

Stats

• Nautical miles traveled: 733
• Total passages: 17
• Major destinations: 7
• Islands stopped at: 3
• Nighttime passages: 6
• Times run aground: 2
• Dolphins seen: countless
• Gales: too many

A quick recap

In the summer of 2025 we managed to get Luna Moth into the realm of close enough and were able to (metaphorically) cut the dock lines and start cruising in earnest. For the last year we had been moored at Owl Harbor, which is located near the little town of Isleton in the Sacramento Delta, farther inland than one would expect to find a cruising yacht.

In need of relaxation after our push to get going, we spent a few days on anchor recharging. Lisa fished, catching several striped bass. These would be the last fish she would catch for the year as the great dry spell would begin when the water turned salty.

From there we worked our way back to the San Francisco Bay, stopping in Emeryville to deal with some last minute things…and to go for one last round of Trader Vic’s cocktails and a last bite of our favorite Bay Area food.

After an ugly night at anchor, we headed out the Gate and turned left, doing our first offshore passage in Luna Moth to Half Moon Bay. This would be a magical time with calm seas, a hump back whale, pods of dolphins, and squadrons of pelicans. Half Moon Bay treated us with lovely weather, a friendly yacht club, and easy harbor to get into the cruising groove and find our rhythm.

From Half Moon Bay we sailed south to Monterey Bay, doing our first of several overnight passages. After an extended stay in Monterey to fix our autopilot, we sailed on to San Simeon and Morro Bay, where we got stuck for weeks waiting for a weather window. From Morro Bay we crossed the difficult waters off Point Conception and to California’s Channel Islands.

We spent a month cruising the Channel Islands, spending a lot of time on Santa Catalina Island in both good weather and bad, hiking, relaxing, and making new friends.

Leaving the islands we made a recovery stop in Newport Beach, then sailed to San Diego where we played tourist and stocked up on a few things that would be difficult to find in Mexico. On December 8th, we sailed into Ensenada Mexico, our first foreign port of call.

What worked:

• Electronics overhaul: In general our move to throw out the antiqued Raymarine gear in favor of tablets and Lisa created hardware worked well.
• Watermaker: Having heard about people having a lot of issues with new watermaker installations, we happily had none. Our DIY skills worked out.
• Engine: purred along and never gave us any concerns, fuel economy was great as we generally didn’t push things.
• Yacht clubs: We had lovely experiences at several clubs along the way, meeting a lot of cool people.
• Overall we really enjoyed going to new places, experiencing new restaurants and markets, and meeting new people.
• Our Portland Pudgy with her electric motor worked out great, serving as our family car/pickup truck.
• noforeignland was invaluable, helping us to find various things we needed, steering us to good restaurants and shops, and serving as a way to meet new people.
• The aquatic life we found ourselves surrounded by, from whales to sea otters, was a real treat.
• Sunsets and gorgeous California Coast made the hard work worthwhile.
• Mooring and docking: While our anchoring game was pretty solid before going up into the Delta, we hadn’t had a lot of time docking Luna Moth in different situations and had done mooring balls with her once. On the way down we really got use to her and figured out our systems for things.
• Provisioning: We did really well stocking up before departing and adapting to shopping without a car. The addition of a freezer for meats helped a lot as well.
• Route planning: We made it a habit to fully plan out each step of the way, watched weather obsessively, and made good choices avoiding times and places that might be difficult, even when it meant missing out on things we wanted to see or do.
• We were really surprised at how helpful and friendly various harbor patrols were along the way.

Where we had issues

• We hit one bug in Lisa’s instrument bridge which caused a software crash when more than a hundred AIS targets were tracked. While we had a hot standby system we could have switched to quickly enough, a tired brain forgot this, leading to undo stress.
• We had one hiccup with the electronic charts of Mexico that we used that was caused by overzealous DRM thinking that switching of a tablet to power save mode meant that it should cut us off from seeing where we’re going.
• The pin for our autopilot broke and while we planned for this, our spare turned out to not be the correct one and we ended up having to have parts custom made.
• Solar power was a challenge in both Morro Bay and the Channel Islands autumn brought short days when the sky was often overcast. Additionally our engine’s alternator is poorly installed causing low energy production when motoring.
• The captain made a navigation error in the fog leading to an extended stay on a sandbar waiting for a tide change.
• Fishing did not go well.
• One planning error we made was that we didn’t count on some bail out spots being either full up or not practical to reach due to weather.
• Kelp! While it was often hard to pick our way through long stretches of kelp, it was very frustrating when the bay we were staying in filled with dead kelp, making dinghying to shore an Olympic event.
• Leaving late in the season led to a lot of days we ended up with either no wind or headwinds when the summertime prevailing winds would have been at our back. It also meant waiting out gales or dodging them far more than we would have liked.
• We had several really cold overnight passages and very uncomfortable nights at anchor that we didn’t love.
• We had some rivets pop on our boom, making us weary of using our mainsail.
• The metal strap that secures our engine’s muffler system snapped, but we were able to engineer a repair without too much issue.
• We learned the hard way that we should stash a spare kill switch (key) for our dinghy motor on the dinghy as we drifted away from Luna Moth in the strong Morro Bay current scurrying to get the paddles out of the hull storage chamber.

What’s next

We plan to spend the good part of a year in Ensenada, traveling back to the states to see family and working on a few projects that we want done before doing a longer stretch at sea. After Ensenada our crystal ball starts to get a little cloudy. We originally planned to sail on to Panama, through the canal, and hang in the San Blas Islands for awhile, but recent saber rattling makes us a bit uneasy about hanging out in the southern Caribbean Sea. Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest might be in the cards and we haven’t ruled out doing the Coconut Milk Run (the relatively easy run from North America to New Zealand via French Polynesia, Somoa, and Fiji). As always are plans are written in the sand at low tide…