The last post ended outside San Diego Bay, staring across the Pacific toward Japan. Sadly I couldn't continue westbound. I sailed 4 miles offshore, turned around, and moseyed back to the marina. It took eight hours to leave San Diego Bay and come back; it's a big bay and with the big turn at the north end of the bay; you are guaranteed to be sailing into the wind at some point.
Back home in Utah we got busy planning the next chunk of boat work which would include some time offshore. As I've already shared, boat work never ends. The priorities for the next trip were bottom paint, transducer installation (remember that 2" hole I needed to make?), and repairing a seacock for the sink drain in the head. Some funny terms there, huh? For you non-sailors, a seacock is a valve that lets water in or out through a hole in the bottom of the boat (the hole is called a thru-hull.) Boat water closets, lavatories, bathrooms, or restrooms are called heads. The toilet itself is also called a head. Now you know. When we bought the boat there was a sticky ball valve under the sink and when we tried to turn the valve next to it (the seacock) it broke as well. So out with the old and in with the new. The bottom of the boat is coated in a paint that slowly sloughs off and releases a biocide to keep marine growth from sticking to the hull and slowing the boat down. It is traditionally painted every year but Elysian Sea hadn't been painted in three years. There were the priorities. So right after Christmas we headed out to San Diego with a plan to attack these priorities.
The secondary list included varnishing the wood on the outside of the boat, fixing a leak in the engine's seawater pump, installing some other electronics bits, stitching a tear in the cover of our genoa, installing some new LiFePO4 batteries I assembled, and making sure the dinghy that came with the boat was still in decent shape.
All the primary items require pulling the boat out of the water and in California that is not a fun idea for my wallet. We planned to sail down the Ensenada, Baja, Mexico, get hauled out, and pay to have to boat painted while I addressed the thru-hulls. San Diego to Ensenada is an 85 mile trip. In order to arrive in Ensenada during the daylight, we would have to sail through the night. This was a big step for us. Neither Kelli nor I had sailed at night, kept watches, and she had never been offshore. Big trip of firsts.
We left about 17:00 from our marina, planning to be in Ensenada about 9:00 the next morning. It is said you should not sail on a deadline because you're setting yourself up for failure and it will often force you into a bad weather situation you really should not be in. Luckily the weather wasn't bad but it wasn't conducive to good sailing either. That being said, we motored 90% of the way. Ugh.
Sorry Kelli, I couldn't find a more flattering photo of you on watch.
Leaving San Diego Bay I handed the helm over to Kelli. Our plan for the watch was for her to keep watch until she was too tired (hopefully until midnight or 01:00) then I would take over. I went to "sleep" around 20:00. The motion was pretty terrible without the sails up. The boat would both pitch and roll without any pressure on the rig. I managed to sleep for a while and about 00:30 I got up and checked on Kelli. She was up at the bow watching something. When I came up behind her I tried not to startle her but that didn't work, she got a little jump scare. She had been watching dolphins on our bow wake. She said they had been there since about midnight. It was pretty cool to see at night and she said it really helped her get through the last hour. Sadly she had been suffering from seasickness for a while. She took Dramamine earlier but only after she started feeling ill so it came back up almost immediately.
I relieved her watch and she was happy to head below and try to get some sleep. Now my turn. Our course took us outside the Coronado Islands about 10 miles offshore. We would make the turn inbound to Ensenada when we were near abeam the harbor to try and avoid any fishermen or fishing gear near the shore. I settled into my watch with a thermos of hot coffee and about five hours until sunrise. The dolphins hung around for a little while longer and then I was left with the whine of the engine and the night sky. Then I started feeling the motion in my gut. It started pretty light but between the smell of diesel exhaust, the coffee I drank, and the endless random motion, I knew my time had come. Now I've never been motion sick in my life to the point of throwing up. Being in the back of an airplane while others were doing flight training got me queasy but never bad enough to blow chunks. With many hours of motion ahead of me, I new I had no chance. About 45 minutes into my watch I went to the aft rail, leaned over, and let 'er rip. A few minutes later, I settled back down and felt much better. The exhaust was still stinky but it wasn't making me nauseous like before.
The night was pretty long but eventually I was nearly abeam Ensenada and turned in toward land. The sun was just starting to show itself and with the change in heading, we got a more favorable breeze so I raised sail. The stability from having sails up really helped the motion of the boat. Kelli got up not long after and we greeted the sunrise heading east.
Short after that the fog started rolling in. We had about a mile visibility and would occasionally hear a fog horn behind us which kept us on our toes.
After that long first overnight trip we motored into Ensenada while texting the boatyard to figure out where they wanted us. The timing was perfect. They had just finished launching a sailboat and we saw them motor out as we motored in to the boatyard. With some hand gestures and yelling across the water I was told to back to boat into the travelift. I whipped it around, backed it into the narrow waterway like a teenager learning how to parallel park, and we were secured to land again. It took about an hour to get things positioned, remove the backstay since it was running into the travelift's supports, and pull us out of the water. This was our first time seeing Elysian Sea out of the water.
With just a little scraping, the bottom didn't look bad at all. You can see the slanted line on the bottom of the keel where there's more growth, that's the lead ballast. For whatever reason the lead attracted more growth than the fiberglass above it. You can see some grey spots where the blue bottom paint was completely worn away from time and monthly bottom cleaning while in the water by the previous owner. She would be much prettier and smoother with a fresh coat of blue. But as they say, "No rest for the weary." It wasn't time to nap, it was time to get to work.
The paperwork side of entering Mexico by boat is convoluted and complicated. It took a few hours to get it all sorted and I don't look forward to doing it again but let's just say the beauracracy sucks.
Kelli had taken on the job of varnishing the wood. You can see in some of the photos the miles of blue tape she had applied around the wood to keep the varnish from getting on the paint. She got right to work sanding and coating, sanding and coating. It was a bit of a challenge since we got occasional rain and the boatyard was pretty dusty but she got several coats on over the following week.
My first job was to remove the valves and thru-hull under the sink as well as the old transducers I was no longer using on the bottom of the hull.
See these nasty broken valves? Out with the old.
On boats the preferred metal for this kind of stuff in bronze. Not brass from the hardware store, specifically bronze. The funny looking triangle thing on the bottom of the lower valve is a thru-hull flange. It's a better method of installation where the valve can be changed safely without taking the boat out of the water. With the old method, the valve was screwed onto parallel pipe threads in a fitting that went through the hull. If the valve was too hard to get off the threads, it would risk rotating the fitting that was sealed to the outside of the hull causing a leak. This method secures the flange to those threads and to the inside of the hull making rotation of the entire assembly impossible. It should last the life of the boat.
And assembly installed inside the boat:
Next was the 2" hole for the transducer.
We had two transducers originally. One was for speed through water, the other was for depth. We combined our sensors into one transducer so the other hole got filled with fiberglass by the boatyard crew. They were impressed with the build of this boat. Where the other transducer went they said the hull was 1-1/4" thick! The combined transducer we installed has pretty mixed reviews so hopefully it wasn't a mistake to install this one. Time will tell.
We weren't all work and no play though. We ended up in Ensenada for right at a week. That's two days longer than I was hoping but that's how boat maintenance goes. We walked around town getting groceries from time to time and went on a hike north of the boatyard up to a viewpoint looking over the city.
And of course we found coffee.
I did some work on our old Volvo Penta engine that appears to be leaking every fluid from every place possible.
Kelli wanted to learn more about the engine and how things work so I did my best to keep her attention while man-splaining what I was doing and why I always end up bleeding while working on this kind of stuff. We got the coolant and raw water leaks mostly sealed up so that was productive.
Before too long we had a fully painted boat below the waterline. I replaced the zinc on the propeller and propeller shaft. All the holes on the bottom of the boat were sealed up and it was time to float again.
The launching was very utilitarian without any fanfare. We were lifted off the jacks, they slapped some paint of the very bottom of the keel and the took us to the water. Once we were low enough I reinstalled my backstay, tensioned it, and got lowered all the way down. We were tied off to the dock, I started the engine and checked for leaks before waving goodbye and setting off. This was about 10:00 in the morning. We wouldn't stop or waste any more time, we just set course out of the bay and aimed for home.
The wind, once again, wasn't very favorable but I really didn't want a reenactment of the motor down to Ensenada. The wind was coming from the north so we would be sailing into the wind. I decided to head west until we got a decent angle to raise sail and head north. About 30 minutes from Ensenada we raised sail and kept heading west, offshore. At about 18 miles offshore I started nudging us north. The motion was better with the sails up even if that meant we were beating into the weather a bit. The up and down motion of the boat gets a little rough while sailing into the wind and waves but the side to side almost disappears entirely. Once we got 24 miles offshore I figure we had a good enough angle to make it to San Diego Bay with our wind and tacked north.
This day and night I decided we would try a different watch schedule; three hours on, three hours off. We traded back and forth a few times throught the afternoon and into the night. My final watch came around midnight and I went on deck to relieve Kelli. She had another bout with motion sickness and was ready to try to sleep. I made myself some hot tea hoping that would be better than coffee. I sipped it slowly while moving north at about 6 knots under sail. It was a nice night. I was watching our new AIS system and spotted a couple commercial container ships that were on an intercept course with us. I figured I would keep an eye on them as we got closer and make a move if necessary. Both of them changed course enough to avoid me which I appreciated since I was sailing quite close to the wind and didn't have a lot of great options for maneuvering. Early in the morning I started seeing some sparkles in the water and went to investigate. There were tiny bioluminescent worms in the water that were being stirred up by waves off our bow and the tubulence off our stern. It wasn't bright but it was a neat phenomena to witness. Early in the morning I sailed into San Diego Bay as the wind died. Once our speed hit 1 kt I dropped sail and started the engine. We docked at the Police Dock, cleared customs, and motored the rest of the way to Chula Vista. Kelli let me take a little nap on the way which was nice.
We pulled into our slip a little before sunrise, took as long as we could manage sleeping in that morning, then eventually got about our day. We weren't quite done with the trip though. A day later we met up with the helper who assisted me in pulling wires down the mast. Kelli hadn't met him yet so we planned to see him in Mission Bay the next night. We sailed north, spent two nights in Mission Bay anchored out, then eventually made it back to the marina before finally heading home. The two nights at anchor in Mission Bay were pleasant. We spent some time on the beach, walked around Belmont Park, and generally relaxed. We got a lot of boat work done, learned a bit about watch schedules, and enjoyed New Year on our new boat.
We haven't been back to San Diego since that trip over the New Year. Work has been needy and we've had some demanding things at home but soon I plan to head back out there and address some more projects. I have a new autopilot to install, there's an oil leak on the engine I want to address, there's a chart plotter project I need to finish, and I need to get our helper out on the water to enjoy some sailing. So hopefully at the end of April I'll be heading back out to the coast to enjoy a little more time on the water and get a little saltier.
Until next time.
Joshua