To the ocean…

In the last few weeks since my last post, there haven’t been many projects of which to speak. I have had a couple of business trips and in between, I’ve been mostly working and learning about sailing. In April, Jason came out for a visit and stayed about 12 days. During that time he and I did a couple of projects on the boat and spent a lot of time sailing.

The first trip we took we had only planned on sailing up to the bay from the marina. This is about a 2-hour trip one way.  We started out fairly early, just before sunrise, on the trip.

From the Chula Vista Marina up to San Diego, there is a bit of a narrow channel that parallels the boatyards where they work and repair damaged boats, Naval shipyards, and hotels on the bay front. When we left the marina we used the engine to get out of the marina then raised the sails once we got clear of the sea wall and into the channel.

 

There really wasn’t much wind. If you look in the background you can see the water is basically like glass. That’s a good indicator of how much wind is actually blowing. I don’t have an anemometer (wind speed gauge) yet, so I have to take a guess at how fast the wind is actually blowing.  Jason is looking up at the sail wondering if we have it trimmed well enough to capture the little bit of wind we did have.

It was enough, kind of slow going, I think we were maybe doing about 1.5 – 2 knots, which is pretty much the equivalent of a slow walk. HAHA! It wasn’t long, though, and the wind picked up and moved us along at approximately 4 knots. Not too bad for a calm day! Next, under the Coronado Bridge putting us into the San Diego Bay.

From here we tried a few other sail configurations, got used to how the boat was actually handling in better wind and just enjoyed the scenery. It was pretty cool to realize that the only thing pushing the boat along was simply a little breeze. We passed by a pretty large Navy ship. When thinking of ‘right-of-way’ a boat under sail generally has right-of-way, but as the warship approached we kind of thought it might make sense to give him the right-of-way…we didn’t want to hurt his feelings. 🙂 All kidding aside, if I understand correctly any commercial vessel or vessels with limited maneuverability automatically get right-of-way, so… we just got OUT of the way! Seemed like the right thing to do.

Of course, we needed a couple of action shots to prove its really us! LOL

We sailed a while longer toward the mouth of the bay. With Point Loma to starboard and the Naval Supply center to port, the ocean was directly ahead. We originally thought we would just go ‘take a look’ to see how rough it looked, but the closer we got the bolder we got and decided to just take it out for as far as we felt comfortable. After all, if there was any kind of issue we could drop the sails and kick on the engine to get out of any danger should any arise. Also, there are so many boats in the area, we felt that if something were to go wrong we could just radio and have help nearly immediately. Rubio approved so we went for it!

Into the ocean…

 

We sailed about 5 miles off shore, then in the interest of time (and not pushing our luck) we made a u-turn and headed back toward the bay and eventually back to the marina before the sun went down.

The whole experience was really pretty incredible. No issues, no near misses, no sinking boats or getting yelled at by the coast guard or harbor police… just a nice peaceful, yet exhilarating experience! I’ll post more from the other trips we took while Jason was here in a couple of days. Stay tuned!