Sea Day 3 Halfmoon Bay to Santa Cruz

Wow! What a day! I’m completely exhausted! We left at 0830 and arrived at 17:30. The first 4 hours of the day we were motoring or motor-sailing. When the sun came out, the wind picked up and we cut the engine and sailed. The wind was building so we reefed the main. These are the biggest and most turbulent seas I have been on. Swell 5-7 ft and 20 knots of wind. The autopilot cannot navigate the wave action to keep the boat from broaching (the boat falls on her side) off a wave, so Tim was all on for about 4 hours. 

Again this was a day of lessons learned and items to fix or change. One lesson, I had gone below to with my fixes and GPS reading to calculate where we where we were in comparison to our dead reckoning point. With the bouncing around of the boat, everything takes longer! I was down about 10 minutes to get everything lined out on the paper charts. I thought I heard Tim arranging something topside, out of the cockpit (where he had been steering). When I emerged into the cockpit and called him, there was no answer, so I yelled louder and he answered. Time for a new rule! "If one of us is below decks and the other is going to leave the cockpit, say so!" It was that moment of contemplating that if what I thought was Tim on deck was just our rigging and Tim had fallen in, he would have been somewhere 10 minutes behind us. Set two in all of this is asking myself, if he had gone overboard, what would I do, how would I get back to him? Tim did have a harness and tether so it's much less likely that would happen. 

Lesson two, bigger is not better! We have heard controversy from family and friends that the boat we should have should be bigger. Today proved that we are at our limits in 20+ knots of wind. It took us 25 minutes to reef the main, which was before it was blowing 20, normally it's 5 minutes. Tim is going to create a better solution to add to the Jiffy Reefing System already in place. We will be sailing downwind in the days ahead with similar winds. In order to jibe the mainsail (the stern passes through the wind) I had to crank for 3 minutes to bring the main near center for a safe jibe. We are going to find a better and safer setup, such as using a preventer that is tying off the boom when going downwind so I can’t accidentally swing to the other side of the boat in rocking seas.

I think you get the idea. Tim set up his harness and used it when out of the cockpit. We do our very best to be safe and smart. It was also cold so we had the chance to try out our foulies. Our bibs and jackets did a good job keeping us warmer and our jackets fit over our life jackets.

I’m plain tired and my muscles are sore. We got a good transient slip here and it's time for sleeping.

Lynette