Day 4, Oct 4 2012, Thursday

This night watch was not nearly as nice as the last one.  A weak wind coming from the wrong direction meant that I had to  watch the tiller every minute, constant battle between finding the wind and holding the course.  We were back in the shipping lanes and there were several boats around, including a brightly light cruise ship that seemed to be headed straight for me.  Luckily it was going much faster than I was and passed safely in front of us.  Shortly after that, a jib sheet suddenly came untied.  I got  Alan out of bed to help me both times, so he did not get much sleep at all.  When he came officially to relieve me about 5am there was almost no wind and we were way too far north.  Time to turn on the engine.  We left the sails up but kept the engine on and finally made it to the Harbor Police dock about noon. 

We had arranged to have a sailmaker pick up the sails to give them a through check up and put in another set of reef points.  For you non-sailors, that is so we can shorten the sails in case there is a huge storm, not something that I ever want to do, but one more safety precaution.  So we got to work taking the sails off with Alan carefully photographing everything as we did it.  I sure hope we will be able to remember how to put them back on again.  It does not look like they have ever been taken off. The ends were actually wrapped with strips of webbing sewn on.  I am not quite sure how we are going to do that but I guess we will figure it out.  She looks naked without her sails.  Except for a few spots along the boom where the paint has rubbed off, everything seems good. 

Once the sails were collected,  it was time to move on.  We had a reservation at  California Yacht Marina, in Chula Vista at the very south end of the bay, almost to Mexico.  It is run by the same company as our marina in Wilmington so we get two weeks free mooring.  Unlike Long Beach/San Pedro, there are almost no container ships in San Diego, just lots of pleasure boats.  This means that the harbor is much more shallow and only the main channel is kept dredged.   As we got further and further south beyond the Coronado bridge, the channel began to get more and more narrow until it seemed to be barely wide enough for two boats to pass.  The chart showed only a few feet of water on each side of the channel markers so missing the marks was not an option.  We put the engine in dead slow and crept along, Alan standing up so he could see and me scrunched down in the cockpit watching the depth sounder and the chart and calling out the readings.  We got down to 2.3 fathoms at one point and the keel depth is about 6 feet.  I think we may need to make some adjustments to the cockpit arrangement so that the person steering can also see the radar.  It’s fine if you are sitting down in the cockpit, but you really need to stand to see over the cabin when you are in close quarters and then you can’t see the screen.  Eventually we made it into the marina entrance and slid smoothly into our assigned berth.  Wow, I would hate to do that in a fog or bad weather! 

Given what it took to get here, I had expected to find either very few boats or only small power boats with a very shallow draft.  Surprisingly, it was packed full with hundreds of large sailboats.  Since it was after 5:00 the office was closed but the nice couple on the next boat lent us a gate key so we could get in and out.  We secured the boat, hit the showers, had dinner and turned in.  Tired, but far less tired that I had expected after sailing for 3 days straight and quite proud of ourselves.