Naa Naa Nah Goodbye!

Well it went pretty well, a sloppy and slow motor out of the bay, followed by a boring and uncomfortable motor sail for the next 10 hours, the seas were not big but there were two swell directions and thus we rolled.
Liam unfortunately got seasick but he was a trooper and kept on going.

The first nights are always the hardest and this one was no exception, the wind picked up to 15 - 25 kts just before sunset so we had a booming reach with big following seas, Grace is a wonderful seaboat and the windvane did all the steering, the wind picked up more so we were down to the 2nd reef and the yankee jib, surfing a few times we pegged the knotmeter several times, our knotmeter goes to 10 by the way. But she was steering herself very well so all we really had to do was watch her work.

All down the coast the following down we didn't have to touch the sails and we were really moving, our 24 hour fix had us making 140 miles.
80 miles or Piedras Blancas it was time to jibe, our new track had us heading straight towards San Miguel island and the west end of the Santa Barbara channel.

We were sailing well, the new tack was at a better angle to the swell and some of the SW component seemed to have gone, Liam was doing a lot better and seemed to adapt to the situation very well, never complained but he did seem a little bemused. Heather was magnificent, she had to spend most of her time below with Liam which must have been hard, but still she kept producing food and cleaning up below.
By now we did have no small amount of vomit here and there.

Towards evening the wind increased again and the SW swell resumed, the seas became peaked and lumpy and steep and close together, 6-8 seconds apart, I hauled down the main and we rolled along with just the yankee.
It was an ugly night, John and I traded off with 3 to 4 hour watches and it was tough, I felt apprehensive, there was a loud bang and one of the blocks that leads from the windvane to the tiller ripped off the rail, I hand steered for about 2 hours and thought about it, and then when John came up to relieve I rove the line through the stern  anchor roller and it worked fine, a relief because handsteering would have sucked.

So on we rolled through that very unpleasant night, at 0530 I fixed our position and discovered that we had made 300 miles in the last 48 hours, we were getting into the protection of the Channel Islands and then at bout 1000 the sun came out, the wind lightened to15kts and the air suddenly felt warmer. We had a wonderful day sailing under full sail with the vane steering and everyone relaxing and feeling great, we dried out some gear had a good meal, I got reaquainted with Liam in the forepeak. Around nightfall the wind died and we fired up the diesel, the diesel died so I changed the fuel filter and we motored through a warm night under a near full moon, arriving at Avalon in the early morning.

Michael

PS; Heather will write one of these days and I'm sure the grammer will be much better.