Monday, August 6, 2018

TR: early August sail to Santa Cruz Island

I'm going to move blogging about Mental Physics, my Olson 25, here, since I don't feel like it's worth a separate blog. There's some backstory about the boat that I might fill in, when I get the chance, for instructional purposes. In the meantime...

Ben and I made it out to Santa Cruz Island from SB for the first time on Mental. (We'd done one trip to Yellowbanks and one to Scorpion last year from CIH.) We took off around 10am on Saturday. The wind filled in for real around 1pm, and we reached SC near Lady's and sailed down the coast (reef + #2) in big swells, poked into Fry's where we found three sailboats anchored, but kept going East because the forecast for the next day was for high winds and I didn't want to deal with it on the way back on Sunday. We found E Twin Harbor empty and dropped anchor in the middle, with a stern rode to the beach at high tide. Overnight there were periods that were comfortable, and a few hours when swells reflected off the SW corner of the cove and made the motion of the boat pretty uncomfortable.



When I was coming back from swimming the stern rode ashore, I surprised four bat rays who took off right and left. The other critters in the cove were spotted (presumably harbor) seals, who swam from kelp bunch to kelp bunch and popped out up to their chests whenever we did something interesting, like put in the kayak. I also saw a dark brown bird with a bright red beak that I'd never seen before, which I think was a black Oystercatcher. Sea surface temp was 73 F on Saturday evening and 71 F on Saturday morning, in other words: balmy.

We left Sunday at 11am, thinking the wind was filling in, but didn't get consistent wind until about noon. We saw a mola mola in the SB traffic lane, and two enormous container ships in the NB lane. The wind shut off 5 nm from SB, and I caught nothing trolling greenie. We were back at the slip by 4:30pm.