SF-SD Day 6 Gale 2

It is 1.30 AM on Tuesday the 19th and Pachuca is sailing well almost directly for San Diego.

We started sailing at about 1 PM yesterday with a fair wind and very lumpy seas from the previous night's gale. It was a stunningly clear and sunny day, To our pleasant surprise and contrary to the grib file report we've managed to carry this course with good boat speed for the last 12 hours during which time we made good 60 miles toward San Diego. This has been a break that we have sorely needed after days of adverse winds that were either too week or too strong.,

Tonight's weather faxes indicate that the next low of 984 millibars will not cause us great problems today. We can expect swells of 12-15 ft and winds of maybe 15 kt.

The low after that is a more serious affair of 970 millibars. However, it appears that we may be close enough to San Diego by then to escape gale force winds. It is classified as a storm with winds of over 50 knots and will hit the San Francisco Bay area very hard before proceeding north.

At present we are 195 miles from San Diego, 130 miles directly west of Santa Catalina Island. Arnold and I have read about San Diego Harbor in the cruising guide. The key words are "expensive" and "crowded". The Police Dock will give us 10 free days, but it is often crowded out. Lying at anchor is out of the question for security reasons (advised to always have someone on the boat) and practical ones of provisioning and showing visitors the boat. We'll get by, as we did at Ala Wai and Victoria where we were warned that slips were hard to find. We are hoping that we may arrive during a lull in the arrival of transient boats. We figure that anyone wanting to spend the winter in Mexico would have gotten there by now. Only a lunatic would try to sail from Mexico back to the Northwest or Canada this time of year, and even those boats bound for San Diego may hold back until this rough weather passes. But these are little more than guesses.

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Things got rougher throughout the night than we had expected. The winds were not quite as strong as during the earlier gale (Though we did see 40 kt gusts) but a lot more water passed over the deck, resulting in those pesky leaks over the head of the starboard bunk and a few drops over the navigation table. They were not huge leaks but nevertheless hugely annoying. But as Arnold said, that was pretty good considering the huge amounts of water washing over the cabi

The aftermath of the gale was almost a rerun that of the previous morning. We woke up at 0930 with the wind still high and the sea furious, inching along at 2 kt with the double reefed main in an as hove to position as we had been able to set up. We had coffee, discussed the prospects for the day, then Arnold saw a patch of blue sky to the SW. I detected a very subtle veering of the wind which suggested that we would eventually get a westerly wind. At 11 AM the sky was clearing and the wind was from the west, so we turned the boat south, rolled out some jib, then dropped the mainsail because I hate running downwind with that boom threatening to brain somebody or damage the rig if we accidentally gybe. We set up Jeff and soon the boat was doing 4.5-5 kt in a lumpy sea with just a small amount of jib, headed SE. We could have steered more east toward San Diego but we wanted to keep well clear of San Nicolas and Santa Clemente Islands because we expected another rough time later within 24 hours.

Indications are that the passages of these storms will end by Friday and things will settle back to the "normal" 10-15 kt northwest wind on Saturday, which would be an excellent time for making our entry into San Diego Bay. We are willing to position ourselves 20 or 30 miles from San Diego and wait until Saturday.

At noon we were still directly west of Santa Catalina island and 175 miles from San Diego.

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