Red
To gain more sailing experience my wife and I had just volunteered to crew on Red’s ketch, leaving the following morning for Seattle. Red was returning to his home port, a journey of about thirteen hundred miles.
A couple months prior to this, we’d started practicing nautical knots for the first time on the bathtub handles in our Oceanside apartment. To pay the rent we were working on refinishing a Norwegian sloop called Somerfugl (Butterfly) in the local harbor. We then graduated to sailing a Sabot in Oceanside Harbor, and crewing for folks along the coast. We soon met local sailor Harvey Royer, a former Air Force test pilot who sailed competitively in the California Handicap Racing Fleet and berthed his Ranger 29 sloop in Oceanside. We wanted to learn to sail, and Harvey found himself in need of crew—even though we knew little about sailing, much less sailing competitively, we started crewing for Harvey, and he kept working with us even though we had a lot to learn. Harvey was a master sailor and tacticion—more often than not he guided us, at top speed, across the starting line in the lead.
The rules of the road at the start of a sailboat race are a complex set of rights-of-way among dozens of tightly packed, aggressively piloted sailboats. Harvey’s Ranger 29 could turn on a dime and was very fast in the typically light air. While Harvey was top-notch, his crew wasn’t ready for prime time, but we had a lot of fun and got along well.
Flash forward to the evening before we were to leave with Red: we’d learned more about sailing theory and practice, though were still beginners. Harvey had come by to see us off and to look over the boat, a ketch-rigged Islander of about 45 feet. He wasn’t impressed. He said the boat had way too much freeboard, meaning its profile above waterline was too high and offered too large a target for high winds and large ocean waves, including cabin windows that were too big. In fact, he didn’t like much about the boat at all. When he asked us about the captain’s experience, we realized we hadn’t thought to grill Red about his qualifications, being so unsure of our own. Harvey pointed out the Islander was a motorsailer, designed as much as a motorboat as a sailboat, and wondered out loud if we were really going to be sailing up to Seattle. We’d asked Red about this, and told Harvey, ‘You bet, Red said we’d sail as much as we could.’
The next morning we motored out of Oceanside Harbor and turned up the coast. Red’s plan was to hug the coast all the way to Seattle. We thought this didn’t make a lot of sense for many reasons, including the fact that longer tacks offshore could take advantage of favorable winds that could take us closer to our ideal heading under sail but of course Red was the captain. When we asked about actually setting the sails, Red replied the wind wasn’t right, we’d motor until it was blowing in the right direction. We motored all day with Red, my wife, and I taking turns at the helm. After motoring for nine or ten hours, we pulled into port at Long Beach some 90 miles up the coast, where we tied up for the night.
The next morning, we asked Red about raising the sails, but his reply was again that the wind wasn’t right—until that afternoon when we were overtaken and convincingly passed by a sailboat. Red relented and we raised the mainsail and jib and sailed for an hour or so until the winds lightened. About an hour before dusk we entered the small commercial harbor at Santa Barbara.
It had been a long day, and the following day we’d be rounding Point Conception and Point Arguello. Most of the Southern California coast is considered easy sailing, but the waters off Points Conception and Arguello are where the cold southbound California Current collides with the warm northwest-bound Southern California Current: the area’s currents and weather are unpredictable. Southern California sailors warn it’s best to round these points at night, since winds were usually lighter. Red wasn’t aware of this. We tuned into marine weather for the current forecast: “Point Arguello to Point Hueneme, winds light and variable,” and decided to push on. We threw off the lines and motored back out onto a calm sea, excited at the prospect of getting past Points Conception and Arguello in ideal conditions.
Point Conception is about 50 miles west of Santa Barbara, where the California coast makes a 45-degree turn to the north, and about 15 miles later, at Point Arguello, the coast turns to the north again a similar angle; we figured we’d be passing Point Arguello a few hours before dawn.
About 20 minutes out of Santa Barbara a fresh headwind washed over us. No problem. It steadily increased; we checked the marine forecast, which was still predicting ‘winds light and variable’ so we didn’t worry, figuring we were experiencing a short-term aberration.
The wind steadily increased over the next few hours, and our calm seas changed to 4-5 foot swells, but the night sky was cloudless. We each were taking one-hour shifts at the helm.
The coast in this area was a bit dark, and of course at night it was impossible to know if there were shoals or rocky outcrops in our path as we paralleled the coast. We asked to look at Red’s charts—he had zero charts other than the one laminated into the table in the main salon. Red’s boat was equipped with Loran, but he refused to turn it on. We realized after a long discussion that he either didn’t know how to use Loran or it was down and he hadn’t bothered to repair it.
We finally saw the light at Point Conception and crawled past it—once it fell behind us we looked forward to passing Arguello’s light, and hopefully calmer weather. But the winds continued to increase, and a little over two hours later when we rounded Point Arguello the swells were higher and closer together. We were motoring without sails, and the Islander was pitching and rolling like a cork. Yet the marine forecast remained unchanged. We’d been taking a bit of a pounding and were tired; our shifts at the helm were getting shorter. My wife, who was prone to sea-sickness, was feeling awful but insisting on taking her shifts. None of us were getting any sleep. Above, stars were still visible. We hoped that dawn would bring us some relief.
Our compartment on the boat was the V-berth forward of the main cabin, itself forward of the center cockpit. The noise of the waves pounding the V-berth and the bouncing motion made sleep impossible. After one shift, Red let my wife try to get some rest in the slightly calmer captain’s cabin in the stern.
She got no rest, but confided later she’d seen no ship-to-shore radio back there, meaning there wasn’t one anywhere as we’d already searched the rest of the boat. If we ran into trouble there was no way to call for help. We asked Red about this and his response was to show us a small Styrofoam-clad emergency beacon which was activated when immersed in water.
Dawn came with increased wind force. Our headway was diminished by wave action and wind. The center cockpit deck was high above waterline, and combined with one’s standing height, the helm had seemed far from the water—now, each time the bow dropped into a trough and plowed into the next wave, sheets of wind-blown seawater slammed onto me at face-level. It was a great aid in staying awake, and for a while seemed rather comical.
What was not comical was the fact no-one had gotten any sleep in the last 24 hours, we were motoring under bare poles with the boat pitching and rolling wildly, and we were beginning to see strings of blowing foam sweeping over the surface of the sea, an indication the wind was at least 30 mph; swells were 8-10 feet. The marine radio still disagreed: winds light and variable.
My wife and I had been lobbying overnight to raise the jib and main to help stabilize the boat’s motion. Finally, mid-morning Red agreed to try it. We weren’t experienced enough to know the right order to raise sails in high wind to balance the helm properly and avoid being pushed broadside to the wind and waves—the correct order would have been to first raise the rear-most sail, in this case the mizzen, and then the jib, and not raise the main at all—but sail-raising order turned out to be the least of our problems. With my wife at the helm, Red and I removed the sail cover from the roller-rigged main, and when Red attempted to attach the main halyard to the head of the sail it slipped out of his hand. Because the mast was being wagged around like a baseball bat in the rough sea, the halyard immediately swung up around the mast and spreaders some 25 feet above the deck. Red ordered me to go up and get it.
Triangular aluminum steps were affixed to the sides of the mast. As I climbed, it became more and more difficult to simply hang on—by the time I reached the spreaders I was rapidly swinging back and forth out over either side of the boat, combined with the boat pitching me forward and backward on the swells. From my perch on the mast, the deck below looked really small, and smaller still as I swung out over the ocean on either side of the boat. I finally I managed to unwrap the halyard while hanging on for dear life, and descended to the deck. Exhausted, I gave Red the halyard when he reached out for it. Five seconds later it was out of his hand again and whipping back up around the spreaders. Without a word he stared at me and pointed up the mast.
I was angry: I wondered on the way back up the mast if he’d intentionally let it go to put me in my place—or worse. But I needed to focus on not getting flung off into the ocean or fall to the deck. I retrieved the halyard a second time. When I reached deck level I moved past Red’s waiting hand and attached the halyard to the head of the sail myself, and then winched the main about halfway up the mast.
The jib was roller-rigged on the forestay so we partially unfurled it and adjusted the sheet. With the reefed main and jib in place, the boat’s roll stability improved, but there was no getting away from the wave action.
The wind intensified—by midday seafoam had become an ocean-sized diaphanous sheet streaming past us, indicating Force 8 winds (40+ mph), full gale; 12-15 foot ocean waves were pounding us, our bow was burying into each oncoming wave. Too much freeboard. Looking to either side of the helm, chaotic wave crests rose above the blowing foam and receded again. The sky was still clear of clouds. Each time the Islander crested a wave we could see right over the flying plateau of foam and balefully glimpse ant-sized cars crawling along the coastal highway. They seemed a million miles away. My wife didn’t know how to swim—not that Red or I would fare any better in the cold tumbling ocean water if we lost control of the boat or fell overboard.
In spite of the waves, and the howling of the wind in our rigging, and the bronco-busting motion of the boat, it was beautiful scene. What troubled my wife and I the most was being in the hands of a captain with even less sailing experience or sense than us, and who seemed to have no interest in gaining any.
That afternoon my wife, Red, and I were now rotating at the helm in 15-minute shifts. When not on deck I’d been poring over the yellowed chart laminated into the table in the main salon—it serendipitously depicted a good portion of the Southern California coast—not a ton of detail, but I’d noticed it did include little hash-mark-clusters depicting the low coastal mountains. By reconciling them with what we could see along the coast, I thought I’d figured out approximately where we were—perhaps 30 miles from our next shelter, San Luis Obispo Bay.
So when Red announced we were turning in for San Luis Obispo Bay, a protracted debate ensued, including suggesting unsuccessfully that Loran be turned on to prove me wrong. Finally, after we’d pointed out the clear correspondence between the chart and the coastal mountains we could plainly see, Red agreed to hold our course. Late that afternoon, our only navigational aid—the table-top in the main cabin—told us it was time to head in to San Luis Obispo Bay.
As we approached the shore the winds diminished rapidly to the long-awaited “light and variable” conditions we’d been hearing about the last two days.
San Luis Obispo Bay was a safe anchorage except from southerly winds (i.e., coming from the South) as there were no significant enclosing land forms. The town of San Luis Obispo itself was inland. We dropped anchor and straightened up the boat’s interior, as it looked like we’d been rolled in a typhoon. (I happened to know what that looks like, as some years previously I’d spent a short time working on a boat in Suva Harbor, Fiji, that had in fact been rolled in a typhoon, fortunately not with me on it at the time—but that’s another story).
Having now been up for over 36 hours, the last 15 of them in rough seas and high winds, we were beyond exhausted and retired with no schedule for the morning. But before losing consciousness my wife and I briefly reviewed our observations of Red’s judgement and seamanship, and agreed there was no way in hell we were going to be under his control off the coasts of Oregon and Washington State, where weather conditions and seas were significantly less forgiving than along the Southern California coast, and our table-top chart would be of no help to us. We decided we’d stay with Red until we reached San Francisco, some 250 miles to the North, where he’d have a better chance to get new crew than in the smaller towns along the way.
Fortunately, we had mild weather the next few days. We told Red of our decision the day before we were to arrive in San Francisco. The next morning, Red insisted I say at the helm without a break, apparently as punishment. That afternoon we tied up in Sausalito, just inside the bay from the Golden Gate Bridge, having learned a valuable lesson about vetting the people we chose to sail with. And we looked forward to getting back to Oceanside to crew with Harvey in the next race.