Adventures of s/v Octavia, Derek Elliott Date: 06 Nov 2011 Derek & the Monarch Butterflies race to Mexico: On October 23rd 2011 at 9am in lovely California sunshine I sailed out of Travis Marina at the foot of the North end of the Golden Gate Bridge, accompanied by half a dozen pilot whales, to start a 1500 mile journey to Mexico & the commencement of an almost lifelong dream of single handing my boat to Mexico. About 13 miles out I turned left or SSW or 207degrees (I’ve got to write ‘degrees’ until I find that little circular degree symbol on this keyboard). By now its 11:45am so you can see this journey is going to take a long time: 9am to 11:45 am is 165 minutes to travel 13miles which is = to 12.69 minutes per mile. Multiply that by 1500 miles & it = 19035 minutes = 317.25 hours which is about 13 ¼ days. This time frame assumes perfection & no problems. I should easily beat that pesky Monarch Butterfly. 12:30pm (45 minutes after my calculations) I start getting radio weather reports of unseasonable SW winds approaching. As I’m on a SW course this means sailing directly into the wind which is not good, so I decide to run for Half Moon Bay & safety. By now I’m 18 miles off shore & 21 miles from HMB so I phone Cissy on the satellite phone to tell her of the change in plans & she changes her plans so that she can meet me in HMB which is only an hours drive from San Francisco. I don’t know why but there are two plans for these satellite phones, one is per minute with a two-year agreement & the other is cheaper but you prepay for time that has to be used within two years, although you can add more time whenever you like. The problem with the latter plan is you cannot use those minutes in the USA unless you are at least 12 miles offshore. But between the satellite phone & our cell phones that are usually OK a few miles offshore, we should be able to communicate all the way to Mexico. The wind started to veer & I now had it directly on the nose (sailing directly into the wind) so I took all the sails down & motored in the last 7-10 miles. While motoring in I got a hell of a fright as I thought I’d run over a crab pot. Fishermen put their crab pots down & attach them by line to small buoys so they know where they are & can pull them up. The problem with this arrangement is they are difficult to see and running over them it’s easy for my propeller to get caught in the line from the buoy to the crab pot. If that happens your fucked, as the line wraps round the drive shaft, kills the engine & can actually pull the shaft out so that water starts pouring in. Several years ago Cissy & I were moored in Half Moon Bay & on leaving wrapped the mooring buoy line round our prop. We had to have a diver go down & cut it loose; thankfully the only damage was to our pride & pocket. But I digress, in panic I knocked the engine out of gear & reduced the revs only to see the supposedly Crab pot buoys were large orange jellyfish covered in algae & looking similar to the pots. They were everywhere, 100’s of them seemingly just below the surface. Then I noticed what looked like small fish skipping on the water, so I went over to investigate & circling I saw they were the fins on Sunfish. Sunfish are real weird fish. They are large disk like fish (3 feet wide & bigger) with two fins for swimming & a small fin like tail, they look like something Hollywood or Disney would think up. Apparently not very good eating, as they are all bone. They were on their side eating the jellyfish, some jf were huge, over ten feet long. They have mooring buoys in HMB so I phoned the harbormaster & booked one. I eventually got into HMB about 5PM & tied up to a buoy. I say tied up to a buoy but it wasn’t that easy. These buoys have a ring on the top that you pass your mooring line thru & attach back on the boat. We have high sides on our boat that make it difficult to lean down & pass the line through the ring. But we do have a great device on a pole that passes the line thru the ring & easily allows you to bring the other end back on to the boat. It’s called a ‘Happy Hooker’. Problem was the ring was too small to pass our ’Happy Hooker’ through. After attacking various buoys 6 or 7 times, I gave up & had to resort to attaching a boat hook to the buoy like Sir Lancelot & wrestling the line through the ring while being stretched by the buoy & boat. Not very nautical, but it worked. One of the problems with working on the boat outside the cockpit when single-handing is the 5-foot line or tether you have attached to you & to the boat that stops you accidently falling overboard. It constantly gets in the way. Your either tripping over the fucking thing or it gets caught somewhere along the safety line (Jack line). You attach a strong line to the boat that you can clip your tether onto & it enables you to get round the boat safely. Still it beats the alternative. When I sailed out of San Francisco I realized I’d put the Jack lines inside the standing rigging (the wires that keep the mast up). So I had to redeploy the jack line so that it went outside the rigging. Otherwise I’d have to unhook myself when strolling about the deck. Once attached to the buoy I launched the dingy & went ashore to pick up Cissy. She had bought a great takeaway Chinese. Not the way I had envisioned my first night at sea but it was a good alternative. What a day. We were exhausted & cuddling in bed by 9:30PM. The bed on Octavia is actually more comfortable than our bed at home & the one at home is not uncomfortable. Next morning, Monday 24th, I dropped Cissy off at the docks about 9am so she could get back to San Francisco, but she will be back tonight as I decided to stay another day in harbor, as the sail down here showed up a lot of faults (like the position of the Jack lines). The main fault being the outside mike from the radio works intermittently, therefore I did not hear the updated weather forecast until I was well out to sea & able to go below & hear the radio. Also a couple of days before I was due to leave, the Apple MacBook Pro computer that has all my charts, documents & bio fell in the water. We got it out pretty quickly, dried it & it worked. Next morning when I tried it again it was dead as a dodo. We took it to Andrew at ‘The Total Mac’. He managed to save the hard drive. In the meantime we bought another Mac laptop & he transferred the info to it. He subsequently got the original laptop working so we keep it as a backup. Because the new laptop has the new apple operating system on it I could not get my GPS to work until I downloaded the updated drivers. This I was able to do due to the Wi-Fi antenna I installed on the boat a few weeks back. I can now hopefully get Wi-Fi while miles from shore. After dropping Cissy off I got back to Octavia & signed onto the Internet for $6.95 for 24 hours. As I was working away trying to get everything together I heard a knocking on the hull. Thinking it was the Harbormaster or a kayaker I went outside but couldn’t see anything. Just then about 40 feet away from Octavia a sea otter surfaced & I watched as it attempted to open a shellfish on its chest by striking it with a rock. When it saw me it swam back to Octavia, dived & started striking his lunch against my hull again. I started hitting the hull in time with the sea otter but must have frightened him as he then swam away. At lunchtime I was eating my sandwich in the cockpit & heard a commotion. It was a bloody great seal, shaking a big fish like a terrier shakes a rat or toy, and then letting it go. He was breaking bits off to eat & loads of seagulls were chasing after the little bits. The weather is pretty dismal but looks like the NW wind will override the Southerly by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll drop Cissy off at the docks tomorrow morning, load the dingy onto Octavia & set off about 8 or 9am. Go out 20+ miles then head South again to continue my journey. That evening Cissy & I finished off the Chinese for dinner. Its been real nice these past couple of days being with her, as for weeks I’ve been involved in my projects, trying to get everything ready for this trip. Cissy doesn’t do well on little or no attention. We can now relax & enjoy each other again. Next morning, Tuesday 25th I dropped Cissy of at the Harbormasters office, she paid him $10 for the mooring buoy (should have been $30).