Surviving California's Storms - Morro Bay, CA - Sailing Avocet

When you last saw us, we were on our way back to Avocet from the mountains, where we had spent the whole month with friends and visiting our family for the holidays, getting all of the snow time in we could before sailing south of the border. We had also dropped off our diesel parts to get fixed by a mechanic, and we're thrilled to have them back and ready to reunite with our Perkins. We were eager to get back out to the anchorage and even more eager to get out of Morro Bay. So Chris didn't hesitate to jump right back into the engine work, hoping our Perkins would live to see another day. So this little guy right here is our high-pressure injection fuel pump. It has been sort of the gremlin of our engine, unbeknownst to us up until about a month ago. So we've been chasing a lot of other problems that I've been believing we've had, all of them being fuel-related. And this is the last one we haven't touched because this little bad boy is kind of Pandora's box inside. I have no idea how it works, no idea really how to fix it. So when we figured out that it was the thing leaking diesel into our sump, it was sort of a sigh of relief because it was the one thing we haven't touched. I'm about to install it. You can see it is all painted and looks pretty. I dropped it off at a shop in Fresno, spent about three weeks at the shop. It got completely torn apart, new seals got tested on their bench. So it should work just fine. When it came time to put his work to the test, I continued to hope we would hear the purr of the Perkins once more, instead of angry growls or even worse, silence. All right, well, it is time to try to start the engine. I have dotted on my I's, crossed on my T's, and I think I've done a decent job bleeding all the injectors, the fuel line and the pump. But it'll still take a minute to crank over, crank over, crank over. I'm gonna be loosening the inlet into the injector, those pipes to bleed the engine while Marissa cranks. Eventually it should start to pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, and then turn over. So here we go. We're without water. Yep. Okay, leaving the slip. We're still in Morro Bay, but we're headed back out to the anchorage so we can stop being charged for being in a marina. If you hear that, that is the sound of our Perkins 4108 working again. She is back, she's better than ever. We are so excited to have a functioning engine and we're gonna put her to the test right now as we move out to the anchorage. So Chris is just grabbing the last of the things that are keeping us connected. So shore power is officially cut off. We are relying on solar and our batteries. So yeah, we're gonna get back out to it. From what we could tell in our short transit of 200 yards, the engine was running better than ever before. And we soon found ourselves back where we spent our first weeks in Morro Bay. But unlike our arrival to the bay, it was much, much colder, which was the perfect excuse to turn the diesel heater up to high, get snuggly and play some games with our dear friends from Ventura. I mean, you know, I think my chances of being stuck are pretty low. Despite being back on the hook, the anchorage was not free. In Morro Bay, you are allotted five nights for free, then you are charged $1.50 per foot per night every night thereafter, which in our opinion seems wrong, especially when they close the harbor entrance, not giving the option of departure. But California will squeeze the money out of you every way possible. With a working engine and the high of the holidays behind us, we were looking forward to continuing south, but soon found ourselves living an inescapable groundhog day. It's super windy outside. The rain just started again. We're doing a few 360s here on the hook. Keep seeing the lights on the stacks. It will come into view and then it will come out of view, so it's kind of trippy. Keep hearing things splashing against the hull. It's gonna be a long night. We're supposed to see like upwards of 40 knots. So that'll be fun. And it's supposed to get worse. The worst is supposed to be at 10 o'clock tomorrow. We'll see. But we have a lot of scope out and a really long bridle out and we're just gonna hold on. Right now the wind is opposing the tide. So that means tomorrow when it's at its strongest, the wind should be going with the tide. And anyways, it makes it a lot more comfortable. Makes the boat stay in one place a little better. Right now we're doing big 360s because we keep loading up on our chain and then the bow gets caught and the stern wraps around. So anyways, super fun. All right, well it is coming down out there. I'd say it's blowing at least 40 knots. Tide hasn't been opposing too badly tonight. It is just now starting to come back in though, of course, as it's gonna be the worst in the next hour and a half, two hours. We are at our completely end of our scope. I know that because we get pretty close to the little warship that's behind us, which is exactly where we rode out the last one. But it is a little aggressive. Chop height, I would say, is at least three feet. By the time it gets to us, we're all the way at the north end of the bay and it's a south wind. So there's a lot of fetch in between us and the end. These poor boats behind us are just getting thrashed. Actual dock is broken. I need a deckhand, I'm 48, six foot. Pull up, where I'm going. It's kinda nasty out. Dodger's lovely. So glad we were on it. Wee. It's getting more intense, for sure. Tide has swapped, so now it's coming in. We've got opposing tide and wind and it's made the wave height higher. So now it's probably two and a half feet, three feet here, which is fine, but it's just more uncomfortable. The boat's bucking a lot more. And we're going kinda sideways and then when the wind blows hard enough, we'll go back to being straight. But when it dies down, it goes back to being sideways. So it's a weird tug of war between the wind and the tide. Well, we made it through the night. It was pretty windy. I think we got, the most we saw really was about 45, 47 knots. Didn't get past that, which is good. Everybody else, the harbor patrol came up to us twice, kinda worried about us because they had heard that they were gonna get 60 knots, but we never saw anything like that. And we're the only ones out here in the anchorage. We're the only ones on the hook. So anyways, we knew a wind was coming, so what we did to prepare for that was just put out some more scope. We have, I think, 200 feet out right now and we're in about 20 feet of water. Luckily, Morro Bay is very protected, so. It's a super protected little hurricane hole. We never felt anything from the storm surge outside in terms of the 20 to 30 foot seas we had, just outside the little sandbar, so that's great. I can't say that about Santa Cruz Harbor, that's for sure. We're gonna check on our friend Reed, who's on a mooring out there, and our other friends on SV Mundial. So we're gonna check on them, make sure they all fared through the night. Is that what we're getting in the dinghy? No, we're gonna call them. We have technology. Wanna go to shore today? So the sun finally came out, and we took it as a chance to go to shore and stretch our legs, because when you're stuck inside a 41 foot boat for three days, you start to go a little bit crazy. So it's really nice to be outside and get some fresh air, get some sweet vitamin D on our skin, or at least the skin that's exposed, because it's still a little cold. But we're just walking around, checking out how other boats fared during the storm. There's a lot of eelgrass all around, a lot of kelp bulbs floating, some other debris. The otters all look really confused, they're all huddled together, and yeah, we fared a lot better than, I'd say a majority of the boats that are on the dock. Saturday, we have another big storm rolling in, and I wanna do one project on the boat before we leave Morro Bay, which we are hopefully leaving on Wednesday next week. I need to install a shaft lock on a propeller shaft. It's a long story, but the quick version of it is that we have a feathering prop, an autoprop, that is designed to have the shaft locked in order for it to feather. We have a hydraulic transmission, so we can't just put it in gear and have the shaft locked, it still spins. The transmission needs hydraulic pressure in order to go in forward or reverse, so the answer for us is the shaft lock. The reason I'd like to not be on anchor while we're doing this is that we have pretty intense tidal swings here, and it's going past the boat fast. I'm gonna start taking up this anchor. It's gonna be very buried because of all the crazy weather we just put it through, but eventually, I should be able to get it back up. Lot of peanut. Come on, baby girl. Rock space for the day or night. Engine sounds amazing. Yeah, we're really happy with it so far. Obviously, we haven't been able to use it out on the open ocean, just because we've been a little trapped. However, we put a few hours on it, motoring back and forth and making power to supplement the batteries. Yeah, it sounds great. Our second docking. Urs is gonna do a great job. Once tied off to the Yacht Club dock, we plugged into shore power, kicked on our space heaters, and got to work installing the shaft lock. Fortunately, installing the shaft lock was a pretty straightforward process, but unfortunately, while installing it, we noticed that our Sigma Drive coupling was cracked. With our coupling situation sorted for the time being, we returned to the anchorage with a project list a little longer than when we had left. So we got a little break in between the storm, and we're gonna take it till you get off the dock. So we put the engine back together with the new shaft lock installed. And even though our coupler is pretty broken, pretty sure it's been broken for a while. So I think we're just gonna take it as it is. Are you ready? The harbor entrance was still closed in anticipation of more storms, keeping us confined to the bay where the days felt stale. The brief intermissions of happiness laced within long gray days seemed to coincide with visits from friends. Fortunately, we had plenty of friends around to distract us from our current state of trapped, reminding us that there is still good even within the bad times. But now back to the boat talk. When we set our hook, we do a couple things. I usually let out the chain we're going to a lot to whatever anchorage we're in, nice and slow, make sure not to ball it up. I basically have Marissa in reverse as I'm hanging out chain, and that lays it across the seabed nice and evenly. And that way, when we come to the end of the scope, it's not an aggressive yank and pull. It's a nice, slow, even motion. And it gradually increases the tension on the anchor until it finally sets. Marissa's now backing down on the anchor, just in gear up until we get the slack out of the scope. Then we'll set it with high RPMs. There it is. All right, now that's tight. All right, bring it up. Now I look around and I find a point on land and I make sure that we don't move. And we hold this for about at least 30 seconds. If we don't move, then we don't move. I'm using this half inch Dyneema that I all spliced together and it's basically our, oh ----, it's not going to go anywhere bridle. I know that these can break, but this could lift the whole boat. And this is always on. So even if we have a snubber that's in front of it, which we always do, I still put this guy on right here. That way, if that one breaks, it doesn't all load up on the gypsy because with enough tension on the chain, even if the gypsy's tight, the chain will go skip over and pay out. We've had that happen to us. So now that we walked you through how we set our anchor, the next step for us is to set a snubber and to set the appropriate one for what kind of wind and tide you're going to see. For most instances from five to 20 knots, we usually use this, which is a half inch three strand. And you also know that it's only one line. We don't use two lines going to the port and starboard side hoss hole. We just do one line right off the port bow roller. That way, while you're tugging back and forth at the anchor, the line is able to move over the bow roller and not chafe. It's great because it gives a lot of stretch in between the chain and the boat. But anything over that 20 knot breeze, that's when we break up the bigger guns, which is this guy, which is more of a five eighths to one inch size three strand. And this is about 20 feet long. So when we really have big blows come through, like we just experienced here, we had one of the biggest winter storms in the last 15 years. We've had a 20 foot or even more than that, 25 feet snubber out. And that again, just decreases the amount of yanking on the chain and therefore the anchor. Your snubber is basically the bungee cord in between the two of you to make sure that you don't rip out the anchor. And also on deck, you don't have an aggressive tugging motion, breaking your hardware up on the bow. That's what you try to avoid. And so far this has worked out for us. The way we attach our snubber to the chain, we decided to switch up a little bit and go with this Mantis hook because it disperses its load probably the best out of every sort of a fixing to chain possibility. We use this type of hook for a long time. There's nothing wrong with it, but again, it kind of side loads the chain instead of this one keeps the chain in its perfect orientation and pulls on it very evenly. The other thing you can do is called a rolling hitch. That's just a regular knot that everyone should know. And most sailors that use that method of just tying a rolling hitch onto their chain swear by it. So all of them are decent options. We decided to use this and so far we've been loving it. And that's basically all there is on snubber talk. With the next storm quickly approaching, we took to the beach to watch our friend Reed make use of the otherwise annoying high winds. This is what we do in bed now. Let's look at the weather and hope that something will change. Well, it's not changing tonight. It's gonna be crappy. I know there is a lot of weather in this video, but it's a good reminder that living on a sailboat isn't always sunny days and bikinis. With a promising forecast, we were at peace with the latest storm and let it wash over us, knowing that we would soon be sailing south. That was a big gust. That was a good one. I would have said it's a 52 is our max right now. It's a sustained 35 gusting into easy 40s right now. It's apocalyptic orange outside. I probably look really tired because we woke up at 4 a.m. to the boat bucking. Going down, that's what you just signified. Basically. It was a long day of rain and wind, and now it's apocalyptic orange, so. What's up? Yeah. So I don't know if you can tell, but we seem to have run aground. I don't think we've ever even heeled over this much. Wow. We are really, really in the mud. What are we doing? Off of the shoal? Off of the shoal. What's that called? It's a, it's a kedging, right? Never had to do that before. Yeah, it's the first time for everything, so. Look, Ellie, how easy it is to get on the boat now. Chase hard over, buddy. Some people think that you must be underway to run aground, and although in most cases that is true, the textbook definition of running aground is to be immobilized by water too shallow to allow your vessel to float, which was most certainly true for us. We had anchored in the same spot we had left a few days prior at mean low, low tide with five to one scope in anticipation of the incoming strong southwest winds that blew throughout the night. However, what we didn't plan for was mother nature's decision to rearrange the seabed during the latest storms, shifting the existing sandbar further into the anchorage that resulted in our predicament when the wind flipped to a faint easterly at the same time the tide began to go out. All right, we just got free. Using a kaj anchor, just like this, finally we're able to get ourselves off that dam. So we're just getting off now. Wrist is up on the bow, we're celebrating. We're floating again. I'm overriding a winch to almighty content because I'm not paying attention. Okay. All right, so we're free. About 15 feet out of the keel again. Now I gotta deal with this kaj anchor that's off the back of us. The wind is opposing us, the tide is opposing us, we're free. Throw the stern light off the back. There it is. Floating again. Amazing. Little fender. Still in there. At this point, we were wondering if we would ever leave Morro Bay. F***ing in there. So, give me a second to process this. But don't worry, all of that is next on Sailing Avocet.