Sailing to Mexico - a peaceful journey on the Californian coast

That's right. You ready for the night passage? Yeah, should be good. Looking forward to going to bed. Go to bed now. Yeah, I think I will. There aren't many sheltered ports or places to anchor a boat on this part of the coast and so you're often forced to do legs off 80 miles or more. This is fine but it means you have to travel overnight if you want to arrive in daylight. The morning was clear and bright when we arrived in San Simeon, a beautiful anchorage with no facilities but a lot of pelicans. Another overnight passage, this time from San Simeon down to Santa Cruz Island around the notorious Conception Point. Heavy winds and violent dangerous waves are very common in this area. It's another reason for an overnight passage, the conditions off the point tend to be much more favorable in the early morning. In the end the wind was so light that we motored through much of the night watching the lights of the California coast pass by and occasionally navigating around the brightly lit oil rig. In the morning after we were safely around Conception Point the winds largest of California's Channel Islands and is owned by the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy, so all 60,000 acres of it is more or less a nature reserve. Although Santa Cruz Island is relatively close to LA, nobody lives there and it feels surprisingly remote. It's famous for the Santa Cruz Island fox which is endemic, meaning it's not found anywhere else in the world. Apparently they're pretty common to see but unfortunately despite our best efforts since Victoria. He was planning to stay on board longer but something came up for him and he had to rush home to Canada, so Marek rode him ashore to Santa Cruz Island where he got a ferry to the mainland. Are you going to do a circle and I'll be a bit nearer the pier? After that it was just the two of us on board. Now we could have arranged for someone else to get the ferry out and meet us there, but we've been wanting to try sailing offshore double-handed for quite a while, so we decided to give it a go sailing overnight to Catalina Island. So I want to talk just a little bit about this passage that Marek and I made because it didn't go exactly according to plan. But first I want to acknowledge really quickly that this video is a little bit different from a lot of my videos and part of the reason is that we weren't really filming very much during this period of the journey. We were quite far behind in the editing and the videos and we were pretty focused on just operating the boat and making progress and also trying to enjoy the areas we were in and the scenery and so I didn't get very much footage which I now regret and also managed to lose some SD cards somehow so I lost a bunch of footage as well. And this journey that Marek and I made from Santa Cruz to Santa Catalina Island is a perfect example of why things don't always get filmed when sometimes it's the most exciting stuff because actually when things get a little bit hectic sometimes, you know, you don't have a camera crew so the priority becomes actually just making sure things are safe and filming becomes less of a priority. So anyway, basically we had much higher winds and forecasts and didn't really show it very well in the video but the sea state was actually very short and quite unpleasant. The waves weren't huge but the period was very short so it was quite a rough motion and then the other problem was that Marek had actually injured her back a couple of weeks before. Normally she's very active in sailing the boat and helping out but her injury kind of reactivated itself that evening so she was standing watch and so on but she wasn't really able to help with the more physical side of sailing. So I found myself middle of the night, pretty strong winds, having to reef the boat on my own. It was a good experience and it was a challenging experience and then I had to gybe and that was actually the hardest bit, just bringing the mainsheet in all the way to be able to gybe the sail over safely. It took a lot of energy, a lot of work on my own and I actually had to put another reef in, so reef down to three reefs in the end. But we had a great sail, it was just a little bit hectic in the middle of the night there and I definitely wasn't about to try and pick up the camera and get the shot. I was just focused on keeping the boat going safely and properly but then later in the night the wind eased, we motored for a bit, we arrived in Santa Catalina, had a very nice time there. We didn't film anything and then we had another friend fly in to Santa Catalina just to join us from the journey from there to San Diego which was just a day trip which we also didn't film very much. But at the end of those few days we did arrive in San Diego and we had a hitchhiker for the last part of the journey. It's great, got the topsails up, it's pretty light, motored a little bit but it's great, good to get the topsails out and getting hotter every degree south we travel. Kind of welcome, I think we're gonna get pretty overheated in the next couple of months. That sounds amazing. They're announcing our arrival. We didn't stay in San Diego for very long but we did get a chance to visit the Maritime Museum of San Diego where Tally Ho met the HMS Surprise straight out of the Master and Commander film and we got to see a lot of other amazing historic boats including the Iron Hulled Star of India which is the world's oldest active sailing ship built in 1863 and still operational. She's sailed 21 times around the world and has never had an engine. I thoroughly recommend visiting the museum if you have a chance but for us it was time to head out and head south again. On the border, like right at the front of the boat, those are all people. Or not a bundlin, what's this one called? I know this knot. It's a bundlin? Yeah, it's a bundlin. Well we're in Mexico and we had a great time sailing down through the southern part of California but we're pretty rushed and part of the reason is that we wanted to be in one place for a little while before heading south into the Sea of Cortez. I've got some personal stuff to catch up on, some work on the boat and various other things so we wanted to be a little bit stationary and a little bit stable and this seemed like a good place to do it so we wanted to get a few miles under our belts and then find a good place to to stop and regroup and get some work done. So we're here now. I didn't do as much filming or storytelling really as I would have liked in California. We were really just very focused on moving the boat but I think now we're kind of catching up on things. I'm actually really excited about getting back into filming more and telling more stories so I think we're going to meet a lot of interesting people here in Mexico. We're going to get some good work done on the boat so there's a lot of good stuff coming up. I'm really excited about the next few months traveling south through Mexico and into Central America and heading for Panama Canal probably around the end of the year, early next year. But now though, thanks a lot for watching and a massive massive thank you to everyone who has donated or otherwise supported these videos and this project and this channel. It does make a huge difference. It means we're able to carry on sailing this boat, maintaining this boat and making these videos. So I really really appreciate it and I'll see you next time. Cheers!