Monterey to Santa Barbara and Channel Islands

We have had another full couple of weeks making our way down the California Coast covering over  300 miles. Here are some of the highlights.

Monterey Aquarium

We spent a full day at the Monterey Aquarium – literally. We arrived at opening time and were one of the few groups remaining at closing time. Wow! It is one of the leading Aquariums in the USA and we could see why. It took us all day to make our way through it. The exhibits were large scale and the aquarium focused on sea life in the ocean right outside. The huge 1.2 million gallon tank with sardines, tuna, dorados and hammerhead sharks was a hit. So was the kelp forest. We also learned about the history of cannery row and the disappearing sardines. I have downloaded Steinbeck’s Cannery Row to my Kindle and am looking forward to reading it! 

Monterey to Santa Barbara

We had two long travel days to cover the 230 miles from Monterey to Santa Barbara. The first day we left before sunrise and enjoyed a great sail in 15 to 25 knots with decent swells. Thankfully the new medication for Nathan seems to be working and he was not sick – fingers crossed this continues! We pulled into San Simeon at nightfall and enjoyed a reasonably calm evening considering the open anchorage. The next day we again left before sunrise with the goal to round Cape Conception – also know as “the Cape Horn of the Pacific” – before nightfall.

Interesting fact from our cruising guide: “The winds at the cape can be 50 to 130% higher than the strong breeze well offshore” Ummm…maybe this explains our experience at Cape Mendacino?!

The forecast was for 10 to 15 knots and we were hoping to sail at least part of the way. The good news is that our rounding of Cape Conception was calm and uneventful. Unfortunately we ended up motoring the entire day as the forecast turned out to be optimistic as there was no wind and the water was glassy.

We spent the night at Cojo anchorage – a surprisingly gorgeous spot with a beautiful beach and rugged cliffs. We could hear the surf pounding on the beach from our anchor spot so decided that we would not pick this beach for our first surf-dinghy landing attempt! We were pretty tired from the trip and enjoyed a good night’s sleep.

The next day was another travel day – again no wind and we motored the 40 miles to Santa Barbara. We passed several oil rigs along the way and noticed an oil slick in some areas. Apparently there are up to 150 barrels per day that seep naturally into the water in this area and George Vancouver himself wrote about oil slicks in Cojo anchorage when he explored this area, so we assumed the oil we were seeing was not spilling from the oil rigs – we hope!

Fishing success – finally! We caught our first tuna of the trip about 5 miles before arriving in Santa Barbara – a nice skipjack. Gavin did a great job filleting and bleeding the fish (lessons learned from our prior tuna experience) and we enjoyed a delicious sushi dinner in Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara

We had an enjoyable few days in Santa Barbara. We met up with some family friends who kindly received some packages for us and brought delicious treats for Gavin’s birthday – thank you Ray and Vicki! We enjoyed walking the streets of Santa Barbara and taking in the historic Santa Barbara County Courthouse. I think Santa Barbara ties with Sausalito as my favourite Calfiornia town so far! It is beautiful and I loved the red cobblestone streets and white washed buildings with the Spanish colonial influence. We also enjoyed an evening out at the Santa Barbara Yacht Club with a beautiful veiw of the bay and even sat right underneath the RVYC burgee!

Santa Cruz Island

We then had a great sail for the 24 miles across from Santa Cruz Island. The entire island is part State park and conservation area. It is like another world. We shared a very bumpy overnight anchorage along with two other Canadian boats and woke up early to enjoy the amazing painted caves the next morning – motoring inside the cliff in the darkness of the caves to find happy sea lions on their private shelter inside. Then we found our favourite anchorage of the trip so far at Lady’s Harbour as we set both bow and stern anchors and hunkered down to do schooling and enjoy the sunny afternoon.

Leaving Lady’s Harbour we had a bit of drama leaving the harbour. The night before we did a load of laundry and turned on the generator (the laundry machine requires generator power). The generator ran out of fuel partway through the cycle so Gavin used the transfer pump for 10 minutes to transfer fuel from our full fuel tank to the now empty one. The generator pulls fuel from one of our fuel tanks that is also attached to our boat engine. The next morning we turned on the engine and pulled up our bow and stern anchors. Lady’s Harbour is a very small inlet between rock walls. We had barely exited the anchorage and the engine died. Oh no! There was a lumpy sea and luckily not much wind, but we were very close to rocky shore on both sides. Gavin quickly jumped into the dinghy and pulled us into deeper water. Then we put the anchor down in 60 feet of water and addressed the fuel issue. Apparently our fuel transfer pump is very efficient and had transferred all our fuel to the other tank! We checked the fuel level on the tank the boat engine was drawing from and sure enough the tank was empty! We switched the engine to pull from the other tank and thankfully it started fine and all was good. Phew! Nathan was a huge help with the anchor and dinghy when we were scrambling around. It was a good lesson in boating and how a small issue can lead to a potentially risky situation in a few seconds!

Next stop was Pelican Bay on Santa Cruz island. Wow, another beautiful cove. The rock formations, clear water and beautiful scenery has this anchorage high on our list so far. We snorkeled, paddleboarded and perused the shoreline. Goregous! 

We also had a memorable evening stargazing with all of us lying on the foredeck as we watched the stars appear in the clear night sky.  Nathan, Julia and Gavin had done a lesson on celestial navigation and had built a home made tool to find our latitude once we saw the north star Polaris. They were only 1 degree off of our actual latitude – not bad!  I loved the excitement of the kids as they found the ‘big dipper’ and then Polaris – and their wonder at seeing the milky way and satellites as they crossed overhead. We purchased a sextant in Santa Cruz and I am looking forward to testing our skills at navigating the old fashioned way!

We highly recommend Santa Cruz Island and there are many many more anchorages to explore that we didn’t get to.

Santa Catalina Island

The weather forecast had southeast winds in the upcoming days (upwind for us) so we decided to take advantage of the 10 to 15 northwest winds forecast to go the 73 miles to Santa Catalina island. Gavin and I enjoyed a gorgeous sunrise as we motored the first stretch away from Santa Cruz island. We had the asymmetrical spinnaker up and enjoyed a beautiful sail to Catalina island. We anchored just off Little Fisherman’s Cove in Isthmus Cove next to the large and mostly empty mooring field. Things are pretty quiet here in the fall! We are getting pretty comfortable with using fore and aft anchors and decided to forgo the $50 fee for the mooring ball. It is clear that Catalina mus be very busy in the summer months and there is a need to be very organized with all of the mooring balls which likely allow for more folks to enjoy the anchorage. We enjoyed a walk ashore to see Catalina Harbour and the Two Harbors enclave. This morning we have been snorkeling in the warm crystal clear water. Next stop – the mainland!

Catalina Harbour[/caption