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Thread: Getting Ready for SHTP 2021

  1. #271
    Join Date
    Sep 2008
    Location
    Saratoga
    Posts
    336

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    Quote Originally Posted by DaveH View Post
    oh, now I get it - you made an aluminum caber!

    DH
    They toss farther than the wood ones.

  2. #272
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Location
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Posts
    2,095

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    I’m back and the aluminum caber stayed in the forepeak!
    1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
    1962 Buesher "Aristocrat" tenor saxophone
    Piper One Design 24, Hull #35; "Alpha"

  3. #273
    Join Date
    Jul 2012
    Posts
    75

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    Well done. Congrats on the happy landing.

  4. #274
    Join Date
    Jul 2016
    Location
    Bodfish, CA
    Posts
    436

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    Quote Originally Posted by AlanH View Post
    I’m back and the aluminum caber stayed in the forepeak!
    I would imagine you are grinning now, considering the windless, smoky purgatory of the last few days.

    Excellent effort. Special kudos on the determination.

    Ants

  5. #275
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Location
    Arnold, CA
    Posts
    586

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    Well done!
    Welcome back.

  6. #276
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Location
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Posts
    2,095

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    The sail past San Francisco, down the peninsula to Coyote Point was grim, today...and my bronchi feel like there's sand in there, even though I wore a surgical mask all day.
    1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
    1962 Buesher "Aristocrat" tenor saxophone
    Piper One Design 24, Hull #35; "Alpha"

  7. #277
    Join Date
    Sep 2008
    Location
    SF Bay Area
    Posts
    380

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    AH- Very well done. Your perseverance is admirable. No amount of preparation or weather forecasting could have foreseen the conditions. I’ve been following the NWS Forecast Discussions, and the forecasters have consistently had low confidence given the impact of all the smoke.
    Tom P.

  8. #278
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Location
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Posts
    2,095

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dazzler View Post
    AH- Very well done. Your perseverance is admirable. No amount of preparation or weather forecasting could have foreseen the conditions. I’ve been following the NWS Forecast Discussions, and the forecasters have consistently had low confidence given the impact of all the smoke.
    Thanks! Yeah the last couple of days were "challenging"....
    1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
    1962 Buesher "Aristocrat" tenor saxophone
    Piper One Design 24, Hull #35; "Alpha"

  9. #279
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Location
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Posts
    2,095

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    QUALIFIER SUMMARY

    Day 1. SUNDAY

    It took forever to get out of the Bay. I’d tied up in Clipper Cove and it was totally windless when I left. I saw Steve Saul..LTNS! On the way out. After an hour and a half of trying to sail out of Clipper Cove, I gave up and motored around Treasure Island. I picked up wind right about Fort Mason so the first 4-5 miles of my InReach recorded trip don’t count. I sailed until full main and my very old high-clew dacron 150% in increasing wind up to Point Cavallo, where I snuck in under the bluffs, reefed the main and rolled up the genoa to a hankerchief. That got me through the Gate, where of course it moderated within a few hundred yards.

    That day way pretty windy for a lot of the time, varying from about 6 knots to 18 but bright sun all day. I set the boat up to sail as far up to windward, heading SW, without really sticking it as high as we could go, about 240 Mag. Everything worked great. I dropped down to the working jib right before dark, and put in a reef right after dark. I didn’t really get out of the Gulf of the Farallones before dark, I could see the flash of the south entrance buoy right after dark.

    That night had a close encounter with a fishing boat, as in within a couple hundred feet when I overslept my alarm. BAD….but no harm done. Aside from that, the evenings sail was uneventful.

    Day 2. MONDAY

    More of the same, in building wind but with good speed right down the track. I always opted for easing the main to take loads off the autopilot. By nightfall I was well out past 100 miles, more like 140-150 so that was great. I put a second reef in, just before sunset.

    It was rough enough that I decided against going all the way to the LongPac Longitude, and turned around at 1:30 AM at about 175 miles out. That’s when I discovered that while the boat was fine going to windward, the autopilot was toast. It would respond to +/- 10 degree button pushes...the ram would move but it was super slow. I tried it a couple of times on the broad reach course and it just could not keep up and sometimes “went hunting”. So I disconnected it and drove the rest of the night. I had my headlamp on, and just drove by watching mainsail trim, and also the moon, at least for a few hours until the fog obscured it and it rose so high that it wasn’t useful any more.

    Day 3. TUESDAY

    I hove-to at about 5:00 AM and slept until 7:00. After eating a bit, hand-steered more north, which was a more manageable course. The wind and seas moderated during the day and by about noon were down to 10 knots of breeze. That’s when I tried setting up the sheet-to-tiller steering, which miraculously, worked after I shook out the reefs! After 2-3 hours the wind piped up to 17-20 for about an hour and a half, and the setup I’d made couldn’t handle it, so I wound up hand-steering for a while. The wind eased again, I re-engaged the sheet-to-tiller system, shook out the reef and it drove for the rest of the day and all that night.

    Tuesday night I sailed through a 30-mile patch of REALLY bad smoke. I would estimate it to have been around 300 on the purpleair.com scale. Nasty. After getting through that, the fog set in and visibility was under 100 yards. When it’s that thick, there isn’t much point in getting up every 20 minutes, I can’t see anything so I slept in 1-hour stretches and just got up to check the course, which stayed steady all night. Speed was better than I thought it would be.

    Day 4. WEDNESDAY

    Woke up, had breakfast, started Open CPN on the Android tablet for the first time and hullo! I’m up at the latitude of Point Reyes! Enough! So I gybed and headed towards home. The wind was directly out of San Francisco, about 110 Mag. Emphatically NOT the usual NW breeze. I wound up trying to tack back and forth for most of the day, heading for Point Reyes, then heading for the Farallones, and made progress for most of the day, still using sheet-to-tiller.. In the evening, realizing that I wasn’t making nearly good enough time, I started hand-steering.

    As I’d get a few miles south, the wind would veer to the east, and I’d get headed. So I’d tack, and head towards the coast. After a few miles, I’d get headed again. I did this, by hand all night….one of the low points of the trip. I finally decided that I would head for the coast until I could at least see it, but ran out of wind long before that, about an hour after a very grey sunrise. Checking the charts, I discovered I was becalmed right smack in the middle of the north shipping channel.

    The rest of the day and all night was spent going nowhere, with visibility varying between about a mile and 50 feet.

    Day 5. THURSDAY

    No wind. None. All Day. I did get a few zephyrs in mid morning which allowed me to get out of the shipping channel. There were whales everywhere….birds, seals, dolphins. Incredible. But no wind. This was now the second day with no sunshine, and the monochrome gray was getting to me. I did have a humbling close encounter with two blue whales, which surfaced and blew about 50-60 feet from the boat. I could physically FEEL the concussion of that exhale….could smell it, too. Fog closed in after dark, and stayed dense all night. Again, if I can’t move and if I can’t see anything, no point in getting up every 20 minutes, so I just got up once an hour. I got 10 hours sleep that night, and recovered from the previous night of no sleep.
    1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
    1962 Buesher "Aristocrat" tenor saxophone
    Piper One Design 24, Hull #35; "Alpha"

  10. #280
    Join Date
    Sep 2007
    Location
    San Francisco Bay Area
    Posts
    2,095

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    Day 6. FRIDAY

    Woke up at 8:00, had breakfast, stepped out into the cockpit and realized that I could hear the Pt. Reyes buoy a whole lot louder than when I went to bed. When I started hearing the low rumble of what must have been very low surf...there was essentially no swell running, it was time to get out of there. I got up some sail and so-happened to pick up a few zephyrs that bought me a mile or so in an hour.

    The NW wind started showing up around 9:30, so finally started sailing again. Visibility opened up to 1-2 miles by noon, breeze was about 10 knots and I was broad reaching between 60 Mag and 120 Mag. That got me down to where I started finding the smoke.

    By the time I got into the shipping channel the smoke was really bad. I sailed across it ...in retrospect, shouldn’t have done that, but it showed up a bit faster than I thought it would. Anyway, about 4:00 PM I was 200 yards south of the channel, in lessening wind, and traffic started coming out. Between 4:00 and 5:00 I saw.. An Evergreen container ship, a tug with a tow, the big Coast Guard cutter out of Alameda, and a Hapag-Lloyd container ship. It was disturbing that while I was only 200 yards south of the channel all of these vessels were blurry and indistinct in the smoke.
    By the time I got to the innermost red channel marker the wind was essentially gone, and I could hear, and vaguely see yet another ship coming out. That’s when I decided that enough was enough, my trip log said 435 miles, and I was done. So I rolled up the working jib and motored in.

    Since the wind came up something fierce about half a mile before Seal Rocks, I was motorsailing. I never saw the rocks, never saw Mile Rock or any of the San Francisco side cliffs. I just kept my eyes on the Samsung Tablet, running Open CPN and sailed in on that. I’ve never done that before! Note that when inside mile rock, I couldn’t see the South Tower. I was less than ¼ mile from it, before I saw it. From the South Tower I couldn’t see the North Tower because of the smoke. Anyway, so the last 4-5 miles of the InReach track “don’t count” as I was motorsailing.

    Once I got in the Bay I just headed for the GGYC, where I tied up across the slipway from Tom Boussie, shut down the InReach and called it “Done”. Total sail-only mileage, 425 nautical miles.
    1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
    1962 Buesher "Aristocrat" tenor saxophone
    Piper One Design 24, Hull #35; "Alpha"

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