Warmer Waters

The light house on Point Conception

We rounded Point Conception with a good wind and calm seas, left the fog behind us and looked forward to warmer weather. This is where we saw our 1st seamonster, a dead giant squid floated by with tenacles that must of been 6-8 feet long. Spent what started out as a peaceful night at the Cojo anchorage. We were woken up about 2am by a 35knot wind which swung around and started blowing out of the east putting us on a lee shore. We were surfing 6' breaking waves in the anchorage which caused our snubber to snap, sounding like a gun shot going off. Kind of made it hard to get any sleep after that, the guys on the 120' oil platform tender didn't get much sleep either. It eventually calmed down and we did sleep for a couple hours, woke up to perfectly flat calm waters, with no evidence of went on the night before.

Pelican Bay on Santa Cruz Island

This is where 'Diary of a Sea Captain's Wife' took place, from about 1908 until the 1930's, they had a camp here where they catered to wealthy Easterners and the Hollywood studios filmed many movies near here .

They say that as soon as you pass Point Conception, you can take off the wool sweaters and breakout the swim suits, well not exactly it turns out. We sailed next to Santa Rosa Island, saw a couple male humpbacks about halfway there, compeating for best tail and fin slap and highest breach, quite amazing. When we got there around 4pm it was nice, sunny and warm, and we thought, we're here, we've made it. But, it was not to last long, wind picked up during the night and blew a steady 25+knots for 2 days straight. We decided to give up on Santa Rosa and headed for Santa Cruz, put down an anchor in Pelican Bay, and finally found what we had been hoping for, we'd still be there to but as we were running low on fresh water, propane, fresh food and been completely out of beer for several days, we decided we better make a run in for civilization, go find a grocery store, and let people know that we were still alive.

We headed for Ventura Harbor, passing 100s a dolphin along the way, large pods were congregating coming into one area from several different directions, it was quite a sight. We went into Ventura, called the marina at Ventura Isle for a slip, pulled in, met some cool people and then found out that they wanted $75/night. That sounded a little pricey just for access to a hot shower and so we headed down to Oxnard Harbor, about 8 miles away, and got a slip from the Harbormaster for $40. We found ourselves in the mist of a West Wight Potter's club, a group of people who get together with their trailerable 24' boats at different locations, do a little sailing and a lot of partying. Anyway, they invited us over for a bit of pizza, beer and Jim got to tell everyone how great he is.

We spent the day doing the laundry, restocking the frig, filling the water and propane tanks and topped it off with a nice hot and spicy dinner at a Thai restaurant. We'll probably head out in the morning for one of the islands, either back to Santa Cruz to check out some of the other anchorages or maybe Santa Barbara. With all the smoke in the air, I don't know that we want to go into Newport Harbor just yet. I remember what it was like during the fires when we lived in Costa Mesa a few years ago, the air in the LA basin is bad enough without adding wildfire smoke to it.

The fires around the LA area are turning the skies gray.
The plume from one of the largest fires looks like a volcanic eruption, it's gotten a lot bigger since taking this photo.