Late Mid October 2021

We left the protection of Morro Bay and did a quick and leisurely sail south before tucking around the corner into Port San Luis. We would spend the next two nights here, our last in central California. This was a good place for us to ready the boat for passage, transforming it from a home to a sailing vessel. We did a check of the engine, topped up fluids, and got some laundry and a little baking done. I was not feeling adventurous enough to try going ashore so there was nothing to distract us from our tasks.

Weeks before, Charles and I had taken advantage of still having the car and had done a road trip down the coast exploring the region and scouting out future anchoring locations. The ease of getting ashore combined with availability of and proximity to resources are always deciding factors for how much time we will spend in a place. As such, we are always on the lookout for dinghy docks or good spots to land, and Port San Luis apparently, has neither.

What they do have by way of shore access, is a system of ropes and vertical ladders that you must scale all whilst precariously perched above an angry and surging sea that is completely indifferent to your needs or wishes. It literally does not care if you are out of groceries or that you need a new thing. So rather than a spot to spend some time, Port San Luis became a staging and jumping-off location for the Channel Islands and southern California.

Needless to say, weeks later we found ourselves anchored here with no desire to go ashore. Instead, with our weather window arriving in two days we spent our time readying the boat and ourselves for our upcoming leg. We would be passing Point Conception (a notoriously tumultuous and chaotic spot) and heading offshore to the westernmost Channel Island, San Miguel. Charles was excited, we were finally doing what he had imagined, going to remote, beautiful places that few people get the opportunity to see.

I, of course, was worried and set about doing distracting tasks and reassuring myself that everything would be fine. To me, this felt like a big step, like, bigger than Big Sur big. I had become accustomed to the peace-of-mind that clinging to the hem of civilization can bring, and we were about to release our grip and head off into the wilds (to be fair there is a ranger station and research facilities on the island, but still…). It was scary, exhilarating, terrifying, part of me had anxiety-butterflies, and a part of me couldn’t wait.

Point Conception is famous for having unpredictable and rapidly changing weather. Wind-less, dead-calm conditions and glassy seas can shift very quickly to ferocious, howling gales and churning, rolling breakers. Throughout the year, the jagged and rocky shoreline is pummeled and lashed by the elements, and often shrouded in a thick, dense fog. This point is where the warmer waters of southern California meet the colder waters of the Pacific Ocean, and, like the currents, the weather systems of these two regions also clash. This point has a long history of wrecking ships and taking lives, including one of the worst peacetime naval disasters in US history (link), so my anxiety about this stretch wasn’t completely unfounded.

As a result, San Miguel Island, the westernmost of the Channel Islands, became our destination. It is remote and rarely visited thanks to a general lack of good weather windows, the relentless wind and waves of the Pacific combine with the brutal storms that regularly blow through buffeting the island. It is raw and inhospitable so it ticked off a bunch of our ‘adventure’ boxes, we had the perfect weather window to get there, plus, it would take us on a circuitous route safely around Point Conception, thereby reducing my worries as well. Not to mention, San Miguel Island is the land of pygmy mammoth and elephant seals! Could any place be more magical?

On passage day we awoke in a haze of fog that intensified as we headed out from the anchorage, reducing our visibility to just a few boat lengths. We knew the fog was likely to dissipate the further out we went so Charles fired up the fog horn and we ‘WHOOO-WHAAAA’d our way through (video with our fog horn sounding), thankful that our westward destination was putting Point Conception and my fears behind me, literally.

We motor-sailed through the calm seas and negligible winds, alternating watch every 3 hours. The fog thinned for a time when the wind picked up, allowing us enough visibility to see ghostly shapes with plenty of time to act if needed, but never fully disappeared. We saw our first off-shore oil platform without realizing what it was until we checked the charts, the enormous ghostly shape revealing itself gradually as it got bigger and bigger shrouded in a lessening haze as we neared. Then, there was another, two colossi, looking for all the world like Star Wars walkers appearing in the distance. The acrid smell of crude oil as we passed, reminding us that California has one of the largest oil deposits in the nation, with surface seeps of the black tarry substance being common (think, La Brea Tar Pits) and sticky tar-balls frequently washing up on southern California beaches.

As we passed south and very safely west of Point Conception I was excited that I could add this to my list of milestones and the moment was made all the sweeter because I was at the helm. Eventually the sun began to peek between the clouds, allowing glorious but fleeting blue skies to appear before being obscured once more.

As we neared San Miguel Island the fog became thick and by the time we rounded the corner into Cuyler Harbor, we could see about one boat-length in front of us. Thanks to AIS (Automatic Identification System, transmits a boats location to other boats, but not all boats have them) we knew at least one sailboat (SV Taku, from Canada) was currently anchored there. We dropped anchor as soon as we could, not wanting to venture blind into an unknown harbor that had at least one other boat anchored in it.

With heavy sighs of relief we were there, our passage was over and we were anchored for the first time in southern California! At least according to our map, that is. We had little visual proof of our location, the fog surrounded us completely, only thinning once, just enough to let us know there was cliff face, just off starboard.

We set our anchor alarm and would keep our vhf radio on at all times now, tuned to Ch16. Despite our proximity to the cliff, we would sleep soundly, hopeful that tomorrow would be clear and fogless, and that, at the very least, we would get a glimpse of this magical mysterious place.

Ideally though, we wanted to try beaching the dinghy and getting ashore if conditions allowed. We knew that our weather window was short, we would have the better part of a day to explore before forecasted systems started moving in. The morning after that, we needed to leave. Conditions were looking to worsen and change direction, making Cuyler Harbor a bad choice for anchoring. We fell asleep with fingers crossed and a lot of hopes for what the morning would bring.