Treading Water to Oceanside
A popular description of sailing is, “The art of going nowhere very slowly at great expense while becoming violently ill.” The first part of this was illustrated to me one ill-fated trip up the California coast from San Diego to Oceanside.
I’d made this trip several times in the past and found it to be a nice 35-40 mile daysail. I liked this trip because, depending on winds, it takes from six to eight hours and has a nice slip, hot showers, and good restaurants at the end. Over a weekend, you feel as though you’ve been somewhere compared to returning to your slip each night.
On this trip, Gert, Kevin, and Alan were aboard. It would be their first time to Oceanside and I was looking forward to displaying my local knowledge and coastal navigation skills. Alan was to meet a business associate in Oceanside and we’d all have dinner at a local eatery.
We left Marina Cortez a little late that day in the usual morning fog bank. Even though the fog was thicker than normal, I was confident it would lift long before we reached Oceanside. There’s a healthy growth of kelp outside Point Loma and all along the coast, so we had to sail out to deeper waters before turning north. The shore soon disappeared in the fog as I navigated by the depth sounder and compass past the 100-foot line. We turned to a northerly heading and watched the knot meter settle in on four knots. Not fast, but we’d have better winds later and there was the iron Genoa (diesel) if it got late.
With the sails and rudder trimmed to hold our course with minimal attention to the wheel, everyone settled back to enjoy the trip. We relaxed in the cockpit, had a snack, and waited for the view to improve. After two hours, it seemed that the fog might be thinning a little, so I began looking for features on the shore. There are many easily recognizable landmarks along this stretch of coast and I hoped to be able to identify one and thus our position. My mental dead reckoning placed us about an hour north of La Jolla and I wanted to learn how accurate I’d been.
A digression is in order here to explain a bit of nautical trivia. The phrase “dead reckoning” does not refer to what happens to those who depend upon it, but is a corruption of deduced reckoning that was abbreviated as “ded rec” as mariners marked their calculated position on their charts.
We all stared fixedly to starboard as the coastline became visible through the mists. Details were becoming clear and I could see some whitish lumps on the hills. The fog lifted some more and I saw that they were light-colored storage tanks.
“Hmm,” I mused, “Those look just like the tanks outside of Point Loma.” The fog cleared even more and I could see that those
were the tanks near Point Loma. In over two hours, we had made about 300 yards from our starting point.
Instead of being a quarter of the way to our destination, we hadn’t even begun. Oceanside was now out of reach before dark. We agreed to pick an alternative and chose Mission Bay that was about an hour away.
Luckily, Alan had brought his hand-held ham radio and was able to connect to a telephone repeater to tell his friend to meet us, not in Oceanside, but at a to-be-determined location in Mission Bay.
So, what happened? Obviously, we were sailing in a southerly current that neatly offset our progress. We had essentially been treading water for the two hours I thought we were sailing north.
Could this have been prevented? Easily, if the boat were equipped with LORAN or GPS, either would have given us our position and speed over the bottom. (zero) With that information, we could have started the engine to overcome the foul current or moved further offshore to avoid it.
Another trivia digression: A foul current is one going against you or setting you off course. A fair current is one that aids your progress.
The lesson? Use all your tools, especially if visibility is impaired by darkness or weather.
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