Oblivion Moves Again
A few posts ago I uploaded some photos of my friend, Connor’s, Mariner 32 ketch sailing north from Long Beach to Ventura. He had to move it back south to Marina Del Rey and I offered to help crew. The plan was to leave Safe Harbor in Ventura early Saturday, get to Paradise Cove in Malibu in the afternoon to anchor for the night, and arrive at Marina Del Rey Sunday afternoon. Connor’s girlfriend also conveniently lives on her sailboat in Ventura and was also moving back to MDR, so we were essentially buddy-boating the trip. All that was left to do to assure the trip could happen was make sure everyone was negative for the virus: check.
I was secretly looking forward to the change of comfort and tap into the sailboat days again. I opted to sleep in my sleeping bag outside Friday night and Saturday night. It was so damp outside that before I set up my area Connor offered to hose down the cushions so my sleeping bag wouldn’t pick up any of the dirt. Because hosing them down would leave them just as wet as they already were, only cleaner. Haha. I thought it was funny. Anyway.
We got up at dawn Saturday, finalized some packing of his truck and shifting some items from his boat to Courtney’s sailboat to accommodate space. Courtney’s boat was a much newer 40ft sailboat with a ton of extra room and she was sailing just by herself and her dog.
For some background, Connor used to work at SpaceX, then he sailed his boat (2 previous boats ago) south through Mexico and across to the South Pacific until the boat wasn’t really structurally safe anymore. He sold it, bought a more seaworthy single-handling sailboat and made it all the way to Australia and then sold that one. He came back to the US and was about to crew on a 55’ catamaran from Mexico to the South Pacific when Covid broke out, so they pivoted and went to Hawaii instead. He returned again to California and got a job for one of the largest Covid testing companies, bought the Mariner 32, and is now starting a different job which is partially the reason for the relocation.
This is all to say that he takes a few things very seriously: Covid safety, sailing, and rocket launches.
Conveniently, SpaceX was launching a rocket just north of where we were sailing away from and just about 2 hours after we left the dock, so we got good views of it and felt the sonic boom. The rocket booster went up, let go of the payload, and fell back down to land safely. And all within 15 minutes, most of it in plain sight.
As you can tell from the photos, it was very calm, light wind and small swell, so we motorsailed the entire time. While going down the coast from Ventura to Oxnard to Malibu, we saw a lot of dolphins and even a whale, that surfaced about 30 feet away from us out of nowhere, not more than 10 minutes after Connor thought out loud, “I wonder when whales start showing up?” “I don’t think until January” I incorrectly said back.
We anchored in Paradise Cove which had a slight swell roll, deployed a flopper-stopper which helped but didn’t stop the motion entirely. With about an hour left of sunlight we launched a sailing dinghy from Connor’s boat and one from Courtney’s boat (she anchored next to us) and had a competitive regatta where the target to sail around was actually a powerboat that up and left during the race, and the other rule was that we had to each chug about 3 beers. Stupid, but totally appropriate.
That night I slept outside again and woke up about every 15 minutes, sometimes to gusty offshore wind, sometimes to the dinghy hitting the boat because it was so calm, sometimes to sea animals surfacing for air a few feet away, but most of the time because of rolling swell.
By sunrise on Sunday I was feeling exhausted and slightly hungover or motion sick, couldn’t tell. But I definitely was approaching the limit of getting my fill for sailing life again, so it was a successful endeavor.
We motorsailed about 4 more hours to Marina Del Rey straight to the guest docks where Courtney would have to tie up to for a short while. We help her get tied down and then got Oblivion over to its new slip.
The trip went off without any problems and was a memorable weekend.