Welcome to the sailcetacean blog! We left our Portland slip Tuesday, July 10, 2012. We’ll be updating this journal with descriptions of our adventures aboard Cetacean, our Tayana 37 cutter, as we make our way south and then east. The sailcetacean blogsite includes other pages (ships track page, writings and gallery) for you to explore. Hopefully you will find the writing and images amusing, informative, maybe thoughtful. Stay tuned. We welcome your feedback and comments.
We are in La Paz. La Paz is a wonderful and warm city. The people are warm and friendly, it’s also hot here. This is the capital of the state Baja California Sur, a city of 200,000, it’s also the cruising center for the Sea of Cortez. The Sea of Cortez is this huge (about… Continue Reading
May 1, Bahia de los Frailes We arrived at Bahia de los Frailes (bay of the friars) at about 6 p.m. after a long day of motoring. Actually, the trip was a respite from all the adrenalin we’d generated the night before heading around Cabo Falso to Cabo San Lucas and our overnight in that… Continue Reading
From Bahia Santa Maria to Los Frailes or Cabo San Lucas Time: Sunday April 28 9:30 MDT Engine hours at Santa Maria: 1172.1 hr. Barometer: 1011.3mb Weather: High fog or low overcast clouds. Kind of Gray; winds 11k from north Breakfast: Cereal with LaLa (brand of ultra pasteurized milk) ————————————————— The GRIBs this morning are… Continue Reading
We are finally, finally in Mexico. It was hard to believe we’d arrived even while we checked in to the country at the Ensenada immigration and capitan de puerto office. Several days later, we picked up our zarpe (permission to leave port) and were given a friendly nudge by the Baja Naval marina staff out… Continue Reading
Sailors have always needed to watch the weather so it should be no surprise that we have lots of weather related tools and books on board to understand weather at sea before we set sail. Maybe ‘understand’ the weather is too literal. Maybe ‘some idea’ of the weather is better. As we leave the US… Continue Reading
Moored in Oxnard, 3/30/13 to 4/2/2013 In 1961, my parents, my two brothers and I left Palo Alto, California, a city that was and continues to be one of the most desirable places to live in the U.S., for this town-with-a-funny-name a little over 100 miles north of Los Angeles. When I consider how long… Continue Reading
The trip south from Monterey to Southern California came with all the angst the internet is capable of generating. By that I mean that the internet is full of scary stories about passing Point Conception. Almost everywhere there is a cape, a point, a tidal rapid, or a bar that has a reputation for being… Continue Reading
The seals waved (yes! they did!) goodbye as we pulled out of Monterey’s municipal marina today (Wednesday, March 27, 2013). We sailed over gentle swells in 9 to 10 knots. Saw whales just outside Monterey Bay. Ron called me from lunch preparations in the galley to view a large pod of dolphins heading towards Monterey… Continue Reading
Monterey is a pleasant place to stay if you live on a boat. We like our slip at the public marina, there are bike lanes for safe transit to and from shopping and sightseeing. The weather is lovely, lovely, lovely. It’s still not quite spring but the temperatures have been warming. After our overnight sail from… Continue Reading
We spent a long afternoon and night travelling from Half Moon Bay to Monterey, a trip of about 90 miles inclusive of the southward portion and segments going offshore and then back. We left HMB dodging dozens of crab traps left in a seemingly random pattern exactly in our path any path we took. I thought crabs… Continue Reading