‘Rosie G’ — Cruising South to St. Somewhere
It’s been a little more than a year since Rosie G, with her crew (Jim Antrim, 72, Françoise Ramsey, 65, Samantha (Sam) Spanier, 74, and Barry Spanier, 77), sailed out the Gate with perfect light wind, reaching conditions, and a glorious sunrise while we went under the Golden Gate.
It was a three-and-a-half-day adventure beginning with good whale sightings and a comfortable, building breeze. Sam had never done a night watch, Françoise had done many, so they posted together and had an uneventful night, going faster by the hour, the wind almost perfectly splitting the transom. The Hydrovane was already tuned in and there was hardly an adjustment for the next 48 hours. It drove the boat better than we could. Jim even tested that and finally gave up to let it do the work.
The wind steadily increased until we were often surfing at 8 or 9 knots, the vane still in control. The ladies had the record for top speed at 9.7 knots, recorded by Garmin. There were periods when the wind simply shifted away from us and we were forced to improvise a sort of “motorsailing,” using only 1.5 to 2.0kW, in order to keep steerage and a nicer motion.
On night two, we were settled into the watch routine and hadn’t been doing much because of the crew for 8 p.m. to midnight shift. I woke up for the midnight watch feeling as if we were going pretty fast, and while Jim got his foul weather gear on, we were discussing the speed. We went into the cockpit to find the crew standing, having a gam, not holding on to anything, while we surfed along in the dark doing 9s and 10s. And they proudly showed us the recorded speed of 11.7 knots and challenged us to try to match that! So much for Sam’s maiden overnights. She also started remarking when we would drop below 7 knots, as if going faster than that should be normal. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I love her.
The remainder of the sailing to Point Conception was mostly stable and fast, but when we got around the corner, there were many more AIS hits, and, as Sam called them, the “sand people” (offshore oil rigs), warning sounds, lights like a city, and a bad smell. It got very light and we were drifting into one of them and had to burn some electrons to stay clear. By morning, the wind was back, but light, and we were down to 4 to 5 knots, still self-steering. About 2:00 in the afternoon we aimed for Santa Barbara, saw lots of seals — then the fog dropped onto us, and we thanked modern technology for our chartplotter.
Sam was on the bow and heard some yelling. It was three young guys on two kayaks, maybe six miles offshore, totally lost in the fog.