Playa Bonanza

This is a great evening for Norwegian Steam. Cruising in the Sea of Cortez, at last! We are anchored a hundred yards from the long sand beach of Playa Bonanza, located on the east side of the island of Espiritu Santo, which is a natural marine park. Even though the wind is from the west, it is quite breezy out here. As soon as we got anchored, an hour before sunset, Jennifer and Amy rowed the dinghy ashore. I was worried that they might not get back, with the wind so strong, but they made it. Best rowing workout Jennifer has had since here crew days! The moon has not yet arisen. The sky is full of stars. Sally is preparing a risotto with Andrew's assistance. We have opened up some wine. Is this not paradise?

----------
radio email processed by SailMail
for information see: http://www.sailmail.com

Welcoming Committee

Amy and Jennifer Await NS

Most of the Westhagen clan have now gathered in La Paz to welcome Norwegian Steam.   Peter, Suzanna, Avery and Stella are not here because Suzanna is expecting a baby in February.  Eric is absent because he needs to care for a bunch of cats.  Even NS has, at last, a plausible excuse for her delay.

Pescador and Amy Await NS

In her perch atop the cargo ship Beluga Elegance, NS has been battling gale force winds all the way down the coast.  Although the BE has not shown up on marinetraffic.com in the last 31 hours,  she was halfway between SF and LA when her position was last recorded and, by my reckoning, should reach Ensenada tomorrow, given that the storms are predicted to abate this evening.  With only five boats to drop off or pick up, the BE could be on her way again in as little as 10 hours.  From there to La Paz, she should have a tail wind, allowing her finally to achieve her potential of 350 nautical miles per day, which could bring her into La Paz on Boxing Day.

Jon, Amy and Jennifer Await on the Malecon

Visiting Lisa and Ron near Todos Santos

Jon, Jennifer, Sally, Amy, Alan and Andrew Await NS on the Beach near Todos Santos

I love La Paz.  Wonderful town, great people, fine food, perfect weather.  A few in our party would like the evenings to be slightly warmer, but I do not concur.  In my opinion, 80 degree days and 60 degree nights are ideal.  We are staying in the very friendly and well run Posada LunaSol, a stone's throw from Marina de la Paz.  They have been extremely obliging in accommodating our many and frequent changes in schedule, but will have to turn us out on December 27, because of prior reservations.  This one last time, Yacht Path had better deliver, or we could be out on the street with no place to sleep.

NS Rides South

Bruce, Robert and Alan Push Off for Victoria

Wednesday evening, December 15, Bruce Vik and I moored Norwegian Steam against the hull of the heavy-lift cargo ship, Beluga Elegance, docked at Ogden Point in the harbor of Victoria BC.  There was little wind that night and the loading area was well protected, so we did not wait to see NS actually be hoisted onto the deck of the ship.  After all the delays and false promises, perhaps I should not have trusted the assurances of the Yacht Path crew, but by now I believe that I would have heard if something had subsequently gone amiss.

Bruce, I and Robert Rackl had delivered NS to Victoria on the weekend of December 4th and 5th.  On Saturday, we motored to Port Townsend in light winds, spending the night in the Point Hudson Marina.  We motored half way across the East Entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca the next day, but then the wind picked up.  We had a great sail into Victoria, changing down to reefed main and staysail in 25 knot of winds.  Robert, who was keen to test his resistance to sea sickness, was not sick at all, and exercised a steady hand on the helm while Bruce and I were reefing the main.

The "Old Salts" are Eager

We sailed to Victoria that weekend because the Yacht Path schedule was showing loading to start on the following Saturday, while weather reports showed really nasty weather during the intervening week days.  We took advantage of a weather window, and I am glad we did.  But true to form, Yacht Path delayed loading until Wednesday.  By my count, that was the 11th slippage of schedule.

Leif Eriksson Does Not Like the Look of Those Clouds

After loading 21 yachts, the BE was supposed to have headed for Ensenada yesterday evening.  Instead she showed up this morning in Vancouver.  This worried me a lot, and not just because it represented an additional delay.  Positioned as it is near the mouth of the Fraser river and its valley that cuts through the mountains and often channels frigid air from the interior, the port of Vancouver poses a serious risk of freezing temperatures to any ship moored there and certainly to any yachts stowed on deck.  I had taken the precaution to place anti-freeze in NS's water maker, but her engine and pressure water systems would be at risk.

Fortunately, BE was not in Vancouver for very long.  She was probably taking on fuel at better prices than she could buy it in Victoria.  She is now headed out the Strait of Juan de Fuca and lists Ensenada as her destination in her AIS report.

If there are no additional unplanned stops and nothing goes wrong, NS will be delivered to La Paz on Christmas Eve, according to the latest schedule.   Although I hope that the "splash down" will occur in daylight hours, I am now imagining that it will occur at the stroke of midnight.

La Paz for the Holidays.

All along we had been planning to spend a month and a half in La Paz, during which time we would celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years,  I would enroll in a Spanish language class and Sally would make a quick trip back to Seattle for dental work.  With the latest delay in schedule, it looked like even Christmas in La Paz would be unattainable.  If NS were dropped off in Ensenada as planned, there would not have been enough time for her to reach La Paz for the Holidays.  Instead, we would most likely have been anchored in some cove or inlet on the outside of Baja.  That might have been nice enough, but we had wanted to be in a reliably fixed and easily reachable location at Christmas so that family members could fly down and enjoy the occasion with us.

Suddenly we may have gotten a break!  Yacht Path has changed ship on us twice.  The first two vessels were not scheduled to visit La Paz.  The third and currently designated ship, however, the one named Beluga Elegance (think sturgeon eggs), has added La Paz to the itinerary.  I have just arranged with Yacht Path to have NS deposited in La Paz rather than Ensenada.  The projected date is December 16.  We have our fingers crossed.

Thanksgiving will have been celebrated in Seattle.  There will no longer be enough time to learn much Spanish.  The dental work has already been done.  But maybe, just maybe, there will be caviar on our Christmas smorgasbord!

And Still We Wait

Yacht Path originally scheduled the loading of yachts in Victoria for
shipment to Ensenada for October 22. That is what we naively expected
and signed up for. Since we paid our money, they have slipped the date
nine times. It is now supposed to happen on December 6. They have
also changed ship twice. The original cargo vessel was the BBC Gdansk.
This was replaced by the Da Fu. The current ship is the Beluga
Elegance. Checking the marinetraffic.com and vesseltracker.com web
sites, we were able to observe that neither the Gdansk nor the Da Fu
ever left the far east during the time that either was designated as our
transport vessel. The Beluga Elegance however is listed by
marinetraffic.com as en route from Australia to Kalama, Washington,
which affords us some small measure of confidence.

And so we wait. But the time has not been entirely wasted. I have added shelves
to the galley, to the hanging locker and to the lazarette. I have
installed a salt water tap at the galley sink. I have improved the air
intake to the diesel fuel day-tank and had the carburetor to the diesel
stove rebuilt. I am currently working on a number of rope and sewing
projects. And still we wait.

Shake-Down Cruise

Bound for San Francisco, Norwegian Steam left Seattle Monday morning, September 13, 2010.  On board in addition to me were my two sons, Peter and Jon, my trusted old sailing buddy, Bruce Vik, and a young ships' officer and friend of the family, Mark Hammond.  Tuesday we stopped briefly in Neah Bay for diesel fuel and additional provisions.  Wednesday we were beating to windward in confused seas, when it became apparent that one of the crew was suffering a medical emergency.  Originally assumed to be seasickness, we eventually realized that this was an unrelated life-threatening medical condition.  At the time, NS was about 70 miles off of Gray's Harbor, Washington.  With weather conditions worsening, we did not want to risk running the bar at one of the coastal harbors and, instead, turned back towards Neah Bay and subsequently to Seattle, arriving Sunday afternoon.  The long anticipated voyage to the Golden Gate became, instead, a one-week shakedown cruise.

All systems, with one major exception, worked very well.  This was especially gratifying, since I had installed or modified most of these in the past year.  The exception was the diesel engine, which would suddenly slow down to an idle at least once an hour, run very slowly for about 15 seconds, and then very gradually come back up to speed.  This was puzzling.  We were concerned, of course, that it would not resume speed at some critical moment.  At first, we thought that it was a fuel supply problem, possibly a partially blocked air intake vent to the tank.  I believe now, however, that we were trying to drive the engine too fast.  About two years ago, I replaced the standard two blade prop with a three blade MaxProp.  The pitch of the old propeller was fixed, but the pitch of a MaxProp can be set to whatever you want, in a rather wide range.  I think we set the pitch too high, initially.   With the old prop, 1700 RPM was a good speed for the engine, but with the new prop and a very heavily loaded boat, the engine could not sustain that pace.  Why the slow down?  Mark Hirawa. diesel mechanic extraordinaire, suggests that the governor on the engine could act in that manner in an over-load situation.   On the way back to Seattle, we did in fact discover that the odd slow-down behavior did not occur at 1500 RPM.  I have now reduced the pitch of the MaxProp by two inches and hope this will allow us to cruise once again at a comfortable 1700 RPM.

Back in Seattle, we were already into the fourth week of September.  As much as I would have liked to set sail for San Francisco again, this option no longer looked very appealing.  None of my original crew would have been available due to other "promises to keep".   Perhaps I could have recruited another crew, or I could have hired one, but weather reports for the next several weeks were highly unfavorable.  For boats the size of NS, the "weather window" for prudent cruising off the Pacific Northwest coast closes after the equinox.  Stormy weather with adverse winds then becomes the norm.  In fact, the worst storm to hit this coast in recorded history formed off Oregon on October 11, 1962 and reached its peak on the day that honors a man who did not discover America.

I toyed for awhile with the idea of putting NS on a truck and shipping her to San Diego.  I thought we might still make it to the start of the Baja Haha on October 25th.  Then I learned that I would have to remove everything from the deck that would be more than 13 feet above the bottom of the keel because of height restrictions for trucks traveling the Seattle to San Diego route.  This would have meant removing the solar panel arch, the radar and the boom gallows, as well as the mast and boom. A huge amount of work, only to be reversed in San Diego.  No way all that work could be done before October 25 and no way did I want to undo and redo so much work only recently completed.

The other option was to place NS on a ship.  There are two companies that routinely ship yachts from the Pacific Northwest to Mexico.  Of these, only Yacht Path had a scheduled delivery that would get us to Mexico early enough to enjoy most of the current cruising season.  The loading of yachts was to occur October 22 in Victoria, BC, with unloading in Ensenada five days later.  After some negotiation and locking in an early-commitment discount, we began the wait.