Bahamas or Bust

Chapter 2 – The Preparations

Few cruising books cover the part about getting ready in any detail. I suppose that’s because most writers and readers would just prefer getting on with the voyage. Well, that’s what I feel! But we have about 1 month to go and tomorrow the boat is going to the boatyard. Next Monday it goes on the truck and I get on an airplane. There is not much to do now except worry.

About 3 years ago I fulfilled my lifelong ambition to get a boat and go to Catalina. This is an island about 30 miles offshore of Los Angles. I spent four summers there as a Boy Scout when I was young. We had so much fun at Camp Cherry Cove, I will never forget those days.

Four years ago, I left the corporate world and started my own computer business, together with my wife, Karen. The work was long and I was away from home a lot, but the money was coming in. We camped at Catalina with our little girls one summer. I looked at a lot of boats when we were there. So we went to a boat show and bought a new 24 foot family cruiser.

We took everything slow and finally made it to Catalina, having left late one Friday afternoon on what was to become our worst passage ever. Anyone who knows southern California waters knows to leave at first light and to be there by noon. But it was our first trip. We had already moved from dry storage at a marina to a small slip, and we had taken many day trips. The boat was small, light, and very fast. There was room for us four – barely. I think we made about 4 or 5 trips that first summer and we had a blast.

We did learn to leave early. We learned that we needed a decent dinghy. Our motto for that first summer was "How to enjoy a weekend with a wet bottom". Can you believe that on that first trip we planned to swim to shore if we wanted to go to land? We bought a GPS after the first offshore trip away from the sight of land. We bought a succession of dingies and motors which have finally led to us having a good one for this trip.

We loved Two Harbors and visited Avalon. The children had so much fun they wanted to go every weekend. We caught our first Yellowtail after a sailboat next to us gave us their surplus catch and it was so good. We bought fishing rods and equipment for the next trip. As we look back, we always refer to this first boat as "Junior", since we have named them both Indiscipline.

Before the beginning of the next summer, we sold Junior and moved up. I had learned to appreciate the great value of a 15 year old boat in good condition. In many ways Junior was like a sports car and the new Indiscipline like a bus. What would you rather live in for a weekend? Although slower, our horizons expanded so much with the new boat. I had to have twin diesels with lots of fuel, generator, good electronics, solid fiberglass hull (not cored), and at a price we could afford. We now had room for guests. We had real fishing equipment. We didn’t have to eat dinner in bed! We had a generator, TV/VCR, and microwave!

The first year we kept Indiscipline in Los Angeles while living in San Diego. We had nice dockage and a very short run to Catalina. We did most of our travel to the island on the freeway. At the end of the summer, we moved her to San Diego. We selected the Chula Vista Marina, a wonderful place where we still have many friends.

Come next spring, Chula Vista to Two Harbors was now over 100 miles, one way. We could do it, leaving at 5 AM and cruising 12.5 knots, but that long run was not worth it for a short weekend. Our trips became longer duration, but less frequent. We made our weekend fishing trips to the Coronado islands.

When we bought Indiscipline, our goal was a reasonably fast, safe, long range family cruiser. My dream was to have a boat outfitted for a voyage from San Diego to the Channel Islands. I grew up in Ventura County and I’ve always wanted to see Anacapa, Santa Cruz, and the outer Channel Islands. So last summer we prepared ourselves for a long voyage. We covered 500 miles (round-trip) in two weeks with stops at Dana Point, Catalina, Marina del Rey, Channel Islands Harbor, and finally Santa Cruz Island. This was to be a dress rehearsal for the cruse that this book is about.

We had a great time and we learned many things. One of the most important was that we could live this life and really enjoy it. Another very important one was that covering 500 miles in two weeks was pushing much too fast. We were up early and in bed when it got dark. Let me see if I can compress the lessons we learned into a brief list:

We can cruise 100 miles per day but it is very tiring. It is better to go 30 miles per day and arrive early and take time to play and explore.
After 2 or 3 days at anchor or moorings, we were quite ready for a marina.
We needed additional refrigeration for storage of more fresh food.
We carried plenty of water.
The batteries held up fine and required about 3 hours of generator time twice per day for recharging, which we always did at dinner and breakfast.
Our engines and generator always started. Nothing broke on the entire trip. We constructed a fairly good speed range curve for the boat, and found that we get 0.85 nmpg at 15 knots, 1 nmpg at 13.5 knots, and 1.25 nmpg at 8.5 knots. Indiscipline is a reliable, long range cruising boat.
Don’t assume that you will catch fish for your dinner. And don’t throw back the first one that would feed you because you think that you might catch a better one later.
The little girls get disappointed when Mom and Dad fish all afternoon and never have time to take them to the beach.
It is very difficult to land a dinghy on a sloping beach with breaking waves behind you without getting swamped.
We set two anchors in the Santa Cruz coves, one big Danforth off the bow and a smaller one off the stern (to prevent swinging in the narrow cove). The winds reverse at night. That means your stern anchor becomes the main anchor. A 15 lb Danforth set in 3 feet of water, in hard sand, will hold against a tremendous wind. Good luck trying to retrieve it in the morning! Always set the stern anchor in sufficiently deep water so that you can break it out with the main engines.
Be cautious of boats that drop their anchor right on top of yours and say that "They will move later". They will hit you. Their rode will get tangled with yours. They will drag it up around midnight when it becomes a crisis.
Don’t worry about waves, it’s the wind that dominates and drives life at sea.

After this trip, which was far to short, I returned to work. Looking back on it, Karen and I can’t remember when we got the idea to ship the boat to Lake Michigan and do this. I know that when we did the Santa Cruz Island trip, we were already planning it. I also know that when we bought Indiscipline, we did not have the idea. Surely, in retrospect, I would have bought a Defever 49 and outfitted for a Panama Canal passage. However, this cruise plan is somewhat the result of fitting a voyage to the vessel we own and to suit our desires.