Cold beer, hot days, the blue, blue Pacific & Huntin Cal

[C9]

A touch off topic perhaps, but life in SoCal wasn't always about hot rods.
   With that in mind, here's a little story you can perhaps identify with . . . and maybe even wish you were there.



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      Cold beer, hot days, the blue, blue Pacific and Huntin' Calico's
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   We bought our sailboat, a Columbia 23, hull #2 in June of 73.  It was a really nice boat.  The V-berth up front had angled and well cushioned upholstered foam pads about 7' long and 7' + wide at the bulkhead.  As you can imagine it tapered toward the front becoming about 3' wide up there and there was another bulkhead up front and the storage area forward of that was where we stored swim fins, masks etc.  There was a removable foam cushioned plywood piece in the center of the wide end of the V-berth where the Porta-Potty was.  It made for a nice wide area and sleeping in there with your favorite girl and the two of you inside a zipped together couple of sleeping bags was more than nice.

   When I bought the boat I thought no one would want to sleep just over the top of the Porta-Potty, but the chemicals used in them were not offensive and the potty sealed up so well you couldn't smell anything.

   The Main cabin had a pair of bunks, one on each side.  They were about 3' wide at the front a touch wider at the rear and close to 8' long.  You could sleep oriented fore or aft, but most opted to sleep with heads forward.  With the four big bunks it handled four guys quite well, but the guys only fishing trips were best with three.  That way we could fill the unused V-berth bunk with sacks of groceries, jackets, duffle bags and the like.  Not to mention one big ice box with a couple of 25# ice blocks within and a bunch more chipped off so that box was completely full of ice.  There was also a medium sized ice box that doubled as a step when going down into the cabin.  That one had the food in it.  A small ice box that held the squid we used for bait was in the right side locker - which was also the cockpit teak seat that hinged upward to access one of the three anchors and close to a 1000' of anchor rope.  Two anchors were for overnight use and the other was smaller and called the lunch hook.  The idea behind that was to use it for easy anchoring when day fishing.  Easy to get up as well.  In this right side locker we had a couple of medium sized ice boxes.  Beer in one, more beer in the other and some food if there was room.  We usually took a case of beer per guy plus a spare and always brought quite a bit back.  Cept when our 6'7" tall Boulder, Nevada friend came along.  He'd drink his share and still have a day to go.  When he did that little trick, we'd let him suffer for a while and then share our beer with him.  The extra cases of beer and soft drinks went underneath the cockpit sole (floor) and sat on the inner hull which was cool.




   The left side seat locker held two 6 gallon fuel tanks and was constructed so that it was isolated from the rest of the boat.  It had a vent system as well.  Natural air flow carried away fuel fumes with an inlet and outlet that plugged into a pair of 3" vents on the top of the transom.  The exhaust vent faced aft and the inlet vent faced forward.  The tanks were well sealed and we never smelled gas fumes in the tank locker or at either vent.  Nice part about the fuel locker was that the tanks sat on a reinforced plywood shelf I built and the 6 horsepower Evinrude outboard would slide into the locker and under the tanks plywood floor.  Originally the boat had a single tank shelf setup, but I knew we'd be doing quite a bit of motorsailing at the islands.  Turned out to be a good decision, we spent three days out there once and it was so calm that motorsailing is all we did.  We burned 9 gallons on that trip and could have sailed back in the light winds, but it would have been an all day trip.  The 6 horsepower motor doesn't sound like much, but it was enough to drive the boat at hull speed which is the maximum speed a displacement hull can attain.  I'd made a point to consult with Evinrude for the recommended prop for my boat.  Turned out to be a three blade fine pitch prop.  It really worked well and helped conserve fuel because it allowed the motor to run in it's most efficient range.  The standard two blade coarse pitch prop worked fine on a 12' aluminum fishing boat, but when used on a heavy hulled sailboat - comparatively speaking - it lugged the motor down badly.  I'd see similar sailboats running the same engine and listen to them lug their way across the harbor.

   The displacement hull theory works for most boats, but the bottom of the hull on my boat had a long flat run and it would get up on a plane of sorts and really fly down some of the long swells when the wind was blowing hard.  Hull speed on my boat calculated out to 5.99 knots which is right at 7.0 mph.  Sometimes we surfed down some pretty big waves and the boat was probably doing 10-12 knots.  Doesn't sound like much, but it was thrilling stuff and you had to pay attention or you'd slide out going down a wave and end up with the windows in the water and a little further over the mast spreaders would be touching the water.  Times like that if you were dumb enough to leave the cabin slides out of the cabin door, it was possible to get a boat load of water inside.  We made a point to install the slides and lock em in place when we were really clicking off the knots.


   Somewhere along the line I'd learned to buy the 25# ice blocks 3-4 days in advance and stick em in the freezer.  Ice house ice most times is right around 26-28 degrees.  A few days in the zero degree freezer meant the ice lasted for a long time.  Most times we never had to tap into the spare ice, icebox.  It stayed solid as a rock for 3-4 days.  In fact, ocean going sailboats that have built-in ice boxes that are well insulated with 2-3" of high tech insulation have top opening lids which means the cold stays inside the box when the lid is open.  200-300# of ice in these large ice boxes would last about two weeks.  Just about the right amount of time to sail from California to Hawaii.


   The boat was pretty basic when I bought it.  For two reasons.  I could buy a lot of the stuff - like sail winches - drill a dozen holes and install them myself for about half the price the factory wanted.  In the end I had a better boat because I bought better quality and heavier duty stuff than the factory used in most places.  The basic bit means the cabin was a little spartan, it had the bunk cushions and that was about it.

   I made a table using camper type table mounts and that allowed us to have the table stored away out of the way when sailing for the islands or simply day sailing.  When dinner time came, we'd put the table up and use it.  When we were doing the two couples island trips, we'd put the table down between the bunks - it was sized to fit there and lock in place - drag the center cushion out and end up with a bed that was almost 8' long and just under 8' wide.  Enough room for two couples in fact.  That worked well because groceries, jackets, sweaters etc. could be in the V-berth and the potty would be available for the girls at night.  * over the transom was the general drill for the guys.

   We put curtains on the side windows and they rode on shock cord which allowed them to slide fore and aft as desired.  A new beach towel was sewn at one end to make a sleeve for the support rope and was hung from a taut horizontal rope on the main bulkhead which was the fore end of the main cabin bunks and the aft end of the V-berth bunks making for a privacy curtain for the potty.

   The main cabin had some nets strung below the side decks and parallel to the windows.  Camera's, sweaters etc. went in those.  You could access storage under the main bunks by simply lifting the cushions, lifting the trap doors and that's where the cooking gear, extra sailboat parts etc. went.  The tool box rode aft of the cabin floor step icebox underneath the cockpit sole.

   The small storage area up front worked out well because the twin deck vents were right above and stuff stayed dry there due to the good air flow.  We always dried out the diving gear stuff before we stored it away anyway, so moisture wasn't really a problem.  And if it got rough we had plugs that fit in the vent holes.  Kinda glad there cuz I figured if we ever took on green water a couple of 4" diameter vents could dump a lot of water into the boat.  Green water being nothing more than solid water and not the spray that came off the front of the boat in heavy going.  Even in medium rough waters, the vents could stay in since the upper part faced to the rear and spray didn't get in.  Funny part was, as long as I had the boat - 14 years - and running in some pretty rough seas we never took solid water over the bow.  Maybe we could have if things had gotten really rough, but we've sailed in heavy winds with gusts exceeding 45-50 mph according to my wind gauge.

   Looking back, if I had stuck the bow of the boat into a solid chunk of water it would have been a mistake.  There are lots of things you can do to take it easy on the boat and the occupants at times like that.  The biggest one being, don't drive the boat straight off a wave and let it fall into the trough.  I did it once in not-too-rough seas just off the coast of Channel Islands Marina to give Sweetie a bad time.  She was using the potty and I drove the boat up and over a 6' swell and let it fall all the way into the trough.  When the boat hit bottom it sounded like a loaded dish cupboard that had fallen off the wall.  Lots of screaming and bad words came forth from behind the V-berth privacy curtain.  I don't think I ever had my ancestry questioned so strongly before.

   The trick when running large swells is to drive the boat up the swell at a somewhat steep angle - not head on though - turn almost parallel to the wave at the top and when the top of the wave slides under the boat, turn the boat so it's going down the backside of the wave at an angle, but not straight down the back of the wave.  Both of these maneuvers stay pretty close to the course you want and the overall ride is smooth and safe.  What I did to Sweetie was run up the swell at an angle and instead of turning at the top, I drove the boat straight off the swell.  The bow of the boat must have dropped eight feet or so.  It wasn't too bad for those of us in the cockpit, but up front it was a long drop.  I'm a fast learner though.  Never did it to her again . . . not that I wasn't the same fun-loving boy as before, I just didn't think I'd live through another one of those....

   We ran a similar set of swells one time - except they were eight footers - when we were traversing Prisoners Harbor which is a big open bight of water at Santa Cruz island.  Winds, as mentioned, were running 30-35 and gusting to 45-50 mph.  It was scary stuff and the boat was soaking wet clear up to the top of the mast which was 30' off the water at the top.  Looking at the backs of the waves after they'd gone under us we saw that they were covered with white spindrift.  A mistake there would have rolled the boat and the consequences could have been
disastrous.


   As a small matter of information, a lot of folks don't know how to judge the height of a swell or wave.  You'll hear stories of 25 to 50' waves from people who've been out in the channel on a moderately rough day.  What they're doing is looking at the face of the wave and measuring the almost horizontal component that runs from top of wave to bottom center of the trough.  Wave height is measured vertically from the bottom of the trough to the top of the wave.  It's not hard to do.  All you need do is estimate the height your eyes are off the water when you're seated in the cockpit or standing on the cockpit sole (floor).  My eyes were about 4'6" off the water when I was seated in the cockpit.  If the horizon just disappears when you drop into the trough, you can figure the wave height is about 5' and so on.
                        
   Some of the more interesting wave/swell patterns were when an Aleutian storm had come and gone - which generally leaves the wave pattern running in the usual/normal direction off the California coast - and then having a storm start up in Mexico.  Tropical storms right after an Aleutian storm are not too common, but they do happen.  What happens to the wave patterns is, you have the normal one running down from the N/W and the Mexican one running up from the S/W.  With the patterns crossing at right angles, you can see how the wave patterns mix.  What makes these real interesting is that sometimes the troughs from both directions meet and you get the height or drop from both combined and you'll either be on top of a really big swell or drop into a fairly deep hole in the water.  This has been the cause of more than a few powerboats being lost in the channel because they're usually running at a higher speed than the sailboats - although not by much in storm conditions - and they drive off into the hole hitting the bottom of the combined trough with a lot of way on and they'll either pitch-pole (headfirst, * over teakettle) or slam the windshield into the water.  Either one creates a lot of damage, sometimes the engines go off line and most times a lot of water is taken on board.  A few more waves and that's it for the displacement vessels.  They sink.  For boats small enough to have foam flotation in them, they remain floating, sometimes upside down, but if right side up, the water is up to the deck and the occupants have a very real danger of dying from hypothermia.  Even in summer.

   I know I got off on a tangent about storms and the like, but it's good for you to know what goes on out there and what can happen.


   This little story is about the first time I took the boat to the islands and the fishing we did while there.  Your favorite part I would guess.

   There were four of us on the trip.  I figured if I got totally lost and the Coast Guard found me and the guys out in the middle of the ocean, it would be a little embarrassing, but no big deal.  I'd done a lot of reading and had a reasonably good feel for navigating as well as I'd done some practice navigating along the coast, but there's nothing quite like setting off into the fog and haze.  It would seem like how the heck could a guy miss the islands, but when they're shrouded in haze it would be easy for an amateur navigator to miss all of em and by the time the day had gone by conclude he was well and truly lost.  Course, by the time night falls, turning east always works.  Somewhere along the line you'll hit the west coast of America.

   There are a lot of ways to navigate, electronically for one and it's too easy.  Nice, but you can get yourself into trouble relying on a gadget that could fail at any time.  Something I saw when pilots, experienced ones, but stupid to my eyes, flying Loran or GPS equipped planes took off without the proper sectional's (airplane talk for airplane maps) which are required to be on the airplane as well as be current.  Sectional's are only good for a six month period so the hot setup is to subscribe to a supply house and get the new ones when they come out.  Sextant, you know about that or at least know the basics.  I can explain that if you wish.  And dead reckoning which involves taking bearings, triangulating same, noting times and speed traveled and if you do a good job you'll come out very close.  Loran if I remember right is accurate to about a half mile or less.  GPS is good to several feet although the military only allows privately owned GPS units to be accurate to about 20' nowadays.

   The guys on board were a couple of brothers who worked at the same power station I did as well as their friend from Northern California.  Jerry & Jimmy were the brothers and Buddy was their friend.  They were good guys, but Jerry, the ringleader, could be a pain in the * sometimes.
You may remember him from my little dirt bike in Baja story.


   So . . . in June 74 after having owned the boat for one year, doing a lot of coastal sailing as well as a trip to Lake Powell in early August of 73 and doing a lot of reading and studying as well as endured some strong winds and high waves in the interim I decided the time was right for a trip to Santa Cruz island.  Jerry and Jimmy, both avid fisherman were all for it and since Buddy  - an out of towner - was visiting Jerry he came along as well.  Nice guy and no problem for me.


   I felt like the boat was pretty well equipped, life raft, lots of life preservers, extra water and food on board, flare launcher, three anchors with sufficient line for each and with a little bit of experience under my belt we launched early on a Saturday morning.  Destination; Little Scorpion anchorage at the S/E end of Santa Cruz island on the mainland side.  It was about a 17 (statute) miles trip out there and visibility was 2-3 miles.  I thought things would clear up, but it didn't.  I forget the exact course, but I cranked in an extra 5 degrees to windward as well as another 5 degrees for the Littoral Current drift.  Keep in mind as well that a sailboat sails at a cocked angle aiming into the wind when beating into the wind.  I felt the 5 degrees to windward would do it.  We ended up on what is called a close reach which translates to about as far into the wind as you're gonna get.

Here's a translation:
Close reach = approx 45 degree angle into the wind.
Broad reach = 90 degree angle to the wind, a good point of sail since you get all the benefits of the sail pushing as well as pulling.
Run = the wind directly behind the boat which is a nice point of sail.  No spray coming over the bow and the jackets & sweaters can come off.  Nice time to drink beer too, it can get pretty warm since in most cases the (apparent) wind over the boat is lessened by the boat's speed and the cockpit can get to be a warm place with the sun beating down, reflecting off the water and white sails as well as off the white hull.  Overcast days can be even worse.

   (Short explanation on true and apparent wind.  True wind is exactly as it sounds.  It's the wind generated by weather patterns.  Apparent wind is the wind generated by the movement of the boat.  Power or sail although this explanation is for a power boat because it's easier to envision.  If you're in a power boat making 10 knots and a 10 knot true wind is blowing directly behind you the apparent wind will be zero.  If you turn 180 degrees and head directly into the 10 knot true wind at 10 knots of speed the apparent wind will be 20 knots.  Angling into or away from the true wind brings in the vector factor, but roughly speaking you can cut the wind speed in half and add or subtract from the true wind - depending on the direction you're headed - to attain apparent wind velocity.)

   One method of sailing a boat is called motor sailing.  Pretty much as it sounds and it's used a lot in light winds and also as a method of steadying the boat.  As you can imagine, with the weighted keel down low and the mast & rigging up high you can get quite a pendulum effect when running under motor with no sails up.  Having a least one sail up - the main - dampens the pendulum effect and adds drive to the boat so you get a little more speed out of the boat than you would under motor alone.  Look close at 45-60' & up trawler type diesel powered boats and you'll see a small sail rig up high and out of the way.  This is for roll damping, but if it came to it you could get into a port somewhere depending on the wind direction involved.

   Maybe all this is more than you want to know, but I think it helps you to understand what's going on.  Like many other things sailing can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it.


   Our boat was fairly simple at first, but with my tendency to learn about things and get the most performance out of them I can, the boat was changed to a considerable degree.  We did race the boat and a lot of the stuff was racing oriented.  Suffice to say, at the first we had only three ropes in the cockpit.  Port and starboard jib sheets and the main sheet  A couple of years later the cockpit looked like an explosion in a rope factory.  Not gonna name em all, but we had about a dozen ropes in the cockpit.  Sounds confusing, but it wasn't.  Woulda been simpler if I'd bought colored ropes and set up a color code.  Lots easier to say, "pull the green rope" instead of saying, "tighten up on the boom vang . . . the second one from the left coming over the cabin top, no . . . not that one, the other one...."

   Anyway, we got the boat squared away and headed for Santa Cruz a little before noon.
An early leave didn't really help when sailing cuz the wind didn't fill in till one o'clock or so and it was only a 4-5 hour trip out.  Nice and fun part was the wind filled in strongly when you got about 6-7 miles from the islands and there was some fun sailing to be had.  Not this time though.  It was fairly calm as I mentioned so we motorsailed most of the way.

   Funny part was, I wouldn't let anybody else steer the boat since I was sticking close to the course and paying attention.  Potty breaks - sailboats run on beer you know - were about the only time I let somebody else steer.  I was worried about hitting Santa Cruz near the east end and it's conceivable with the overcast and fog we had that I could have slid right between Santa Cruz and Anacapa ending up headed for Hawaii.  A two week trip that I wasn't set up for.  Not to mention that Jerry and Jimmy could steer the boat ok, but they tended not to pay attention and were a couple of classic type guys who didn't worry about much.  Their main interest was fishing and sailing out there was simply something to be endured far as they were concerned.  Course, like you'd think they drank their share of the beer.  As well as ate their share of our traditional sailing breakfast of boiled eggs and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that Sweetie always packed for us.
      

   Close to four o'clock we could see the outline of the island.  When we got close enough I saw the pier at Big Scorpion harbor and turned a bit to the east because we were about a quarter mile from the western end of Little Scorpion anchorage.  Made me feel good that all that navigation stuff worked out ok.  Especially after sailing most of the afternoon in the fog and haze.

   Little Scorpion is an ok anchorage most times.  It's open to the sea and there's not really any place to hide from storms and the like, but as far as fishing went, it was the place.  Especially for us after we'd learned a few things.

   The learning didn't take long.  We got anchored fore and aft - as is traditional at the islands -  pointing west and were parallel to and about a hundred yards from the big kelp bed that surrounds most of the island.  We got the boat squared away for the hanging out end of things,  blew up the life raft,  launched it and tied it to the aft end of the sailboat.


   We fished off the sailboat for a while and around dusk we decided to row the life raft across the kelp and up close to the big rock cliff at the east end of Little Scorpion.  The life raft was a six man model, which made it about the right size for four guys, a beer cooler and a small cooler full of bait.  Bait in this case being frozen squid from the market.  Equipment used was a combination of salt water spinning rods & reel as well as a smaller salt water bait casting rod and reel.  I especially liked the bait casting rig, my dad won the reel at a golf tournament and gave it to me.  It was a beauty with it's strong white plastic trim & knobs and chrome plated components.  I was just about as happy with my long Berkeley salt water spinning rod and the big Garcia salt water spinning reel.  The bait casting rig was loaded with green dacron line and the spinning rod & reel carried monofilament.  I forget the line weights, but they were sufficient for most all of the stuff we caught.  At the end of the line on all the spinning rigs was a hook, fairly large one and no weights.  The bait caster had a small lead weight and a short monofilament leader.

   We rowed the life raft to the kelp bed, rowed right over it with no problems and on the other side of it we were about fifty yards from the almost sheer rock cliff.  We tied the painter (raft tow line) to a wad of kelp and that was our anchor.  A small trick that always stood us well.

   The fishing was simple stuff, we'd stick a piece of squid on the hook and that was enough weight to allow casting with no problems.  It kept the bait up off the ocean floor as well.  We were fishing for Calico Bass - also called Kelp Bass.  They're a beautiful fish with pale olive colored skin and purple splotches.  Once you get em out of the water the purple fades away rapidly.  I've seen these fish cruising along underwater, always near the kelp.  They use their coloration to blend into the kelp and it's an excellent camouflage.  You can be 20-25' down - free diving - and cruise right by one without seeing it.  The general drill was to pick a large one, shoot it with the spear gun and get out of the water.  That due to the sharks hear the struggling fish and home in on it.  I read up on sharks, their habits and the like and found that - even in summer - it was a good idea to wear a black wet suit.  A person swimming at the surface looks like a wounded fish to a shark.  Pale on the underside, clumsy movements which mimic a wounded or hurt fish and the shark figures lunch is on.  Sometimes I'd go back in later and get another Calico, but most times we caught enough fish with the rods that we had plenty for dinner so spearing another one wasn't necessary.

   The guys I was with, at least the two brothers were most times blind to the beauty of nature and the world around them.  Part of it, they were absolutely avid fisherman and once they got rolling with it, nothing else existed.  I liked the fishing ok, especially so in the ocean.  You always caught something there and after I started salt water fishing I never went fresh water fishing again.

   After dark, which wasn't too dark due to a quarter moon, it was really something to be sitting there in the raft about a hundred yards from the anchored sailboat and watch the ocean swells run up and down the sheer rock wall of the cliff.  Add to that the sounds of the swells when they passed as well as the mysterious booming inside the many water level caves starting a quarter mile or so to the east of where we were tied off to the kelp bed and ending at the eastern tip of the island.  The booming was caused by air compressing inside the caves and when the swells went further into the cave, the trapped air compressed and blew out through the water.  If the cave was open on both ends it blew a strong air current all the way through.  Many of the caves went all the way through the narrow tip of the island and if the swells were coming in from the ocean side it could be a little scary and quite impressive if you were inside the cave in the liferaft.  A few weeks after the trip I'm talking about here, Jerry and I took the girls to the island for the weekend, put them in the life raft and rowed them inside one of these open on both ends caves when the swells - modest ones - hit the island tip and blew air all the way through.  Gotta admit it was kind of spooky, the chill air blowing through the somewhat dark cave and watching the water level rise toward the roof.

   We did well - the guys and myself - fishing for Calico's.  I think the fishing was good because the big boats wouldn't go over the kelp bed and the little boats didn't care to anchor up near the cliff.  All of which left a fairly large area that was seldom fished.  Sort of a secret fishing hole right out in plain view.

    That trip was a three day fishing extravaganza and once we filleted all the fish - aside from the ones we'd eaten for dinner two nights running - we had 37# of fillets.  All of which was within limits.  Although we did screw up and later found that multi-day trips need to be registered with fish and game if you expect to bring back more than a one day limit.  We did get away with it, but thought for a while we would be inspected since the game wardens were doing a surprise inspection of boats returning to the launch ramp.  Funny part was, since we were in a sailboat they didn't look twice at us.  Everyone knows that sailboat people don't fish . . . even if four guys in wrinkled clothes and four day old beards show up at the launch ramp late in the afternoon..


   The times when we were sailing the coast, if winds were light, we'd toss out a couple of lures behind the boat and troll for Bonita.  Most times without success, but we caught a few.  Most interesting was when we caught a 2' long Barracuda.  I had no idea they were to be found on the west coast.  We let the Barracuda go.

   I think the lack of success most times was due to the boat was running too fast for the lures even if the winds were light.  Most times we trolled running downwind which had us heading S/E and east to return to Ventura.  We did better if the wind was up by lowering the sails and letting wind pressure on hull, mast and rigging drive the boat at a slow pace.


   Anther place where we fished was at Richfield Island near La Conchita just down from the Ventura/Santa Barbara line.  The island is artificial as you probably know and constructed of large cast cement Tetra-Pods with smaller boulders, rocks and cement filling in the middle so there was a flat area to build on.  The Tetra-Pods resembled very closely the jacks that grammar school girls played with.  Instead of six points like a jack had, the Tetra-Pods had four points.  Once they were lifted into place, they settled in and locked together.  They weren't oriented any particular way nor did they have to be.  They were an elegant engineering solution to building an artificial island.  If they were standing on flat land, the point that went straight up was probably 15-20' high.

   Before I got the sailboat, Buddy - Jerry's friend mentioned above - worked at Richfield Island and he would take us onto the island at night and on weekends.  In fact, later on he worked on Platform Helen offshore from Goleta and we went out there for a night's fishing.  It was really weird walking around on the big steel beams about 5-10' above the water at night and fishing.  Most fishing was done from the main deck.  Safer and way less spooky.  Specially considering it was so foggy when we went out at midnight the boat had to use radar to find the platform.  

   Getting off and on the boat was a trick as well.  You'd time the rise of the boat, grab a large knotted rope and swing onto the platform.  Same thing going back.  Time it wrong and you'd find yourself dropping 6'-8' down onto a deck that was coming up and that could hurt.  More than a few platform workers got hurt with the crude dock setup.  I don't know why the platform didn't have a floating dock.

   Funny thing too, all the platform workers had short pole salt water bait casting rigs in their lockers.

   Strangest thing that happened in all this coastal fishing stuff was about a year before I got the sailboat.  Jerry had an all wood 20' long outboard cabin cruiser.  The boat was an accident waiting to happen, but Jerry thought it was cool since he could go fishing off the coast if he wanted to.  The thing leaked water like a sieve and you had to bail it out every hour or so.  The water collected at the transom and there was a seat back there so when the water started lapping at your feet it was time to bail.  The boat had a beat up old motor that ran pretty good, but I always worried about it.

   The boat's bulkhead mounted compass was pretty worthless because it constantly spun when the motor was running.  To that end . . . and knowing it was going to be foggy the first time I went out on the boat I brought my pocket compass.  Kinda saved our butts.  We could follow the swells and find the beach, but even with the compass, Jimmy and Jerry didn't have a clue where we were other than west of Ventura toward Santa Barbara.  There was a lot of zigging and zagging into and out of the coast because if we were where I thought we were, we were in a rocky area and I told em so.

   Jerry was the kind of guy who relied on his luck and he truly was a lucky guy.  Seemed like he got away with everything.  He didn't believe me, but he turned seaward anyway.  We were along the Rincon seawall a ways west of the group of beach cabins above the Solimar beach cabins and I'd been swimming and skindiving there quite a few times.  Not trying to say I was always right here, but when I was with the Jones boys, I was right more often than I was wrong.  They weren't dumb - most times - but could get insistent.  Especially Jerry.  Jimmy was the more easygoing of the two and a lot of the time he'd sit back, grin and watch the . . . almost an argument.  We got along well, just that it bugged me when Jerry would fall back on his luck yet again.  Luck is nice, but my thinking is you make your own luck.

   So we fished around Richfield Island without much luck and came home with no problem.  It was interesting to see water pour out of the boat when we parked in Jerry's back yard, got the trailer unhooked, tipped it back and found water coming out of the hull.  We'd pulled the plug and thought it had drained well on the ride home, but apparently there was a lot of water trapped under the cockpit sole inside the hull.  Took a while for it all to drain out.


   A few weeks later, Jimmy and another Edison guy - Bill - took off for the islands.  They were headed for Anacapa and fished with a fair degree of success.  And like you'd think, they bailed pretty often.  I think the shark packs they ran through along with the area close to the islands on the mainland side - that locals call windy lane - getting a pretty good chop and some winds late in the afternoon kinda spooked em both and they were wondering if they were gonna make it back or not.

   A few more weeks down the road and after some ambitious work along with some more than ambitious beer drinking by the brothers, the boat's problems were declared fixed.  I think between the two of them they'd come to an understanding that maybe they ought to stick to coastal waters in the little cruiser and not venture out to the islands.  Their safety equipment consisted of four beat up old life preservers, a fire extinguisher of dubious appearance and a life raft that was conspicuous in it's absence.  Absent because it didn't exist.  Did I mention the brothers were cheapskates?  They were generous when it was their turn to pay, but they preferred not to spend money on stuff they weren't gonna need anyway.  Given the fabulous luck that Jerry enjoyed most times and nothing ever happened anyhow why spend good money on safety equipment?

   Now it may look like I'm leading up to a disaster here along with a learning experience for the brothers, but it didn't happen.  Many years later the chickens came home to roost and to an extent Jerry's luck deserted him.  No one died or even got hurt, but life stepped in and slapped Jerry a good one.  A whole other story and not relevant here.

   So with the boat declared in good repair, the engine all tuned up - I think they stucki a new set of spark plugs in - we figured an overnight trip to Richfield Island would be fun.

   This time around our mutual friend Ed, another Edison guy - all of 6' 7" tall and a total klutz - came along.  The two brothers and myself made a crew of four and we were well equipped with six fishing rod/reel setups, bait in an old Styrofoam icebox, four sleeping bags and jackets for all plus food and that all important accessory to fishing and sailing . . . beer. Nice part about the cruiser was that it had a small cabin with a raised floor and thick foam cushion so things stayed dry in there.  Probably because once the water got to licking at your heels if you were sitting in the transom seat we started bailing and didn't let the water get high enough to flood the cabin.

   We took turns bailing, but more than a few times I asked myself what the hell I was doing out there.

   Along with the brothers cheap-skatedness, the boat didn't have an anchor aboard.  When I asked Jerry what we were going to use for anchors he pointed out a short string of 66kv power line insulators with rope tied to them.  Borrowed from the company insulator junk pile.  He'd had success in using a single bell off the same insulator string when he had his 14' - old - outboard powered ski boat that we used at Piru Lake for fishing.  Most times we'd anchor over mud and the insulator bell tied to a rope upside down would settle into the mud like a good mushroom anchor and half the time we had to cut the rope to get loose.  Really good rope too.  (Disregard tongue in cheek here.)  Yellow 3/8" polyethylene the district used to pull in the big rope for an underground cable pull.  The rules were they could only use it once.  With so much not in the best shape rope kicking around just about everyone in the district and power station had their own 200-300' supply of the stuff.  The price was right though.  Free is hard to beat.

   Like you'd think, underwater at Richfield Island and up and down the coast for that matter was a hard sand bottom.  The insulator string - with 5-6 bells on it - didn't hold worth a darn.  Jerry, like a lot of non-boaters thought it was weight that held the boat in place.  Hell, he didn't have enough rope to give the anchor line - known as a "rode" in boat terminology - a 45 degree angle let alone the recommended 6 or 10 to one ratio (depending on wind strength) of anchor rode to depth so the anchor could hook onto the bottom with a shallow angle on the rode.  We were in 40' - 50' of water so 100' of rope didn't cut it.

   We ended up drift fishing until after dark.  Somewhere in here, Ed dropped Jerry's favorite fishing pole overboard and we lost it.  (On a later trip to Santa Cruz island, Ed insisted on sitting on the cabin top trying to get his fishing pole/reel squared away with new line and dropped my long time owned Marine K-Bar knife overboard in about 3000' of water.  After that, we didn't let Ed have anything of ours unless he was in the cabin or cockpit.  Funny thing was, Ed never dropped a beer overboard.  Too valuable I guess.  Although he did throw one of my brand new, neatly spliced light blue colored 40' nylon dock lines overboard near the entrance to Baby's Bay at Santa Cruz island.  Jerry was rowing the raft in so we would know where to cross the reef without hitting a rock.  The raft painter was being slowly pulled off the sailboat as Jerry rowed out and Ed thought he'd help.  He picked up the aft dock line that was lying in a pile next to the painter (which was white), bundled the painter together with the dock line and threw the whole thing overboard.  The dock line sunk to the bottom in maybe 20' of water, but it was too rough near the reef to attempt to recover it.  Cest' La Vie and all that stuff.)

   As you can imagine, Jerry's boat had no running lights and we couldn't anchor so we ran up to the Richfield Island dock, tied off to a piling sticking out about 20' from the dock, motored up to where the pier from the beach/highway area turned right and down to the island and tied off to one of the pier pilings, let the boat back out on the line and we were neatly tied off between pier and dock.

   We fished a while, got a few bites, caught nothing, said to hell with it around one in the morning and decided to get some shuteye.  We drew straws to see who would get the cabin . . . the nice comfortable cabin . . . and Ed & Jimmy won.  I thought I heard laughing for a while, but it must have been fate planning the next move.

   Jerry and I opened up one sleeping bag, put on our jackets, sat down on the transom's hard wooden seat, laid the sleeping bag over us to keep the fog off, leaned into the hard wooden corners on each side and tried to sleep.  Listening to Ed snoring away in the cabin didn't help any and when Jerry started snoring I figured I wasn't going to get any sleep.  I swear, those guys could sleep anywhere.  I do ok there, but if there's something to worry about - like the boat sinking among other things - I don't sleep very well at all.  I was consoled by the little thought that if the boat did sink I'd be outside and it wasn't a very long swim to the dock ladder so what the heck.  Jerry and I took turns bailing.  Me because I was sorta keeping an eye on the water level and about every hour it needed sloshing out.  Jerry took his turn regular-like cuz I let the water get deep enough to get his feet wet, he'd wake up, glare at me and bail.  Jerry was quick to take advantage and probably figured he'd sleep through the night and let me worry about things.

   About seven in the morning I woke up to a subdued light due to the heavy fog that was in, looked over at one of the tetra-pods and saw a light brown haired girl in a green bikini walking over the horizontal leg of a Tetra-Pod.  Geez . . . I had to look two or three times until I figured out I really was awake and that really was a girl in a bikini.  Nice bikini too, not one of the not much there wonders of today that leave nothing to the imagination.  Every year I wonder where bikini's are going and every year a little more of them gets lost to the designers who are attempting to be more daring than the other designers.  Not to mention that they don't wear their minute little creations.  Anyway, that was a more than interesting way to wake up and what was going on was, Moorpark College ran a Marine Biology class and once a month they took a field trip to the island to monitor algae growth, the starfish and abalone population and the like.  Diving for abalone on the island was prohibited, but fishing was ok.

   Not long after I'd seen the young lady in the bikini, other college age kids started showing up.  After a while, some of them donned Scuba gear and dove the island.

   After a while we figured we weren't going to be fishing there because we'd just be in the way so we untied the boat and headed down the coast toward Ventura.

   That was the last trip I did on Jerry's little cruiser.  Jimmy and Jerry did a couple more trips along the coast day fishing with it, did a little fishing at Lake Piru and Jerry sold the boat to another avid fisherman who thought he could fix the leaks and knowing Jerry he probably didn't lose any money on the deal and more than likely turned a profit.


   One of the better days spent fishing on my sailboat was when Jerry and I took it out to Richfield Island.  Not to go fishing at the island, but we'd heard that halibut were being caught in the big cove off County Line beach the surfers frequented and we figured we'd get us some of that good eatin' fish.


(Richfield Island is just above the beach in the photo, but you can't see it through the haze.) (County Line Beach - made famous by the Beach Boys and long reknowned by SoCal surfers is just around the corner to the left.)



   Nice part about a sailboat is they're self-tending if you set em up right.  We hove up out to sea a ways, took the sails down, tied the tiller to one side, the boat turned sideways to the very light wind, got the poles out, baited the hooks, tossed em over and after a half hour or so we'd drifted close enough to the beach where we fired up the motor and ran back out to sea where we'd do it again.  Sometimes we'd have the tiller tied off to the other side and along with drifting into shore we'd work from one side of the large cove to the other.  Since it was a weekday and the surf was non-existent, we had no conflicts with the surfers.  And if the surf was up, we wouldn't be there anyway.

   The fishing was easy, spinning or bait casting rig with a few of the larger split shots on the line, bait a hook with anchovies, let the line out till it was dragging on the bottom and drift along hoping all the while that a halibut would latch on.  We didn't catch a thing.  Got sunburned, drank beer and had a nice day as well as a fun sail back downwind in the fairly hard winds.

   The only halibut I ever caught was on the pier near the railroad trestle that goes over the campground where Highway 101 turns to the north headed away from the coast toward Santa Maria.  Darned thing wrapped itself around a pier piling in the light surf, broke the line and that was my one and only shot at a halibut.

   We had hope though.  I even had the life raft marked off with Magic Marker which showed the legal minimum length for halibut.  We never caught a one.



   About the second to last trip out to the islands, Jerry, Buddy and I were anchored at Little Scorpion anchorage near the east end of the island on the mainland side.  After a good nights sleep we woke up and discovered to our horror that we had no coffee.  They were a little ticked off about the whole thing.  Didn't bother me too much since I didn't drink much coffee at the time.  Nothing like those guys did.  Seemed like they couldn't function until they'd had their morning fill-up of caffeine.

   I couldn't handle the whining and * and figured a cup of coffee would hit the spot on a cool and slightly foggy morning so I got in the life raft and rowed over to a 35-40' ketch that was anchored about a hundred yards away.  A nice lady came out, said hello and I asked her if she had any coffee she could spare.  She smiled, went below and came up with a brand new unopened jar of Tasters Choice and gave it to me.  I thanked her and asked if she liked fish.  She said she did and in fact, her husband and the other couple they were with had fished all the previous evening, caught nothing and were highly disappointed since they'd all been looking forward to a fish dinner.  We'd done our usual trick of anchor the sailboat a little ways off the kelp bed, row the life raft in, drink beer and haul Calico's in like nobody's business till about one in the morning.

   I told the lady I'd be right back, rowed over to our boat, snagged a double bread bag about half full of fillets and rowed back to her boat.  I think there was more than enough for two dinners for four.

   She said thank you, smiled her beautiful smile and a few seconds later the sun broke through the fog.



   What more could a guy ask for?  Anchored in the blue, blue Pacific, next to one of California's most beautiful islands, coffee on the stove, the promise of a bright and sunny day, a fondly remembered smile from a beautiful woman and we still had three days to go before heading home....

                                                                      -<>-

[Bib_Overalls]

Jay,

You know you can sell this stuff.  Some of it is really pretty good.

[Harry]

Jay;
that's a great story, thank you.
Seeing as how you're from the west coast, perhaps you've heard of Lapworth boats? I owned a Lapworth 36 up here on Vancouver Island and really enjoyed the ocean sailing. I also raced the old tub and did very well against newer boats.
A friend of mine kept his boat at Marina Del Ray. It was a Catalina or Coronado 27.
Them were the days....