Oil's Well in So Cal

Oxnard, California, USA

After only a single night in Morro Bay, we were ready to move on, especially as the weather forecast looked very good for rounding Point Conception, called the "Cape Horn of the Pacific" because of the heavy NW gales frequently encountered off it.

Before we left, I spent the morning replacing our port (red) navigation light.  This is the second of our horribly expensive OGM LED navigation lights that have failed us, with very few hours of use.  The first, our starboard (green) light was replaced just before we left Nanaimo; we had previously bumped this one on a pole in the marina and had assumed that this had compromised it's watertight seal, leading to the condensation that eventually appeared under it's glass front, and it's subsequent failure.  The port side light however has no such excuse and has exhibited the same symptom (condensation) before this failure.  Since we had hardly used them before this trip, I figure that it cost us about $5 per hour for the time they actually were turned on - not a very good pay-back for the investment in LED technology boasting of their 50,000 hour service life.  We are now using a much less expensive set of LED lights produced by a different manufacturer.  I don't think we will be going back to OGM in the future.  NOTE: We still have a working OGM stern (white) light which we only got installed this year - so far it is still working.
OK, enough about my current pet peeve.

We left Morro Bay just after noon and motored for a couple of hours before a light NW wind came up.  We sailed for about 3 hours, past San Luis Obispo, before we restarted the engine to make some better time towards Pt. Conception.  We rounded Pt. Arguello around midnight, actually under sail for about an hour as the wind did pick up a bit between Pt. Arguello and Conception, maybe 10 or 11 knots for about 20 minutes.  After that, the winds died.  We rounded Pt. Conception with flat seas and no more than 1 knot of wind.  These conditions persisted for the rest of the night and the next day, so we motored along at a leisurely 6 knots or so, past Santa Barbara and Ventura, to our current location here in Channel Islands Harbor, in Oxnard, California.

We were forced to take a bit of a longer route around the headlands as there are a series of military "Danger Zones" all along the coast from San Luis to Pt. Conception (missile test ranges) that extend from the shoreline to the 3 mile limit.  These zones (1,2,3 and 4) were all active during the night we were passing them, so we had to take a route further out, through the many oil platforms that inhabit this coast.  They are quite easy to avoid as they are lit up like small cities at night (I tried to take a picture but a long exposure on a moving boat does not work so well).  They were actually quite pretty in a way and helped break up the monotony of an otherwise boring passage.  Unfortunately, after passing one of the platforms that was quite near the shore, we encountered a nasty, smelly oil slick for more than 10 miles in the vicinity of Santa Barbara.  This was one of the reasons we decided not to stop there as we did not like the thought of potentially siting in an oily harbor overnight.  As it was only about 8 AM when we got to Santa Barbara, it was no problem to keep going on to Ventura (where the marina I contacted did not have room for us), and on to our current location at Oxnard, where we arrived around 2 PM.

While on route between Santa Barbara and Oxnard, we saw a lot of wild life, a huge pod of dolphins that looked like a tidal wave as it went by, a small whale of some kind (looked a lot like a huge black dolphin), the usual variety of seals and sea-lions and a surprising number of California sea otters.  The most spectacular sighing however, was a smaller pot of dolphins that were herding a bunch of fish right beside us, to the delight of the hovering pelicans.  The dolphins did all the work while the pelicans went into some kind of feeding frenzy, dive-bombing the dolphins and fish in great numbers.  They kept this up for probably half an hour, sometimes on one side of us and sometimes on the other.  It is these types of events that really make your day when you are on a cruising yacht.

One other note:  Passing Pt. Conception means that we are now officially in "Southern California", home of palm trees, warm breezes and movie stars.  Well, there are palm trees, but the weather is still a little cool and we have not spotted any celebrities yet.  Maybe tomorrow.

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