Catalina Trip – 7/23/13 from Cuajota on Vimeo.
Ok. So I did the Catalina turnaround in one day.
Got to the boat at 5am. Prepped it and reached the harbor entrance at 6am.
Motored over to Catalina. The boat cruised at 6.5 knots. Did the trip to Long point in 5 hours. Not bad. I think it’s 28 miles from Newport Harbor to long point. On the way i saw more dolphins than i have ever seen at one time. They swam all around and under the boat. Jumping out of the water and swimming in the boat wake. Picked up a mooring there and swam, napped, and ate lunch there. Long point was an amazing place. Quiet, isolated, peaceful and gorgeous. It looked like a secluded Greek island. Amazing.
At 3pm we left Long point. We had about 12-14 knots I wind. Sea state was choppy 4 foot waves with whitecaps. Raised the main and unfurled the jib and we were off! I had my buddy checking speed and on the GPS we instantly were at 8.5 knots. He had a garmin handheld, I had my iPhone and we had compasses and charts on board. Checking them all. His gps gave him instant speed data. My iPhone app shows average speed over a 2 minute period. We spent time trying to see how fast we could get the boat up to. On his gps that was 11.3 knots. On mine which is averaged over 2 minutes it was 10.5 knots. Not bad for a old IOR designed 30 footer!!! We sailed the entire way back pretty much on one reach. Total sail time for the return trip was 4 hours and 15 minutes. We would have been under 4 hours I the wind didn’t die down the last 10 miles. Still for 28 miles that’s an average of 8 knots. The last hour we were down in the 4s.
Yes it was a long day BUT it was a great day. No one was hurt. Boat wasn’t damaged and lots of smiles.