The Noob Cruise

A first-time passage to Catalina Island serves up wildlife,
outboard hijinks, starry nights, and happiness.

Issue 143: March/April 2022

I was getting pretty good at the marina thing. Nine months after getting Delilah (see “Hey There Delilah, May/June 2021), I was settling into that unsettling period just after one realizes their midlife crisis dream. To onlookers, I was a real-life sailor with a zinc-slathered nose and a capable little 1972 Cape Dory 25. But I had no real chops at ocean sailing.

Twice a week, I went to the boat. I’d bring along a VHF radio, a life vest, and a few magazines. So my wife would think I was a serious sailor, I’d also pack a small cooler with drinks, chips, dip, and some moist towelettes. At the dock, I’d pull out the cockpit cushions, warm the outboard, and chat with neighbors. Then, when they were out of sight, I’d turn off the motor, apply sunscreen, and nibble on snacks.

Also, my slip was located between a Trader Joe’s and a nautical-themed restaurant with old photos of John Wayne, Ben Stiller, and Goldie Hawn laughing, drinking, and eating fried food. So, no, I wasn’t on the open ocean, per se, but the smell of fish sticks, the photos of the cast of “Overboard,” and the fact that I could see my boat from the restaurant’s patio meant I was almost sailing.

“What are you gonna do?” a dockmate hollered at me one morning. The guy was maybe 70. He held a paint brush and a coffee cup filled with epoxy. It looked to me like he was transforming his Catalina 25 into a Hawaiian-themed houseboat. “You gonna cruise that new boat of yours? Anchor at Malibu? Take it to Catalina?
What are your plans?”

I poked my head up from the cockpit. “Well, I’ve got a lot to learn before an adventure like that,” I said.

“You know more than you think you do,” he shot back.

When I first got here, the thing that struck me was the size of things. Marina del Rey is a city and a marina and a condo development. On weekends, 20-somethings charter megayachts to take TikTok videos of themselves twerking on the bow of a boat.

The other thing that struck me was the size of the Pacific Ocean. Each time I sailed Delilah beyond the breakwall, I got the sinking feeling that I was entering into danger. Over some months, that fear faded, though by summertime it still hadn’t disappeared, and I still hadn’t sailed beyond the Santa Monica Bay.

Then one evening, I met a guy on a Catalina Capri 18. That’s a small boat for an ocean, I thought. The boat isn’t really that small; my 25-footer is just 18 feet at the waterline. Anyway, we talked on the dock and exchanged info. A couple of weeks later he texted.

“Hey, it’s Jordan on the Capri 18,” he wrote. “I’m sailing with my buddy Dan to Catalina Island in August. Would you like to come along on your boat?”

Santa Catalina, aka Catalina Island, is one of the Channel Islands, a 21-mile-long volcanic remnant off the coast of Southern California renowned for its rugged beauty, rare species, and OK restaurants. Two Harbors is a village on its skinny northern end, 18 miles from the island’s only city, Avalon, and 31 miles from Marina del Rey. To get there, sailors cross one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and areas of ocean where water depths reach 3,000 feet.

I bit my thumbnail and considered Jordan’s text. Then, I wrote back: I’m in.

The summer heat was searing. A couple of weeks before the trip, I took my son to the pool. I was floating on my back, lost in thought, when the lifeguard stopped me. He was just a teenager, but he was in that little tower and he had that whistle. Pool rules: He said I’d have to pass a swim test to be in the deep end. I was 39; the pool’s depth maxed out at 5 feet 5 inches, but I respected it.

And, so, here’s the thing I want to mention about sailing: Unlike at the 5-foot-deep pool, anyone with a boat can simply float out onto the ocean, totally unsupervised, and go. When I’m nervous, I bite my fingernails. Sometimes I eat chips or make lists. As the Catalina adventure neared, I made an inventory of
everything one might want on a weekend cruise. Typing with a single, Dorito-stained finger, I searched for chart plotters, biminis, and outboards. As my list grew, it migrated from scrap paper, to cell phone, to laptop.

A few days before departure, I was resting on my kids’ bunkbed, using a magic marker and writing cool dinghy with drink holders on my hand when I had an epiphany. Maybe I didn’t need this stuff. Maybe the boat was ready. Maybe I was just…nervous.

That night, I went down to the water, tidied up Delilah, and rehearsed some things. Here’s hot dogs on top of beer in the cooler; and here’s hot dogs beside beer with lunch meat on top. “What do you think?” I asked my wife.

“You’re going to have fun, David.” Emily said. “Do you have gas for the outboard? Have you downloaded Navionics?”

“You read my mind,” I said. “It’s literally next on my list.”

An experienced sailor might wait until there’s wind to sail to Catalina Island. I lacked that particular insight. So, we left at 8 a.m. and motored through soupy seas
and light fog—Jordan and Dan on their Catalina 18 and my buddy, DK, and me bobbing along on Delilah.

“Point the boat about 2 inches to the right,” I told DK, squinting at my iPhone like an Angelino in traffic. This exchange repeated every few minutes. Between intervals, I’d spill a coffee, sit on my sunglasses, or drop my phone, then glance down at Navionics and announce, as if for the first time, “OK, let’s head about 3 inches left. Yes, DK. Hold it right there!”

This story might be titled “Amateur Man Goes Motoring” were it not for the fact that, with each passing mile, a sense of flow took over, and my anticipation of the trip was replaced by the real-time experience of it.

“Oh my god!” DK said. We were about 7 miles out. A pod of bottlenose dolphins, numbering perhaps in the hundreds, was stampeding at the surface. DK went to the bow. I held the tiller between my legs and shot some video. Most of my life, I’ve seen protected or institutionalized expressions of nature: zoos, stocked fishing ponds, cats playing keyboards. To encounter this many dolphins, from a small sailboat, with the cliffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula behind us, was wild.

“Did you get a good video?” DK asked afterward.

“No,” I said. “But not to worry. It’s a thing now.”

“What’s a thing now?” he asked.

“Unfocused video,” I said. I told DK how kids who’ve grown up with cell phones consider sharp, focused photos boring. “They post blurry stuff as a sort of middle
finger to the tyranny of perfect pics,” I explained. I looked down at my phone. “Damn. I forgot to hit record.”

“So, no video?” DK asked.

“Right,” I said.

“Well, that’s probably cool now, too.”

We started sailing about midway through the shipping lane. The fog was gone. The island was in view. On the horizon, a smattering of container ships was faintly discernible. Delilah has no radar or AIS, but Jordan had a free mobile app called Ships Near Me that reveals the real-time position of the big ships.

“Is that the far end of the island?” I asked Jordan over VHF.

“No, that’s a container ship,” he said.

“Is that a distant rock formation?” I asked.

“No, that’s a container ship,” he said.

The final ship we passed was stacked implausibly high and had the letters COSCO splashed in big red letters across the side. DK got excited and grabbed the VHF to radio Jordan and Dan. “Capri 18, when you get close, we’ll take two 20-ounce Pepsis and a couple of Kirkland Signature all-beef hot dogs. Thanks!”

The wind was rushing through the island’s isthmus as we approached the outer anchorage at Two Harbors. I dropped the mainsail and steered. I hailed the harbormaster on channel 9 but got no response. Were we too far out? Was our radio garbled? I tried hailing them again, only this time in a deeper, more masculine-sounding  voice. Nope. I tried a British accent. Still nope.

“Well, we’ve done everything they tell you to do in the sailing books,” I told DK. Then I had a horrifying thought: Was this God’s punishment for enrolling in AAA insurance instead of BoatU.S.?

If leaving the dock was the hardest part of cruising, coming into harbor was second. Moving closer, DK and I explored the various downsides of motoring through
a busy mooring field in a strong headwind with a 3-hp outboard. When the motor began acting flakey, I readied the sails and sent DK forward to prepare the anchor.

“Just in case,” I told him. Outwardly I was a man in control; inwardly, I was teetering on the edge of an emotional break.

“Sailing vessel Delilah, this is the harbormaster,” a voice suddenly cracked over the radio. “We’re sending a boat.” Minutes later, a calm young woman in a patrol boat appeared. This is just like that episode of “Baywatch,” I thought as she led us to our spot on the string line.

“You’ll want to go ahead and grab the pickup pole,” she said after our bow had floated over the hawser. DK looked at me.

“How do we do that?” I asked her.

“You pick it up,” she said.

That night, we enjoyed cold beer and OK burgers on the patio at the village restaurant. But something felt different. Was it endorphins? Was it the fact that four first-timers just sailed two small boats 31 miles to an island? Or was it the super-spreader event that was now unfolding on the restaurant’s crowded dance floor: Conga line in the time of COVID?

I slept like a baby that night to the sound of gentle moving water and the Macarena. At sunrise, I woke to the snorted rattle of DK snoring. I snuck out to the cockpit, brushed my teeth with no paste, splashed a little lemon-flavored La Croix under my pits, then—after landing a few contact lenses on my cheeks—put on glasses.

 

Nearby, Jordan was in the cockpit of the Capri 18, waking too. I used an ancient maritime method of boat-to-boat communication called whisper-yelling where one airs one’s grievances without using vocal cords. I told him about DK’s snoring.

“You’re kidding me,” he said, using only his breath. “That’s why I’m in the cockpit. Dan snores, too!”

Jordan swam over and together we shared instant coffee under the shade of a wet towel hung from Delilah’s boom. Nearby, families cruised the cove in fancy dinghies with sunshades and steering wheels. When DK was up, he and I floated around on a pair of five-dollar inflatables from the kids’ toys section at Target. We met a few cruisers; we also made some friends. Two of them, buddies on a Catalina 30, joined us aboard Delilah on a short shlep over to nearby Emerald Bay where we saw the famed Indian Rock and some remarkably translucent green and blue water.

That evening, Dan, Jordan, DK, and I climbed an isolated trail, high above Two Harbors. We saw Catalina Island fox—found on Catalina Island and nowhere else in the world—stood awed at the moonlit California coast, and witnessed the kind of jaw-dropping shooting star one can typically see only with the aid of psychedelics.

I slept in Delilah’s open cockpit under a huge sky. For years, I’d dreamt of this sort of experience, and now I was doing it. Does it get any better than this? I wondered.

On Sunday, I rose at sunup and discovered that our Tohatsu outboard had gone kaput. Was it a clogged carb? Bad gas? Gluten? I said these questions aloud to impress DK with my motor maintenance knowledge, which is about as deep as an Us Weekly. The best you can do in these situations is to pull yourself together and look helpless, I told myself.

And, it worked. A nosy neighbor on a dinghy—who I should mention had been snoopy from the start—instantly appeared and taxied me and my injured outboard
to shore. But the shop was slammed and couldn’t help. Add the fact that the coffee shop wasn’t open yet, and now we had a full-blown crisis.

I was lugging the outboard back to the dock, sweating, and bearing my burden for the world to see when the guys from the Catalina 30 appeared. “Do you want to borrow our dinghy motor?” Hudson offered. What a dream! We dropped their propane-fueled outboard into Delilah’s motor well and, just like that, we were jamming again—but, not so fast.

Before leaving the island, Jordan suggested one last adventure. We sailed over to nearby Big Fisherman’s Cove and anchored the boats, then snorkeled in the warm August water, surrounded by cavernous rock and volcanic caves. Dan pointed out kelp, crab, garibaldi, and sea bass, along with a variety of marine macro algae, plants, and invertebrates. Then, after he spotted a large bat ray, Jordan surfaced from the water.

“Can you believe it?” he said. “Most guys are on the couch, eating chips, and watching football. And we’re doing this! And afterward, we’re gonna go sailing!”

“Yeah, but what kind of chips?” I asked.

We left the island at 1 p.m. in the Pacific sun and a 10- to 12-knot breeze. And, boy, was it magic. We sailed seven hours on a single tack back to Marina del Rey, all the while smiling, snacking, and jabbering like Chatty Cathys.

Of course, this was a high point; it hadn’t been a perfect trip and we weren’t perfect sailors. In fact, one of these days, I’ll probably scribble down a long list of lessons learned and potential upgrades. Maybe next time, we’ll sail more than we motor. Maybe I’ll have a cool dinghy with drink holders, a cockpit table, or a heated towel rack. A guy can dream. Until then, though, I’ll probably just wing it, grab a few friends, a couple of small sailboats, and go cruising.

David Blake Fischer lives in Pasadena, California. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Moth, and Buzzfeed, among others. Follow his sailing adventures on Instagram at @sailingdelilah.

 

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