December 1, 2006
33°36'N 117°53'W
Newport Beach, CA
Hello everyone -
We've left our snug berth in Ventura and done a quick overnight passage
to Newport. We're now tied up in front of the Orange Coast College School
of Sailing and Seamanship where Beth will be giving a slide show tonight and
we'll be doing an all-day seminar tomorrow. Then we'll be FREE! We're both
looking forward to heading south to warm weather and tropical waters, to
really cruising again instead of working almost full time on books and
moving the boat from place to place. We plan to play tourist in Mexico with
whales, ancient ruins and lovely beaches at the top of our sightseeing list.
Beth returned to the boat on November 16th, and since then we've both been
very busy getting ready for our next six months of cruising. Evans made
sure HAWK was in sailing shape with a bottom scrub, a trip up the mast and a
look at everything electronic and mechanical on board. The boat was in
chaos for a week with bags of canned goods, teas, batteries, and toiletries
on every available surface while we worked to find room for it all. Beth
canned 20 quarts and 20 pints of stews, chili, soups and veggies. We left
the dock in Ventura with full water and fuel tanks and every locker full to
bursting. It's not as if we don't expect to find almost everything we buy
here down in Mexico, but there is something so intensely satisfying about
knowing we could head offshore and be self-sufficient for two to three
months.
Over the weekend, we had an interesting experience when Steve and Linda
Dashew invited us to test drag devices aboard their 80-foot aluminum motor
boat, WIND HORSE. We set a 28-foot diameter parachute sea anchor in calm
winds and a large swell, and then retrieved it. We then towed several
drogues at 7 knots of boats speed to compare how they performed. We'll be
doing some more testing this week on HAWK before we head south. Overall, it
was even more difficult to retrieve the sea anchor than we had guessed, and
we would not want to do it in any serious conditions. The drogues worked
much as we expected, though the series drogue didn't slow the boat down as
much as we would have guessed. Motoring at 7 knots, the series drogue
slowed the boat down by about 3 knots, while the other drogues (a Galerider
and one similar to a Delta Drogue) only slowed the boat by 1.5 knots. All
in all, the testing was interesting but we've used the Galerider enough in
storms to know that it didn't begin to simulate open ocean conditions in
real waves. We didn't get the shock loading we regularly see on the
Galerider when we're running in front of storm-force winds, and those make a
huge difference in how the boat responds. We'll just have to test them in
real conditions sometime!
We had a fabulous overnight sail from Ventura down to Newport. The first
winter front of the season came through the day before we left bringing
25-35 knot winds, and while the wind had dropped quite a bit, we had 20
knots most of the night. HAWK was eager to go, and we kept reefing her down
so we wouldn't arrive at Newport before dawn. It has been so long since
we've been running along at 8 knots leaving a line of molten gold in our
wake under an orange half moon. It felt so good to be underway again, to be
connected again to the moving sea beneath us and the bright, crystalline
stars shining overhead. We have found nothing quite like it ashore. HAWK
was alive beneath us, tired of being held captive by lines for too many
months. I swear she growled at me when I put in the second reef, and I
don't think she slowed down one little bit!
We'll be heading for Mexico sometime next week, and we'll only be able to
access this e-mail when we're in harbor, so don't worry if we take a bit
longer than we have been to get back to you. Beth very much enjoyed
catching up with many of you on her wanderings around the country. We are
so blessed to have so many wonderful friends in every nook and cranny of the
many continents we have visited. One of the rewards of our vagabond
lifestyle.
Here's to finding your own cruising magic, whatever and wherever it may be.
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
September 12, 2006
34°15'N 119°15'W
Ventura, CA
Hello everyone –
HAWK is now tucked into her winter berth here in Ventura. We have spent the last week winterizing her and working hard to get some weight off the boat. When we built HAWK, we looked around at all the lockers and thought we’d never manage to fill them up. But after seven years aboard, every locker was overflowing and tending to eject its contents when opened. We were desperate to reclaim some space. A half dozen boxes and 500 pounds or so later, we can now open all the lockers without having their contents leap out at us.
We had a wonderful time in San Francisco. We were made to feel incredibly welcome by the San Francisco Yacht Club, the Point San Pablo Yacht Club and the Cruising Club of America. We have spent so much time in remote areas, it was great fun to be wined and dined, to get to share wonderful evenings with accomplished sailors, to exchange sea stories and get to know new friends. We have rarely been made to feel so much a part of an existing sailing community in such a short period of time. Our only regret was that we had to turn down many kind invitations because of the unrelenting demands of the books. Beth was in the midst of going through the page proofs for The Voyager’s Handbook, which was a 12-hour a day job for several weeks.
After leaving San Francisco, we had some fine sailing down the coast with strong northerly winds most of the way. We stopped in Half Moon Bay, Santa Cruz, San Simeon, Port San Luis, and the Channel Islands before making our way to our winter berth. This is a tough coast for coastal cruising with few good harbors, frequent fog, and lots of swell. But that doesn’t seem to discourage the many sailors we have met equipping boats for long-distance voyages. It has been a pleasure to see how strong and vibrant the sailing community is on this coast, from the summer sailing camp for youngsters in Port Madison on Bainbridge Island near Seattle to the cruising boats that fill the anchorages on the Channel Islands to overflowing despite the fog and large swell.
Beth will be heading back to the east coast at the end of this week, and Evans will follow on November 1st. Beth will be doing seminars and slide shows at the Annapolis Boat Show, Strictly Sail St. Petersburg, and the SSCA gam in Melbourne, Florida. In December, she’ll be doing a slide show and all-day seminar at Orange Coast College. She’ll be promoting her new book, Blue Horizons, which is now available from Amazon. Her revised The Voyager’s Handbook will be available in early November. She’s looking forward to seeing friendly faces at these events and catching up with good friends along the way.
We’ll have good Internet connections and be easily reachable over the next few months, so feel free to get in touch. Look for another HAWK update when we get underway again in mid-December, bound for Mexico. We’ll finally be back to full-time cruising, with the books behind us for the time being.
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
August 3, 2006
37°56'N 122°20'W
Point Richmond, CA
Hello everybody –
Since our last update, we have made the passage down the coast and are now in San Francisco. Before we left Puget Sound, we spent a very enjoyable week in Port Madison where we shared the harbor with Lin and Larry Pardey aboard TALEISIN, their 30-foot classic wooden cutter, and Linda and Steve Dashew aboard their brand new WIND HORSE, an 83-foot aluminum powerboat. It’s hard to imagine three more different cruising boats than TALEISIN, HAWK, and WIND HORSE! At a hamburger barbecue put together by Tad and Joyce Lahmon, whom we first met in Scotland in 2000, the company consisted of six couples that had circumnavigated at least once, and three couples who had sailed to Cape Horn.
We spent about ten days in Port Madison, and during most of that time I was busy with the final page proofs for my new book, BLUE HORIZONS, which chronicles our voyaging on HAWK. During that time, the weather was perfect for a passage south to San Francisco, with strong northerly winds from a high pressure system offshore. But by the time we reached Neah Bay at the mouth of Juan de Fuca Straits on the 4th of July, the high had wandered off and a series of low pressure systems brought strong southerly winds. We may have missed the weather window, but we were just in time for a spectacular fireworks display courtesy of the Indian reservation. The show was as good as many we have seen in big cities, with a ten-minute crescendo that filled the sky with a dozen colors to the cheers of the hundreds of people lining the shore.
We waited in Neah Bay for ten days before the weather finally returned to the normal summer patterns. We could have left earlier, but we saw no reason to hurry when we knew we’d have a much more pleasant passage once the northerly winds came back. We left Neah Bay on July 15th and anchored in Drake’s Harbor just under Point Reyes four days later after a fast downwind run in winds of 25-40 knots. The passage would have been uneventful except that we paid more attention to the weather forecast than to the conditions we were actually experiencing. We were consistently over-canvassed on the passage because every forecast called for the wind to die in the next 12 hours – and they were all wrong. HAWK came through just fine, but we had a few more bumps and bruises than we should have.
After a good night’s sleep, we left the next morning for the run in to San Francisco. By the time the sky was blushing pink, we were motoring along a sandy coast surrounded by Guillemots chasing after silver fish splashing on the surface. We got our first glimpse of the towers of the bridge rising up above the low brown hills, with the cone of Mt. Tamalpais a handspan to the left of the northern tower. We reached the bridge around 9:00. The infamous Potato Patch, the shoal that lies north of the channel leading to the bridge and that can have treacherous waves, was covered by rippled water as the tide ran over it, but it was so benign that we could have motored right across it. The bridge was beautiful – a burnished red and so elegant, nestled between the hills on either side, providing the perfect frame for the skyscrapers jutting up against the pale sky across the Bay. We had both pictured coming under the bridge in fog and not being able to see the city at all, but here we were motoring in with nearly perfect visibility. I took lots of photos trying to capture the moment, the beauty of the bridge arcing across from brown hill to brown hill, the sweep of the bay, the beautiful houses jutting out over the water in Suasalito and Tiburon, the sense of wealth and power and the weight of population.
We built HAWK to do three things: to sail the Patagonian channels, to re-visit Australia, and to sail under the Golden Gate Bridge. We had as perfect a moment as it’s possible to have coming in on that beautiful morning through the soft air. But that doesn’t mean we’re done. After all, Chile’s still down there, and we intend to have another go!
We hope that you too manage to realize your most cherished dreams.
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
April 23, 2006
Fisherman’s Wharf, False Creek, Vancouver, BC
49°16'N 123°18'W
Hello everyone –
We’re in the big city, tied up among the fishing boats right in the heart of downtown. We’ve enjoyed a wonderful week wandering around nearby Granville Island, shopping at the incredible public market there, eating seafood fresh off the boat, and wandering around the streets agog at the snow-capped mountains in the distance. We’ve also been doing lots of socializing, catching up with old friends and with new acquaintances made when Beth did her presentation here for the Bluewater Cruising Association.
Last night one of those new friends, Don Brown, took Beth for a flight over Vancouver in a small four-seater aircraft (a Cessna 172 for those of you who know your aircraft). The pure blue sky was empty of clouds, and the weather was about as perfect as it could be. Vancouver seen from the air is even more beautiful than from the ground, for the perspective allows you to realize how forested and remote the mountains are that back the city, and to see how the small peninsula of land is cradled by the many inlets and tributaries surrounding it. It was late in the afternoon, and as the sun approached the horizon the slanting golden light turned the jagged mountains into dark silhouettes while shimmering red and gold on the waters of Georgia Strait. It touched the buildings of Vancouver and highlighted each one in bright light while creating long black shadows that increased the sense of depth. What an incredible treat!
Before arriving in Vancouver a week ago, we spent several weeks cruising the Gulf Islands. We’re not entirely back into footloose and fancy-free mode as Evans continues to finish winter projects and Beth responds to various requests from her editors regarding the two books that are currently in production. That’s just as well, as the weather has remained a bit winterish with frequent SE gales. We found ourselves in Pirate’s Cove for Easter weekend, an almost-landlocked lagoon on DeCourcy Island in the Gulf Islands. Saturday, it was pouring down rain and about 45 degrees when someone knocked on the hull and invited us ashore for an Easter egg hunt and a wiener roast. Sure enough, a fire was roaring and a group of about 40 hearty Canadians were searching the brush for “brown eggs” when we got ashore – beer cans nestled under bushes, tucked into small holes or hidden under fallen logs. It turns out that the Pirate’s Cove Easter event is a long-standing tradition for the Gulf Cruising Club, and they treated us to hot dogs and marshmallows while kids played with dogs and the adults joked around the fire.
Despite the inclement weather, we did manage to get in some wonderful sails and to get everything functioning again – including us! We all needed to work out some kinks, and HAWK needed a bit of tuning after having her rig out for the winter. Now we’re all ready to head a bit further north and to once again enjoy wilderness areas and have anchorages all to ourselves.
This is the first time on HAWK when we have not had some definite plan in mind and some place we were aiming to be within two or three months. With Beth needing to be in communication to edit the books, we’re not planning a major trip this summer, just some relaxing sailing in this large and well-protected cruising ground before we head down the west coast. After the fast pace of the last few months, we’re both very much looking forward to some quite sailing in some truly magnificent country.
We’ll be leaving Vancouver, somewhat reluctantly, tomorrow. We’re heading up to Princess Louisa Inlet and Desolation Sound where there won’t be any Internet cafes or DSL connections. So don’t worry about us if you don’t hear from us for a bit. We’ll be back in touch when we come back south again in a month or six weeks.
Fair winds and full sails,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
March 22, 2006
48°39'N 123°23'W
Port Sidney Marina
Sidney, British Columbia
Hello everyone –
We’ve been out of touch for a very long time. It has been a busy period for both of us, and we are both more than ready to get back to HAWK and settle into our normal cruising routine – as much as we can be said to have a routine!
We spent the winter with our families, and HAWK spent the winter in a shed at Canoe Cove about 20 miles north of Victoria on Vancouver Island. We both enjoyed catching up with friends and family for the first time since we left on HAWK in 1999. When we weren’t socializing, both of us were busy with several winter projects. In addition to managing the refit, Evans put together a CD compilation of most of the articles we’ve written while we’ve been out on HAWK. He returned to oversee the last of the refit at the end of January and ended up doing a number of extra unexpected projects including replacing the windlass.
Beth put together a new slide show and presented that at Mystic Seaport and gave the original Following Seas show at New Bedford Whaling Museum and Peabody Essex Museum. She was able to meet up with many of you along the way and very much enjoyed being able to spend some time and catch up with your sailing and non-sailing adventures. After returning to HAWK in early March, Beth also did slide shows for the Vancouver and Victoria chapters of the Bluewater Cruising Association. When she wasn’t presenting, Beth was writing. After three years, she FINALLY finished the revision of The Voyager’s Handbook. The first two sections of the book have been entirely re-written and greatly expanded, and there are eight brand new chapters. The new book will be half again the size of the original. She also took the best of the columns that ran on the back page of Blue Water Sailing and put them together into a book to be titled Blue Horizons. Both books will be out in the fall, and Beth will be returning to the east coast to promote them at the Annapolis boat show and several other venues.
Over the winter, HAWK had an extensive refit and is now ready to do another 50,000 miles. We had the mast pulled and did a major rebuild on it, redid the hatches and replaced our hatchboards with a new, watertight Dutch door – expensive but a huge improvement both in terms of convenience and safety. In fact, HAWK’s all set to head back to Chile, which just happens to be the long-range plan. In the short term, we intend to head north to explore the rich cruising ground between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia coast, an area that we missed by sailing down the west coast of the island last summer. Beyond that, our plans are still very fluid and will depend on Beth’s promotion schedule for the new books. But we’re thinking along the lines of the west coast of the US, Mexico, Polynesia and then south to Chile in time for the summer season of 2007/2008. After that? Stay tuned!
We apologize for being so out of touch over the winter and look forward to hearing from you over the next few weeks while we’re still in the land of fast Internet connections. Please drop us a line and catch us up with your lives, and if you’ve sent us e-mails that we’ve been remiss in responding to, expect to hear from us soon. The next HAWK update you get will be about SAILING!
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK