My O’Day 22 Sailboat Blog

Last Sunday I chartered a Catalina 320 out of Long Beach with a few friends for the day. Anticipating the Catalina Island trip, I decided to take the same boat which we will be taking in July for a test run. Having never sailed out of the Long Beach/San Pedro/LA Harbor before (which i learned to be the worlds biggest harbor), I thought it would be prudent to get some experience under my belt before the crossing.

Lance on the helm

Long Beach harbor is indeed very big. Just getting out of the harbor took over 30 minutes. There were 5 of us on the boat with 3 who had little to no sailing experience. That meant the first couple hours of the trip had to be a sailing 101 crash course. They caught on real quick and we were headed out to sea.

The LA Harbor receives 10% of all the freight traffic around the world and is responsible for most of the import/export of good in the West Coast. That meant we had to play frogger with the tankers all morning until we were clear of the shipping lanes. The shipping lanes merge at the harbor so in order to clear them we had to travel nearly 12 nautical miles out before we are safe. Luckily by the time the tankers are near LA Harbor, they are practically sitting still waiting for orders from the tugboats so the traffic was not overly dangerous.

Having checked out the boat and underway around 9:45AM, we had very little wind for a few hours. We had some relaxing time ghosting along in 5 knots of wind while listening to music and playing the guitar.

Typically the wind comes out of the west but this past Sunday, we had a south wind in the morning and a northwest in the afternoon so we had to sail upwind going in and out. When the wind picked up in the afternoon we had some exciting sailing going at hull speed with reefed main and jib.

On the way we saw a couple of schools of dolphins and a few curious ones came very close to us for a nice photo op. We also had a few gulls following us along on the way back ready to drop bombs on us.

On the way in, my buddy Dan D. was on the helm and we were cruising at an exciting 6 and a half knots in a close reach with 10 knots of wind.

Here is a little video I shot while standing on the foredeck. Note the shot of the GPS to show the speed of the boat.

We got back in the the slip at around 7pm. I felt pretty good about the trip and very much looking forward to the 3 day trip coming up in July to Catalina Island.