Sailing Vacation along the California Coast

In the morning, we’re greeted by a marine layer that obscures the sun. The wind blows at five to 10 knots out of the northwest. It’s cold enough that we dress in long johns and fleece under our foul-weather gear, the standard uniform when one sails off the coast here, where the water temperature hovers year-round in the 50s F. We keep that gear on when the skies eventually clear because the wind picks up to 25 knots out of the northwest, and the air is still cool. After about 50 miles of sailing, we round the corner on our way into Santa Cruz, the next harbor south. As we come into the lee of the land, we immediately begin shedding layers. We can see kids splashing in the small waves at the crowded beach and pedal-powered boats idling around in the near-glassy calm outside the harbor entrance.

Santa Cruz is distinctly California, and while you might get away with saying that San Franciscans are like New Englanders living in a town with palm trees, you could never say that about Santa Cruz. The clusters of surfers standing up on the cliffs watching the waves break, the shuffling hippies who smell like patchouli, the homeless kids socializing between stints of panhandling on Pacific Avenue, the teenage couples strolling past the Beach Boardwalk amusement park: All are Californian to the core. Wherever they may have come from originally, in this town they’re Californians, and on a sunny, 75 F Sunday evening, they’re all outside, and you couldn’t mistakenly locate this scene in any other state.

In the morning, after bobbing around in the kelp to watch surfers ride waves, we unclog our raw-water intake and steam through the fog for a couple of miles to pick up a mooring off the beach town of Capitola. It’s a pleasant little town of bright colors and small buildings set close to the beach, definitely a nice place at which to enjoy lunch. Afterward, we strike out for Monterey. We cross Monterey Canyon, where the depth sounder spins complete circles again and again. We know from the chart that it bottoms out at 2,000 feet here and reaches down to depths of more than two miles farther offshore. The water is as black as it should be over an abyss. Once out of the lee of the land, the wind comes over our starboard quarter at more than 30 knots, and it takes no time for us to arrive.
Monterey is dominated by tourists, and although Cannery Row, today clogged with T-shirt shops, is much more interesting when seen through the eyes of Steinbeck or captured in the old photographs at the Monterey History & Maritime Museum, the Monterey Bay Aquarium offers a chance for Anton and me to see some of the creatures over which we’ve just sailed, such as schools of tuna and the wolf eels that live in the kelp forests. Walking a couple of miles along the shore from the harbor to Lovers Point Park, in nearby Pacific Grove, I see otters floating on their backs and harbor seal pups napping on the beach. It’s easy to feel like you’re on vacation here.

Impulsively, we decide to add another day of sailing and point Zeus toward Carmel-by-the-Sea. While there are no decent anchorages or a harbor there, the trip makes for a spectacular day of sightseeing: Views of the Pebble Beach golf course and its groomed fairways appear just above Pacific breakers, and we catch glimpses of the Spanish-looking Carmelite Monastery set among palm trees above a beach and beneath a mountain.

Eventually, it’s time to sail back up the coast to San Francisco, and on the 50-mile leg from Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay, we get a taste of why it is, perhaps, that so few boats cruise on these waters. The lighthouse at Pigeon Point, ruggedly attractive, set against green hills, and surrounded by blooming flowers, is certainly worthy of a good look. But for the past four hours, it’s served to drive home just how poor our V.M.G. is. Beating into 25 knots of wind with a single reef in the main and tacking through 105 degrees limits our progress to the pace of a brisk walk. We’ve been staring at the light’s 115-foot tower for far too long.

The truth is that if it weren’t for the limitations imposed by scheduling, we could’ve mitigated the circumstances of our one long beat by just delaying our return trip by a day; as it is, we’ve only added a few hours of sailing time to our trip. The effect, however, is to make us feel as if we’ve earned all the great unspoiled sailing that we’ve experienced.

When we coast in under the Golden Gate on a Sunday afternoon and see all the boats out chasing each other around buoys while we’re shedding safety harnesses and foul-weather gear, I feel like I’ve been on a great voyage and that I’m seeing the small world I left behind through new eyes. I know that you could drive to the farthest point that we reached on our trip in less than three hours, but I’ll still claim our adventure as a rare journey to the back of beyond.

Abner Kingman, a journalist who lives outside of San Francisco with his wife and two children, 6 and 3, is spending a lot more time these days getting to know areas close to home.