Author Archives : Chris French

Pulling into San Francisquito


Up before the sun and underway just after 6:00am, we headed for San Francisquito. Visions of stocking the freezer with fish filled out heads and we motorsailed 40 aught miles south. Mellow day on the water with not much wind and calm seas. Only drawback at one point was a 1.3 knot current against us. Thankfully it only lasted an…

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Clean Up, Isle Guarda


A spectacular sunrise began the day. Life is good. The blow in Gonzaga left a film of fine dust over the boat and the first order of business was a good cleaning. We might have gone overboard and used over 250 liters of water but it felt good to walk on the clean decks. Jack took it a step further…

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Tiptoeing To Refugio


We woke to a mill pond, overnight it was perfectly smooth with no wind. What a change from the previous few days. The plan, if the seas had settled, had been to head for Refugio (a 50 nm passage). Looking out with the binoculars it still looked quite rough so rather than make a decision we broke down the emergency…

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Happy Halloween!


Groundhog day and/or Halloween? The wind picked up around 2:30am back into the mid to upper 30s just like yesterday. With 24 hours of continuous wind my confidence in our anchor holding let me sleep until 6:00am. The sunrise is getting later with a 6:50 rise over the horizon. The waves outside of the bay looked frightening with huge breakers.…

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Windy day in Gonzaga bay


The day started early, 3:00am actually, as the wind picked up and turned us to point north. It was a relief having the anchor well set and watching on the anchor alarm that we were not moving. Over the next few hours we saw a peak gust of 39 knots and steady upper twenties to low thirties. Ugh, this could…

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