First Night Watch. First Sail.

Radu woke me up 15 minutes prior to arrival. It was 7 am. After our first 21 hour passage from Ensenada to St. Quintin and going overnight, it was hard to get up. Once in the cockpit, I was awed by a different world. Round hills of volcanic origin in light purple were sitting behind a long white beach with large sand dunes. The sky was overcast in grays, light blues and complemented the picture of pastel colors. What a serene image after a very long night!

Sailing through the night means that we switch off at the watch. It’s only Radu and I, so we switch off when one get’s tired. The other one is sleeping, catching up on rest. This schedule can be grueling at first but we must get used to it, because sometimes there aren’t any good anchorages along the way, or we want to get somewhere faster and eventually we want to cross at least one ocean!

During the passage just before sunset, friends of ours hailed us on the VHF. We had met Nicolette and Dave at Shelter Island Marina and had followed them online after they had left San Diego last October and spent the winter in Mexico. So ‘First Date’ and ‘Imagine’ had a short drive by date on the ocean. How fun! They were coming up from St Quintin, where we were heading to. We circled them a couple of times, chatted a bit on the VHF and went our ways again. They will be making some money over the summer and coming down again in fall. Hope to see them again on the seas!

The sun was setting and I was weary of taking the shift right after. I had never been on an ocean at night, let alone on watch in a sailboat. Radu had been working and traveling on container ships and was very familiar with what to expect and stayed with me. Instead of resting, he fiddled with his iPad, which for some reason didn’t want to connect to the chart plotter. And we needed a chart plotter display in the cockpit. It shows the radar image of large objects at sea, which is crucial at night, when regular vision is impaired. He set a boundary around us with an alarm to alert us if a vessel, object or land is coming closer.By the time it was 10 pm, I was tired and Radu said he could go a little longer, so I went below and slept until midnight.

When I got up for my watch, I saw that the wind had shifted and that for the first time, since we started our shake down and cruise, we actually had wind to sail with!! We had motored steadily at around 6.5 knots already, so we would arrive way earlier than expected at St Quintin Bay. We unfurled the headsail, which gave us 5 knots by itself and exactly the speed we needed to arrive after sunrise. Radu went below to sleep, I turned the engine off, took the boat off the autopilot and sailed! For four hours it was total bliss.
The Imagine cut through the waves with ease, gliding along on a calm sea. The wind wasn’t strong but she held 4-5 knots for most of it. I had to contend a little with the current pushing us off course and off wind, but oh what fun. A midnight sail! The moon was bright and I could see some lights on the Baja twinkling in the distance and the stars above.

Later, the sky got cloudy and everything around me turned black. Pitch black. I couldn’t see anything. An occasional light very far away and the lit chart route, radar image and compass in front of me. Suddenly there was a splash next to me. I couldn’t see anything and grabbed the flashlight and let it shine over the water. Still couldn’t see what kind of animal was there. Those splashes were distinctly different to what I had been listening to for the previous hours. The wind snapping the head sail, the bow of the Imagine slicing the waves, waves splashing against the sides of the hull… This one was a hop and splash. I must admit, I was first scared because it sounded big, like whale big. But I didn’t hear a fountain, so it must have been a large fish or dolphin. Dolphins have been around either traveling along side us for a bit or fishing with birds further away. Deduction: must have been a dolphin. Unfortunately I am not as smart as an animal and can’t see in the dark!

At the end of my watch around 4 am, the wind had declined giving me at most 2 knots. Radu was ready to take his turn, we furled the head sail back in, turned on the motor and I was ready for a nap on our comfy captains berth below, secured by a lee cloth, with Samba, our Welsh Terrier, sleeping between my legs.