Meeting the Santa Ana Wind
By Robert Mariner, East Sierra Branch
At dusk, two days under sail out of Oakland, California, we still had some hours to go before rounding Point Concepción, near Santa Barbara. Winds had been light to moderate, but steady, so we’d shut down the engine shortly after clearing Potatopatch Shoal outside the Golden Gate.
At 116 feet in length and displacing 170 tons, the ketch-rigged boat could carry 5,000 square feet of plain sail, and was capable of speeds well above 25 knots – almost 29 miles per hour – in good strong winds under full sail (two jibs, main, mizzen staysail and mizzen.) But we hadn’t found any such winds on this trip, and as the last glow of evening faded from the western horizon, the wind gradually fell to nothing, so the big propulsion engine rumbled into life. Soon a trail of greenish phosphorescence from disturbed plankton stretched far behind us, marking our wake as we continued on our way.
Shortly after midnight about a dozen glowing, greenish comet-shapes sped through the water to play about our bow. These were Pacific bottlenose dolphin, always a wonderful sight, especially at night. Their motion through the water disturbed the plankton, which responded by momentarily giving off their pale light. The dolphins stayed with us for only 15 minutes before accelerating and veering off towards the coast to our left. We were doing about 12 knots, apparently not fast enough for them to find us any fun to play with.
Finally turning generally eastward to run through the Santa Barbara Channel, we began to get a bit of a breeze. This was the Santa Ana wind coming off the land, hot and dry. That wind slowly gathered strength; after a while we shut down the engine, though running a generator to power our radar; the Channel was crowded with shipping and private boats, and we wanted to avoid any collision.
The wind continued to rise, so we raised all our sail, the boat gathering speed until it was moving faster than the swells we had been chasing. And it kept on accelerating, heeling over to starboard at about 15-20 degrees while we kept trimming sail. (As a boat sails across the wind, the direction from which the wind seems to be coming moves forward as boat speed increases. This requires the sails be adjusted, or “trimmed,” to keep producing power to drive the boat. Racing boats can move faster than the wind this way.)
We lost track of time in the excitement, concentration and effort of keeping ourselves on course, avoiding other vessels, and keeping the sails trimmed for their maximum power. The entire crew was on deck, trimming sail, and laughing as the radio operators on some of the oil-drilling rigs began to chatter about that large radar blip moving at 32 knots through the Channel. One of our crewmembers answered their curiosity, “Oil rig _____, this is sailboat ________. Nice night for sailing.”
The eastern horizon had begun to glow with the coming dawn while we’d been busy sailing the boat. As the sun came up, casting a path of brilliant red-orange reflection upon the surface of the waters, we sailed across the sunrise on wings of the wind.