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Shanghaied! I should have known better. I should have stayed in my own brightly lit computer lab, safe and protected, but one soft day after another made me careless. I craved adventure. I took to wandering. My footsteps led me to the CAD room. The dim light and workstation pastel glow of three dimensional valve block renderings lulled me, and when Guy, the sailor, beckoned I was easy game. I sat at his station and listened as he spun a wonderful yarn about a wooden schooner stranded in Morro Bay. Sheridan T. Badger was the name of the boat, or "the Badger" as Guy called it, but it might better have been christened boomerang, because it kept coming back. No matter how many times Guy sold it it would always return to him. A man named Bill had been the latest to lease the boat, with an option to buy, but he defaulted and so Guy was forced to repossess. On the weekend last he and his intrepid crew set out from Monterey to sail her to her new berth in Long Beach, but the engine went out, the fan belt broken, and there was no wind. John, the English truck driver/sailor spliced a rope into a fan belt and they limped into Morro Bay, just twenty miles down the coast from Monterey, in the dead of the night in a thick fog.
I was fascinated. He had a calendar with a picture of the Badger's sister ship. Forty-five feet, the fore-mast shorter than the main (that's how you can tell a schooner from a ketch), with the mainsail, foresail, staysail, jib, and fisherman all flying. It was a beautiful thing. After that everything went dark and the next thing I knew I was sitting with Barb in the passenger seat of Guy's pickup. Guy was driving and Guy's son, Scott, and John, the English sailor, were stowed in the back with the rest of the gear.
We pulled into Morro Bay not too long before sundown. Guy kept me off balance by immediately dispatching me to the yacht club bar to meet with a high ranking Douglas retiree on urgent business involving beer, peanuts, and a less than one hundred percent stable landing gear. While I was safely distracted the others transferred the gear into the boat. By the time Barb and I boarded the dingy to the Badger it was dark. We quickly made ready to sail and Scott left us to drive the truck back to Los Angeles.
We pulled out of Morro Bay under power and under the stars, the diesel churning in the ship's belly. It was a beautiful night. The current was strong and there was no wind so the coastal lights passed behind us with aching slowness, our engine chugging into the night. I took my shift at the wheel sometime past midnight. I sat behind the wheel, my eyes straining to make out the compass heading down at the binnacle, which was lit by the firefly glow of a chemical light stick. But it was impossible to look only down. Behind us streamed the boat's phosphorescent wake and above us shooting stars streaked across the Milky Way. I gave up the wheel about three A.M. and found the cramped bed in the forward cabin, falling asleep with the sound of the diesel pounding in my dreams.
Quiet! It broke me out of my sleep. The engine was still. The silence louder than the missing clatter. I crawled up the companionway and back to the stern to ask Guy what was wrong. The transmission was out. We had no engine. We were truly a sailboat. I went back below and fell asleep again, with no sound but the waves.
I woke up to little or no wind. The boat wallowed in the sea and the sails banged from one side to the other. We were barely making steerageway. It was dawn, or near dawn. The day passed in a blur. I took my turns at the wheel and ate when I could. It was sunny and not at all cold for the time of year. We decided to keep on going. Guy had wanted to pass Point Conception at night, when it was calm, but the loss of the engine and lack of wind meant we were going to reach it at midday. Point Conception. Ships used to sail hundreds of miles out to sea to avoid it. Point Conception, said in the same breath as Cape Horn. And here we were, the four of us, two novices and two real sailors, and Guy, the captain, was seasick.
The wind began to pick up as we approached the point. It blew more strongly with every passing minute. Guy ordered John and I to take a reef in the mainsail. Still the wind blew stronger. Thirty knots Guy guessed it to be. Thirty knots and cross seas. The wind was going one way and the water another. The boat was heeled over, the starboard rail in the water. Guy had trouble steering his course. He had to let the wind take us where it would. A line caught on a running light in the rigging. I rushed up to free it. In the struggle the wind took my Broncos cap. It skittered past Barb in the stern, teasing her before sailing out to sea. Davy Jones must be a Broncos fan. I'm glad I wasn't wearing my Broncos jacket or he might have taken me too. I tugged and pulled at the line. Off came the running light and the line was free. We were sailing like a Dutchman in a hurricane but we weren't getting anywhere. Barb went below. When we sank she didn't want to be there to see it. We'd be lucky to round the point before nightfall. John and Guy finally agreed that we had to turn back. Point Conception had defeated us that day.
We sailed easily now with the wind behind us, but it was too good to last. The wind didn't follow us from Point Conception . Becalmed in the huge Pacific. Lost. --- Well, not quite lost. Guy had rented a global positioning system and after a few minutes with the manual I was reading the charts and had our course plotted down to the minute. The great navigators of the age of exploration didn't have anything on me. We started out for San Luis Obispo and then when I was at the wheel decided to try for Morro Bay but once I was off the wheel and able to check our position again it was clear that without wind we'd be lucky to make Morro Bay by the next morning. So Port San Luis Obispo it was.
It was about four o:clock in the afternoon when we pointed ourselves toward shore. Three hours later we were still drifting in, no wind. We decided to radio the port authority for a tow. The radio was out. There we were, becalmed in the wide Pacific, drifting in toward the breakwater, no radio, no wind. There were buoys marking rocks. Each inch we made on those buoys seemed to take hours. Finally, sometime after dark, we passed the breakwater. The harbor was dark. Guy steered down the channel. Another hour passed as we inched along. We shone our flashlight on the sails hoping somebody might see us and come looking. No luck. At last we made out the dim shapes of boats to port, starboard and forward. We didn't have enough steerageway to maneuver in an unfamiliar harbor in the dark so we dropped anchor in the middle of the channel. Guy slept on deck and the rest of us staggered below, exhausted.
Dawn again and I was up with Guy watching a dozen small boats head out to sea before we finally managed to flag one down that had a radio and could call the harbor master for us. We were towed to a mooring by a water taxi with a white bearded skipper who had salt water running in his veins and a knot for every occasion. Guy left with the old sea dog to pay for the mooring while John, Barb, and I did our best to set the boat on fire. John and Barb were heating water for coffee and instant soup but the line to the burner from propane tank wasn't set and it leaked into the bottom of the stove. Here we had escaped Point Conception and now we were going to be done in by a Coleman camp stove. We got the better of it though. We tied a line to it and dunked it overboard. There's nothing like a handy ocean when you've got a fire to put out.
When Guy got back we all put on our innocent faces and went about coiling the lines, covering the sails, and bringing our gear up on deck. (Actually Bill see page one had left the Badger in such bad shape that Guy might have cheered us if we'd burned her up.) An hour later the water taxi picked us up and ferried us ashore. We celebrated with beer and eggs for breakfast --- a true sailors' meal if there ever was one.
| Badger At Sunrise (116K) | Badger At Anchor (88K) |
Gregg Writes
| 1989 | Besieged | Claire de Lune |
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| 1992 | Flood --- Riot --- Earthquake! |
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| 1993 | * Gregg and the Trail Bike * | A Stabbing | |
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| Under a Full Moon | Burt Rutan | I Meet a Bear | |
| 1994 | * 7.2! * | A Star Is Born | * My Car Is Stolen * |
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| 1995 | This Year I Flew Like A Bird |
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