The ‘Bird’: Almost Ready to Take Flight

For yachtsmen, the activities of fitting out, or boat maintenance, are more important signs of spring than the appearance of the first robin or house finches prospecting for a nesting site in the eaves.

This spring I’m feeling a little smug. Except for varnishing my Herald Bird’s Sitka spruce mast (when I can locate a talented monkey, armed with varnish and brush, to haul up in my boatswain’s chair) and putting a second coat of white paint on the cabin top, I’m fitted out earlier and better than I’ve been in years.

The Bird’s teak deck is now refastened, bleached and sealed, and new lifelines have been swagged and installed. I’m ready and itching to make that first spring cross-channel passage to Catalina Island, just as soon as I call a halt to making shorebound social engagements that interfere with free weekends at sea.

My wife and I have been nosing the Bird back and forth across the San Pedro Channel for 14 years now, and you’d think those hundreds of past cruises would have made that round trip of 54 nautical miles a pretty dull and uneventful affair. Far from it. We are still filled with delight by seeing the remarkable flights of flying fish. Close encounters with gray whales and sportive pilot whales playing about the Bird still fill us with awe.

Visits by schools of porpoises playing tag with our cutwater are an undiminished joy to us. Only once have we seen a pod of killer whales, and only twice have we seen the great sickle-shaped dorsal fins of leaping thresher sharks silhouetted against the horizon.

Several times the dorsal fins of marlin swordfish have knifed in to investigate the feather albacore jig we usually troll astern on a handline. Thank Davey Jones they never took it, but I’ve heard of instances where they did, and then it was, “Goodby, handline.” When we’re lucky, it’s usually bonito that take the jig, and then it’s a fine dinner that night at White’s Cove.

We’ve been frightened by waterspouts passing too close for comfort. Any waterspout, no matter how far away, is too close for comfort. But our greatest fright was when a 30-foot high rogue wave rolled in out of nowhere, it seemed, when we were powering about five miles off Corona del Mar. I quartered the Bird’s bow into the monster and up we rose.

“My God,” I gasped to my wife as we crested the wave. “We’re going to bury our bow!” A sharp, but smaller wave followed the big rogue. The Bird came to the bottom of the trough with an impact that sent flying everything loose in the cabin. Blue water rushed over the deck. But she rose beautifully! I still have occasional nightmares over that encounter at sea. What if it had caught us broadside and we’d have been broached?

And now I’ve heard of a new experience not to look forward to: Downbursts, which is cold air pouring from the bottom of a cloud at speeds of up to 130 miles per hour and fanning out along the surface. When you spot the thunderheads building up and suspect a thunderstorm at sea, then is the time to reef down if you’re in a sailboat, crank up the auxiliary engine and head for the nearest port.