Wendaway raised anchor and moved northward from Cazadero on January 23, 2017. The Fox stayed behind for one more day. The morning was calm and I noticed heavy dew on deck. GB stayed aboard and I paddled to shore for more beachcombing - an addiction that cannot be resisted. Life was good. #foreshadowing.
The next morning's forecasts called for 7 days of NW winds starting in the low teens and then increasing within 36-48 hours. There was again heavy dew on deck. We decided it was time to press northward, aiming for another favorite anchorage of ours, San Marcial, about 36 miles away.
Long story short, we didn't make it.
For some reason GB insisted on aiming for the nearby anchorage at Punta San Telmo (south of the point in that there pic), although it was clearly exposed to precisely the direction of the wind and seas we were currently struggling with. Sometimes a skipper cannot accept a navigator's recommendations and must actually enter an anchorage to experience what's going on there. Such was the case this day. We actually had to arrive at our predetermined anchoring waypoint so that GB could see (and feel) the 4-foot breaking seas throughout Punta San Telmo's anchorage before he determined with great confidence that his anchoring choice was in fact untenable. What was the nearest tenable anchorage, you ask? Why, that would be Cazadero, now some 23 miles astern.
And so it was that we reversed course and rolled downwind back to Cazadero. It turned out to be a good decision anyway because we discovered en route that our primary alternator (rebuilt in Georgia when we had been cruising there but with very few hours on it) had packed it in and GB needed a flat-water anchorage to replace it.
So, into Cazadero we bounced. Anchored in 22' near our favorite waypoint. Water was calm with a northerly breeze in the anchorage of 12 knots or less. Round trip: 46 miles. But we were both safe and mostly-sound.
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