San Simeon Cove

8-31-06 Thursday - We got up early and left Monterey right after breakfast. It was really foggy and stayed that way all day. Visibility ranged between 1 to 3 miles. Gray skies, gray water, and a little sliver of brown California under the overcast. There was little wind so we motorsailed all day. This was the longest section of coast to be covered and it has a well-earned reputation for gnarly weather with few anchorages to take refuge. So we were highly motivated to put it behind us. The motor motored, the autopilot steered and we were pretty bored.

Finally we turned the corner at Point Piedras Blancas and then the fog got even thicker. Thanks to electronic navigation, the green buoy outside San Simeon Cove showed up right in front of us where it was supposed to be. Then we had to find our way into the cove without running onto some beach. The GPS puts a little red boat on our electronic charts that shows where we are. We drove the little red boat into the middle of the cove on the chart and dropped the anchor. Whew!
The next morning, we went over and re-anchored under the lee of the wooded peninsula that you can see in the photo. There were seals playing everywhere and they were very curious about us. We liked it so well here that we declared a rest day and stayed over. So that gave us a chance to visit. We invited local residents Bud and Linda, my husband-in-law and ex-wife for dinner (they brought Mexican food - how easy?). We had fun and they were good sports about getting wet butts and we rowed the dinghy out through the surf. The next morning, we had a pleasant coffee with celebrity circumnavigators, Beth Leonard and Evans Starzinger. Also sharing the anchorage with us was a one-armed Japanese single-hander who sailed over from Japan and was not migrating down the coast with a goal to reach Chile and Cape Horn. Tough dude! When the wind came up, we set sail for Port San Luis