Cruising Active Transport

We circumnavigated between 2008 and 2014. After sailing to Alaska we ended up in Seattle for four years.

19 September 2018
Youtube Video of our Voyage
08 August 2018 | Marina del Rey
Settling in at Marina del Rey
23 July 2018 | Marina del Rey
We are tied up in MDR
22 July 2018 | 25 miles west of Cambria
Good first day
21 July 2018 | Crossing Monterey Bay
Whales
21 July 2018 | South of the Golden Gate
On our way on the last leg
16 July 2018
Enjoying the Bay Area
14 July 2018 | Grand Marina
Change in Marina
14 July 2018 | San Francisco Bay
Back in the Bay After Ten Years
13 July 2018 | Point Arena
Passing Point Arena
12 July 2018 | Thirty Miles NW of Humbolt Bay, CA
Weather Is a Bit More Contrary Than Forecasted
11 July 2018 | Crescent City
Not a Whole Lot to Report
10 July 2018 | Neah Bay
Waiting in Crescent City for Blustery Weather to Die Down
09 July 2018 | Thirty five miles WNW of Reedsport, Oregon
Another Day of Motoring in Flat Water
08 July 2018 | Forty Miles West of Columbia River Entrance
A Successful First Day at Sea
07 July 2018 | Neah Bay
On our way
06 July 2018 | Neah Bay Marina
The Gods of Lousy Weather Don't Want Us to Change Our Minds
05 July 2018 | Neah Bay Marina
Weather Still Looking Good for a Saturday Departure
04 July 2018
Tied up in Neah Bay
03 July 2018 | Port Angeles City Floats
Docked on the Cheap in Port Angeles

Youtube Video of our Voyage

19 September 2018
John
I just added a link to a youtube video of a google earth animation that shows the route we took around the world. The route for our circumnavigation is in red. Our subsequent voyage to Alaska and then Seattle is in Yellow.

Settling in at Marina del Rey

08 August 2018 | Marina del Rey
John
We have been here in Los Angeles for two weeks, at this point, and life has settled into familiar routines.

We bought a car. We got a 2012 Honda Civic that runs on compressed natural gas. Almost all the airport shuttles use CNG for fuel so there are quite a few fueling stations nearby.

CNG and Electric vehicles are the only ones that are allowed to use the car pool lanes with only 1 person in the car. They used to allow hybrid vehicles to use those lanes but ended that program when Toyota sold thousands of Prius cars just so their owners could get the magic sticker that entitled them to use the carpool lanes. The carpool lanes became so crowded that their original purpose, of encouraging car pooling, was negated.

We have both ordered bicycles. Neither has shown up yet but we expect them to be very useful here in Marina del Rey because parking can be a real problem in the shopping plazas like the one where we have to go to pick up our mail.

The bicycle trails are well developed in this part of Los Angeles. It is possible to ride all the way to Malibu on bike trails and there are a lot of cultural activities that we will be able to bike to. We are going to see Shakespeare by the Sea this Saturday evening at Pollywog park in Manhattan Beach. We are seeing "The Merry Wives of Winsor" which is Shakespeare's take on "Housewives of Beverly Hills."

We have also bought tickets to a couple of events at the Hollywood Bowl this month. The first is a performance by the LA Symphony. dorected by Dutamel and with Itzhak Perlman on the violin. The, later in the month we are going to a performance of Carmina Burana.

The Hollywood bowl is a wonderful venue for big performances. It's way too big for a lot of things but it is very nice to have your picnic dinner and wine before the performance starts.

LA has so much going on that we could spend a fortune on everything that is worth seeing.

We have been having a heat wave but here on the edge of the ocean we have cooling breezes most of the day.

Shawn has actively started looking for a job and has a lot of leads on really interesting opportunities. A couple of the jobs he has looked at are in Santa Monica which is so close that his commute would consist of a 25 minute bike ride along the beach.

Im adding a satellite view of Marina del Rey that I snagged from google earth. At the bottom are some of the runways at LAX. Any of our international friends with layovers at LAX can easily come visit us. Give us enough warning and we will pick you up. Visiting some place like Venice Beach would be a lot more fun that sitting in the airport.

The blue dot in the marina is our slip.

We are tied up in MDR

23 July 2018 | Marina del Rey
John
After a bumpy ride around Point Conception last night we made it to marina del Rey around 5 PM this afternoon.

It was a motor boat trip the whole way.

After a couple of tries we got docked with the help of our friend Cecile who was sitting on her boat waiting for us and then did her Vanna White imitation to show us to our slip.

Tomorrow we will be occupied with errands like getting a mailbox, getting driver's licenses, picking up a rental car, etc.

At the fuel dock in Oakland Shawn's shorts got caught on the lifeline and it ripped the pocket off. His cell phone was in the pocket and it had a pocket on the back that contained his driver's license and credit cards. So replacing all that stuff will be among the errands we have to deal with.

Our friend Cecile, who has her sailboat next to our old slip in Seattle, is coming by in a few minutes so we can go get some supper. I ate the last of our KFC this morning (aka the Breakfast of Champions)
Vessel Name: Active Transport
Vessel Make/Model: Tayana 37 PH
Hailing Port: Seattle, Washington
Crew: John and Shawn
About:
John and Shawn left San Francisco in September of 2008 to sail around the world. They completed their circumnavigation when the came out of the Panama Canal in late October 2013. From there they sailed to Mexico, out to Hawaii and up to Kodiak, Alaska. [...]
Extra:
This blog is intended for friends and family who may or may not be sailors. It is not intended to provide technical details of any of the boat's systems. Its purpose is to keep friends up-to-date on our progress and, whereabouts Following the completion of our circumnavigation our blog entries [...]
Active Transport's Photos - Our Second Time Through the Canal
Photos 1 to 31 of 31 | Cruising Active Transport (Main)
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For the North to South transit a yacht gets two advisers because the transit takes place on two separate days. This is Ricardo who was the senior adviser on our transit. Behind him Narciso who was on his last training transit before he was a qualified adviser. Ricardo did a very good job of telling everyone what to expect. You can see the skipper, Andrew, at one of the two helms on the Benateau Oceanus 40 that we went through the canal on
Here we are approaching the first of the three Gatun locks. There is a long pier at the approach to the lock. We are following the ship in the photo into the west chamber (we are headed south). Take a moment to admire the excellent job I did on the back of Shawn
You can see the big arrow on the end of the pier that leads into the lock. These arrows are still used but are a bit of a relic from the days before radios when they were used to tell the approaching vessels which side of the lock they were going to enter and the approximate time until the lock would be ready for them. At night these arrows are framed in two colors of fluorescent lights
when we were entering the west chamber of the first lock there was ship coming down in the east chamber. In this photo and the next one you can see the "muels" that are used to assist the big ships through the locks. The ships themselves must still provide about 80% of the energy needed to propel them through the locks.
Here is another view of the ship what was in the other chamber as we entered the first of the Gatun locks.
Our lock mate was a refrigerated cargo ship, named Elizabeth, registered in Monrovia. Here you can see the ship steaming along the pier that leads to the lock. You could actually see the ship roll a bit when the big propeller bit into the water and started pushing the ship forward.
Here is Elizabeth entering the first lock. Notice the dark sides of the lock that show the level the water will rise to once the gates are closed and the water is allowed to rush in. You can see the track for the "mules" to run on. There is a rack between the rails. The mules have a gear that engages the rack to allow them to climb the steep ramps between the various levels of the locks. When the mules are headed down one of these slopes they remind me of an amusement park ride.
Elizabeth is pulling well forward to leave the back part of the lock for us. You can see the gates nestled in cutouts in the sides of the chamber.
As we approached the lock four line handlers on shore approached us and, under the direction of our adviser, they would throw a monkey fist, with a light hemp line attached, over the deck of the boat so that we could attach the hawsers that the line handler would them pull ashore and drop on one of the big bollards on the edge of the lock chamber.
Here is a closer view of the gate for one side of the lock and the wall of the lock showing the water level that result when the chamber is flooded.
The gates are starting to close behind us after we have our lines secured to the sides of the chamber. You can see one of our blue colored lines leading away from the stern of the yacht and up to the bollard on the edge of the chamber. Narciso was buys with his iphone. He hid under the dingy that was stored on deck so he would not get hit with a monkey fist.
The lock is full and the gates at the south end have been opened so that Elizabeth can start moving into the next lock. soon our line handlers will drop our hawsers into the water and we will retrieve them so they dont foul the prop on the yacht. The line handlers on shore walk the light retrieving lines from lock to lock. The hawsers are too heavy for them to carry especially since each of the Gatun locks is higher than the previous one when boats are headed south.
Elizabeth pulls away so we can start moving. Her prop wash is pretty intense when she starts up so our adviser had us continue to hold the yacht steady between our hawsers until Elizabeth was well ahead of us.
Here is Elizabeth pulled well forward in the next lock.
If we look behind the yacht we can see the Caribbean sea below us.
Notice the year on the Gatun lock control building. Its hard to imagine that this engineering marvel is still working as intended 100 years after it was finished.
The canal authority operates the canal for north bound traffic during the morning and starts the south bound vessels in the afternoon. Because small sailing boats can
The pilot boat draws closer to pick up Ricardo. When the advisers board the boat the pilot boat must pull alongside the yacht but when they have the option of using the mooring as a boarding platform they do it that way instead.
Our advisers making their exit.
The pilot boat was over an hour late bringing our next adviser out the following morning.
The next morning the pilot boat was later than expected with our new adviser, Alejandro. The guy on the bow must have been the greeter as he just stood there and said "buenas dias". He wanted a response in Spanish. He got the appropriate response but with American and Aussie accents.
Alejandro used the mooring buoy to board and then we started the long motor trip across the lake. It takes about 5 hours to get from the mooring position (very close to the Gatun locks) to the Pedro Miguel locks where we started our descent into the Pacific. We had a comfy night 85 feet above sea level.
The canal authority had widened the Galliard cut since we were last here. The last time we went through we had to slow down so we did not create a wake and rock the dynamite barge.
The young woman in the forward part of this picture is Jo. She just completed her Captain
The Pedro Miguel lock only has one chamber on each side. After clearing Pedro Miguel we motored a couple of miles to the Miraflores locks (2 chambers where we completed our descent into the Pacific ocean. I failed to get a photo of the gate on the last lock which is much taller than the others. The tidal range on the Pacific side can be up to 16 feet which means the amount of the last drop can change a lot. The guy in the board shorts is Alejandro, our adviser. He asked if it was OK if he got rid of his jeans since it was really hot. In Panama you are supposed to wear long pants when going to government offices which seems really silly in such a hot place. I have the feeling that tradition may go by the wayside as Alejandro
We got really lucky all our down side locks and got to go through alone. The ship we were supposed to lock down with was late. The lake is full this time of year (rainy season) so they don
This shot shows a heaving line headed for the boat. This guy was good and threw the monkey fist completely over the boat. A monkey fist, for those of you who might not know is a baseball sized piece of lead covered with woven line. It is used when heaving lines like they do at the canal. You don
The shore side line handlers are walking the light heaving lings along the locks
The lock is full so this is a shot taken when we were entering the lock on the Pacific side. Going down is a lot easier for the line handlers on the boat because you just have to slowly let the line out as the boat goes down. The water is a lot let turbulent when its running out of the lock than when its flooding in.
One of the last legs in the canal takes us under a bridge. They are building another tall bridge close to the northern end of the canal to replace the single lane bridge that must be withdrawn every time a ship moves in or out of the locks.
this is called a caisson. It is used to substitute for the lock gates when the gates must be removed for repair. since there are two chambers at every lock they can close down one side if they have to for maintenance but suffer a reduction in throughput that must hit the bottom line of the canal authority.
 
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On the hook in Tomales Bay

Who: John and Shawn
Port: Seattle, Washington