The passage from Port San Luis to Santa Barbara was over 100 miles, so we up-anchored at 8pm to time our arrival for mid-afternoon.  The timing also worked out so we’d be rounding Point Conception at daybreak.  After we got away from the harbor, we put out the sails and averaged over 6 knots with a comfortable 15 knot wind from astern.   That worked well until we began rounding Point Arguello, about 10 miles north of Point Conception.  I was about an hour into my watch which began at 3am and the wind picked up to 25 knots.  We were sailing with a partially furled genoa and full mizzen sails.  Gusts to 30 knots created a lot of weather helm on a broad reach and Apropos was screaming at 8 knots.  Karen and I take turns sleeping in the port quarter berth and under those conditions it gets noisy with the wind and boat speed.  Karen eventually came up and we furled the headsail in to about 50% and then tied a reef in the mizzen.  Furling the genoa on a port tack under these conditions is difficult since the starboard winch is holding the sheet, so we have to run the furling line around a cleat to the stays’l winch to pull in the genoa.  This made the boat handle much better–just in time for the wind to die down as we rounded Point Conception.  Our sailing guide (Charlies Charts) call Point Conception the “Cape Horn of the west coast” because of the wind and waves, but this night it was peaceful and we fired up the engine as the wind dropped  below 10  knots.  We reached Santa Barbara at 3pm, refueled, then tied up to a dock in Santa Barbara marina.  A Latitude 38 Cruising rally called the Ta-Ta was gathered in the marina and held a pre-daparture Bob Marley themed party at the Santa Barbara Yacht Club, where we had dinner (we finally got some mileage from  our Sloop Tavern Yacht Club reciprocity!).  We hit the showers, walked around the marina, then caught up on some much needed sleep.

A nice thing about rounding Point Conception is that it marks the northern boundary of Southern California weather!  The water and air temperature increase by about 10 degrees and we can finally put away some of the 3-layers we’ve been wearing while sailing offshore.