Except for our glorious climate that allows comfortable sailing the year round, the California coast is not a good place to sail. It is nearly devoid of bays or estuaries affording any protection. It is steep and without foreshore. Where there is a beach, the surf will cost you your boat. About the only place for Southern Californians to go is the Channel Islands. Yes, we have them too, but they don’t lie in a channel: they form one. The closest island to Los Angeles is Santa Catalina, lying about 20 miles to the south.

Catalina is 18.5 miles long, and varies from half a mile to 7 miles wide. The tourist town of Avalon is at its east end, but the rest is pretty much untouched. Geologically part of the mainland, it looks like the Hollywood Hills before the discovery of The Movie Star. Rocky, covered with grasses and scrub oak, some bison (breeding leftovers from a western film), and wild goats, it, too, is steep: in most places around its perimeter you’d damage your stem-head fitting before you went aground! There are some coves with beaches, though, and after some desultory research and a couple of months of weekend afternoon sailing in my Drascombe Lugger Crema Inglesa, I decided that Parson’s Landing was the best place to put ashore and camp.

On Friday, 17 October, Michael and Susan Hernandez and I dragged the boat through the pre-dawn dark, the hour down the freeway to San Pedro (Los Angeles Harbour). By the time we launched it was light, and we spent quite a while wondering how to get all our props of civilization lashed inboard. There was an ice chest full of goodies and a smaller one for the trip over, a folding table and chairs, a vast tent with full standing headroom, and wads of bedding like a polar expedition. If it floated, it would be luxurious.

At 0930 we finally cleared L.A. Harbour Light, an unprepossessing piece of architecture to mark the entrance to the largest man-made harbour in the world, and the busiest on the West Coast. There was no wind — never is till noon or 1300 — so we fired up the Seagull and started across the San Pedro Channel toward Catalina, still out of sight at this point in our journey. Visually, the effect is that of sailing to Tahiti. The mainland side of the channel carries a lot of commercial traffic; if you don’t keep an eye out you can be overwhelmed by a churning, 20 knot load of crude oil or Japanese cars. The wind came up, gently at first, at 1400. We could see the island now, its highest point 1200 feet. Our pocket compass had been close enough.

It was bathing suit weather, with air about 28°C and water about 19 or 20, but it became apparent we weren’t going to be able to point high enough to make Parson’s, though the wind had been increasing all afternoon. Soon it was blowing an honest 18 knots. We were still 5 or 6 miles off and a fair amount of spray was coming over the weather bow. Instead of tacking, we opted for Emerald Cove, getting no lee till nearly aground on a fine sand beach with no surf. The passage had taken 7 hours. We learned later that Emerald is better than Parson’s — luck!

We found a large flat area for the campsite, and though there were a dozen or so boats moored offshore, we were the only people on the beach. A peccary or other small, wild pig got into our garbage Saturday night, but otherwise it was a flawless weekend. We could see the lights on the mainland at night and during the day found we could see bottom in 5 fathoms or more. We stayed till Sunday morning and, having shown the flag (DCA burgee) at Catalina, had a warm, uneventful reach back to smog and ‘life in the fast lane’.