Sailing from San Diego to Australia — How Hard Can It Be? (Part 1)

When Natassja Shayer and Severin Gatzen-O’Keefe wanted to buy a cruising boat, they looked in the place where “old boats grow like barnacles and monthly slip fees are equivalent to the cost of a small car.” They bought Lochinvar, a Westsail 32, in California. One small problem … they wanted the boat to be in Australia.

Buy a boat and sail it home — how hard can it be?

This is the question we asked ourselves when we first came up with the idea. Boat prices back home in Australia follow a very simple rule: If you can throw the boat, you can afford the boat. Unfortunately for us, this puts most cruising yachts a bit outside our budget. Thus the following plan was hatched: 1) Fly somewhere with cheap boats. 2) Buy one. 3) Fix it up. 4) Sail it home.

This led us to California, the land where old boats grow like barnacles and monthly slip fees are equivalent to the cost of a small car. This made the perfect mix for us to afford our dream boat, the Westsail 32. This full-keel, heavy-displacement portable bomb shelter would safely see us across the Pacific, and hopefully ease our parents’ worries.

After two months of hard work, and help from the broker, the previous owner, a friend of my parents who lives in San Diego, and various other salty seadogs, Lochinvar was ready! Or so we thought.

On the sail from San Diego to Ensenada, we quickly realized that our 1989 stainless steel windvane was so crevice-corroded it might as well have been made of plaster. Epoxy seemed to fix the problem, at least until we tried to use it again.

With some hand-steering and a malfunctioning autopilot, we reached Cedros. This was one of our favorite stops so far, with magnificent mountains and lovely locals. The next leg took us to Magdalena Bay, where we discovered our forward bulkhead was completely rotten. A Texan sailor and mechanic by the name of “Starboard Mike” (to distinguish him from “Port Mike,” who was in the same anchorage — both were named according to the color of their boats) rafted up to us and spent two weeks helping us rebuild our forward bulkhead and samson posts.

One would be hard-pressed to find more abundant sea life than in Magdalena Bay. The whales would swim so close you could feel the spray from their blowholes on your face (turns out they have not yet been introduced to breath freshener).

And so we set off once again, with a shiny new bulkhead and a jury-rigged windvane, which worked for nearly two hours before breaking again — a new record! Hand-steering, on to Puerto Vallarta!

In PV, we ended up tied to an abandoned marina known as “The Boneyard,” where all the docks had sunk long ago, and only the concrete pilings remained. Sunken boats loomed from the depths all around us — and underneath us, as we discovered when the tide dropped and Lochinvar ended up sitting on another boat. We had to move when the tide came in again.

Continue reading, then look for Part 2 in Latitude 38‘s August issue, out on 8/1.