The latest Local Notice to Mariners for the 11th Coast Guard District contains some important navigational updates for San Diego sailors in particular.

• The Point Loma Light’s sound signal is currently inoperative.
• Chart 18772, ‘Approaches to San Diego Bay’, has a new edition out, “due to numerous Notice to Mariners changes.”

On the new chart, more information (including the downloadable raster version) should be available soon from NOAA’s nautical charts web site. As of the time of this posting, though (0854 PST, 8 January 2006), they’re still offering the previous edition (from 2003) for download.

I actually have really fond memories of working on that chart. I talked about one time in particular in a book I wrote most of, but never (yet) got published, called A Distant Sea. At some point I might post some of that book on this site, since it would be nice to let that material see the light of day.

The story regarding that chart involved the finish of the San Clemente Island race one year. That race started off Dana Point, left San Clemente Island to port, and finished in San Diego. This would have been in the mid-1970s, and I was racing on my dad’s Columbia 52 Victoria. The approach to San Diego was made in the morning, after racing all night from the southern tip of San Clemente with no navigational aids to speak of. (This was pre-GPS, and we didn’t have anything fancy like a radar or LORAN.) It was pretty hazy that morning, so the approaching shoreline wasn’t visible, and it was a tricky navigational problem to know just where to aim to hit the #3 buoy (the last turning mark before the finish off Point Loma). We were doing pretty well in the race, with lots of competitors close to us, so there was a lot of pressure to make the right call; coming in in the wrong place and having to make a big course correction at the last minute would surely have cost us positions.

I’ll leave it until later to post the whole story. But the (supremely satisfying, for me) result ended up involving some careful dead reckoning, a running fix on the Point Loma radio beacon, and (especially) my dad’s uncanny ability to accurately estimate the distance of a visible landmark.

There’s a nice write-up about Carl Eichenlaub in the latest issue of The Log: Carl Eichenlaub takes sailing to a new level.

I’ve never met Eichenlaub, though as a kid growing up racing in Southern California I competed against him a lot. His two tonner Cadenza, which was way ahead of its time in terms of having bold graphics spelling out the boat’s name over most of the hull, was frequently in the same part of the racecourse as my dad’s Columbia 52 Victoria, which tended to be depressing since we owed them time. But the boat was certainly fun to look at.

The Log’s Marisa O’Neill has written an interesting article about Geronimo, the world’s largest trimaran, which is in our local waters (Update: er, was in our local waters — she left on the 13th) in anticipation of an attempt on the Transpac-course record: Trimaran eyes Honolulu record.

The 110-foot maxi trimaran Geronimo – fresh from Tahiti – will briefly make San Diego her home before attempting a record-breaking run to Honolulu, planned for next week.

Geronimo sailed into San Diego Bay at about 8 a.m. November 6 after sailing 4,000 miles in 12 days from Tahiti. She will stay at Driscoll Boat Works on Shelter Island while she prepares to break the Transpac speed record of 5 days 9 hours 18 minutes and 26 seconds.

“We want to make her very light for this record,” French skipper Olivier de Kersauson said. “Then we’ll go to Hawaii, stop two days – no more – then come back.”

Upon her return, Geronimo will remain at Driscoll’s until January. Then it’s on to San Francisco, Yokohama and Hong Kong.

At first I didn’t have a good sense of the boat’s scale from that image. When I looked closer, though, and realized that the boat is twice the length of the largest boat I’ve ever sailed on, I said, “whoa.” That would be something else to sail on — or even to see passing by on the water. Look quickly, though; she isn’t going to be there for long. :-)

This story by Jack Innis of San Diego’s The Log caught my eye: Sinkhole swallows boat and vehicle.

A late-model trailerable boat sank in a Point Loma alley October 18 when a broken water main opened up an enormous sinkhole that swallowed the boat, a trailer and a tow vehicle.

Not really relevant to sailing, or even boating, I admit. But I thought the headline was kind of funny, in a “man bites dog” kind of way. (As long as it happened to someone else. If it was my boat, not so much on the funny part.)

Welcome to SoCalSail. As you can see, the site is now running a weblog on its home page. In addition, I’ve added some new features in the site’s Buyer’s Guide. I look forward to adding a lot more content and features in the days ahead; in the meantime, please feel free to poke around and offer your feedback.

You can submit comments in response to individual weblog postings (like this one), or you can send me email at jbc@socalsail.com.

Welcome aboard!