Planning a 5200 Mile Voyage
By Capt. Dave Abrams
Reprinted With Permission from Ocean Navigator
I’ve had a love of the sea for as long as I can remember. I did not have a boat growing up, but I had enough friends and extended family with boats that I spent time on the water every year as a kid, even if it was just a rowboat. I joined the Navy through the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship program and made my first ocean crossing from Pearl Harbor to San Diego as a midshipman. The ocean cast a spell on me. I spent almost 3 years after my commissioning on a guided missile destroyer, USS Kidd (DDG-993), cruising mostly up and down the east coast and Caribbean. An encounter with Hurricane Hugo off of Cape Hatteras in1989 taught me a lesson on the power of the ocean, and that weather forecasts are not always accurate, especially back then.
My second tour on a merchant tanker out of San Diego gave me the opportunity to cruise the Pacific coast from the Columbia River down to San Diego, and during that time I bought my first boat, a 20’ Pacific Seacraft Flicka, dreaming of cruising off on my own. Out of the Navy and three boats later, I had only done very localized cruising, and never more than a week at a time.
About to turn 50, I decided that I needed to either do some serious cruising, or just shut that dream down for good. So I “retired” (briefly), bought a 58’ Cape Horn steel trawler, and went cruising. I loved it. The first big trip lasted about two months up in the Pacific Northwest, followed by a cruise down the coast to Mexico, and then successive cruises from San Diego to the Sea of Cortez and mainland Mexico leading the CUBAR rally.
Part of CUBAR is teaching fellow cruisers how to prepare for a 2 – 3 week trip, with 200+ mile legs between stops, and very limited support services for 750 miles down the Baja coast. I’ve cruised from Maine to the Bahamas and Alaska to Mexico. So now deciding to move my new boat from Virginia to San Diego, a 5200 mile journey through the Panama Canal, I am ready for my longest passage to date.
The Vessel
My new (to me) vessel is a 1970 former Norwegian Society for Search & Rescue (NSSR) vessel that was converted to a yacht. M/V Paul Johansen, or PJ for short, is a 75’, 140 ton trawler style yacht, with 10mm Norwegian steel hull plating. She was built ice rated and designed for operations in the North Sea. The yacht refit added modern accommodations, electronics, and stabilizers. The twin Detroit 8V71 engines and Tenfjord rotary steering gear are about the only original pieces of equipment left on board. I’ve cruised PJ through 40 knot sustained winds and 8 – 10’ short seas (off of Cape Hatteras again, with an incorrect weather forecast) without any issue. PJ can take much more than the crew and I can handle, as is the case with most well founded vessels.
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