Southern California is known the world over for its incredibly dull weather. Sun, sun and more sun. Clouds ? If I were born here, chances are I would’nt really know what they were ! But for mariners things can get interesting without much of a hint. At least, the talking heads on the television hardly ever get it right. While they get excited about 3-5 degree fluctuations, (it will be colder tomorrow than it was today by 3 degrees LOL) They hardly ever get what is going on, or coming soon, very right.

It is very easy to get lulled into a certain sense of….boredom…with the weather around here. Or not !

On Friday a pitiful small craft warning was issued for a front that passed just to our North. My favorite saying is, “It wont be the front that gets you, but the tail surely will.” Fronts come through and some times you can hardly tell they occurred. Then the tail of the pressure cycle reaches us and BAM, we get hit hard. Like Friday, when it blew in the 30’s all day (small craft warning ?) with gusts in the high 40 knot range. To me that should have created a gale warning and surely not as many boaters would have been caught unaware. Saturday was post storm day which was followed by a “Santa Ana” condition that began at about 4am this morning. The Santa Ana occurs when the low pressure is replaced by a high that races into place in the desert. This phenomenon causes a lot of friction ! So here we are on Sunday with winds in the 20 knot range blowing offshore, gusting into the high 30’s and yet all we have is a pitiful small craft warning again.

I only cut the NOAA a little slack when I look at these two live graphs. On the left is Oxnard and on the right is Ventura. The two harbors are separated by about 7 miles of coastline…
Peak gust at Ventura during this event was about 15knots. Peak gust in Oxnard was 40knots.

We happened to have a member plan their ASA 104 which consists of a multi day trip out to Santa Cruz island. Captain Dan shows them all the great anchorages and they work on their navigation skills and living aboard in self sufficiency. We knew we might have some wind on Friday. But hey, NOAA says just a small craft warning. So they went ! They were lucky to make an escape back to the mainland on early Friday and got in some heavy weather practice with 15 foot seas and gusts in the 40’s to boot. They probably felt sheepish on Saturday when everything seemed fine. But a Santa Ana did not get predicted by the weather folks until late Saturday night. What makes a Santa Ana tricky is that it makes safe anchorages completely unsafe in a moments’ time.

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