Settling In

T-minus 6 days


Friday, not much actually got done. First things first. Search for coffee. There is tea onboard, but that left me still yearning. Wandered over to the harbor masters office, which as a little store. Coffee, but not particularly good.

Then we went over to get some jerry cans (5 gallon plastic containers for carrying liquids) from a friend of Adrien's. He stored them at her house a year or so ago, and it was time to get them back. We want these yellow containers for carrying extra diesel fuel on the passage. This is important as the weather patterns are not that typical and we might need to motor more than we would prefer. Diesel is also important because it runs the generator, which our only source of electricity for charging batteries, and we need that electric power to run all sorts of things such as the water maker, autopilot, navigation instruments, and lights.

Unfortunately, Adrien thought there were going to be 8 cans, his friend thought that there were 6, and in the end all we could find was 4, so we will probably be off to find some more before we leave.

Afterwards we went in search of some lunch/breakfast and found this very local roadside place that made us some excellent eggs, bacon, sausage, and rice. It tasted OK, but the important part was the atmosphere of the place. In the hotel restaurant the night before I had the feeling that the entire scene could have easily been transplanted to San Diego and nobody would really have noticed the difference. But this place made me feel like I really was someplace different and that is important to me when traveling.

After lunch it was a Starbucks stop where I got some beans for the boat, and Adrien got his frou-frou coffee drink. Then back to the Marine.

The plan was to hoist Adrien up the mast so he could inspect the rigging before the trip. But once we arrived we both agreed that it was actually nap time, and the rigging could wait until a little later. But then later came, and it was kind of hot, and it seemed to make more sense to go for a swim, and then after that Adrien realized he wanted to retape the spreader tips and didn't have the right tape, and as you can imagine, nobody ended up going up the mast this day.

After the regularly scheduled ham radio stuff (again more on that later), it was off to Ace Hardware for the tape, and to K-Mart for some towels (there didn't seem to be enough onboard for beach and shower use), and some new flipflops (called slippas here), a pretty good Chinese restaurant with lots of locals (just say no to Panda Express!), and finally to Safeway for a few groceries for breakfasts and lunches for a few days. The big provisioning trip to Costco will wait a few days.

That's about it. We got back to the boat, a bit of reading, email, web browsing, etc, and eventual called it a day.

Of course mixed in with all of this was meeting some of the neighbors here in the marina, Cheryl who has been looking after L'eau Life will here owners were away, Ted, Steve, and a few others. Lots of discussion about the boat "Irish Lady" which left a few days ago with Barbara and Vin on boat headed to California. This is where we get back to that radio schedule stuff. Seem that lots of offshore sailors are ham operators, and use the ham radio to keep in contact with other sailors, friends and family. There are regularly schedule "nets" where a bunch of boat (maritime mobil) and land based ham operators meet up at a predetermined time and frequency. Everyone checks in with info about where they are and how things are going. If there are any problems people can report them, people report the weather where they are, and just general exchange of news and info. No it turns out that they folks on "Irish Lady" haven't been checking in since they left the marina. There are conflicting stories about how they might have been given the wrong info about the time and frequencies, and about how motivated they might actually be to check in with the group or not (its all totally voluntary). But their lack of contact is definitely the talk of the docks around here, and Adrien has been trying various versions of the wrong time and frequency that they might be using to contact them. So far, no luck.

That's all for today. Saturday we plan to actually go up the mast, and hopefully talk the boat out of the slip and sail a bit. There is a brand new roller furling jib sitting in its bag on the foredeck which we haven't been able to install because the wind in the marine has been too strong and from the wrong direction. It will be good to go out for a little sail and test things out, find out what is working and not, and still have time for getting what we need from the boar supply stores.

We will see.