San Diego, CA

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An Early Morning Sail

Rouser en route to San Diego

On our way over to San Diego from Catalina Island, we traveled with our friends Michael and Sara on Pelican. Pelican is an Alberg 35 (right). It is similar in speed to our boat for many wind speeds which makes them perfect to sail with.

Pelican

However, on the trip to San Diego, we thought that maybe they had missed the boat. Since it is a pretty long trip over to San Diego, we gave ourselves some extra time by planning to leave at 3 AM. We said we would wake up and drop the mooring buoy at that time and reconvene out of the harbor on the VHF. Well, it turned out that we wanted to play with our regulator a little bit before we took off for San Diego, so we decided to drop the mooring at 2:30 AM and give ourselves time to get that settled down before heading on. We woke up, Angela made

Rouser

coffee and we had a leisurely go of it.

At 3 AM, we were hanging out looking for signs of Pelican. By 3:15, we were pretty sure they overslept, but decided that since they are usually pretty punctual they would arrive at any time and so decided to start off with only our headsail up. We entered a point into the GPS and low and behold, our ETA was 2:45 AM!!! At first we couldn't figure out how that could be, since it was ALREADY about 3:30... and that's when it hit us: daylight savings time! Ugh. Half an hour later, right on the dot, Pelican pulled out of Avalon Harbor ready to go. We had gotten up at 1:30 AM for a 3 AM departure!

The funny thing is, one of us (we won't name any names) asked the other the night before if all the clocks were changed. And HE said that they all were... except for the alarm clock! Too funny!!!  :)

Reprovisioning Nightmares & a NEW Sail!

When we arrived in San Diego, we were pretty much out of everything. Catalina Island is a very expensive place to buy produce, or anything else for that mater, so we opted to wait for San Diego. San Diego is a fine place to buy food but all stores are quite out of the way when you're on foot. We ended up having a super time exploring and restocking foods despite the distance issue. It turned out that Laurie (Our DC Mom - Eric's) and Alan decided to visit us for a few days while we were here. Before they

Our new toy!!!

arrived, we had the use of their rental car as they were only going to be around for 4 days out of a week's rental.

This turned out to be very fortuitous. We went with Pelican to Costco, Trader Joe's, the local grocery store and even Play It Again Sports to replace Eric's busted snorkel and get Sara, the new snorkel-fanatic, a lightweight wetsuit. While the water is warmer down here than up in Washington, it is still very chilly. We have heard that it will remain this way until we get at least as far south as Cabo San Lucas. We ALSO had enough time after all the restocking to head north to Minnie's, a marine warehouse, and to go to Knott's Berry Farm amusement park while up there. We all decided that some of the rides were much scarier than anything the ocean could bring on - knock on wood - but definitely an adrenaline junkie's ideal set-up. There was one ride that accelerated from 0 to 89 MPH in 2 seconds, covered over a mile of track and was over in 35 seconds!

After several trips around California in light winds, we made room in our boat for a new sail. It is a beautiful lightweight asymmetrical spinnaker (right). It is made out of .9 ounce AirX, which is half the weight but as strong as the typical 1.5 ounce sails. It is so beautiful and we love every second we get to use it! The first time we had it up, we never did LESS than 7 knots! It was awesome!

A Wild Time with Mom

To wrap up our time in San Diego perfectly, Eric's mom, Laurie, and her fiancé Alan came to visit us. While they were in town, we all stayed at their friend's house north of San Diego. San Diego anchorages are quite protected and we never thought twice of leaving our boat there for the week. Pelican was anchored nearby and the Coast Guard station was 300 yards away, so we were confident all was well. We had a wonderful time exploring the region, including a visit to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography Aquarium and to the San Diego Wildlife Park. We always love time with family! We are now looking forward to Puerto Vallarta where we are going to be visited both by Eric's sister Emily and by Angela's parents, Jim and Val! Yippee!!!

< Catalina Island : San Diego : Baja Mexico >