Ah…we’ve arrived. I hear Nicolas Cage keeps his boat on a mooring just a little ways down the mooring fields. Newport Beach Harbor. All three of us, Mahdee included, have spent way too much time in San Diego; that place is like an evil vortex sucking us back, but we’ve finally broken free! On the sail up to Newport Beach Harbor, I promised Mahdee that she didn’t have to return to that Bay–well, except for perhaps a “short” visit when we come back down the West Coast and we’d expect to pass through San Diego.
Mahdee, the cruising boat that she is, must have been so disheartened to have been “stuck” in San Diego for going on 30 years. Starting out young and trim in Massachusetts and spending her early years in Maine and up and down the east coast, she served her country during WWII like many other yachts doing shore patrols and then she later visited the tropical Caribbean, and in her mid-life she migrated to the west coast of North America, cavorting up and down from the Canadian border to Costa Rica–and having done two Transpac races to Hawaii–she had a fabulous cruising life.
But then, for 30 years, she forlornly sat with little sails to-and-fro all around San Diego and, poor dear, sat for about a decade in her slip on Coronado just waiting for the chance to sail. After our purchase and her extensive rebuild, her anticipation must have been great when we finally brought her sails aboard last fall and slowly began the process of rigging her and sailing her. As I pulled out the various sails, receipts for their most recent repairs and cleaning fluttered to the floor–dated from the late 1990’s. I realized that this was more evidence that, with no engine, she hadn’t left her slip in more than a decade. Poor dear.
Still, we ventured out but kept returning to San Diego with little things to fix after each trip. Finally, we decided to leave San Diego for good. As we passed Point Loma around 3:30 in the early morning, I swear I could hear her sigh–good bye San Diego, hello World.
It was a good trip, motor sailing up the coast. It ended with some adventures that I’ll talk about later. In the meanwhile, I’m just sharing with everyone that we did make the trip and we’re now “officially” gone from San Diego. We’ll spend up to two months here in Newport Beach Harbor with trips to the channel islands before our next leg up the coast.
