Here we are in Southern California enjoying everything between Ensenada and the Channel Islands. The end of summer is coming up and I’m thinking about the California Delta — our favorite place in the late summer/early fall times. This year we’ll be staying south but I’ll share a photo of Mahdee last fall in the Delta.
So time flies and a decade has passed since our last visit with Mahdee to SoCal and San Diego Bay in particular. We arrived in SoCal last fall and wandered familiar anchorages from peaceful Santa Cruz Island to Newport Beach Harbor’s postage stamp anchorage at the end of Lido Island and then to San Diego’s “cruisers anchorage” for a bit before Mahdee’s trip to Ensenada and our haulout at Baja Naval. We stopped in at the USCG customs dock aka “Police Dock” or Public Dock for inspection and obtaining a permit to the cruisers anchorage. While there we noticed there were very few boats in the slips adjacent the inspection area and the lively boating scene was quiet. Strange.
We returned to that dock a few times over the winter as it is one of the more convenient places for boaters to use the pumpout, get water, or drop off recycling trash items. It’s conveniently on the way from the La Playa anchorage back to the cruisers anchorage. We note that we haven’t found other public trash dumpsters that include recycling. Each time we’ve visited that dock we again notice that the nearby slips are strangely void of both boats and boaters.
Last month it really clicked — for logistics reasons we needed to at a dock rather than anchor or mooring for a day or two and none of the local yacht clubs that we have reciprocals with had guest dock space for us on a busy weekend. So we stayed in a slip at what they now call the “guest dock” rather than the public dock. The prices have increased from a flat rate that used to be as little as $10 – $20 for small boats and $20 or $30 for the bigger ones like Mahdee and amenities included water, power, clean restrooms and hot showers. Now there is a per-foot rate of $1.27/ft/day, amenities still include water and power but no showers and what was once clean is now a filthy restroom that seems to be frequented by the homeless community (bring your own TP).
No wonder boaters no longer use the police dock. What was once a part of the vibrant boating community is now just an overpriced place for boaters without connections or resources to berth elsewhere. The check in and check out times used to be in the morning — checkout was by 10 am as I recall but there was a lot of flexibility for boaters to get into the open slips as early as possible in the mornings. This was partially errand-running driving and partially the desire to get into the slips during the early morning calms rather than the mid-day cross winds. Strangely, the checkin and checkout times of the slips are now 1pm and 11am respectively. As if parking a boat is similar to staying in a hotel? Checking in at 1pm makes absolutely NO sense to a boater whose primary reason for visiting a transient slip is to run errands or logistics-related activities that often mean the boat remaining at the dock from early in the morning until the sun sets. The check in times mean a boater will pay for two days rather than one in order to get a full day at the dock. I’d often thought of the Port of San Diego and associated Harbor Police as being, well, out of touch with reality but this is just further proof of it. No clue.
In the past we’d really enjoyed meeting a variety of cruisers and local boaters there at the public dock and I’m saddened by the present condition of the facility as well as the breakup of the boating community that had congregated around these temporary slips. There are plenty of San Diego boaters engaging in the San Diego Samba but the welcome resource of the public dock is no longer the place it once was.
Other sailors know that a boat’s tender is truly the family car. It carries loads of fuel, water, groceries, people, takes us out fishing, crabbing, and just generally is super important for adventures aboard Mahdee. Our tender, a cute little inflatable dinghy, a Tinker Star Traveller, was made by Henshaw in the UK in 1996 and we purchased it used on Craigslist in 2006. We immediately named the little boat “Tinker” of course. We had it aboard Stargazer, our Rawson 30, for a couple years while we rebuilt Mahdee and then with the re-launch of Mahdee in April 2009, it became our number one way to go places when traveling. It weighs about 65 lbs, folds up into a reasonably sized stowable satchel, and has a separate bag for the mast, boom, and sails. Though an inflatable, it is narrow and intended for sailing or rowing rather than motoring. We did not even have a motor for the dinghy until 2015! It is 12 ft long, has about a 1000lb weight capacity, but only has the stowage of about a 9 ft dinghy. The front is low and narrow and it is intended to be this way so you can enter the boat over the bow from the water while swimming or diving. It makes for a bit of a wet ride sometimes. We stash groceries and other things up under the front spray hood and that makes the hood sit a little higher but it’s not much protection if there’s a lot of chop while motoring across a roadstead anchorage.
In terms of Tinker’s maintenance, I’ve repainted the (outside) bottom of the plywood floorboards three times over the years and reglued some of the bottom reinforcing patches that keep the plywood to Hypalon seams from leaking. When they leak, I inspect and re-glue. David built a new heavier-duty rowing bench seat/centerboard trunk for it back in 2010 and we’ve added dinghy wheels for bringing it up onto a rocky beach. I stained and urethane sealed the transom a couple years ago as well. The largest repair I made was in 2015 following what I’ll call a “bad-parenting incident” when a clueless family was letting their child use our dingy as a trampoline at the beach we’d pulled into, the child’s play put a major hole in the dingy. After the emergency repair to just row back to Mahdee, I did a couple different traditional Hypalon fabric repairs that did not last. An inside patch is probably what is needed. In frustration, I finally, inappropriately, repaired the Tinker with a huge patch of West Marine epoxy. Don’t ask what I was thinking. I was not thinking. However, the patch has held up. So far.
Last summer we noted a couple of the floor seams are leaking quite a bit and more recently, when I got the dingy out on deck to do my plywood-to-Hypalon regluing, I pumped it up and noticed it’s losing air very slowly from the port main air chamber. That has put me into action. I ordered a new valve stem, seat, and dust cap seal as well as a valve wrench necessary for taking apart the B7 style valve. I also purchased some adhesives and NRS Pennel Orca materials to make repair patches, Today, with my parts in hand, I re-watched the excellent NRS video on replacing the valve seals.
You can see that video here
It was simple to do the replacement following their steps though someone had already repaired or reinstalled this valve using a drying silicone rather than the forever-in-gel-state marine silicone that should be used. It was very difficult to get the valve unscrewed even with the correct valve tool because of the “glue” together way the previous repair had been made. Someone had used a silcone sealant that dried into the threads so it was difficult to get the two parts of the valve apart. All’s well that ends well and it seems to be holding air. Fingers crossed that I can still say that tomorrow. If it doesn’t hold air, I’ll use some non-drying silicone between the hypalon and the valve body.
Next projects to spiff up Tinker? Apply a new white rubstrip along the bottom of each tube, remove or cover over the old California registration since the Tinker is now registered in a different state, and get back to my original project of sealing up seams that glue the plywood floor to the Hypalon. We’ll have dry feet. And maybe I’ll re-patch the area where the West Marine hard expoxy is still doing service.
