We’re now in San Diego. We vacated our last Catalina anchorage at midnight (Thursday, Oct 7th) and just started our trip down to San Diego a little bit early because of the big swell that was hitting our anchorage late that night. We were at the Isthmus Cove and I must admit we were cursing at all those stupid moorings, the rules that say one cannot anchor within 300 feet of the durn moorings, and the few anchored boats already there that made it so we had to anchor in 90 feet of water in order to anchor at all. Well, anyway, we spent a lovely night Wednesday and day Thursday at the Isthmus. There was no wind to speak of and no swell…and just as we went to bed that Thursday night a growing NE swell started working into the anchorage. Two things–big NE swells usually mean big NE winds will follow and that place isn’t exactly the best place to be in NE winds, second–the swell wasn’t long period but rather short. There was no wind when they started. The boat was circling so that we’d be bow into the swell, then side-on and then stern-to. First gentle movement, then bang-bang-bang actually quite violent. Finally, we said “let’s go, it’s a long trip to San Diego, we might as well start now since we won’t be getting any real sleep tonight.”

In the year-and-a-half we’ve been living aboard the boat and 9/10ths of that time at anchor, we’ve only left an anchorage one other time for reasons of weather, swell, etc that would make a dangerous situation if we’d stayed put.

So, there I was at midnight, standing jammed against the anchor locker in the forecastle flaking 300 ft of chain (David had a God-awful 400 feet out…) into the anchor locker while the boat rolled all over the place, thinking about the flopper stoppers that we’d been contemplating installing. Finally after being bashed and banged around enough I said to myself “flopper stoppers aren’t a good idea, we couldn’t retrieve them in this crazy rolling anyway!” and “I wonder if David’s still on deck or if he’s been pitched overboard?” It really was an amazing swell and a violent roll to boot.

All’s well that ends well–we motored a few miles out away from Catalina, found some wind, and enjoyed a very long day of sailing to San Diego, getting in to the anchorage behind Shelter Island around 7:30 pm. Calm…flat…I now remember why I liked this place.

After spending the weekend at La Playa anchorage, we sailed down under foresail and staysail alone (slow sailing with that duo and winds only about 10 knots)…well…I should say we “mosey-ed” along down to Fiddlers Cove to park Mahdee on a mooring for a few days while we went up to San Francisco to retrieve Buttercup, our car. The week before I’d called the management of the marina alerting them to our arrival and asking them to have someone dive on the mooring to inspect the lines since we’ve been gone from San Diego since late last February–8 months ago. We rent the mooring at Fiddlers Cove just for reasons such as this–a safe place to leave Mahdee while we’re someplace she can’t be with us. When we arrived at the mooring, we expected to get our hands cut up with shells on the mooring lines since they can build up after just a couple months. Low and behold, the wonderful people at the marina had not only dived and inspected the lines on the mooring, they’d cleaned every single line. As a well-gloved David hauled up the pickup pin, I couldn’t believe it. Clean as could be. A bit of mud, but no shells. That was going to save us lots of time of line cleaning and save me hours of fixing Mahdee’s varnish that would have been scratched up by the shells as we ran the lines over the covering boards to the fairleads. Even though I wrap the lines in leather across the covering boards once we’re properly set on the mooring, the first haul-up of the lines always scrapes through the varnish because of all the shells. This time, no problem. Nice, nice, nice.

On Tuesday, David picked up a Hertz rental car at the Hotel Del Coronado just down the way from Fiddlers Cove and we drove up to San Francisco to pick up Buttercup. We arrived mid-evening but we couldn’t return the rental to the drop-off location in South San Francisco until 8 am when they opened so we slept in the car at the marina parking lot and then dropped off the rental car when the Hertz office opened and we were back on the road with Buttercup heading South during rush-hour traffic through South San Francisco. When ever we do a driving trip, we stop at a grocery and pick up “something” for the road. The something always seems to be a combination of whatever is on sale and what one or both of us happen to be craving. So, this particular two day driving trip saw us overdosing on roast beef on gourmet bread, grapes, chocolate covered marshmallow cookies, pepperoni, sugar cookies, and Ruffles. Weird combination.

We got into San Diego early enough to stop by NAS North Island and watch a movie on our way to the boat. They were showing The Expendables which David loved but I found to be way too much noise, blood, and testosterone in one film. That night, after a nice, flat, no wind, no waves row out to the boat with lovely bioluminescence with each oar stroke, we both commented on how easy life was here in San Diego. Ah, no rushing river currents, no nasty swell or wind. Nothing. so easy. We left the mooring the next morning at 5:00 am to motor for 1.5 hours to the public dock where we hoped to pick up a slip for a few days and to provision the boat as well as pull things off the boat to put in the storage locker while we’re working on Mahdee’s interior. And, indeed, they had a slip for us. David did the bike/ferry/drive thing to get Buttercup over to Shelter Island later on Thursday and we’ve spent much of Thursday and Friday…buying things…yep, spending money. It seems we’ve a long list of “things we need” that we knew where to find/purchase in San Diego but didn’t know where to find them elsewhere. So, among other places we’ve been to Staples (new printer), Downwind Marine (masthead lightbulb), the HAM radio store (handheld radio battery), REI (clothes and shoes), a sewing machine repair shop (to get the machine timing right), Fryes (solder and flux), and a grocery store.

When we got back to the boat this evening, we had the welcome surprise of a nearby cruiser giving us two very large halibut fillets for dinner. He’d caught a couple halibut on his way into the San Diego channel on his trip from Newport and he couldn’t eat all that he’d caught. With no refrigeration…he shared. So, we’ve just stuffed ourselves with poached halibut, yum. A good ending to the day.

Tomorrow, on the way to Navy Yacht Club San Diego’s membership meeting, we will visit the wood hobby shop at NAS North Island where we’ll be doing a lot of mill-work for Mahdee’s interior. Next week we should be settled into some sort of routine that involves lots of moving around wood and beginning the interior woodwork.