Burning Daylight

fly away birdie

It’s time to fly away to new things and new places. The ever-more-complicated-windlass-motor-issue kept us captive here for too many weeks in one marina. I just can’t take it anymore! The motor still isn’t working but we just HAVE to move on. I’ve been teasing the harbor crew that this marina is the “Hotel California” and we need to break away! Fingers crossed that the windlass motor will be ready by Monday for us. Even if it is not, we plan on leaving here Tuesday or Wednesday–we’ve just GOT to MOVE! We won’t be able to switch anchorages at will, but we can plop the hook in Aquatic Park and spend some time in downtown San Francisco whilst we wait for the motor to be done. The latest in a long series of the fixes involves a local electric shop sending our ancient windlass motor (the original failure) to Arizona to have the armature done and to also have the impossible-to-replace commutator custom made by a gentleman there who knows his stuff. Fingers crossed that it works! The two replacement motors will be going back to the manufacturer and we will hope to get one back that we can use as a “spare.”

Happy tweets and whistles from David, Beryl, and I as we’re almost…almost…almost back out there enjoying the anchorages. I have a laundry list of places to visit in the next 3 months–all over the Delta and along the Pacific near San Francisco.

The Return Trip

We’ve had an interesting couple weeks since my last update to the blog. Arriving back in San Francisco Bay, we went straight to Brisbane Marina and started sorting through new projects and plans. I’ll update the blog about the trip over the next several days. Here are some pictures of the early portion of the trip while we were still in SoCal.

Swimming in Newport Beach harbor during warm sunny days anchored there was fun for David.

While anchored in Long Beach harbor behind White Island, I repaired the foresail leech which was losing its stitching to the combination of age and UV damage assaulted by leech flutter due to too much motor sailing in light winds.

Anytime I wanted to check or plot our progress, I had to negotiate with Beryl about access to the chart.

Sailing at sunset from Long Beach to Frys harbor anchorage on Santa Cruz Island.

The Santa Cruz north shore is full of rocky cliffs, sea caves, and kelp it seems.

Finally!

Happy dance! The windlass motor arrived yesterday. May 10. Our cel-phone purgatory of the Fiddler’s Cove Marina is about to be over! Today I’m finishing up painting the sides of the bowsprit so David cannot install the windlass motor until tomorrow. Big day tomorrow. We should be able to leave San Diego if it tests good. We’ve promised a friend that we will attend an event on Thursday evening. The plan is to tidy up all the little projects between now and Thursday, do the event, sail up to La Playa for a weekend of anchoring and then leave the harbor Monday morning, May 20th. A full 5 weeks after we thought we’d be leaving. Just glad to be able to go.

We purchased a winch chuck for our V28 angle drill and that was going to be our “back up” windlass if the motor didn’t arrive before next Friday. So glad it did though. Happy sigh.

The boat’s a mess with things strewn all over the place–seems to happen when we’re in a slip for more than a few days. Today is the Navy Yacht Club San Diego general membership meeting and there we’ll be picking up a new burgee (our old one is pretty pitiful) and paying up our dues for the upcoming year. After the meeting, David is hitching a ride with a friend to visit Fryes to pick up a new scanner/printer for the boat. Our old one can print from our computers, but now that I’ve updated my computer and have Windows 8, we have no drivers for the scanner to work on our computers and expect none are forthcoming from Kodak, the printer manufacturer. Fingers crossed that the new one works as advertised since I’m getting a backlog of scanning to do.

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