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.

Weather Recordings

After a very long time, we finally have our Airmar Weather instrument collecting data. It’s not working 100 percent yet, but we are getting wind speed, wind relative bearing, temperature and barometric pressure–all the fundamentals. Of course, we got it all working at a point in time where the weather here is incredibly calm–calm being a relative term, because as you can see, we are still getting periodic winds over 30 knots, but nothing like a few weeks ago.

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.

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