Oh, what a good day it was. Sunshine, a little wind, not too hot and not too cold. I did the “scary” part of my mainsail re-cut and sew project without incident and did all the machine sewing for the project. Now, rebuilding the clew and hand sewing remains. As the sun lowered in the sky, we stashed the 100 lb 700 sf sail down into the boat’s scuttle room, laughing as it filled the entire compartment and joking about which one of us was going to pull it back up onto the deck for me to work on it on Tuesday.

We’ve had really enjoyable boat neighbors on a nearby steel boat named Arctic Tern. She’s a lovely boat about 40 ft with a long, jaunty bowsprit. Her owners, Jim and Juanita, have been very friendly and have shared local knowledge about the best places around Orange County to find various boat-related things and, importantly, where the “deals” are on cheap food in the local Newport Beach restaurants. Every night of the week there’s a different “best deal” to be had. Though we don’t typically eat out much, it is hard to beat the delicious $1 tacos at a nearby Mexican place–twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays we have the chance to enjoy that inexpensive meal.

Tomorrow is an early morning drive down to San Diego to volunteer all day at the North Island woodworking shop and to stop by the storage unit and pick up a load of firewood as well as sundry items that we want to have on the boat. It’s strange to think that shortly we’ll likely be hundreds of miles away from our little storage unit in San Diego and we’d better get all the stuff we think we might need for a while onto the boat rather than sitting in storage. We think we’ll be back in Southern California next fall/winter to deal with the rest but in the meanwhile…

It’s hard to believe we’ve been here in Newport Beach for three weeks already. We’ve really unwound from our San Diego times. People are friendlier, the harbor is calm and importantly–we’re not moving the boat every 3 days! It is possible to actually make some inroads into our projects and that is a wonderful thing.

Well, we picked up a new v-belt at the auto parts store for our washing machine. The old one died on the last load of laundry we did before leaving SD. Today, with the new belt installed, I’m catching up on laundry.

We usually use our little Honda EU2000 generator when running the washer, but decided to go all-out and use the Onan (8kW) genset this time. That would mean turning on every electrical appliance in the boat to try and come close to loading up the Onan–hotplate, space heater, icemaker, washer AND it’s internal hot water heater that we usually don’t use, both computers, all the battery chargers for tools and stuff, all the 110V lights in the boat. Well, I suppose we could have run the air compressor but we didn’t 🙂

We try to use the Onan at least 1x per month just to keep it working. Since we don’t use it often, our “system” for start up isn’t as smooth as it should be. Today, we actually forgot to turn on the raw water (cooling water) until the genset had been running a few minutes and our handy-dandy little “raw water failure alarm” started screaming at us to do something about it. Thank goodness for that little gizmo! It surely saved us the impeller and a melt-down of the (plastic/rubber) exhaust system.

The boat is now smelling like clean laundry and I love that smell 🙂

The winds have been up for several days now and it is howling at night through the rigging and making pretty sparkling waves during the days. The weather map is filled with “pretty colors” representing gale force winds. We’re snug in port, but Mahdee would love to be out cavorting in these high winds.