Sunday 10-09 through Wed 10-12 at Avalon

10-09-2011, Sunday: Many of the boats are leaving today, but the Holland America, Oosterdam cruise ship arrived in the night and is now parked at the entrance to the harbor. Town should be a mess today with all the cruise ship folks wandering around. We did some chores around the boat and watched all the activities going on in the harbor again.

We had to see the 49er game, so we went to the local sports bar to watch it. GREAT game!! 48-3 win over Tampa Bay… Woo Hoo! Could it be we are back?

The cruise ship left in the evening. We had a fabulous dinner out tonight at Steve’s Steakhouse. Excellent food and service.

10-10-2011, Monday: Another beautiful day in the neighborhood! Hold on….. wait just a minute…. Wow…. A big fog bank just came in! What’s a mother to do? My folks were coming on the ferry this morning and called us to let us know they got through traffic early and were on the earlier ferry. Instead of being here at 11:00, they were going to be here at 9:30, and that the fog (which we couldn’t see yet) was causing the ferry to go slower than it usually would. About 15 minutes later the fog rolled in thick to the deck. Dick went and picked them up at the dinghy dock and brought them out to the boat for a couple hours. We got to update them on all the additions to the boat and spend some quality time. We went to Antonio’s for pizza and then took them mini golfing. A good time was had by all. The fog sort of came and went all day, but was pretty clear when we walked them to the ferry. We put them on the 3:45 ferry and watched the fog form again from the shore. We stopped by a couple of boats that were flying their “Ha-ha” flags and introduced ourselves. We’ll be seeing them soon, of course. Nice day!

10-11-2011, Tuesday: No fog today! Absolutely beautiful! A Carnival cruise ship came in last night, so more action in the harbor today. Love it! Never a dull day. Got to relax on the boat today. Had a nice shrimp cocktail picnic in the cockpit for lunch and went ashore in the afternoon to play some pool. The full moon was fantastic tonight!


10-12-2011, Wed. : Our last day here! No cruise ship today. Just the usual ferries. We will be preparing for the sail to San Diego today. Breakfast at the fabulous Sally’s on shore, pick up a few items at the store and prepare the boat. We will be leaving at 3:00 in the morning so we get to San Diego in the light of day tomorrow. It is supposed to be mild conditions, so we may finally get to use our light wind sail. Can’t wait to see the colors I designed for it flying in the air. We haven’t seen it opened yet! I will certainly be taking pictures of that :--)

Getting the blog updated this morning, so you won’t hear from us until San Diego. Ciao for now!

10-08-2011, Saturday in Avalon

Yep… another day in Paradise! We talked to the Harbor Patrol first thing, and let them know we are going to stay through the weekend. He took our money and reminded us that since we have paid for four nights now, that we could stay for free for three more days (Mon, Tues & Wed). We thought about this for about a minute :--) Had to call my Mom & Dad to see if they would be willing to come visit us here in Avalon instead of going to Newport Beach. They are very excited to do this and will be coming out on Monday to visit here in Avalon. Yay!

Jackofaaaaah got the internet antenna working this morning!! Yaaay! Hence I have spent the better portion of the last two hours uploading pictures and updating the blog. Will be fixing lunch shortly…. Mmmm left over shrimp benedict.

Since it is Saturday, there was a lot of action in the harbor: Paddle boarders, parasailers, peddle boaters, kayakers and other interesting things.

Now we are just trying to figure out what we will do today…. More running around town. We may go up this road to a look-out spot so we can take a beautiful picture of our boat in the harbor from above. We may go see Spyro Gyra at the jazz festival…

No Spyro Gyra, but we did go up the road and stairs to the Bell Tower. What a fabulous view!! Got some great pics of the harbor and Journey in it. Had some chips & salsa with a cold one at a restaurant at the bottom once we came back down. Took a long walk through the neighborhood behind the town center, looked around the shops for a spoon for our collection and scoped out a place for dinner tomorrow night. We haven’t made up our minds yet. So, we will have to look some more tomorrow.

The colors in the harbor were beautiful in the dusk hour as we took the dinghy home. A 100+ foot schooner had anchored out by us. It is the “Californian”. Got a couple nice pics of her.

10-07-2011 Friday in Avalon

Another day in Paradise! First thing this morning the Harbor Patrol informed us that the owner of the mooring we are on wants to come in (or one of their friends). So, we had to move. The jazz festival is in town and the weather has improved, so more people are coming over.

With only 99 CT-54’s in the world, they parked us right next to one!! It is about 10 years older than us, one of the very early ones. Lovely!

Now that we have moved, the internet connection is not good, so Jackofaaaaaah is going to put up the internet antenna later.

We went in to town to play mini golf and go to the little local store. The mini golf course is a lot of fun and VERY challenging. Captn. Dick says it is a world class coarse and NO anthills, there are a few multi-level holes and a par 6 hole! Quite Cleverly designed.

It is yet another beautiful day and forecasted to stay that way. We have decided to stay at least through the weekend. Still no internet. Dick is having problems getting the antenna hooked up. Spent a good portion of the late afternoon working on it. Will try again tomorrow.

My provisioning is working out well. I am quite pleased. I prepared shrimp benedict with pasta this evening and we watched a movie. Nice day!

10-06-2011 Sail to Avalon

10-06-2011, Thurs. Well it was a little dicey this morning, but we decided to go ahead and set out for Avalon, which should only be a 4-5 hour adventure. The winds were a steady 20-30 knots and the seas were pretty large, 6-10 on the beam for the first hour and a half. Things eased some once we turned to head to the east point of Catalina and started taking the seas on the stern.

We got 15 minutes out of Catalina Harbor and found that the regulator had died, so we had no RPM readings and the batteries were not charging. Yikes! ………… To the rescue comes my “Jackofaaaaaah” (Jack of all Trades :--) (pronounced “jacovah”, emphasis on the “ah”) That would now be Dick’s new nickname. So, my honey goes back down into the engine compartment, while I’m conquering the seas, and found a connector on the regulator had worked loose. Fortunately the fuse that should blow if this happens did . (Let’s hope that is all.) Everything else seems to be working properly, which is a good thing.

We saw more wonderful dolphins and a flying sea lion on a mission! No whales yet!

When we got to the eastern end of the island and turned left, the winds calmed in the lee of the island and the seas calmed too, of course. Sooooo, we increased the engine speed. Here comes the engine heating problem again. We ended up creeping our way around the end and up to Avalon at 1.5 to 2.5 knots into the wind & current.

Thankfully, we got a spectacular mooring in a nice protected area right next to the beautiful Casino building. The name of our mooring was “Endless Summer”. They all have names after their owner’s boat name.

We got ourselves situated, pulled the fuse out of the regulator, launched the dinghy, mounted the motor and headed to shore to see if we could find a replacement fuse (oh yeah, we didn’t have one).

First of all, Avalon is gorgeous! Anyway.,… off we go through town, looking at shops, scoping out the mini-golf course (which we will play tomorrow) and scored at the hardware shop for the fuse (got 4). Had a “cold one” at the El Galleon Restaurant/Bar; a very historic spot and headed back to try out the new fuse.

Yaaaaaaaay! It worked!! AND… Jackofaaah found that some air had gotten trapped in the exhaust manifold, bled it….. and presto……the overheating problem was gone. (I hope - D)

Whew!!! We are going out for pizza tonight to celebrate…enough for one day…

Tues, 10-04 & Wed. 10-05 Catalina Harbor

10-04: We woke up this fine Tuesday morning to find it had been raining in the night and was still raining. Mixed clouds and sun followed with minor showers throughout the day.

We went over to the shore and visited the village of Two Harbors. Paid our mooring fees (no discount) and had lunch. While we were in Ventura, our neighbor recommended we have a “Buffalo Milk” drink at the bar here, which turned out to be a lot like a “Mud Slide”. Yummy! We were able to hook up to the internet there updated the blog and do some other interneting :--) while we ate our burgers. Not much else to do at this end of the island; one little general store, a restaurant & bar, you could rent kayaks or go on a scuba dive too. The yacht club wasn’t open.
I went a little crazy over the pelicans on the trip back out to the boat. Dick went in close to a dock they were hanging out on so I could get some great pictures of the lovelies! They were quite the hams. We are expecting to head to Avalon tomorrow, weather permitting.

10-05: On Wednesday we woke up to howling winds and rain! An unseasonable storm swooped in overnight. We decided not to try to go to Avalon as these conditions were forecasted for all day. The two pictures you see say it all. We read and watched a movie today. Nice and relaxing! It looks like we might be able to leave for Avalon tomorrow. It is only about a 4-5 hour sail round the end of the Island. Only 20% chance of rain and manageable winds. We’ll see…. The weather report indicates the weather will be improving through the weekend and into next week. Can’t wait to see Avalon!

Sail to Catalina 10-03-2011

Up at 5:00 am on Monday morning to prepare for 6:00 departure. Our sweet neighbor, Mary came by to bring us a home-baked loaf of cinnamon bread with icing (at 5:45 am)!! Yum yum! Like I said…. Nice people here! We were headed out at 6:15
It was a clear and calm morning as we left the harbor and pretty much stayed that way until mid-afternoon. The sea was quite rolly though. Not too comfortable, as it was coming from our side (beam/west). The wind piped up in the afternoon to about 13-20 knots, providing a little more speed.

Lots of dolphins were around us again from time to time. Such beautiful creatures! The Coast Guard had been broadcasting for mariners to look out for Blue Whales, as they have been seen in the shipping lane and around the Channel Islands. We didn’t see any though, bummer!

Otherwise, it was an uneventful sail down. We arrived at Catalina Harbor at about 5:30 p.m. and settled in for the evening. Got some great pictures of the pelicans around the area :--)
Planning on going ashore tomorrow.

Ventura, Sat & Sun, 10-1 & 10-2

As you can see, we had a lovely slip here in Ventura at a wonderful “Baja ha-ha” special rate. We had super nice neighbors, Brian & Suzy, who also live-aboard. They kindly allowed us to use their internet connection while we were here. They are planning to take off cruising one day. Another couple across the way, Bruce & Angie, offered to let us use their car if we needed. They have been cruising from Alaska to Mexico and were heading back to San Francisco currently. All the neighbors were very nice here. We met a nice gal by the name of Mary, whose husband is a pilot. They have a Vagabond 47, beautifully maintained, which is similar to our boat design. They are also planning to take off cruising soon.

Ventura is a VERY busy harbor! We were slipped with our stern to the fairway and saw all kinds of fun & interesting things. This particular weekend the fishing boats had to come in on Friday night, so ordered by the State Fish & Game, to be inspected. So, the harbor was FULL of HUGE commercial fishing boats. This coupled with all the paddle boats, paddle boarders, kayakers, sailors, etc . etc. made for lots to look at.

The harbor has a beautiful “village” built up around it, with lots of shops & restaurants. We took a nice walk around it and visited the Ventura Yacht Club at the far end around the other side. You could see our happy stern from the other side :--). VYC is a lovely club, but we were unable to enjoy it because they were having a wedding reception that afternoon. We ambled back around to our side of the harbor, after a nice Margarita at the Mexican Restaurant. There was a darling little “Boatel” parked there in front of the restaurant. It is actually a B&B (Pics in the slideshow). We then visited the Pierpont Bay Yacht Club. This smaller club was perched on the second story of a stucco building overlooking another end of the harbor. We enjoyed the few folks that were there and a lovely sunset. We had yummy ribs for dinner and decided we’d spend another day there.

Sunday was another busy day in the harbor, complete with live bands all afternoon and evening, and lots of water activities. All the fishing boats were leaving all day long and into the night. Our friends from Quinn’s Lighthouse, Bill & Al, stopped by the boat mid-day to say hi to us on their way to L.A. It was good to see them! Otherwise, we took the day to rest and prepare for the sail to Catalina. It was another beautiful sunset that evening.