Friday, October 25, 2013

Last Port in US

We are now in San Diego awaiting the start of the Baja HaHa Rally on Monday. There are 165 boats signed up for this 750 mile trip down the Baja Coast to Cabo San Lucas. We should arrive in about a week. The boat is finally ready except for some final provisioning. On our trip down the coast from Oxnard we stopped in Marina Del Rey, Long Beach, Newport Beach and Dana Point and did some Southern California sightseeing. Now it's off to Mexico for the next 4 months or so and then on to the South Pacific. We likely won't be back in the good ole USofA for another year, maybe the government will be working properly by then ... Here is Starshine anchored in Newport Beach.


Monday, October 7, 2013

All Set!

Well, it looks like we are all set and ready to begin our long anticipated adventure! After six months of much more hard work than anticipated for both the boat and getting paperwork for a house and college kids in order, Dave and I believe we are about as ready as we will ever be. We had a "shakedown" day last weekend to test all of the new "toys" on the boat to Santa Cruz, one of the local islands here by Santa Barbara. That is when we discovered that our water maker did not work (specifically the boost pump). So Dave spent the greater part of this past week uninstalling the pump and taking it apart. Luckily he was able to discover the problem, repair the pump, and now the water maker works great - 15 gallons of water per hour! This means I will maybe get to take a shower once a week and even get to do laundry by hand in a bucket instead of shlepping it to a laundromat. Oh joy.... Dave also spent a considerable amount of time installing and hooking up the solar panel arrays on the side of the boat. With each panel in business, we should be getting 20 amps which will help the batteries considerably! Also checked the two electric and two manual bilge pumps, and the electric ones especially seem to be working (hopefully we will never need to use them)! The joke is that while everything is working, we should just close up the boat and go home as this will probably be the only time that everything is working as it should be. So today we leave Oxnard, where the boat has been since last November (both on the hard and at a slip) and we will start making our way down the coast toward San Diego (with stops at Marina Del Rey, Long Beach, and possibly Newport Beach). The Baja-HaHa Rally leaves San Diego October 28th. It is so exciting to realize this 40 year dream of Dave's finally get to play out. Included picture of the anchorage last weekend at Santa Cruz (Albert's anchorage) for our shakedown day. Also picture of the installed solar panel after all of Dave's hard work...