Sell, donate, give away.....lighten the load

On the road again - only staying in Phx at Aaron's to have a garage sale with him and We cleaned out, compressed, were ruthless in throwing out "stuff - yet Aaron had a collection of wonderful, exotic furniture to sell. His neighborhood is an old established one - Arcadia, in Phx/Scottsdale and near an enclave of Hispanics. In two days we sold almost all of his stuff, most of our's and then some - mainly to Hispanics who peeled off $100 bills - off of money rolls. This was a better sale than those we held in Fountain Hills - go figure. At the end of the sale, I was exhausted from bargaining and Robert was just exhausted. We had managed to downsize: do the math - three years, if we last that long cruising x $79/mo, for stuff? We can afford to buy this "stuff" with the money we saved. Then, we get back to the boat and guess what? Rented another smaller locker near the boat

in order to hang up winter clothes. We had put them all in storage as Mexico is the tropics. Again, go figure. But our skis, bikes and possibly our kayaks will fit in there.

Then there is Bishop Jake who is famous world wide. he was featured with a bishop's mitre and cassock in a calendar. He danced and snorted all during our "unbirthday dinner".

The neat thing about unbirthdays is we can just celebrate being with friends such as Shelley and Doug, Eileen & Kenny, and Debbie and ...who? Where is Harold? Falling on his head somewhere while we drink champagne and watch Jake dance. I love it when Shelley explains all of us as family - which we have become. This isn't the family where you go when you have nowhere else to go -but the family that rejoices in your triumphs and mourns in your losses and sorrows. This is the family you would travel miles and miles to be there with for any old occaision. We really love you guys.

The elegant garage sale- it is telling that all that stuff was in storage!

And we are back on the road for Thanksgiving at Bridget and Dave's. On the road again------

crocks on the beach

Good thing there was a fence between him and us - the dogs were throwing out challenges and the meadow behind him was full of his kind. Elk - the critters that have signs all over northern 101 in Calif. We left Brookings and wandered a bit to unwind before getting back to boat work. The elders have caregivers and are ok for now, so we need to get back, move the boat to our new slip and try to figure out how to stay busy in this strange new retirement life.

No problem - we are going to go to Az. and sort out the storage lockers there and sell, donate and give away stuff. I feel it loading us down when we are twelve hours away from all that stuff.

We found this secret beach - Gold Bluffs, in Prairie Creek Redwoods State park - miles of sand and camp sites. Only my sister tells us it isn't so secret as there is a fern gully miles down the treacherous road and people come from all over the world to see the ferns.- we stopped to let the dogs run. We saw ferns in Hawaii, ferns at Lake Powell hanging from seeps in dry cliffs. The dogs needed a run and the fog was lifting. No ferns for us. The ocean was silver in the sun and the waves crash and echoes against the cliffs of this magic place, while the wind soothes the low evergreens by the road. I wanted to winter camp and stay awhile.

The dogs, of course, wanted to swim - but we just yelled at them to stay with us. The waves were huge and all we needed to see was shepherds being carried out to sea while we are land bound. They jump in any water available, so it was tough to keep them dry. Sha'ash thinks it is Lake Powell and he can drink all he wants.

Highway 101 runs down through giant redwoods, to the busy towns of the wine area, to San Francisco, and to the peninsula where you take your life in your hands on the Freeway.

We were glad to get "home" to unpack and organize the boat.

Beach art.

A metaphor.

Wrong way on Coast

And we thought coming out of Half Moon Bay was foggy! At least on Hwy 101 we didn't imagine giant ships spooking through the fog. We are in Brookings taking care of the elders and came up in beautiful fall weather. And then, rain. And today is November and we sat on the beach in the sun with the dogs - the extra dog is Buddha, and she belongs to Robbie, Mom's husband. She isn't sure of the bigger guys and has a tendency to run off. Both shepherds ran into the ocean and tried to drink it - thinking, probably, "hooray, we are at Lake Powell." They don't understand why we yell at them to not drink the ocean. Bad stuff happens to their digestion.


It is strange to be on the beach in Nov. and to have warmth. Mom's beach is a little cove at the mouth of the Chetco River, which is Brookings harbor. We had thought that last summer we would be cruising up here on our way to Canada. There is an old Jewish saying, "Man plans, God laughs" - so we land cruised in the van. Mom's neighbors must think the Clampetts have arrived when we show up as we sleep in the van in front of the house. I just smile and wave at them in my pjs.

Robert looks retired here - his new job is either International Yachtsman/ boatworker/dog walker/boat fixer/mechanic/fog driver/ or whatever he feels like.

We are very relaxed after the awful push of trying to get the boat ready. The worst part is that Robert made another list that is a full page of things to do on the boat. Ok - we will be cruising in and out the Gate for the winter and enjoying doing things with our friends here. As well as shortening the list. One would hope.

This , below, is Mom's beach with the tide trying to wipe the beach out. There are huge logs and piles of driftwood, which comes in from the ocean....or as a sailor would say, was out there on the water before it came to the beach. And something to watch for when we do come north. That plan is back in place - but again, a plan is a plan, is a plan. We shall see. We had some magic charters in Canada, years ago, and there was so much country we wanted to explore that going north is something we should get out of our system. I'O goes to weather beautifully, but the lesson, after seeing the huge logs on the beach - is we will harbor hop from about 20 miles out.

Rock and Roll at Pete's

This view is from our new slip in Pete's down towards the restaurant. The palm trees really give the illusion of tropics but right now we are rocking with high winds. It gets frost here in the winter. I came back from church one morning, several years ago, wearing my clerical collar and slipped on the frost on the dock. Skirt flew over my head and some salty language flew around to the amusement of the locals.
We read that the Baha fleet has had a recommendation of stopping before Turtle Bay to avoid extreme winds and waves down there. Ouch.

From the elegance of the plastic fantastics to the "character " of Pete's Harbor is quite a change. The winds are 40 - 60 mph and there are white caps and rollers in this little channel, in which we tried to maneuver our 45' plus sloop. Ai yi yi....I think our neighbors were checking their insurance policies. The photo shows our dinghy davit/solar panels support and the tv antenna. Are we cruisers or what? We can't move to an outside slip until the poor fellow who is in our future slip gets towed.Boating! After today, we are not sure we want to be out there as we can sit in the sun protected by our dodger and marvel at the wildness in the channel. This should be an interesting couple of months - we are snug and the dogs can learn about the poop deck, finally.

Ignominious, not

Three days of trying to find a circ. pump for our engine taught us a lesson in cruising: take more parts. What we didn't count on was hearing the word "obsolete" when looking for parts. Then finding out that the heat exchanger needed some work: Jeff did a macrame job on it. Robert and Jeff installed the part, tested the engine, found some leaks, tweaked and tested some more....and declared it fixed. We left Thursday early, in dense fog, with high surf bashing both sides of the entrance to half Moon Bay. Robert drove for 4 hours in fog so dense that we rarely saw land, and fought the high swells. The fog lifted, sort of after 6 hours, and we still had to work with the enormous swells, back to SF Bay. Wind was on the nose going and coming - but I'o handled it beautifully. Coming back to the bay was not so much a disappointment as a lesson: you can never be too prepared. We were met with questions of why not continue south and get parts there...not possible on such an old engine, after the trouble we had finding the pump. I made at least 20 calls all over the U S to find the pump, and heat exchanger jury rig convinced us to go back and get a new engine at some time soon. After we win the lottery. We were sorry to disappoint crew who had flown to San Diego to meet us, and found out that several boats had dropped out so we hope Steve found a boat south. We had calls from people we had interviewed who went on another boat and who had horrible troubles: water over the floorboards, losing all their fresh water, etc. - and they didn't get to go to Mexico either. Our return crew, of Frank and Jeff were incredible: the rock and roll driving was pretty scary at times when you could see the breakers coming at us and we rose tried to meet them at a 45 degree - and keep our course. Not always possible so we had a lot of side to side motion. Frank had to make sandwiches as going below was not fun. We had to go a bit north of the entrance to the Gate in order to avoid the wild breakers around Mile Rock. We entered on the end of a flood, no wind to speak of and got a slip at South Beach. I think we slept the sleep of the exhausted: the tension from the fog and the waves did us in. Our bunk never felt so good.

The fog bank off the coast.

Jeff fighting the waves...fog in the background. He handled boats in Alaska and is great on the helm.

Robert after escaping the fog...wondering whose idea this was.

Hiatus in Half Moon Bay

The road to Half Moon Bay under wet weather and southern winds. We are still here waiting for parts to repair the engine - if you have to be stranded somewhere, this is a good place. The rain blew through with three reefs and, with NOOA warnings that we were facing La Nina weather, and Jeff and I worked in the sun while Robert and Frank ran around the Bay area looking for parts. We have some options at this point, but are dependant on others to say if the work can be done. We can go, after repair and make the start out of San Diego; we can go after the delayed start (hurricane Rick) and catch up with the fleet; or we can go and chase them to Turtle Bay; or we go back to the Bay area and sulk. The boat sails beautifully even with the load we have added to it. We are very fortunate and blessed to have such a great crew: Frank is a wonderful sailor and navigator, Bill was with us for a few days but would have been late to his race on Saturday and left this AM, and Jeff, who has done an incredible amount of work on this boat, is on deck adding netting to the railings for the dogs. Jeff is one of those people who doesn't let you know he has the talent to take us around Cape Horn and quietly surprises us with his talent. Thank you, Jeff.

- These are our neighbors - thank heaven the harbor master is moving us -towing- us into a slip as these lovely critters woke us up at 5am with a war. The pelicans chase the party boats in to get the scraps and we get to watch their clumsy ballet. The next news had better be us on our way south.

Out the Gate

We had a send off of all time - and cried to say goodbye to friends. And here, tonite we are at a harbor not very far away from them - Half Moon Bay. It was on hell of a push to get out of Alameda: new stanchions, building fridge and freezer, getting the dinghy davits done, the auto pilot was tuned and programmed yesterday with Phil; shoppng and stowing all the provisions for 5 plus two dogs. I am very tired, and we fought the tide going out, after practicing tacking, reef points, etc. Good thing as the weather gurus here are smoking something funny as we had fairly good winds all the way down here. We were told mostly sunny - yeah. right. We put on everything we own and then some. We were overhwhelmed with the help from our friends: Bridget and Dave, who took the van down to Linda's; Phil who ws tireless in getting the autopilot done; Jeff, who has an astonishing work ethic and who is sailing with us; our neighbor in the Marina, Robert who wa wonderful with last minute stuff; Linda and Jean who surprised us and gave us much advice and direction. And John - it doesn't seem right to be doing this without them - but we have three crew who are fantastic with the navigation, helm and such. Yes, we are tired - but very happy to have made it through one long day out there on the ocean without a catastrophy. Well, we did unwind the jib while it still had a tie on it, but Given a swipe from Dave's new boat knife, we freed that!

Phil is showing the crew how to program the autopilot. We somehow have GPS's attached to navigation software in Robert's computor that just sends us right to where we want to go. In this instance, a harbor for the uptight dogs to in which to leave their mark. Koa and Shaash did very well, but they had remarkable holding ability. We were on the water from 9am to 8 pm and got pulled up the dog when we finally tied up. They didn't even stop to socialize with the seals. It was a grey day of sorts, sad at times, and wonderfully scary at others as we are setting on on the most excellent adventure . Tomorrow we cross Monterey Bay and go along Big Sur overnight

- that will be the dog's real test. Or our's.