I had a delightful visit from Amy and Aaron Bentley and their whole family this week. (Amy is my sister’s oldest daughter, Aaron is her husband, and they brought the whole family: Gage, Levi, Clair, and little Judd.). They live in Utah and drove down for a week at Disneyland. They called and wanted to visit me here on the boat in Dana. It was a beautiful calm sunny day, and we trussed all the kids up in life jackets and headed out in very mild conditions. We killed the engine outside the harbor and sailed out a mile or so and back. We saw sea lions basking on the harbor buoy, and a ton of pelicans and gulls. The smell of all the bird poop on the harbor rocks was pretty pungent today. Sadly we saw no dolphins today.

I have never had that many people on the boat before and we had to carefully coordinate where everybody needed to be sitting (and shift places again and again…) in order to pilot the boat. For the “busy” stuff, like getting underway and docking, Amy took the whole brood down into the cabin and Aaron stayed up in the cockpit to help, then they all came up topsides for the ride. The whole crew seemed to enjoy it, nobody got sick and Judd liked it so much he fell asleep in daddy’s lap. Aaron said “Hey look Amy, we need to get one of these so we can get Judd to sleep that easy!”. He was kind of kidding but the questions he was asking me about the sailing life seemed like he may be taking the idea a bit too seriously!

Back on the dock we grilled up hotdogs and had a great barbeque lunch. Amy was worried about the Doritos mess the kids were making in the boat and I assured her “ No worries. I can just hose it all out!” Clair is now thinking that would be a great way to clean her room…

So they are all off to Disneyland. I am sure all the teacups and space mountains will be pretty lame compared to a day sailing with Uncle Kyle.