Well, this weather has me all befuddled. The big storm never did hit Long Beach, after all those warnings and me chickening out and staying in the marina there another night because of it! I sailed on back to Newport yesterday in easy calm conditions. After a quiet night I was launched today for Dana, with warnings of santa ana winds coming today. These are strong winds coming in off the desert and are stronger inland, but can still hit the water with some force, but I was ready for them. N...

It has been a quiet week, nobody here visiting! So of course I worked on a few projects in between day sailing around dana. It has been very rainy and chilly. I rewired the navigation station with fresh wires big enough to power the instruments properly, and completed pulling out the old fuel tank and exhaust pipes left over from the old inboard engines. There is a ton of more storage space in the cockpit locker and under the cockpit itself now. I am trying to get everything I need to keep ...

It never rains in California, so the song goes. Well, they lied. It has been raining here for the last several days with more to come, at least until the weekend. I have been doing home study on weather and clouds and storm fronts and barometric pressure and I wish I could better understand what is going on! After several months of exactly the same sunny days and West winds, I wish I had an expert to help me calibrate what I have been studying to what is going on around me right now. The ra...

My friend Chriss just jetted off today after a week here. We had a great time this last week in San Diego as classic tourists. Chriss was a great sport hanging out reading her book as I had to handle a recurrence of my engine problem from 2 weeks ago. After replacing that magneto, The engine again started running rough and when I took the cover off I could again see sparks jumping across the spark plug which made the second cylinder go numb. I tried a number of things, replacing the magn...

After I wrote here about Jim visiting last month, I had a flood of friends offering to come keep me company here on the boat. I guess I sounded lonely! First was Diana, then Cindy came, and now my dear friend Chriss from SLC has just stopped by. Next week my son Porter and his wife Erin are coming, and the week after that, Phillipe Shiela and Anya, who are all on a big California road trip, are stopping by, and then not long after that my daughter Kenzie and her husband Julio are coming....

After Diana left from her visit here, another friend from Salt Lake, Cindy, popped in for a short visit. She had asked me what she could bring and I mentioned how hard it seems to be to find good bread here and bless her heart she showed up with 2 loaves of Great Harvest sunflower wheat, my all time favorite! (I bet the TSA inspectors at the airport puzzled over that one. Almost as much as back when I would travel with a dozen power bagels in my luggage!) We spent a day fiddling with the...

Diana and I woke to a drizzly day in Newport. After we had polished all the brass on the boat for the 4^th time, we just had to get out of there. Drizzle or not, after a bit of excitement pulling up the anchor and almost chopping our neighbors anchor line with our propeller, we headed out and down the coast for Dana. ( Long story short, I need to learn patience and teamwork.) Outside the harbor The seas were high and riotous and the winds were strong. We were making very good time , over ...

As John Wayne said (at least I think he said it.. “ Life is hard, and its harder when you are stupid!”

OK all was well with my repaired toilet, all was working perfectly, no leaks, until I went to the pump-out station to pump it clean. I was out on the dock working the vacuum at the pump-out deck fitting when I heard this loud pop from inside the boat. Not sure what it was from. I went below to add a little fresh water to the tank to rinse it and as I poured it in I noticed it running ...