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 in this new life of mine out of my car and the storage unit and onto the boat so I can close out the storage unit (no plans to get rid of the car though!)

Porter and Erin are in Los Angeles this week for a convention and a well deserved Disneyland vacation so we made arrangements to rendezvous up in Long beach Harbor. 2 days ago I started sailing north, spending a night en route in Newport and pulled into Long beach harbor last night. I had planned to anchor in the lee of Whites island there in the harbor but the Weather service started predicting a huge storm coming in last night the remnants of a typhoon somewhere out in Malaysia, with gale force winds and high waves. The Coast Guard posted a small craft warning (‘Small” meaning any vessel less than 65 feet long!). I am doing home study on marine weather and one of the lessons is the validity of the old weather ditties like “Red sky in morning, sailors take warning” and “mackerel scales and mares tails make tall ships carry low sails”. these old saying refer to the cloud formations that precede storms, and they were both very evident yesterday as I was getting up and sailing here to Long Beach. With all that, I took the better part of valor and pulled into the Los Alamitos marina and tied up snug to a guest dock to safely wait out the storm. I have an old seafaring saying posted on the wall of my boat that I live by: “The man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, for he will be going out on a day that he shouldn’t. But we do be afraid of the sea, so we only be drowned now and again!”. I do be afraid of the sea and wanted to be safer than sorrier. Well the storm still hasn’t arrived!. It was a nice calm night and beautiful calm morning. Porter and Erin came to the marina, we went out for a nice sail in the harbor. The wind did pick up quite a bit while we were out and quickly veered a full 90 degrees in a clockwise direction which again indicates the arrival of a storm front (I thought), so we dropped the sails and came back into the marina. Then calm again! Porter and Erin took me to lunch and we had a wonderful time catching up. They think my little boat is very cool (or so they said anyway…), and they brought me some very nice pictures of Porter in cool ‘street’ poses to hang up on my wall (on a boat I guess I should call it a “bulkhead“. ) Porter’s clothes are matching the graffiti on the walls behind him! Very artistic! Erin took them and she has such a good eye. Things are going so well for them I am so pleased.

After they had to leave, I debated about whether to stay in the marina one more night or go anchor out . The forecast is still for the storm to arrive tonight about midnight, and the gale warning is still posted. I called the coast guard to ask for their advice about anchoring out and they must have been well trained by their lawyers because they replied “Sorry Skipper, we cannot give you advice like that. If you are uncertain you may want to stay in the marina again”. OK, so here I am in the marina again tonight. It is now 7:00 PM and still mill-pond calm. I was sitting in the cockpit reading in the fading evening glow as a guy went past in a dinghy and commented on the lovely evening. I asked if that storm was ever going to come and he shook his head “No!” hmmmm. We’ll see what happens.

Last night I made the most amazing batch of chili from scratch! With no recipe! I soaked some beans since morning, and put them in the pressure cooker for dinner, only took 10 minutes to cook on very low heat. I added everything I could think of, lots of fresh onion, garlic, tomato paste, some leftover spaghetti sauce powder, a can of chicken and bunch of Tabasco sauce. MM MMM was it good. And enough to have another bowl tonight. Life is indeed good.