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 rain has come with thunderstorms with fierce lightning directly overhead. They say count the seconds from when you see the lightning and hear the thunder and then divide by five to get the miles the lightning is away from you. I was barely getting to 2 or 3! I am in no danger as I am one of the lower masts in a sea of much higher ones! Surprisingly, boats actually rarely ever get hit by lightening, especially on salt water (compared to fresh water) , and motor boats get hit more than sailboats, and the taller boats would get hit before I would.

I was sitting here all smug that my boat had no topside leaks while all my neighbors were wallowing in puddles and soggy cushions. After 3 days of constant rain, I finally noticed a drop of water forming on the tip of a bolt sticking through the ceiling above my table (it is used to attach the main sheet to the boat.) I pulled the bolt out, re-caulked it and am back to feeling smug.

During the storm I noticed my VHF radio was not getting the weather channel , only a hiss where knowledge used to be. VHF is the standard marine 2 way radio you can use to call for help (“Mayday mayday MAYDAY” with the voice getting more panicked by the third one….) , and listen to 24 hour weather forecasts. I don’t know much about radios but when I wiggled the antenna wire in the back the hiss changed a bit and when I plugged in my emergency spare antenna I could hear the forecasts and call out, so I was guessing the antenna wire plug was bad. The antenna is connected to the radio with a coaxial cable similar to your cable TV which I know very little about. After a few hours reading in the big book of boat repair, I headed to radio shack to buy a soldering iron and ripped into it, cutting and trimming and tinning and soldering. 2 hours later I had reattached the coax cable to the plug and was listening to the weather and calling my buddies on the radio. Saved myself $60 for the guy to come out and do it, and I felt really cool for fixing it myself!

While I was at it, I ran fresh wire from the breaker panel on the other side of the boat to the radio and GPS. Months ago I noticed that the radio was only getting about 11.5 volts to it, instead of the 13 it needs for good operation. A former owner took a lazy route and had wired the radio to run through the light fixtures on that side of the boat which really doesn’t work too well. I ran fresh wire and it seems to work better. (at least I feel better about it!)

After my little experience with my anchor dragging last week I have spent some time this week exploring other anchors and methods. I added 2 new anchors to my family, a Bruce “claw” type , and a Delta “Plow“ type, added to my regular Danforth “Fluke” type. It turns out the Danforth is the best for most conditions around here, with muddy sandy bottoms but the others will be important over at Catalina and down in Mexico where there are more rocky bottoms. Anchoring is a dark art with no hard and fast “this works every time every” rules of consistency. There a few basic axioms like “more and heavier chain attaching your anchor to the boat is better than less” and “more rope out after that is even better” but it seems there is no substitute for doing your best to set it well, and then setting my alarms and alerts to get up every hour to check on things. I must admit, even with my mutant ability to “power nap” and wake refreshed, I was not happy last night when the alarm sounded every hour on the hour all night and I had to force myself to get up and look out and around. I was surprised though that even after all that I didn’t feel bad today and I think it will all be good. No bad days! (or nights….)