S/V Songline - Our Sailing Adventure

It's hard to believe that it's been a month since our last entry. The visit with Pat and John was really fun. We moved the boat on the second to last day of their visit. It's easy to stay too long at the Marriott, although there is a lot to do there we found it too noisy. There was a spot at Shelter Island that we found. Much quieter but a lot further to go to get to places.

Nadia I and went to the Red Bull Air Races. The skill of the pilots zipping around, 60' and less off the water, moving at 250 mph, while doing 180 degree rolls in less than 0.5 second and pulling as much as 10g is incredible.

Brenda organized a really good trip to Julien. It's a small mining town known for their pies of all things. And they are good. We stayed at a BB with an observatory. The owner takes people out for star gazing tours. It's off season now so we had the whole place to ourselves. We had a chance to see distant galaxies, star clusters, nebulae, Uranus, carbon stars, core of Andromeda galaxy and the moon through a 14" telescope. We had also planned to tour the wolf rehabilitation project but the lady who does the tour got sick. We toured a botanical garden and picked oranges earlier in the day as well.

We toured the San Diego Zoo. We bought tickets from the local hotel and arrived at the zoo to find that it was free admission day. Looking at the crowds we decided to leave and come back the next day. Brenda and Nadia also went to Sea World.

I stripped and varnished all the toe rails and rear trim. Lots of work.
We also spent a day at a beach cleanup as did thousands of other people all over North America.

Now the big news, we are back in Canada. It's hard to explain the number of times we have changed our minds on this trip. As the time went by we saw that it would be more and more difficult to get down to La Paz or San Carlos. If everything went right we would have easily made it. But since when does everything go right? We flew to Seattle then took a bus to Anacortes and had the boat trucked there. It took a couple of days to get all the rigging apart and wrapped for shipping. Dudley Trucking arrived as promised and all looked fine until Songline was put onto the truck. We were about 6" over the legal height for a direct route up I5. I had to make a decision on whether to try and take the hard dodger off or pay more money to hire a couple of pilot cars and have the truck run a much longer route through Nevada. I paid the money. The driver of the truck was none other than Max Dudley himself. Max is 73 old trucker who knows a lot about trucking and although I can't say everything he did I can say he delivered our boat in the same time as he said he would on the shorter route and charged us only about a third of the original extra quote. We had planned to re-rig and get on our way. We have known since we bought Songline that we would have to get the bottom completely stripped and new epoxy and urethane put on. With the rig off this is so much easier to do. So we left her in Anacortes to have this work done for us. With nothing to do there for a month we decided to hop on the ferry and head for Sidney and Ron and Cheri's place. The folks who rented our house have just purchased a house and will be moving in 2 weeks so we get our house back.

A couple of weeks and it's life back to normal. Both Brenda and I want to write a blog entry about our feelings about the trip. What we liked and didn't like, what we would do differently or not and just our general feelings about the whole trip.

Peter