We spent time in Santa Barbara visiting my sister and her family, my parents and my aunt & uncle. Love them. Dante is so sad to leave his cousins, they are like siblings. Darold inspected the mast after the raucous ride around Point Conception and everything looks great. He also burped some air from the auto pilot hoping that it will fix its temperamental attitude.
The sail from Santa Barbara to Dana Point was beautiful. For this leg we pressed into service our friend Kent and his son Jack. They lucked out with the conditions. It was seventy degrees, there was a swell so negligible that it was almost hard to believe, and we had loads of dolphins coming to check out the boat. The conditions were so perfect, we brought out the ukulele and also played a game of Hearts. It didn’t suck.
Once the sun went down we got closer to Long Beach and had to deal with avoiding all of the shipping traffic. We have something on the boat called AIS which tells us which blots on the radar are ships, how big they are, what direction they’re headed, how fast, and what our closest point of contact will be in what amount of time. Darold said, “Give me the tranquility of the open ocean instead of playing chicken with container ships!”.
Darold