Catalina trip

This weekend I took my first trip to Catalina in our 30' Newport "Knotabus" with Dave Galey (the other 50% owner of the boat) and his friend who helped a lot with the build Bill. Dave as I've mentioned before is the youngest 79 year old I've ever met. He seems intent of living every second of his life and puts me to shame on the risks he's willing to take. This weekend was no different.

I know that I tend to be overly anxious about situations that I have not done yet, maybe even to the point of paranoid, sailing to Catalina for the first time was no exception. MOstly I was worried about where and how we would gt a mooring or anchor than anything else, would there be one available? what would be do if there wasn't one? Silly I guess but I wonder about such things.

We had wonderfull seas and winds all the way, our time from San Pedro to Avalon was around 4 hours on the way there. We would have made much better time if we hadnt aimed way too high and been on track for Twin Harbors, we didn't bear down until we were on the edge of the lee of the Island and that slowed us way down.

When we got there we pulled into position outside of the inner harbor and when harbor patrol came by the informed us they were out of moorings inside and we had to moor in the outer harbor in front of a huge Condominium complex that was just barely under construction last time I was there over 10 years ago. We went to shore hoping that the seas would settle down a lot by the time we went to bed as we were ricking quite a bit.

Catalina down town hasn't changed we were tired and my foot still hurt from breaking my toe last week so we just got some food a momento or two and started to head back to the boat. The sea taxi's are very cool and I thought to myself that they must have an also large prop, as the driver was able to stop or back up on a dime by thanging gears. When we got back to the boat the rocking hadn't subsided. I tried moving the aft mooring line from the adjacent side as the bow line to the opposite side, this helped tremendously but I think may have been the cause of another problem later that night.

NO SLEEP FOR THE WEARY

After a couple more drinks and upgrading Dave from Early Times to a few sips of Fighting Cock 103 proof whisky, he played the guitar and sung some Irish Chanties, badly and we hit the sack. That's where the fun ended, trying to sleep on that rocking, banging, groaning ship proved absolutely impossible. First it was the normal stuff, the banging of the head door, easily repaired with some napkins, the rocking which I thought might make me sick, but really just kept me from relaxing. And then came the groaning, as the swells came strong the whole boat would twist and the wood in the boat would shift and groan, and grind. The next day I decided to blame this on my mooring configuration which helped with the rocking but put a load on the boat to try and hold it flat.

I still have to get the boat tuned so all of the shrouds aren't quite right. A couple of them where a little loos and that echoed through that fiberglass hull like a concert speaker in an empty auditorium. Bill finally got this fixed by tieing the shrouds together putting tention on all of them. Then a small slide that I had on the sailtrack holding up the gooseneck to a more desired point fell off and started sliding back and forth across the deck like nails on a chalkboard Bill broke first and dragged himself out of bed to get it.

Out of all of us Dave is the only one that got much sleep, I think the little extra whiskey he had helped but the quarterberth in retrospect looks more insulated from all the noises that were driving Bill on the couch and me in the Vberth so crazy. I tried drowning them out iwth the Ipod, listening to classical music all to no avail, finally about 3:30 or so I just decided to watch The Dukes of Hazzard on my Ipod and gave up on the idea of sleeping, next time I'm getting a room.

We all got out of bed about 6:00 and were anxious to find our own bed. By 7:00 we were underway motoring out in the calm lee of Catalina Island. Exiting the lee of the island we found 10 knots of wind, put of sail and close reached all the way back to San Pedro. Bill learned how to work the tiller for the first time, and Dave got sick (the downside of the extra whiskey).

We passed the San Pedro lighthouse at 10:40, took down sail and motored the rest of the way since Hurrican Gulch was living up to it's name and blowing 20 knots or so right out of our harbor, admittedly I lost my hat while taking down the main and none of us felt like practicing our MOB skills and getting it. We were docked, washed down, cleaned out, put away and in our cars driving away by 12:00.

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