Yes, blog posts are still behind real time by quite a ways. Here the start of a story about a fun trip we had, although not aboard Kosmos. We have been exercising Kosmos about every other week by taking her out of San Diego bay and into the ocean for a few miles. She must be wondering what is going on, since we have not run her for more than 4 hours straight since we have been back. A far cry from the more typical 100 hour runs we used to do. We do try to run all the engines under some load (main, wing, generator) once a week.

Friday, September 25th Ever since Eric returned to his job, he has been working on a huge project that required lots of over time. The project was wrapped up this week, and we decided to celebrate by going out of town for a three day weekend. We had a hard time deciding after all, there were so many people and places that we wanted to go visit. But, we decided on Yosemite, since Christi has never been there and Eric hasn’t been there for many years. We could also see our good friend, Cindi, who lives close by.

Today was the drive up. We left San Diego around 1100 and are pleased to report we hit virtually no traffic, even in Los Angeles. Wow! From San Diego through to LA, it is literally a concrete jungle, with massively large freeways that offer views of endless track home developments and shopping centers. North of the LA suburbs, the freeways turn into more traditional 2 4 lane highways, and the landscape quickly changes from urban to agricultural. For the 175 miles (280 km) or so from LA to Fresno, the scenery was an endless expanse of flat, hill less farmland, with the exception of a handful of small (even tiny) towns. This region is a major breadbasket — not just for California, but for the whole country, and to some extent, the entire world. 90% of the world’s raisins are grown right here.

We noticed that there were signs all over the place about water. What was going on? We found out there is a war waging between environmentalists/fishermen and farmers. There is an endangered small fish that that lives in the Sacramento Delta wetlands area, which is farther north, close to the center of the state. This particular fish eventually flows to the ocean, where larger species feed on it. This fish is a vastly important cog in the food chain cycle, and losing this little species could create big problems in the ocean ecosystem and possibly destroy parts of the commercial fishing industry. The delta is a major water reservoir that supplies a big percentage of California’s fresh water, particularly the farmers here. To protect this fish, in 2007 a judge ordered that water pumping needs to be reduced by 1/3.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. That was a drought year, the global recession was beginning, and California’s economy was starting to collapse. The extreme cut in water allocations to farmers has caused many of them to let their farms lie fallow. Unemployment in some of these farm towns is approaching 40%. On these fallow farms, the trees are dying and the land is going back to its natural desert. Other farmers are digging wells to access the aquifers, which are rapidly shrinking and causing the ground to sink. The ground in many areas has visibly dropped by 6 feet (2 m). The farmers want the pumping to be reinstated.

Environmentalists complain that California has overcommitted on water supply by 8 times what is available in nature. Taking more water from the area to compensate for the drought affects more than just the little fish — it means destroying the Delta wetlands, which could have serious long term environmental consequences. As we learned with Hurricane Katrina, wetlands serve an important function in regulating nature, and getting rid of wetlands can lead to tragedy. And, like New Orleans, the dams and levees that were built in the delta are now old and need to be replaced. The levees breaking would mean a crucial water source for millions of Californians and farms would be gone in an instant.

Two years later, California is still in a drought, the recession has hit crisis levels, the State of California is cutting back on public works projects all across the state due to a budget crises, water prices and food prices have gone up, and the water debate regarding the delta is still raging.

We made it to Fresno at around 1645. Normally, you can see the Sierra Nevada mountain range from Fresno, but it was so smoggy that the mountains were completely obscured. Bummer. We found Cindi’s place in the heart of downtown with no problems. Cindi made us an awesome dinner, with a beef dish in a Lebanese marinade that was to die for good. We had a great time visiting with her. It is so wonderful to see old friends!

After dinner, at around 2000, Cindi took us for a walk though downtown. Neither Christi nor Eric has ever been here before, and we have to say we were genuinely surprised. Whenever anyone says the word “Fresno”, they almost invariably use a distasteful tone accompanied by an eye roll. So, we naturally assumed it was going to be an armpit. We were pleasantly surprised to see that it was clean, modern and beautiful. At first, we couldn’t understand the distain, until we realized it was totally dead. We walked for several blocks and only one store was open in the entire area, a hip tea shop that would have been jam packed if it were in downtown San Diego. The streets were virtually deserted, with almost no pedestrian traffic and just a smattering of car traffic. And, this is on a Friday night! It was a warm night, almost sultry, a perfect night to be out walking around, so the weather was certainly not to blame for the lack of people.

Knowing tomorrow was going to be a long and physically active day, we went to bed fairly early. We were really looking forward to Yosemite!