Sunday beautiful morning’s sunrise in La Paz
On Sunday morning, our first chore of the day was plan the logistics of moving Kosmos. The ideal time to leave seemed to be 1800 (6:00 pm), when neither the tides nor wind would be too strong against us. We picked an anchorage 18 hours away, which meant we’d pull in around noon, when visibility would be good.
Continue readingWe are on vacation in Tahiti (by airplane). Since Tahiti is such a special place to us, we wanted to write some posts about what it has been like to come back again.
Day 1 – Sunday
Our flight arrived at 6:00 am. Keith and our friend Rose were astounded to see chickens running around the airport’s parking lot. Christi and Eric informed them we’d be seeing chickens everywhere.
We rented a car and headed straight to the condo that we had rented in a suburb to the southwest of Papetee, the main city in Tahiti. The condo is near the airport and Marina Tahina. The condo had looked nice online, and Continue reading
This is part two of a three part series. Read part 1 here.
On Thursday, June 7, we took off bright and early from Oceanside. Conditions were almost the same as Wednesday, except the wave interval was 8 seconds instead of 10 and they were hitting us on the nose. Eric and Christi were both green almost as soon as we pulled out of the harbor. The good news, though, is that Catalina Island offered some shelter, so the closer we got, the better the sea conditions became.
Keith slept about half the time. While he was up, he seemed unaffected by the seas. We brought his changing pad upstairs, so diaper changing was no longer an issue. We saw the Hover Crafts again, and this time one came up very close to us so we got a good look at it. And a couple pods of dolphins came to visit.
We pulled into Catalina Harbor in the early afternoon and radioed the Harbor Patrol to get a mooring assignment. There were about a dozen boats in the mooring field and at least forty empty moorings. We were assigned a spot with no one around it so it would be easy for us to tie up. Amazingly, as we were motoring towards it, another boat tied to the mooring next to the one we were assigned to. We asked if we could move one over so we would still have plenty of space to maneuver. The Harbor Patrol said no problem.
The moorings at Catalina are a little different than any other mooring we’ve been on. Since it had been so many years since we’d been there, neither of us really remembered the right way to tie up. After some arguing and awkward fidgeting with the muddy lines (that left us both coated in mud), we finally got properly secured. “Ah,” we said to one another “It’s time to relax!”
Literally one minute later, the Harbor Patrol radioed us and let us know the slip we were on had just been reserved and we needed to move one over. Sigh.Now that we knew what we were doing, the second tie up was simple and completed in a few minutes.
That night we stayed onboard and enjoying the peacefulness of the anchorage. Here is a picture looking back at the entrance of Cat Harbor from Kosmos’ deck.
We started Friday off with Continue reading
Since returning from our circumnavigation in 2009, we’ve started several threads that we haven’t finished. One of Christi’s New Year’s Resolutions is to get better about finishing blog threads. So to start the year off right, we are going to finish up our San Francisco thread from a few months back.
To recap: on Wednesday, October 31, 2011, we set out from our home port in San Diego on our way to San Francisco, where we planned to spend a couple months. We broke the trip up north into two legs: the first was 24 hours at sea, stopping in Ventura. The plan was to wait in Ventura for a good weather window around Point Conception. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long. After only 24 hours in Ventura, we were back at sea. Leg two took two days, and we arrived in San Francisco Bay on Sunday, September 4.
We docked at South Beach Harbor Marina, located right next door to the AT&T ballpark in the heart of downtown San Francisco. We picked that location because Eric could walk to work (his company also has an office in San Francisco, which he worked out of). Here is a shot of Eric in front of the ballpark and one at the back of the ballpark.
Monday, September 5 was Labor Day, so Eric had the day off work. We took a walk along the embarcadero to the famous Ferry Terminal Building. Here are some sights along the way:
This is Pier 38 right next to the marina. Along the waterfront, there are several more of these Pier buildings that all look similar.
The view of San Francisco Bay and the Bay Bridge from just past Pier 38
Part 2 of The Unexpected Circumnavigation: Unusual Boat, Unusual People covering Australia to Oman is now on sale! Read the first few pages on Lulu’s “preview” feature and read an excerpt from Chapter 1 here (starts on page 18)!
Jeff Merrill wrote an extensive book review for the Nordhavn.com site.
Many people have asked us why they should buy our book if they can read our blog for free. Just like Part 1, the book is very different from the blog. Here are a few of the differences between the two:
People have also asked us why we broke the series up into four books instead of only three. We had very different experiences in each of the four world regions, so it was best for each region to have its own volume.