Greetings from Dana Point, California

After a five week stay in San Diego we are headed north to Long Beach to pick up Peter our friend from Lake Tahoe and some of his friends for a week long sail trip to Santa Catalina Island. We didn’t get to spend much time there last year and now will spend 2 weeks exploring Catalina and the islands out of Long Beach. After Peter leaves our good friends for home Robin and Karen will meet us for the second week at Catalina Island.

During our time in San Diego we restocked the boat with food items and boat supplies. We also added some improvements to the boat including a few LED lights to replace our hot energy wasting halogen reading lights, new monitoring wall unit for both AC and DC power usage and consumption, gages to monitor the generator’s temperature and oil pressure, fuel pump to use in emergencies and whenever pumping fuel from the fuel tank is needed, shutoff switch for the solar panels which get shut off when charging the batteries with the alternator while motoring. We also added shelves in the back of our hanging lockers and mounted our two fishing poles on the ceiling of the forward berth.

Some of the other chores like waxing the boat and doing maintenance at the top of the mast got put on hold as Jim had a bike accident. He was biking over to a lumber store from the marina when he hit two 5” tall parking backup curbs in the middle of an otherwise empty parking lot. He went over the top of the handlebars and severely injured his groin and rips on the starboard side of his body. He couldn’t walk for three days and now three weeks later is still in pain. Needless to say he has now been banned from the bike. This is not the first time that he has fallen off a bike last year when he was biking to his brother Carl’s home in San Francisco he fell and broke his thumb. Do you see a pattern here!! Hello

We are planning to spend the rest of the month and all of October in this area. We spent the last 2 nights at Oceanside Yacht. We stopped there last year and attended their Halloween Party and had a great time and we are thinking that we will be back through this area on Halloween and hope to attend the party again. The people at Oceanside are extremely friendly and great fun.

On Tuesday we will spend the night at Seal Beach Yacht Club. This is just about 10 miles from Anaheim. We will have dinner with Carl as he will be in the area. After Peter and his friends leave Robin and Karen Cameron are coming down for 5 days so we will go back to Catalina and the islands west of Long Beach. We will return to San Diego for the month of November and then off to Mexico on December 3rd with Jim’s sister Lucy on board. We think of you all often and hope is well is your part of the world. Love Linda and Jim

PS For those of you who are tracking us we have been having computer issues so had not been able to upload our current position. This we hope will be corrected in the next 3 weeks. :)