A Reprieve

Yesterday we finished the 48-hour trip from Morro Bay to San Diego.  The forecast was for more sloppy weather, but luckily we got just what we needed - a gentle passage, the wind never more than fifteen knots and right behind us the entire way.

-This is like tradewind sailing, I said to Alisa at one point.

-Better, she said.  There's no swell. 

Our littlest sailor did fine, with no seasickness at all.  He spent a lot of his time in the well of the cockpit, surrounded by seat cushions.

Seeing Eric thriving on this trip was more of a relief than you can imagine - when he was sick over and over again on the way to Morro Bay, Alisa and I were both privately considering calling the Pacific crossing off.  The trouble with that is that we have so few good alternate plans to consider - we can't imagine living aboard in California, Mexico is about to be closed by hurricane season, and getting somewhere else fun, like Alaska, involves nearly as much sailing as getting to the Marquesas.

So all these considerations were weighing on us heavily when we motored out of Morro Bay.  I can't describe how wonderful it was to have those two days of gentle sailing to remind us how good the life afloat can be.  All the effort that we've been going through to re-mold our family life to fit into the program of a travelling sailboat began to make sense for the first time in a while.

Alisa had her 39th birthday on the first day of the trip - she had to do with a store-bought cake, but it was likely better than the cake mix and packaged icing that I had bought would have been...

Alisa and her presents - a bottle of Tanqueray to replace the one that she dropped overboard at the dock in Alameda, and a hat from Svendsen's boat works, the yard/chandlery/metal shop in Alameda where we left far too much of our money.

Alisa nurses Eric at five or six in the morning, and then they both fall asleep for another hour or so.  This means that I get the best watch when we're sailing overnight, the dawn shift.  The second dawn of the trip found us between Los Angeles and San Diego, where we had our first-ever bow riders on Galactic, these Pacific white-sided dolphins.

We were very happy with Galactic's performance in light winds on this trip.  She's extremely overloaded right now, but kept moving just fine with the wind well below ten knots.

The end.