In Avalon…12.26.07

{GMST}33|20.727|N|118|19.448|W|Avalon|Mooring 208{GEND}
We headed out of Cat Harbor and around to Avalon today. The winds were really light and we motored the entire way. We didn’t see more than 10 knots the whole trip. It was a beautiful sunshiny day, in the 60’s again. We still didn’t see any dolphins or whales but we watched a couple of bald eagles soaring around the island. Our original plan was to spend Christmas in Avalon, but since the Santa Ana winds kicked up we decided to stay in Cat Harbor. The only real reason we wanted to come over to Avalon was to get a Cheese Crisp pizza from Antonio’s….that and cut a couple hours off of our next passage, which we’ll head out for tomorrow morning at o-dark-thirty (3:30am…it should take us approx 12 hours to make it to San Diego). The pizza was just as fantastic as we remember. It’s a simple pizza – garlic, cheese & peppercini’s.…yummy!

It should be another rock & roll night - the red flag is already up indicating a small craft advisory, which means winds are expected to be between 22 and 33 knots of wind in the next 12 hours. We told harbor patrol we were planning to leave early so he placed us very near the main channel of the harbor so it should be a quick exit tomorrow. Think of us at 3:30!! :-) And if you're up and want to watch.... check out the webcam link... ;-)

This picture was from the pier – it has the Casino on the very left hand side and AheaKali is the sailboat on the very right side of the picture.



We decided since we were only going to be here for a few hours to take the shoreboat into town instead of getting our dinghy out – wow! $4.75/per person/each way! It was $32 for one day on a mooring here in Avalon. In Cat Harbor, we paid $68 for the week! And remember those quarter showers? Here in Avalon, it’s $2 for 5 minutes of hot water. We had plenty of hot water from our motor over here so we all showered on the boat before going ashore.

The below is a video from our camcorder. I know, it’s not very good….in fact I should warn you….it’s not for anyone who gets motion sickness easily! But I’m learning so hang with me. This was shot from our boat once we were moored up. Starting at the beginning is the Casino building, which there is no gambling, then the city of Avalon and around to the docks & ending up at the Cruise Ship! There were two cruise ships in port today, which gave us lots of people to watch!

Speaking of videos, there was another one that I posted on the “Cat Harbor” posting – it’s the crazy bad picture of Michael at the end of the post – if you haven’t checked it out, please do! Just press the arrow button at the bottom of the picture for it to play. Like I said, I hope to get much better taking these videos….but hope you enjoy them.

OK, it’ll be a couple days until my next post. Happy hump day! More to follow…
Rene