Rain, rain - go away! 1.7.08

The storms we were waiting on have finally arrived - it's been raining for the last 4 days and it looks like it's about finished. It started coming down on Friday and we cooped up in the boat doing projects all day Saturday as it stormed all day. Sunday we moved the boat to Kona Kai Marina into slip I-70. Getting out of the tight slip was no problem for Michael & I….he has really gotten in tune with the new propeller and the boat steers sooo much better now in reverse. We've been moving around
San Diego pretty well on the public transportation system & lots of walking. We walked a ton on Friday as we were on a mission to find a @#(%& spark plug socket that no one seemed to have. We must have asked a million people before we were finally turned on to a store called Tool Depot that had it! We had decided since it was a nice day we would just walk from store to store. It didn't help that each store we asked said things like "try this place…just up the street a couple blocks". I'm convinced
that two blocks on foot is measured differently than two blocks in a car because we walked for MILES before finding anything! Then we were walking through a huge strip mall and looked at the directory which said there was an Ace hardware….we walked to the entire end of the mall (about 4 blocks away)….and it wasn't there yet - was just being built. Haha….

We did laundry on Friday, ate in some hole in the wall Mexican place, checked out all the marine 'hot spots' - San Diego Marine Exchange, Downwind Marine, etc.

Spending all day Saturday on the boat allowed me to organize & put some music into playlists that I'd been wanting to do for some time. And Thank you Dave….I just assumed that if we were sailing….we HAD to listen to Jimmy all the time! Thanks for clearing that up for me…

We moved the boat to the new spot on Sunday when there was a little break in the rain. Monday, thankfully, we hooked up with our old boat neighbor from Channel Islands Harbor, Bob, who met us for lunch and he was so kind to drive us to and from our errands! He drove us to the post office, West Marine, Seabreeze bookstore, hung out at Vons while Michael & I did our provisioning, & back to the boat. It was sooo nice to be driven around!! We're incredibly thankful to Bob for taking care of us.

We met Chad back at the docks and unloaded all the groceries & goodies from Bob's Jeep, into the dockcart and back to the boat. We were just unloading the groceries into the boat when we were visited by Nick Olsen, a previous owner of the boat. He came on board and remarked how the boat hadn't changed much! He owned the boat in the late 70's and early 80's. It was interesting chatting with him - he told us a story of installing a thru-hull (a hole in the boat in the bottom of the boat)….while
it was in the water!! He said he had a buddy in the water with a piece of Tupperware ready to place it over the hole and he was drilling the hole with an electric drill covered in wetsuit material for his shock protection inside the boat in the engine room. The buddy saw the pilot bit come through and was waiting for the rest of the bit when all of a sudden it came through. It scared him and he jumped back, forgetting to place the Tupperware bowl on the hole for a minute. Nick was inside the
engine room and said as soon as it went through there was an electrical arc from the hole to the drill as he pulled the drill out. It was a funny story.

I've been on a cooking kick lately as I don't seem to have enough to eat around here… I made cookies Sunday, then made a spicy chex mix, enchiladas, & Chinese chicken salad for lunch. Yumm!! Many thanks to Judy Owens for the Chinese chicken salad recipe, Tara Stivers for the enchiladas recipe, & Jeanne Mitchell for the spicy chex mix recipe!!

We're headed out in the morning for Ensenada. We're hoping the Coral Marina & Hotel will be open - when we called the last 2 days the entire port was closed because of weather. We're scheduled to get up at 4:30 and head out at 5:00.

I'll catch you up tomorrow!
Rene & Michael