We are on the west side of Catalina Island, nothing between us and Japan except water. We sailed around the bottom of the island yesterday. The winds were pretty light but we did manage to sail for about 3 hours. When we left our anchorage on the east side of the island our destination was only 5 nm from where we were but we had to go around so we ended up traveling about 20 nm to get here.
It is gorgeous here, there are hardly any people and the anchorage we are in has no mooring buoys. There is a campground on the beach just about 400 meters from the boat, they either have planted a bunch of palm trees or it is a natural oasis, because the surrounding hills are all dry and brown, dotted with cactus, but the oasis has some green patches and there are some wonderful trees there. Someone, I think possibly the Wrigley family, of chewing gum fame, has brought bison to the island, and as we walked around the oasis there they were, browsing on the hillside.
We set off on a hour and a half hike over the hills, past a surfing spot, up a graded road to look over another anchorage, the views were astounding. When we got back we paddled back to the boat, had lunch and then went snorkeling for about an hour, man, what a tough life!! We saw some lobsters in a fisherman's trap, do they ever look funny, I would have loved to see one moving around. We hope to catch the fisherman when he is checking his traps to see if he will sell us one.
On the sail over yesterday I decided that we needed some fresh bread so put together some dough. Barry said he would prefer buns, so made a dozen and then got tired of shaping them so made the rest into a loaf. The dough rose beautifully but the oven seemed to be taking a long time to heat up, I got impatient so popped the buns in at too low a temperature hoping the oven would heat up, no luck, I cooked the buns twice as long as I should have and they came out a little doughy and very very pale. Barry played around with the burner and it seemed to fix it so the bread cooked properly, but by the time I got it in it had fallen from rising too long, but it tasted fine in our roast beef sandwiches.
We are going to stay here for awhile, we are waiting for our friends aboard Mungo. I think they are about a week behind us.