Our buddies, Steven and Sandi on Mungo arrived in Little Harbour right on cue and we spent the next day hiking about and chatting up a storm, catching up on what we have done and who we have seen since San Francisco. Very nice to have some company. Today we sailed to Avalon on the south east side of Catalina Island, we were here about a week and a half ago, we decided it was too far to get to the mainland in one hop so this was a good half way point. We had a lovely spinnaker run on the way over today. Barry was very uncaptain like and allowed me to put it up, I didn't even have to whine. We did our first spinnaker gybe on Cat's-Paw IV but we have a sock so that really doesn't count. We doused the spinnaker, gybed the main and then reopened the spinnaker, it went off without a hitch, YIPPEE, maybe Barry will learn to love the spinnaker. It is a lovely big sail and we had winds about 10 knots on the starboard quarter, just perfect. We went to see a movie in the Casino tonight,
what a gorgeous building. The theater is not a movie house it is a real theater and there was a fellow playing a pipe organ before the movie started. He was really something and the acoustics of the room, it has a 75 foot domed ceiling, were astounding, I enjoyed the surroundings as much as the movie.
I am reading 'The KON-TIKI Expedition' at the moment. It is about a group of Norwegian's that set off from the coast of Peru in a raft made of balsa wood, a replica of an ancient raft to prove that the indigenous peoples of the Polynesian Islands could have descended from the Peruvians. They have just left the coast at this point and are not even sure if the raft will sail or whether or not it will fall to pieces, there are 6 men on the raft and they have provisions for 4 months. I will let you know how it turns out. I just finished Francis Chichester's book 'Gypsy Moth IV Around the World', about an Englishman that circumnavigated single-handed in 1967 stopping only in Sydney, Australia, he was 65 at the time. The book was really interesting because he basically took a boat that had been designed and built especially for the voyage, but the design had not been tested before he left. He wanted a certain kind of boat and the designer figured what Chichester wanted wouldn't work so he made it different. Sir Francis ran into all kinds of problems with the boat and the description of the process he went through to figure out how to sail the boat to overcome the design flaws was quite fascinating. I must have turned into a sailor sometime when I wasn't looking because I understood nearly everything in the book.
We are off to Dana Point tomorrow, a harbour that is half way between Marina Del Ray and San Diego. We should be in San Diego on Sunday. Both boats have some major provisioning to do, we are running out of all sorts of stuff, nearly all our cans from Canada are gone and I have no more white flour or sugar left on board and I think Mungo wants to do some repairs. They had a charter boat sideswipe them going into Monterey. We are hoping to get some of our preliminary Mexican paperwork done there as well so I imagine we will be there about a week. I hope to be able to put some pictures on the blog tomorrow. Hope all is well with all of you.