LandfallVoyages

No matter how well it goes, after any major repair, you’ve got to go out and give things a test run. See what stays fixed, what new things break, and how many other things decide it’s all of a sudden time to pack it in and take a vacation. I don’t like to be ruled […]

This was supposed to be a picture of pigeon parking. Just up the street from the dinghy dock, we spied a smallish flock of pigeons in various states of repose, scattered liberally amongst the blue lines marking off a handicapped parking space. They were supremely uninterested in us, which of course made them irresistible. It […]

Old boats are a lot like old cars, in that the minute you’ve fixed one thing on them, something else decides it’s time to take a permanent vacation. And so it is that our minor hydraulic steering leak went from trickling status to OMG she’s bleeding out. We’ve been trying to isolate the leak for […]

The trip from Oceanside to San Diego is really more of a blip. A hop. 30 miles at the most, during which time a whole lot of nothing happened. The weather was kind of meh and grey but it wasn’t too cold, which is a big gold star in my book. Eli drove the first […]

Today  started off rather inauspiciously with a cold, grey overcast that betrayed no hint  of the gorgeous day we had yesterday,  but by the time we stowed everything that needed stowing, the sun was starting to peek through. After we filled our freshwater tanks and pumped out the holding tank,  El Sol had Señor Overcast […]

I love these SoCal storms–a little bit of wind, a smattering of rain, gorgeous skies, and I’m not freezing my arse off. Hypothermia isn’t my preferred method of weight loss.  The guy at the harbor office didn’t even know we had weather coming in. I could get used to this. We rigged up the tarp […]

Oceanside is essentially a three pronged harbor. The northmost basin is Camp Pendleton. Don’t go in there. The middle basin is where you want to go–it’s got a number of transient guest slips straight under the Hollywood-style Oceanside sign. This basin is strictly for recreational vessels. The southmost basin is primarily geared toward commercial vessels, […]

We’ve got a bilge that’s impenetrably dark and seriously, deep enough to hide bodies in. For real. We haven’t actually field tested this particularly handy feature. Yet. Still, it’s nice to know we could take on a crapload of water and it would mostly just spiral down into the uncharted territory of the deepest parts […]

Recently we realized that in order to continue to thrill and entertain you, our illustrious audience, we needed better Internet connections in strange places. Not strange places in us, perv, us in strange places. First was a failed attempt with a USB dongle that ended in disaster and me yelling at Radio Shack employees. Next […]

You can try and hammer common sense into your kids until you’re blue in the face. Past a certain point they selectively filter out our voices and anything that actually gets through sounds like the grownups on a Peanuts cartoon. Parents, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a fact, they’ve done studies–sometimes, kids have […]