Thursday, April 7, 2011

San Diego - April Trip

Now that we own the old tub it is time to start fixing her up.  Connie and I flew down to San Diego from Seattle for a week of scrubbing and sorting. We got in late, rented a car and immediately bought a bottle of rum. San Diego has plenty of all night liquor stores, especially on Sports Arena Boulevard on the way to Mission Bay.  Tom had brought the boat from Harbor Island up to Mission Bay the week before. What a nice guy!  He left early and so had fog all the way.  So now the boat was waiting for us at Driscoll Mission Bay, a place I’d never seen before. 

Rum in hand, we dialed up the address into the iPhone and navigated at 1:00 in the morning to Mission Bay.  We found the side door to the yard and tried the key that they’d mailed to me and Voila! We were in.  Anticipation:  walking a strange dock in the dark looking for a boat we last saw a month ago.  Looking for our new home.
We found the slip, and the boat, all locked up tight.  I’d brought a flashlight so we could see while we set about dialing in the combination…. And it didn’t work.  Did I write down the wrong lock combination?  When all else failed we sat on the back deck and opened the rum.  I fired up my laptop and started going through various documents stored on my jump drive until I found the correct combination.  Then we were in.

Into our new home for a week, we broke out the clean sheets we’d brought and the sleeping bags and cleared the aft berth.  All snug in our new home we slept till the early morning jets leaving Lindbergh Field woke us at 6:30 AM.

With gusto we attacked various portions of the boat.  We started with the galley and the aft cabin, thinking that’s where we’d be using the most.  All the bedding and curtains came out.  Some went to the laundry, some to the dumpster.  We emptied the galley storage and washed or dumpstered what we found there.  Then we scrubbed every surface, all drawers, ceiling, walls, floors, everything. Whew!
We ended the trip with a visit to the Bali Hai where we sampled their famous Mai Tai and got a little tipsy.  San Diego, what a great place.


Then throughout the week we worked our way from stem to stern poking our way into every cubbie and finding an amazing amount of stuff.  We found replacement parts galore, tools, wire, cable, line, and every kind of nautical gizmo you could think of.  All seeming to be about 20 years old.

We went sailing a couple of times and really enjoyed that.  The ocean seemed so big!  But the boat was solid and we were very happy.  The alternator didn’t seem to be charging and there was oil in the bilge but we called the previous owner and he gave us some clues.