We are in San Diego at the dock. It is a hyper-social context for working on the boat and preparing for Mexico. Karen's cousins Kirk and Deb Shoop have their boat Kela moored here and they are here to visit us. Kela is the boat that we used to cross the Atlantic in 2001. Ron Bauman, a great friend from Seattle, came by while enroute to Yuma Az on a business trip. Our friends Kat and Bill Russell (SV Island Bound) arrived here about 20 minutes after we did. We have a nephew, Aaron Shoop, that lives here and visited us. And our friends of more than 20 years, Barbara and Mike Hurley, live here and visited. Paul and Judy Meany (SV Grace) are due here today or tomorrow. Bob and Sherry Custer will arrive about Nov 10. Sailing friends of Kirk and Debbie (John and Lynette) work here now and have joined us to swap stories (Theirs are way more adventurous than ours).

While all this social networking is happening, we are trying to get the boat and the crew ready to enter Mexico. After all, we have a dinner date aboard SV Jake in Mexico that we want to get to. In spite of our best efforts to "fix everything" in Seattle, our bow thruster and engine room blower failed enroute. The fix entails diagnosis (new failure modes have to be understood) and then parts acquisition. The bow thruster is basically unsupported by its manufacturer so we are left to search the internet for parts. We got very lucky (thanks to Ron Bauman) and found the new contactor we needed on EBAY in California. So today I am installing the new contactor. The blower hasn't arrived yet (we ordered it out of Seattle). Hopefully it comes on Monday's UPS shipment. We have other spares that we've also ordered and those won't arrive until Tuesday, so we can't leave before then.

San Diego is a nice spot to party with friends (especially friends that know the town). Last night we went out for Thai food and Kirk and Debbie invited John and Lynette. John and Lynette are friends of theirs from the South Pacific that have returned to San Diego to work for a little while before doing the South Pacific again. They are much younger than we are and it shows. They are very adventurous and resilient. Their stories included a visit to the Soloman Islands and New Guinea. Both these areas are very seldom visited by cruising yachts for the simple reasons that they have lots of tropical disease, salt water crocodiles and they are not safe from thieves. They visited beautiful dive sites and anchorages that hadn't seen a cruising yacht for more than 7 years (according to the villagers). Lynette said "at least it wasn't boring". You know that we were sitting on the edge of our chairs listening when John and Lynette were talking about how to minimize these types of difficulties (They had some very good ideas). It is no accident that they did this and are still here to tell the story. They were pretty smart about how they did it.

We can report that just before we published this we completed the repair to the bow thruster. We're busy but happy and liking the sun and the warm air.