Its 2am and after our extended break in wonderful San Diego, we're off to Mexico. More to follow at next Wifi.

With another storm lining up to hit San Diego on Thursday and Friday, we are looking at a new departure day of Saturday. The weather this weekend is suppose to be beautiful; sunny and temperatures around 70! We should have a great day of sailing down to Ensenada, Mexico.

When we woke up on Wednesday morning and checked out the weather, that was when we realized that a departure on Thursday was not going to happen. We briefly discussed the idea of treating ourselves, one last time, to a hotel room. By that afternoon, we easily justified the wonderful creature comforts of a hotel room. We enjoyed our evening of dining, playing pool and a very comfy cozy bed. We also spoiled ourselves to room service for breakfast in the morning.

Back on Tanga at 9:30am, we both went to work. Tom is pretty much caught up on everything so he decided to paint part of the decking in the cockpit. It looks really good and should help keep the bright glares down. I worked on the satellite phone and GRIB files. This afternoon, we rented a car and took care of a few items on our errand list. And for dinner? We wanted to enjoy one of our favorite food items, for one last time, good old Taco Bell!

This past Thursday, we took Tanga out for a spin. We tossed the dock lines around 9:00am, motored out into the bay and headed towards the anchorage area. Since we bought our new self-righting anchor back in January, we wanted to practice anchoring with it. While we sat at anchor, we did confirm that Tanga likes to turn beam-on to the wind instead of keeping the bow to the wind. This isn't a big deal if any anchorage area is empty but if it's a full anchorage, we will need to fly a small bit of our mizzen sail to keep our bow in the wind.

After our anchor practice, we motored back into the bay, raised the main, and motor-sailed out of the channel and into what looked like, a wall of fog. Once we were past Point Loma, we sailed around for the next few hours, at 3.5-4 knots. The swells were small at 3-5 feet and well timed out, so no rolling action was felt on Tanga. Once we were a few miles off shore, we looked back at the city, and we could barely see the skyline through the fog. At that point, we decided to head back home to our slip. We saw the usual sea life: sea lions, dolphins, and Tom saw a whale, unfortunately, I did not. We did have a tiny 1 inch crab hop from our anchor chain onto the deck while I was raising the anchor. I forgot to shoo him back into the water; I don't know what happened to that little fella. I looked for him when we were on our way back to the marina. I hope he didn't sun dry. Tom said he hopes he didn't crawl his way down into a dark crevice.

Today, we have been busy doing normal life stuff: cleaning and laundry. Another winter storm is rolling in tonight; so the winds have been howling. We have Brutus, our wind generator, running right now, pumping out 4-5 amps.

Our time is winding down here in San Diego. I'm very hesitant to say anything more than that right now. I will say that March 1st is less than a week away, and for my 40th birthday, I would like to be sailing to a new destination as my birthday present!

It truely is amazing how quickly time goes by on a boat. It's February, the middle of February at that. We're excited about this because the beginning of our pacific crossing is less than a month away!

Today, we lost another boat item to Neptune. So, today, as Tom was filling up our water tank, he accidently head butted our fishing gaff. Apparently, the gaff got mad at this forehead kiss gesture or it really wanted to be set free into the water because it bounced and jumped right over the lifelines and straight into the water. (I think I heard the gaff giggling as it sailed through the air). I truely believe it didn't like the forehead kiss gesture, Tom thinks differently! But, after living on Tanga for well over a year, we think we are doing pretty good with NOT losing items overboard.

On Friday, we enjoyed our morning with a relaxing Tanga stroll inside the San Diego Harbor. We passed along the downtown city waterfront, Harbor Island and Shelter Island. It felt nice to stretch our legs and be on the water again.