Hawk in Ventura CA
12 September 2006 | Ventura, CA
HAWK is now tucked into her winter berth here in Ventura. We have spent the last week winterizing her and working hard to get some weight off the boat. When we built HAWK, we looked around at all the lockers and thought we'd never manage to fill them up. But after seven years aboard, every locker was overflowing and tending to eject its contents when opened. We were desperate to reclaim some space. A half dozen boxes and 500 pounds or so later, we can now open all the lockers without having their contents leap out at us.
We had a wonderful time in San Francisco. We were made to feel incredibly welcome by the San Francisco Yacht Club, the Point San Pablo Yacht Club and the Cruising Club of America. We have spent so much time in remote areas, it was great fun to be wined and dined, to get to share wonderful evenings with accomplished sailors, to exchange sea stories and get to know new friends. We have rarely been made to feel so much a part of an existing sailing community in such a short period of time. Our only regret was that we had to turn down many kind invitations because of the unrelenting demands of the books. Beth was in the midst of going through the page proofs for The Voyager's Handbook, which was a 12-hour a day job for several weeks.
After leaving San Francisco, we had some fine sailing down the coast with strong northerly winds most of the way. We stopped in Half Moon Bay, Santa Cruz, San Simeon, Port San Luis, and the Channel Islands before making our way to our winter berth. This is a tough coast for coastal cruising with few good harbors, frequent fog, and lots of swell. But that doesn't seem to discourage the many sailors we have met equipping boats for long-distance voyages. It has been a pleasure to see how strong and vibrant the sailing community is on this coast, from the summer sailing camp for youngsters in Port Madison on Bainbridge Island near Seattle to the cruising boats that fill the anchorages on the Channel Islands to overflowing despite the fog and large swell.
Beth will be heading back to the east coast at the end of this week, and Evans will follow on November 1st. Beth will be doing seminars and slide shows at the Annapolis Boat Show, Strictly Sail St. Petersburg, and the SSCA gam in Melbourne, Florida. In December, she'll be doing a slide show and all-day seminar at Orange Coast College. She'll be promoting her new book, Blue Horizons, which is now available from Amazon. Her revised The Voyager's Handbook will be available in early November. She's looking forward to seeing friendly faces at these events and catching up with good friends along the way.
We'll have good Internet connections and be easily reachable over the next few months, so feel free to get in touch. Look for another HAWK update when we get underway again in mid-December, bound for Mexico. We'll finally be back to full-time cruising, with the books behind us for the time being.
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK