I dropped my moorings in Cat Harbor on the morning of the second day to make my way 20 miles by sea around the west end of the island to get to the north side of the isthmus only half a mile by foot. My friend, Bruce Smith, was to join me for the sail to San Diego and he hadn't decided whether he'd come all the way to the isthmus or if we'd meet further east at Avalon. In any case, I needed to cut a day off the sail to the mainland to keep Bruce's three-day weekend schedule intact.

Okay, I'll tell Bruce and Janeen's story, ...the one I alluded to in my previous post. I'd known Bruce when we'd both worked in Saudi Arabia, but only in passing at a party or two and at the Saudi Aramco sailing club. Serendipity contrived to have us both moving back to San Diego in 1999, and our recently overlapping experiences encouraged us to strike up a more contiguous friendship.

Bruce was born in Tasmania and grew up on a farm there with family roots in South Africa. Janeen is from Zimbabwe where she grew up on a farm as well. Her mother, Margaret or Mum, is a wonderful woman who harks up the image of a grande dame of the colonial era with her accent and her poise and her stories of steamship transits back and forth to mother England. I absolutely adore her. I'm slightly guessing here to fill in my poor memory, but as I understand it Janeen's family lost their farm to the Zim "government" in the unrest back in the 90s and evacuated to South Africa where Janeen and Bruce met. As my friendship with Bruce grew, so did my friendships with Janeen and Mum.

So, Bruce was making his way to San Diego to fan the flames of his long distance romance with Janeen into marriage. Janeen was already a naturalized US citizen, but Bruce still carried a Tasmanian passport. They'd been working to get Bruce his US citizenship before they got married, but it was taking too long. Eventually they learned that wasn't necessary or maybe they were just getting frustrated with the lengthy process, so decided to tie the knot regardless.

That's when I received a message on my work answering machine that went something like, "Hey, Roy. Bruce here. Janeen and I want to know if you'll marry us."

Now, what would you think if you'd received such a message on your machine? I was flabbergasted and a bit confused, especially since something about Bruce's wording made it sound like he was inviting me into some sort of official three-way. I called him back at his office with incredulity in my voice.

Bruce clarified. Having made their decision to get hitched, they'd investigated with the San Diego County Assessor/Recorder/County Clerk's office and found that they could, indeed, just get married. Further, they were allowed to have anyone they wanted temporarily named as a Deputy Commissioner of Marriages to officiate at their wedding and they asked if I would do them the honor.

They did have an ulterior motive, though, and I can see them hatching up their plans as people do when they start to get excited about an idea. Starting with, "Yes, let's do it!", I imagine them asking each other the whens and wheres and whos of the ceremony. "Big wedding? No, little wedding. Church? No, Justice of the Peace."

Then someone must have stumbled upon the Deputy Commissioner angle, so they asked themselves, "Who?" That's when the light flashed on, "Roy! He's got a boat and we could get married on board!" I'd taken them sailing on Mabrouka several times and I'm sure this plan was fully hatched before Bruce left his message on my machine.

The wheels were rolling at full throttle very shortly. We would sail Mabrouka to Catalina to perform the ceremony at Two Harbors on the isthmus. My then girlfriend, Angie, would come out from Saudi for the occasion. Bruce's idea of dressing up for a wedding was to rent an old sea captain's uniform and I was to dress similarly, though in a modern version akin to Captain Stubing on the Love Boat. Angie got in the swing of things with a blue flapper's dress, complete with feather boa. Janeen opted to costume herself in a traditional wedding dress.

The plan was executed with precision as I sailed Mabrouka up to Long Beach where the rest of the wedding party joined up for a foggy procession across to Catalina. Other family members ferried in to Two Harbors and Bruce booked a room at the Banning House Lodge in Two Harbors for the nuptial bed. We anchored Mabrouka in Cherry Cove and performed the ceremony standing in her cockpit. It was a grand and moving time and I was extremely honored that they chose me to do this for them. It's made us into lifelong friends.

Believe it or not, that was a relatively short version of the story. So with that behind us, I'll move forward to present day. Bruce had decided to take the Catalina ferry to Avalon and would arrive on Friday afternoon, so I stayed at Two Harbors, less than a mile from where we'd had the wedding, only one night.

It's a wonderful place. The rustic buildings sit on a large crescent of a bay rimmed with a sandy beach that, itself, is bracketed by red sandstone cliffs to the west and grey and brown shore that gets increasingly rugged as it goes east toward Avalon. A short, old wooden, entertainment pier painted in 40s aqua blue juts out of town, it's ramp sloping down to a float that accommodates dinghies, shore boats, a fuel dock, and pump out facilities. The water is crystal clear, providing an aqua blue lens through which you can see the Garibaldi swimming lazily over the sandy bottom thirty, even forty feet down. Buoys are arranged with fore and aft ties so that they can line up hundreds of boats to fill the bay in parking lot fashion.

It was sunny and warm the day I stayed there, and I was lucky to get a spot since the bay was filling up fast with boats vying for spots for the weekend's Buccaneer Days celebration. I needed to shift from ancient mariner to party mode to enjoy it because music was emanating from boats all around. The most insistent volume knobs were to be found aboard the ones flying streams of pirate flags. Dinghies were plying pirate clad revelers back and forth to shore. I doubt that any REAL pirates wore eye patches and string bikinis, though I found the contrast fascinating in the extreme.

The drunken revelry ashore that night wasn't much of a temptation for me. Though I'd threatened to chop off one leg, replace one hand with a hook and poke out an eye to get into the swing of things, I decided against it at the last minute and waded through echoes of rock-n-roll to get to sleep that night. I needed a relatively early start in the morning to be at Avalon in time to meet Bruce's arrival.

[By the way, I did enjoy 61st birthday libations with new friends at the bar in Two Harbors on October 1st. These days that's more than enough icing on my cake of well-wishes from family and friends, and I found plenty of those via Facebook. Thanks to everyone.]