Tick, tick, tick.
20 November 2021 | Peninsula Marina, Channel Islands Harbor, Oxnard, CA
Alison Gabel | Cold! We wanna go south!
The timeline is shrinking. We hope to leave in 9 days.
At this point in the crazy prep phase, there's not much of interest to report, but we could generalize our days by saying "one step forward, two steps back, dammit, pour me a drink" and you'd be completely up to speed.
Quick summary: buy 300' of new 3/16" anchor chain, lug it into the car, out of the car, down the dock at high tide, so the ramp is flat instead of steep - a cart full of heavy chain in a wheeled cart down a steep ramp at low tide could get the better of anyone (image: Wile E. Coyote), unload the chain onto the dock, mark it with paint every 50', ponder the logistics of getting the chain into the dinghy (our floating car), under the bow (the pointy ends at the front), up onto the roller, along the guide to the windlass (the motorized gear thingy that pulls our chain up or drops it down) and ultimately into the chain locker. Well, the windlass jammed. Multiple times. Allan finally discovered that parts of it had shattered into 3 pieces. He managed to removed the shattered bits, which un-jammed the chain, and we got all 300' on board without further ado. But, we had broken bits, and needed new bits, and there's this thing we all keep bumping into called the "supply chain" which is apparently a big global mess. Luckily, the supply chain came through and we got our part, and are glad to have it now and all is fixed, while we're still tethered to dry land and the pesky supply chain is easier to access.
Multiply that by maybe 7 and you've got it. Oh, here's a good one: order 200' of line for a new halyard (the rope that hauls the sail up the 55' mast) (the tall thing in the middle) and then, when the very-sought-after rigger man makes a change in his schedule to help you with the new halyard, and spends many large and dangerous minutes (120 of them or so) going up that mast to pull that new expensive line to the top and then back down again, you discover that 200' isn't what you have. You have less. So it all comes back down, the rigger pulls the old halyard back up and into place, wraps up all his fancy mast-climbing gear and leaves.
We spend our evenings saying goodbye. Goodbye to dock neighbors, to old house neighbors, to family. We feel like we're going into space, launching toward Mars, with no chance of returning in this lifetime. But the boring fact of the matter is, we plan to come back next summer! So it's all rather anticlimactic.
Okay, so a friend said we need pictures, so I have pictures. Check the photo gallery. More later - :)