Leaving Day!
15 October 2024 | Catalina Island
Alison Gabel | Cool and Cloudy

Sunday morning, 6am: we awoke to the thickest fog we'd ever seen anywhere. It was so thick, you couldn't see a duck swim by. Everything aboard was soaked. We fretted: what about tomorrow? Tomorrow is Leaving to Go Cruising Day! What will the weather be like on Leaving Day? More pea soup? We've said our goodbyes, doled out our cars, tidied up the house, stocked up on food. It's time to go. But weather is always in charge, and it's been an odd fall: usually this time of year it's clear and beautiful, with perfect temperatures, but we've been plagued with cold, damp, foggy days for weeks, broken by an occasional clear day just to tease everyone, then back to the cold damp foggy. We do have radar, and other fancy electronic gizmos to make "seeing" in the fog a lot easier, but this stuff was ridiculously thick.
But hallelujah! Leaving Day is lovely! By lovely, I mean cloudy and cool, with good visibility and decent seas. The wind was busy elsewhere - we hope to get lucky and put the sails up for a bit later in the afternoon, but mostly it's a motoring day.
We're loaded up on dried rice and beans, nuts and seeds, good sourdough starter and flour, lots of chompy snacky things, 2 fresh loaves of Pam's banana bread and some oatmeal cookies, Jennifer's sourdough bread, Joy's butternut squash soup, tomato sauce and pear compote, gobs of my favorite tea (Teechino Dandelion Caramel Nut) and Allan's favorite coffee (Trader Joe's Fair Trade Organic Sumatra), and fresh fruit and veggies stashed throughout the boat. Fly Aweigh is on course to Catalina Island for a few days where we plan to detox from all the busy-ness of getting ready to go cruising and try out our new wet suits. Our friend Pat loaned us a dive computer, so we'll spend a bit of time refreshing our dive skills and learning to use it.
We're between weekends of the 37th Annual JazzTrax Festival in Avalon, the only town on Catalina Island, a delightful Mediterranean-esque town with a fabulous old 1920's casino. Sorry to miss JazzTrax, but not sorry to miss the crowds. From Avalon we're bound for Ensenada, Mexico, where we'll get some work done on the boat, move to a marina, and stay through the end of November. We're grateful to have friends who offered to bring one of our cars down from Oxnard, (thank you Anne and Doug!) so we can go back and forth through the lovely Valle de Guadalupe Wine Country and spend time at our casita in Tecate. Dia de Los Muertos festivities start at the end of October and are rumored to be quite extravagant in Tecate, so that's where I'd like to be. Hopefully my sister Jennifer and cousin Yolie are coming down to join us for some of that.
Beyond November, we have plans - really fun plans! But I'll get to those in anther blurb.
The busy-ness of prepping was different this time, compared to prior prep phases, of which we've now had a few. It was far less stressful, largely because we've done it before on this boat, and we've been living aboard for 3 years now. We've also been sailing in Mexico enough that it feels familiar. Things were mostly set aboard Fly Aweigh, but there was quite a bit of refining to do: refine the wardrobe from an Oxnard, CA climate (cool and damp a lot of the time) to a hot Mexican climate. Refine the emergency gear to include an inflatable life raft, new LED flare, more smoke detectors. Check all personal floatation devices, check traditional flares for expiration dates, ditto fire extinguishers, get a new A-BC fire extinguisher, make decisions about whether to bring my inflatable SUP (no), our folding mountain bikes (also no), the kite boarding sails and gear (yes!), guitar and ukulele (also yes, although I don't play them often enough), refine the galley a bit, and inventory and enhance the food stores. Our love/hate relationship with Amazon hit ridiculous levels, as we replaced expired, lost, broken or obsolete things. I systematically emptied every cubby and storage locker, wiped all surfaces with a vinegar/tea tree oil mixture to remove and deter mildew, and repacked, taking stock of everything as I did. Allan went up the mast for a detailed rigging check, did the routine maintenance on both engines, took the dinghy to the fix-it guy to have the motor serviced, cleaned out the dinghy locker and power washed the whole thing. Fly Aweigh is waxed and polished, the carpets are clean, (I even slathered a layer of latex on the back of all the snap-down carpets to stop the deteriorating backing from leaving corn meal powder everywhere) and we have lots of toothpaste. The list above is the final, highly-refined list that got us through the last few weeks, but shows just a fraction of the stuff we bought and the things we did. (I'm a list-maker and a box-checker, a very satisfying pastime.) My friend Joy astutely pointed out that we didn't manage to go through the bathroom floor storage, and sadly, we didn't wash the main sail. We'll check the dive compressor tomorrow at Catalina. And, because it wasn't on the list, I forgot to grab the little folding step that makes getting aboard from a dock a bit easier. But the boat is clean and safe and all is well.
Other things have changed since the last time we set out for Mexico (3 years ago), most notably, Starlink. Our connection to resources is fabulous thanks to that white, modern-looking antenna receiver dish thing, which we call Sponge Bob Square Pants. Sponge Bob makes getting weather a snap. Staying in contact with home, friends, emergency services, the next marina, also a snap. Starlink can't make up its' mind about us boaters, though, and keeps changing the plan, charging more money and imposing restrictions, so who knows exactly what this season will be like, but we're better off than we were 3 years ago, and far better off than 15 years ago.
Also different: our knees, backs, agility = our age. When we left the first time to go cruising in 2009, I had just turned a youthful 50. Allan was still in his late 40's. We were fit and vegetarian and well-suited to the adventure. This time, although we're still in decent shape and still (mostly) vegans, we're stiffer, a bit less goat-like, less resilient. We're aware of that, but we're also aware that this cruising lifestyle always gets us in better shape. We breathe fresh air, swim in the ocean, move a lot, walk a lot. Just the activities of daily living (ADL's! Who over 60 isn't familiar with that term?!) keep us in shape. It makes me really realize that if you want to be a fit old person, do the ADL's a lot. Get up, walk, crouch down, climb over, keep things moving. We'll plan lots of ADL's and day-by-day we'll get back into top cruising shape. We look forward to lots of snorkeling and diving, walking and hiking, and just clambering around on the boat, contorting ourselves into unusual positions to get things out of lockers and cubbies. Boat yoga, it's called, and oh by the way we do regular yoga, too.
As I polish this off we've had a wonderful, relaxing night aboard at the Isthmus at Catalina, followed by a solid night's sleep. Waking up at 4am to refine the damn list is hopefully a thing of the past, or maybe I'll just start a new list. We saw a beautiful Seawind 1370, the classy big sister to our boat, parked just behind us yesterday, on their way to San Diego to join the Baja Ha Ha Rally to Cabo San Lucas. We'll likely see them again. And another familiar boat arrived today, one we met a few years ago in Barra de Navidad, no doubt also heading south for the season. Allan is making bubbles under the boat, all suited up in his dive gear. He lost a pair of good sunglasses overboard last night and just made a thorough search, but lo, the first sacrifice to Neptune has officially been made. So instead, he's cleaning the bottom with his new whirligig scrubber thing. It's cool and uber-quiet here, the off-season at the island is really my favorite. A little later we'll take a hike, maybe drop in at the Harbor Reef to have a drink, maybe even, just because, indulge in a big plate of french fries.
So there you go, just wanted to let you all know we made it to Leaving Day and ... we left!