Allan and Rina's Sailing Adventures Continue...

Loyal readers will recall a consistent theme over the years... Stupid Boat Tricks, or put another way, stupid things that I have done while cruising. Usually mundane and not life threatening, but sometimes destructive. Many times, it was just my penchant for...

After 3 hot and sweaty days in Cabo, we are off to La Paz with aunt Stephanie and John. Our passage to Los Frailes was the first upwind sailing we have done on this boat and it did not disappoint. Under double reefed main and hankerchief jib we easily did 7...

The morning of our departure was interrupted at 4:30am by Chubasco winds screaming into the anchorage, with sustained 25 knots and gusts to 40. Several boats' anchors dragged and at least one had to be cut and was left on the bottom. Our start was delayed...

Leg 2 got off to a start similar to leg 1, with strong winds. By late afternoon they reached 25-28 knots, forcing us to reef the main sail (for the first time ever) in big seas. The crew worked flawlessly to put 2 reefs in from the comfort of the cockpit...

Sv iliohale left the dock in Chula Vista at 830am to meet the fleet for the parade in front of the San Diego waterfront. Crossing under the Coronado Bridge, 105 boats converged in the North bay, with a San Diego Fire Department boat marking our departure with...

sv iliohale is off the dock headed for Mexico!

Fifteen years ago the crew of sv Follow You won top honors at the Baja Haha Cruisers Costume Party at West Marine in San Diego with our spot on Gilligan's Island costumes.

This year, four of that crew consisting of Corey and Bernice Wurzner,...

What a journey it's been. Three and a half wonderful years at Bolt Data have come to an end as Rina and I retire and head to Mexico. Thanks to Jeff Komlos for referring me in and the entire team for creating such a wonderful place to work. I have truly...

In what has been a not very well kept secret (except at work), Rina and I are cleared for departure. As all who head south know, the to-do list is massive, and we have been diligently knocking the list down over the past months. On the big project plan...

Iliohale has been berthed in San Diego Bay since bringing her down from the SF Bay area in March, 2023. Rina and I doublehanded her between the the barrage of storms that hit California. The good news was the superior boat speed of Iliohale over our prior...

June, 2004 - Rina christens sv Follow You

With equal parts excitement and trepidation, we have sold our Hunter 466, SV Follow You Follow Me, and will be moving to the suburbs of Las Vegas to enjoy a land-based existence while we search for our...

What a wonderful un-dramatic day and cap to an epic passage.... Leaving Ensenada at 6am we motor-sailed in 6-8 knots of wind most of the day and arrived at the entrance to San Diego Bay by 330pm. The good.... Customs and Border Patrol has an app that allows...

We are tucked into a slip at Marina Coral in Ensenada after an intense couple of days of sailing. We left San Quintin for a 9 hour motorsail to Colonet Bay and for the first 7 hours it was uneventful. Then I wandered into a kelp field. There is an

We left Turtle Bay expecting the worst. The 50 miles above Turtle Bay, including Cedros Island are notorious for creating washing machine conditions, but instead we had a smooth ride for about 24 hours to the west of Cedros including a 1 knot counter current...

It was a dark and stormy night... err.. scratch that... It was a cold and overcast morning when we woke from 7 hours of glorious in-interrupted sleep. I reached over and felt the lightly insulated hull near my pillow and it was cold and damp.... We haven’t...

Arrived safely in Bahia Santa Maria after a challenging 45 hours…. The world goes by very slowly at an average of 3.8 knots.

We prepared well for rounding Cabo Falso, just above Cabo San Lucas, and we timed it perfectly, getting North of Cabo...

Rina and I are both excited and anxious to be departing San Jose Del Cabo Sunday at 5am for San Diego. We have done the Bash twice before and know it can be miserable or just merely uncomfortable. It's all upwind and the drone of the motor and constant...

We are tucked away in our slip in Marina Puerto Los Cabo in San Jose Del Cabo after a 50 hour passage from Banderas Bay. Average speed about 4.8 and burned .9 gallons of diesel/hour. Not bad considering we were bashing into oncoming seas 90% of the time.

The last several weeks have been interesting to say the least. Along with the rest of the world, we have been socially isolating and following a very disciplined hygiene regimen. Unfortunately, we have not seen the same discipline among everyone in the...

Way back in January, as we left Tenticatita Bay for a day sail (aka dumping the heads out at sea) with Aunt Stephanie and Uncle John aboard, I noticed that our Yanmar temperature gauge was reading very high before the engine even reached normal operating...

Wow, sorry for dropping off the face of the earth since...errr... November, but just did not have the inspiration... Here's the short version: We kept heading South until the weather got warm, which was Banderas Bay where we spent Christmas and New Years....

We were in a hurry to head north as the customary north winds were on hiatus and we had 5 days to get as far as we could. Our goal was to sail 335 miles to Bahia Los Angeles, where the desert like conditions and relatively few cruisers make the experience...

When we left La Cruz in Banderas Bay on November 4th for the Sea of Cortez we were looking for cooler weather. Our last two nights in the La Cruz anchorage were hot and sweaty so we looked forward to cooling sea breezes as we sailed North. Conditions were...

After hauling out and getting fresh bottom paint at the La Cruz Shipyard, we relocated full time from Paradise Village Marina to Marina La Cruz to be closer to some of our favorite restaurants and live music hangouts. As October progresses, more and more...

Nuff Said....

For the nautically challenged, a cleat hitch is a simple but effective knot for securing a line to a cleat. No amount of additional turns around a cleat will improve the holding power of this simple but effective knot.

Peter Vargas and his team at SeaTek Yacht Services in the La Cruz Boat Yard did a fantastic job refreshing our aging bottom paint, sanding down to the gelcoat, laying down 2 coats of primer and 2.5 coats of black Amercoat ABC3 ablative bottom paint. His team...

As luck would have it, we were scheduled for a haul-out to repaint sv Follow You’s bottom the day before Hurricane Lorena was supposed to hit us. Generally speaking, a hauled-out boat in the yard is safer than being in the water during a hurricane but it...

During the entire time we were in the States, Rina and I obsessively checked the weather, looking for signs of hurricanes forming and heading up the coast. Climate Change not-withstanding, the hurricane patterns in the eastern Pacific are pretty consistent....

Lewis and Alyssa celebrating the now refreshed topsides on sv Quixotic

We splashed the boat on schedule and headed to Port Denerau to celebrate getting out of the hot and dirty yard....