Our Fishing was off to a great start when Jason landed two Pacific Bonito while enroute to our first destination Channel Islands Harbor (CIH). We left Port San Luis at 1545hrs on Sunday 28th and after 21.5 hours of motoring arrived at the transient registration docks in CIH to have dinner with a good friend, Captain Dan, who also found time to drive us by the market to restock up on some fresh produce. Capt Dan was the delivery Captain that helped Lori and I sail THIRD DAY to Port San Luis after we purchased her in Santa Cruz over two years ago, so it was great to see him again.
The trip to Catalina today had us leaving CIH at 0430hrs. Exactly 12 hours later we had the anchor down on the back side of Catalina in Catalina Harbor. The kids immediately wanted to go swimming in the clear blue (and relatively warm when compared to Port San Luis) water, so how could we say no? Dinner tonight was yesterday's fresh catch prepared "Blackened" with rice and fruit. Just so you know that cruising is a mix of good and bad, here's our list of things that went wrong in the last three days: Dingy Bow fell off of Davits when fitting broke, Oil is leaking from the Oil Cooler on the main engine, Oil is leaking from the V-drive transmission, a plastic bag fell in front of the Ice Box compressor unit fan causing it to overheat and shut down, we ran out of fuel in the Port tank and had to prime the fuel system (note: I thought we had at least another 4hrs of fuel left in that tank), and a slight mishap occurred during our anchoring when "neutral" was confused with "forward". So after that list how are thing going you ask? Really...they couldn't be better! We will divert back to CIH after Buccaneer Days this Saturday to deal with our two Oil leaks and then continue on to San Diego. I would much rather deal with mechanical problems NOW than somewhere down in Central America. Here are a few photos to give you a feel for our last few days.