The picture is the sailing vessel Talaria as she leaves Marina Bay heading out towards the Golden Gate! On board are owners Bill and Jean whom we have had the pleasure to become friends with over the past year. They are making their way down the coast and will be in San Diego to participate in the Baja Ha Ha cruiser's rally leaving the end of October for Mexico. We look forward to seeing them again in warmer climates.

As for us? We are doing very well. A few more months and we may be able to begin thinking about a departure date for us. In the meantime we have been learning to live in our small space, working on projects and just learning to take life a bit slower which can be a lot harder than it sounds.

We are on a Medical Hold and won't know for how long until after the appointments in Mid March. The good news is Rick gave me the green light to upgrade the interior with all new cushions. I am more than half finished, and if I do say so myself they are turning out great. We went with an UltraSuede material and not only has it been a dream to work with, it looks wonderful down below. I will post pictures as soon as I am finished on our .mac site (still trying to get the site updated and looking nice).

We finally had to refill the propane tanks and realized that since they were full when we purchased the boat, they were fitted with the old valves. We could not fill them. One was an old style steel tank and we couldn't even replace the old valve with the new one. The other tank is aluminum and we should be able to get the valve changed out. Still left us with having to replace one tank. We did not want to go with another steel tank, which would have been easy and inexpensive to replace, Rick want another aluminum tank.

Thus began an intensive web search for the new tank. Turns out they are pretty expensive. A 20lb tank was going to cost a little over 200.00. But during Rick's search he discovered some new (to the US) technology, Fiberglass Propane tanks. Seems not only are they rust proof, they will not explode (like the metal tanks) in intense heat from fire. Then the icing on the cake, for under the price of one aluminum tank, we purchased two 20lb fiberglass tanks.

They are pretty close in size to the old aluminum tank, but our propane locker needed some sanding down. Rick also sanded down the plastic housing on the tanks themselves. Project took almost 3 days, but well worth the time and effort. Sometime before we leave we are going to get the aluminum tank valve changed out and fit it for the BBQ. It will be nice to have 3 tanks for cooking as I plan to do a lot of that!

That's all for now.

wish there was a really good reason for not posting an update in such a long time, but there really isn't a great one. We spent the month of July getting rid of everything in the Apartment in San Jose that was not coming with us and moving out.

We have spent August and September thru today working on the boat, and while very interesting to us, make very boring reading I'm afraid. To give you a highlight, we have replaced the stove and have it running. We have removed the old refrigeration and installed the new Tropicool and it is operational! We removed the old head and replaced it with a new Skipper II. We removed the second holding tank under the Vbirth to make room for the water maker which is almost finished.

Course these were mostly Rick jobs, while I continued to work on the canvas projects, as you can see from the picture above I replaced the old dodger along with the sail covers, cockpit awning, lee cloths, wheel/instrument cover and am currently working on a cover (chaps) for our dingy.

All in all we are doing good, if not as fast as we would have liked all the projects to go. As for when we think we will be ready to leave? Hoping to have an answer to that in the next couple of weeks, but think it will be toward the end of November maybe early December if we run into any more unexpected delays.

We had a very brief visit from John and Michelle the end of July, it wasn't near long enough and now as of 3 weeks ago they are in Kuwait waiting to begin their year tour in Iraq. Last time John was in Iraq I only had to worry about him, now I will be worrying about both my son and daughter-in-law. Another reason not to miss TV.

Looks like we will be moving onto the boat by the end of next week. Next BIG step toward leaving. It will help us to find out what is working and what is not ??" keeping our fingers crossed that we do not have to add too many new projects to fix!

Well that's it for now. Hope to update again soon with more real news.