We needed to sail the boat from San Diego to Ventura, with a stop at Catalina, so we spent a week in San Diego preparing the boat for the short cruise. Other than moving all of our stuff aboard, we found a few problems that needed to be corrected, including two difficult ones.

First, the valve from the head to the holding tank was stuck closed. This was a 1.5 inch ball valve in a difficult place and position. I spent most of a morning trying to open it with no luck and most of the next day removing and replacing it.

Second, the boat had a roller furling genoa and headstay, which didn’t agree with our hanked on sails. I was willing to live with it for a short while, but when I inspected all of the rigging and was unable to view and inspect the swage terminals of the roller furling stay, and not knowing how old or what abuse it had seen, I decided to replace it immediately using Sta-Lok terminals. Rhonda and I removed and replaced the old stay and roller furling gear with the new stay in three hours.

 

There were many other small issues to remedy, but most were simple, including,

• Swap out the two zincs (mask, fins and snorkel),

• Re-name, re-letter the boat,

• Stow all our stuff from Colorado and provision,

• Inspect and tune the rig,

• Buy and install ground tackle (see Outfilling, page 2),

• Clean and fill the water tanks,

• Loosen shaft packing nut to proper drip rate,

• Remove old propane stove and tank (will install new paraffin stove in Ventura),

• Install required USCG labels,

• Install required fire extinguishers,

• Replace oversized fuse on bilge pump,

• Install 5/8” nut on gooseneck bolt that was missing,

• Epoxy seal exposed wood deck core at anchor chain pipe (still dry),

We really appreciated the help and friendship of all the folks at the Kona Kai Marina, particularly Linda and Art Ames, who helped us a lot with many of our projects and introduced us to many of the fine people at the marina. We are also perpetually indebted to Chris Owen, who ferried us all over town so we could gather up the parts and provisions to make the boat ready for sea. Good friends are a blessing.

The trip to Ventura and Catalina was wonderful. Aside from having to beat the entire distance, including five hours one wet afternoon in 21 - 23 kt. winds (true), we had fun. We saw hundreds of dolphins and three blue (yes, blue) whales. I had to steer to miss one of the whales. We also got to link up with our good friends, Jim and Kathy McCollum, in Catalina on their Catalina 30. They cooked two delicious meals for us (we had no stove) and took us to Avalon in their dinghy.