San Diego Hospitality

We finally made it to San Diego and in a few days will be in Mexico. We arrived last Sunday and anchored in 10 feet of water in the " La Playa" anchorage just off the Southwestern Yacht Club. It's only available on weekends and holidays (to prevent derelicts and nasty liveaboards).  While there we met up again with our new friends Scott and Donna. They told us about a wonderful man named Frank that is a SYC member who enjoys assisting visitors like LaDonna and Rob did in Sausilito.  He was kind enough to help me get my glasses replaced, reprovision and drive us around sightseeing. The lush canyons and historic homes are gorgeous.  It was delightful and very much appreciated.

The next day we docked at the SYC for three reciprocal days (thank you Semiahmoo YC). Their new 8 million dollar club house is wonderful. Their old 30 yr old club house was very nice and everything recently upgraded but the Port Authority forced them to raze it and rebuild. Another yacht club scrambled to get historic status for their club to protect it and the PA forced them to build more around it. No one understands the logic - if there is any.

Several people have told us that we must absolutely check into Mexico at Ensenada because all the facilities that you have to visit are all in one place. Greg wants to get in and get out as fast as possible while I would like to look around a little. We will wait and see what develops.

It's Greg's turn on the blog:

 It took us two tries to get past Point Conception and get in to the Channel Islands.  Wind coming down the coast has been fluky.  Too much or none to speak of. If you try to sail in a SW wind you end up doing the “Baja Bash” going southward, so you quickly learn to stay at anchor and have another beer waiting for the NW wind to come back.  Just listen for the next small-craft advisory warning and you know its time to go sailing.  Example: we left Catalina Isle in the afternoon and sailed all night in a nearly full moon with 7-12 knots of wind waiting for the “gusts to 25 or higher”.  The anemometer says the max was 27.9 but it either lasted for about 14 seconds or we were asleep when it occurred. It took 18 hours to go 86 miles, but I did make about 80 gallons of water by running the water maker at both ends of the trip (about 2.5 hours). 

For those interested in our water maker:  Since I have to use it regularly, we’ve used it almost exclusively with a few exceptions when we were in marina areas of SF and Sacramento.  The water was so bad in Sacto that we made water out of the river on the way down.  Once we got south of the Bay Area the filters are lasting for hundreds of gallons.  In high salt (open ocean) the production runs about 32-35 gph at 2500 engine rpm with a pressure of 800-850 psi.  This speed is too fast (6.5-7 kn) for most motor sailing, but is good if there’s no wind and entering ports/anchorages.  I can make useful water down to about 2000 RPM but the max pressure available is only about 600-700 psi and the TDS runs up about 130.  Funny thing is that I find the water with TDS at 130 tastes better.  Production is only 15-20 gph.  But if you have to motor all day that isn’t much of a limitation. 

If I was doing it again, I’d opt for a larger engine pulley and run the pump faster at slower speeds.  Higher pump speeds would probably let me use a larger orifice.  Another change that I’d make is to add a manual bypass valve between the restricting orifice and the regulator.  This would have to be a high pressure (1000 psi) SS ball valve which would need suitable hi-pressure plumbing as well.  The valve would let you manually unload the system and allow a higher flow from the supply pump for bleeding and flushing.  Today I have to turn the high pressure pump back on to flush the system out after the valves have been switched back to a fresh water supply.  The supply pump can do it but it takes almost 30 minutes to circulate 5 gallons thru the system. 

Everything else has been working fairly well although I had something chafe the spinnaker halyard cover just behind shackle so I had to shorten it a couple feet and have done some repairs/re-enforcement on the main sail – Apparently Catalina’s sail makers never expected someone to run around with a reef in for hundreds of miles in 20-30 knot winds with the sail flattened as much as possible.  The forward ends of the batten pockets needed to re-enforced too.  Its all Don’s fault – even with the headsail down to 90% it pulls so much that I really have to “kill” the main in order to slow down.  We ran about 70 miles w/just the headsail up at 90% at 7-9 knots.  Wind was 35 and swell was 8-10 feet with wind waves from a different direction, so not very comfortable, if I want to get down to 5-6 knots I must run only a reefed main, maybe with just a scrap of headsail.