Two Harbors/ Small Craft Advisory

It's February 28th and the air is 48, the sun isn't up yet, and I'm going to get in 58 degree water. By the time I get down to the water's edge the cold sand has numbed my toes and somehow 58 degree seawater feels like a warm bath. Not after the first duck-dive, though. Why do I do this? Because I'm smiling during every wave I catch. My hooting and hollering of happiness inside the barrels echo around me before it encloses me and crashes. That's a lot like a surf session. It's great at the moment, then it's gone. Just a memory. Now I'm sandy, and too numb to have the grip in my fingers to turn my car key. I'll spend the rest of the day tired and salty but it was totally worth it.

Connor letting autopilot steer the boat and using his GoPro and iPad to view dolphin videos. Technology has its advantages  

Arriving Saturday - couldn't believe how green the island was

You can see how it would be easy to lose a frisbee in this  

The next day I got a text message from Connor that was just a NOAA style weather forecast for the weekend.

"What does this mean?"

"Catalina this weekend"

I went along with him on his boat, Sea Casa. We left around 8am Saturday and it was a mellow crossing to Two Harbors. The ocean was filled with dolphins, traffic cones, and party balloons. We got there and were among only 6 other cruising boats, went to shore to play frisbee golf and meet up with his friend who does research on the island and lives there. There's a frisbee golf course sprawled out around two harbors but with all of the recent rain the growth on the island covered some of the baskets, so after losing our only two frisbees in the thick green grass and drinking all the beer packed in the backpack (legal there - private land), we returned to the boat, donned Connor's suits to try to fit in with a wedding going on that night - which was the only other reason people were there, plus it over-took the bar/restaurant. Our plan didn't really work and we didn't want to cause any kind of disturbance so we ended up just being overly-dressed and sitting at the quiet bar at Two Harbors, entertaining people who questioned our outfits coupled with our exclusion from the wedding group. 

Leaving Sunday, smacked by all the elements of a small craft advisory  

Connor works at Space-X and his enthusiasm for space travel was evident by this poster in the v berth where I slept. 

On Sunday a small craft advisory was setting to be in effect so we cancelled our plans to go diving and rock jumping at Parson's Landing, and set off in the building wind to cross the channel. When we started we could see clear across the channel to Palos Verdes and it was visibly raining there. About an hour out from the island, the last of the "nice patch" of weather was gone and we had fast moving walls of rain all around us. The winds gusted up to around 25 mph, the boat rounded up a couple times despite our reefed mainsail. Then the rain caught up to us, or we caught up to it, that's a difficult thing to tell when you have no landmark in sight or sense of how quickly your boat is travelling (7.2 knots at one point). Either way the waves were spraying over the bow, the wind was stinging us sideways, and I ran out of layers to put on to stay warm. By the time we got to the harbor entrance, the rain was gone and the wind was steadily around 25 mph, forcing waves to crash crumble and churn everywhere. It was quite a trip and I'm thankful that I was a passenger on someone else's boat in that ugly weather. As luck would have it, it was about 80 degrees and with calm winds the day before we left and the day after we got back, so the wild weather and sailing was meant to be. Connor is planning a trip to Panama and beyond on this boat and looked at it as good practice in case he gets stuck in bad weather.

From Connor's instagram account. I wasn't able to move my fingers enough to operate my phones camera.