Birthday (Weekend)
I requested Friday, Feb 15 off of work so that I could catch up on some cleaning before my mom came to visit for the weekend. I thought I was being smart to measure how much my engine water pump was dripping but putting a large sponge underneath it last weekend - that turned out to be a bad idea because the sponge soaked water and then it saturated under the engine-compartment door and onto the carpet. I love surprises like this.
So with the carpet out in the sun to dry, along with the bilge cover, I decided to completely clean the bilge. History: when I bought the boat the bilge was pretty mucky and about 2/3 full of bilge water. I sponged it all up, including goops of motor oil but realized that with the cutlass bearing steadily leaking (past problem, fixed in October) the bilge was quick to refill anyways.
Nowadays the only drip is from the old engine water pump, and it’s very slight. However there is still left-over mud, sand, and even pebbles at the bottom of the bilge, and it had about a 1" of water. I started by dropping soak-rags and sponge in there:
After soaking up all the water and wiping up all the mud and pebbles, I poured some “boat soap” in there to clean the bottom and freshen it.
My mom arrived around 430pm after driving down from Northern California. Then on Saturday, I invited a few friends over and we set out to sail around 100pm. It was warm, about 77 degrees, and the light wind eventually went away altogether once we made it about a mile out. I dropped the sails and we floated out there in flat seas in the sun for a few hours, had lunch and drinks, saw dolphins and sea lions, then motored back at sunset.
On Sunday my mom and I left the dock with fair wind, but I felt like garbage from eating too much stuffed-french-toast for breakfast and was not having the best time. After about a 3-hour sail we came back and washed the boat. On the way into the harbor we were cut off by a 70’+ cruising-powerboat heading in, apparently sightseeing the area with a boat too large to fit inside the smaller marinas within the harbor - which is exactly where he ended up - and blocked my access while realizing his mistake yet unable to properly spin the boat around. He skirted a liveaboard family’s boat on an end-tie and the revving of powerful smoke-spattering diesels caught everyone’s attention. I never thought people who had enough intelligence to get an occupation that afforded them such an expensive boat could lack the common sense it takes to decide, “I’m not going in there because I don’t know how to drive my boat and it cannot fit” - Unfortunately I was too busy with my own emergency turn-around maneuver (caused by this bozo) and motoring back to less congested waters while he sorted out his poor judgment to snap a photo.
It was a great vacation-style weekend. On Monday morning my mom departed and I noticed a couple of gigantic ‘tanks’ on the horizon in the harbor. They are “coke drums” made for the Chevron refinery in El Segundo, about 5 miles away. Redondo Beach harbor was chosen as the best place for them to get delivered on barge up from Long Beach. They were picked up by a crane and loaded onto the back of several heavy-duty trailers and towed through the beach towns in the middle of the night. They weigh 500,000 lbs each and are about 100’ long.
My neighbors Mike & Joanne are incredibly friendly and generous. Mike has let me borrow his kayak before, and Jo left me some breakfast after they took family out whale-watching on Monday morning. Needless to say, I came home from working out and felt justified to eat all of these at once. I’ll think of it as a final birthday present treat.
