September 20, 21, & 22.
The forecast was 71 and mostly cloudy. Wrong again, fortunately for the part of me that had a desire to go sailing. The wind was stronger than usual, so Mia and I pushed A CENOURA to her edge, in the fun sailing conditions. We had enough wind to sail quickly out of the main channel at Redondo beach and north along the coast. The rail was not buried under the water but enough splashing threw pools of water to the lee side of the deck. On the way back we were abruptly cut-off but a 40’ trawler and changed our course to lessen the blow from their wake. Then sailing fast up the channel eventually passing the trawler under wind power alone. It was pretty sweet. We always comment on how comfortable it is to sail inside the harbor where it’s flat. Must be nice, for all those lake sailors.
When it came time to furl the jib, it was the most difficult I’ve experience - because the threads on the line snapped and we snagged. Evident by the photos, I pulled hard enough to break some of the line and get that sail rolled up.
That night, Mia’s friend, Kait, had us over for pizza and drinks and some spackling because she was moving out this weekend and had some holes to cover up. Fun times! We had a moment to celebrate my moms birthday by calling and singing Happy Birthday.
On Sunday it was again sunny and warm, there was offshore wind and 3-4 foot waves, so I got myself out of bed and walked to the Redondo break wall to surf. The combination of swell made for peaky, short-period waves, which are usually my favorite. You get the chance to catch more waves and some turn into really good rides. Also, it’s rare that the South Bay gets decent waves, so it was nice to take everything I’ve been doing at work in Huntington Beach and translate it here.
Then the errand was done for the new line. 60 feet, a slice, a knot and I was done. Probably one of the simplest yet most important fixes I’ve done on the boat.

It has been exactly a year since I saw my boat for the first time. There have been a lot of good times, but I still have not erased the old name and put on my new one, A CENOURA. There was a blog entry about the difficulties of having the name removed and replaced, but I haven’t given up, I’m just waiting for a good wide open amount of time to tackle the project. Watch, I’ll suffer doing it while the boat is in the water and a month after I finish, I bet the boat will require being hauled out for something anyways.
I guess it’s a good thing I rarely ever see the transom. I saw it this morning on my way to the marina office and snapped this photo, though.
At the marina office was a thank-you-gift-package waiting for me. Inside I found a really sincere card, thanking me for having Mia’s brother and sister James and Maeve out sailing. Gestures like this are very appreciated and two extremely functional boat-friendly collapsible bowls and tongs were in the package. Now I can feel one step closer to being a galley occupying culinary expert. I used to mix salads in the plastic bag I had I buy them in.

September 13 - 15.
I came home from work on Friday to a grand surprise. Just a few days ago my dock hose nozzle went missing. I only had it for a couple months. My girlfriend, Mia, being as thoughtful and nice as she always is, drove around looking for just the right replacement. Target didn’t have one she liked, so she drove 3 towns over to a real hardware store and found one their. This nozzle is a thing a beauty. I’m hiding it in my dock box now. Then, another surprise - that awesome nautical belt! You’ll see me wearing this almost every single day now.
Without much else going on, and overcast weather, we played cards and drank a mixed sangria of sorts, and watched things going on around the marina.
Actually on Saturday I felt like watching “Come Hell or High Water” , a bodysurfing film. The kid in me who would watch a movie and want to act it out, well he wanted to go bodysurfing even though it was overcast and the waves were crud. Mia was totally in on this. We walked over to the Redondo break wall beach, me in a warm wetsuit and fins, Mia in a swimsuit. She stayed out in the water almost as long as I did. I was happily in disbelief.

What you see here is the week around 9/11. The top is a similar photo I took in the winter taken upside down of the reflection behind my boat on the calm water. Then the sky that same day. It was actually colder than it looks. Also, it has that far-away-fire smokey haze to it, but I don’t believe there were any fires.
This is the first week that you could tell that fall is approaching. The drive home from work while the sun was almost set compared to having 3 more hours of daylight, it’s a feeling. Partially good, but partially not good.
That anchor in the bed of my truck belongs to Planet, my dads boat. About a month ago when I was sailing with Mia and her brother, sister, cousin, and roommate, it was really windy. My dad actually motored down to Redondo and after a few failed anchoring attempts due to such strong wind, he found a solid spot in a slightly different location about 40 yards away. It was so stuck, in fact, that it was permanently stuck. So he had to let out over a hundred feet of chain until the rode (rope) was unreeling, and cut that off, abandoning the chain and anchor - until he found out harbor patrol will go retrieve it for free- nice! So I met him and we tossed it in my truck for me to drive back to Marina Del Rey.
Finally just a picture of my bike at the gym.
Also today I came home after being gone for 13 hours to find someone tool my hose nozzle. What the hell.

September 6 & 7:
A couple times a month someone breaks the red parking lot gate. This time they were nice enough to leave their cell phone on the ground, which I answered when it rang. That was fun. I left it for them to pick up, but I should have told them to pick it up at the marina office whenever they can and told the marina, “this is the person who keeps breaking your gate.” Oh well, maybe I got myself some good cell phone karma. This weekend was what I would consider as the start of my favorite time of year. After Labor Day, the crowds are gone yet the weather actually (normally) gets even better through October.
On Friday night I had some laundry to do, 6 loads in total, and Mia helped out. Fortunately the laundromat is conveniently close and empty on a Friday night so everything was done getting washed and dried in a short time - but I take about 3 hours to fold my clothes, so I was up until a out 1am.
On Saturday morning it was sunny and hot, a few errands and chores were done - such as filling the water tanks - I tried to provide photo examples of the before and after of the bows waterline. I can always tell the tanks are almost out of water because the bottom paint is visible for about 3 inches out of the water. After weighing down the boat we decided to go out for a sail to bluff cove. It was a choppy and bumpy short-interval waves kind of sea-state. It felt okay sailing in but as soon as we anchored I felt like garbage. The boat rocked and tossed so much it was almost washing water over the side rail. I tried the “rocker stoppers” but didn’t have enough weight to anchor them down. I thought a filled-up water bottle would do that trick but I was wrong. So after trying to relax in the sun, but really just holding on to things so we didn’t fall off the boat, we decided to sail away. That’s when I pulled in about 80’ of anchor line so only about 40’ was left of chain an rope. This is when the fun started.
With the boat on shorter line it seemed to bounce more in the choppy swells. Things were swaying everywhere as we geared up to sail away. That’s when I noticed the main halyard had wrapped around the radar-detector in front of the mast, about ¾ of the way up. Could not raise the sail, I tried to whip the halyard loose but when I took a break and looked around, we were drifting close to shore. Mia fired up the engine so we would not sail off the anchor after all. Now, I was pulling up the anchor and realized it had scooped up an entire seaweed plant that stretched from sea floor to surface, it was heavy. As I pulled as hard as I could to slowly get the anchor up, and the couple hundred pounds of soaked slippery seaweed along with it, we were slowly heading out into the open water.
I eventually was able to hold on through the motion and only let the anchor slide out of my grip once, back into the water with the weight of speed drag, anchor, and seaweed fighting against me. But soon it was up and tied down, and I pulled all of the plant off of it.
It was obvious that motoring back in the short period diagonal swell was going to be uncomfortable so I figured I should probably try to untangle the halyard using the bumpy and rocking motion of the boat than climb the mast at the dock. What the heck, right?
I used that worthless water bottle weight from before and tied it to the length of the halyard that looked like it could get above the spreader, yet below the radar-detector, and swing out and untangle the halyard. I tied some extra line to the halyard so I wouldn’t completely lose it. After about 1 minute of tugging and timing and pulling with the swells lifting the boat, it somehow worked.
Phew. So we sailed back, mostly down wind and we both started feeling better about it all.
Back at the dock I pulled the chain and rode out and picked off more seaweed that i had to stuff in the locker, and rinsed everything.
Also, the last time I put fuel in the tank was in February, when my mom visited. We topped it off. 7 months later, and what I consider as a decent amount of engine use, all it took was 4 gallons… If only the gas dock didn’t have a monopoly in the marina.
The picture of the wine glass (white grape mimosa actually) was taken while tied to the dock, this shows that even though it feels still and level, it’s not.
I wonder how this will effect how I’ll walk and stand in the next place I live.

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Labor Day. “There’s no such thing as a rope on a boat.”

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The Big Bear Zoo in 15 seconds

Labor Day Weekend. Some consider this the grand finale of their summer. Good.

Little does the world who visits southern California know, the weather actually gets “summertime good” in September and October, right when the vacationers all go home.

I went into negative PTO at my new job and took Friday off, to turn this into a 4-day weekend. Great, because Mia rented a cabin in Big Bear. We pictured cooling off from the hot sun in the chilly, clean lake water and going on comfortable hikes in shaded forests and cooking big meals (something difficult on the boat).  Well we knew that picture wasn’t happening as soon as the Flash Flood Warnings were stretched past the weekday into our weekend. No big deal, we made the best of it. On the drive up the A/C in my truck wouldn’t work – so it was holiday traffic through the worst parts (south and east) of Los Angeles, about 96 degrees out, with the sun broiling the freeway pavement and us while we were soaking my cloth seats with sweat and breathing in exhaust.

Fortunately about an hour later it was pouring that flash flood rain on us, as we weaved up and through the a seemingly empty mountain village and crisp mountain air. Nice transition.

Little driveways, big dinners, big breakfasts, foosball matches, chilling out near the fireplace, and feeling very disconnected from the usual holiday congestion that was going on down at the beaches, this was perfect. Saturday’s weather kept us inside. On Sunday we walked through the neighborhood about a mile to the Big Bear Zoo – which was humorously small, but also kind of awesome to see bears and wolves, foxes, bobcats and eagles up close.  As much as we wanted to get on the lake, it just wasn’t very hot. Also I didn’t want to rent a tin fishing boat, a 13-person pontoon, or a jetski at $250 per person rate. I wanted to rent a 14-18’ sailboat- I check every marina website and made some calls that confirmed, “Nobody rents sailboats on the lake”. I really wanted to go sailing!

On Monday the weather was beautiful in Big Bear and we were back in the auto-heated truck and down the mountain into Los Angeles again. All we wanted was to jump in the water to cool off. We got back to A Cenoura around 1:30 and Mia went to get ice and snacks while I prepared the boat for some sailing. Off we were Bluff Cove, we looked like pro’s as we sailed upwind, dropped the sails and the anchor and we locked in without ever turning on the motor. Then we sailed off the anchor, too, but the lack of wind in the afternoon meant having to motor back anyways to make it to the dock before dark.

Not bad – we escaped the heat, relaxed for a few days, and did go sailing afterall.