Ah, the mellifluous sound of sea lions ‘arkking’, the sweet smell of fish breath. Several sea lions are arkking out on the bait barge. One is sleeping on the swimming platform of a power boat at the end of the next dock.
Above you see GANNET in her new home at Driscoll’s Mission Bay Marina. The boat in the foreground in the top photo is in GANNET’s old slip from which she sailed on May 20, 2014. While she had been in San Diego Bay before and it seemed just to call her entering the bay the completion of her circumnavigation, she is now almost exactly where she began and the flat earth fools have another problem to explain away.
I left Driscoll’s Boat Works on Shelter Island at 8 a.m. I know that the wind in San Diego usually doesn’t come up until 11, but GANNET was in a corner from which she had to ease stern first through a space not much wider than her modest 7’2” beam between two power boats, one of them 80’ long, and I wanted to get out in flat calm. Two boatyard men took GANNET’s bow and stern lines and walked us through the bottleneck. I was on board and fended us off the bigger power boat. We had only inches of clearance on either side.
Once free, I put the faithful Torqeedo in reverse and backed into open water.
After taking in the dock lines and fenders, I raised the mainsail and we powered at 2.4 knots down busy and noisy San Diego Bay. Quivira Basin’s sea lions are nothing compared to military helicopters, power boats, a huge car carrier, tugs towing a submarine, and Navy hovercraft, which challenge the helicopters as being noisiest of all.
Keeping an eye on the rate the Torqeedo battery was discharging, I powered until 9:30 when with the battery at 80% there was slight wind for a half hour off Point Loma. Clear of the shipping channel and a mile off land, I let us drift when we were becalmed for an hour. That seemed familiar. At 11 punctual light wind came from the west and we had a pleasant sail the six miles north to the Mission Bay entrance channel. The sun burned off low coastal overcast around noon. The temperature was 68ºF/20ºC. The little boat skirted kept beds mostly at 4 knots with an occasional 5 in about that much wind.
I made a U turn to tie up facing out. Even for GANNET, there is not a lot of room to do that. Now that I know the cleat spacing, I’ll prepare lines with loops in the end that can just be dropped over them when docking.
I like it here. I always have. I am glad to be back.
Tonight drinks on deck will be accompanied by Bach and sea lions.
Tomorrow I buy a bicycle.
