A Winter Blog about A Summer

It's mid-winter now. Visiting in Monterey for a few days. No blog updates since summer. A large amount of life has happened. All pretty good. Some a little painful. Saw many local friends at the yacht club last night – its January now. Each remarked that they miss knowing what I'm doing. Their dreams are suffering. Here's a stumbling summary. Spent the summer in Monterey. What the local's call summer. Cleaned and painted Eupsychia's bottom but the weather was so cold the paint wouldn't dry. It might harden in a few days. The sun might even shine. But each day out of the water costs money and there is no time to wait for global warming.

Daughter Chloe and I went to New York. Cool music and hanging out in Washington park. Shopping in Soho and seeing the Hair musical. Viewed the Bodies exhibit. Real bodies stripped of the flesh. Very interesting and somehow not as upsetting as I had expected. Perfect weather, Central park, subways, great pizza, all good.

Worked on the cabin in Big Sur where we are not really keeping up with the decay, bugs and rodents. The worst invasive pests are the fellow humans pretending to be friends and neighbors. But it is a nice place. Maybe someday I'll retire there from cruising. Fortunately, like the sea around my boat, the redwoods, rocks and waterfalls are best left to maintaining themselves.

Pulled the cantankerous engine out of Eupsychia. That greasy relationship was blogged above. The little beast powered us all the way up from Mexico last Spring without a single complaint. But I'd left a redundant bolt out of a part deep inside her. On taking the engine apart to simply replace the bolt I discovered more internal damage. A pile of metal chips. Something not understood was causing havoc. That was a Thursday morning. A couple of phone calls, the checkbook, and Friday saw me up in Sausalito picking up a new engine. On Monday Eupsychia was humming with her new bright red engine.

On the subject of broken: All summer I dragged my broken heart around. Parting with “the world's best girlfriend” so she might pursue her own dreams as I do mine was more painful than I expected. We sure had a good time, as the earlier blogs attest.

While in La Paz last spring Bay Wolf, a Santa Cruz 50 sloop, was out of the water for painting. There's some earlier blogging about the fine sailing family that sails her. At some point I made a now widely reported remark that a Santa Cruz 50 is the only other sailboat I would consider owning. Well that comment echoed around all summer. I spent a good deal of time looking into buying a such a boat while considering if it was a reasonable and sane thing to do. I came around to the idea that neither reasonable or sane was necessary. But buying such a boat proved harder than one might expect. Of the few that were available one has been modified so much as to become useless to probably anyone. Another was maybe for sale and maybe not but either way at an uncompetitive price. The most desirable boat was 8000 miles away actively cruising in Southeast Asia. Nothing came of this all summer.