Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Catalina Island Videos

The internet gods have not been smiling on me lately. I went to the Cafe yesterday to upload pics and videos but I wasn't able to get online there because they were having issues with their router. Ben was able to upload some Catalina videos from his computer, so I figured I'd start with those for now. We left Dana Point around 4:15 AM on July 25th and pretty much motored the whole way to Catalina... around 10 hours. We threw up the sails for about the last hour of the trip, when the wind finally greeted us. We were anchored in Hamilton Beach by 1:45 PM. As we arrived at Hamilton Beach, we were greeted by a playful pod of dolphins:



We spent one night in the rollers at Hamilton Beach and by morning I insisted we grab a mooring at Avalon. (This was my first experience cruising and I wanted to go home with happy thoughts about sailing and anchoring.) Perhaps the Harbor Master felt sorry for the only girl on board (Adam left his boat anchored @ Hamilton Beach and came along for the ride to Avalon) because he gave us a pretty sweet mooring, right next to the dinghy dock and close to all the action. Ben went for a quick swim under and around Mo-C and took the camera with him:




We headed back to San Diego on Thursday morning, July 28th around 8:30 AM. The usual northwest wind had switched to a southeast wind so it was a bit of a hindrance to us. The forecast predicted it would switch back to the northwest around noon but it never did. After about 20 hours of motorsailing, we arrived back on the ball at 4:20 AM on Friday the 29th. We traveled a total of 168 nautical miles in 44 hours and 26 minutes over a 10 day period. We learned a lot along the way, much of which I'll share in future posts. We also took lots of photos and as soon as I'm able to upload them, I'll post them here.

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