San Diego

We've been hanging out in San Diego for two days now finishing up a few projects. The foam in our v-berth cushions had disintegrated and I'm tired of having my clothes stored in two milk crates loose in the berth. My friend Mary took us to a foam shop and we got a nice new piece of foam. I'm going to pick up a sheet of plywood tomorrow and make some shelves on either side of the berth (we don't need a 7ft wide bed). I also pulled down the headsail furler and replaced the top section of extrusion with one that was 2" longer... it'll allow us to properly tension our big genoa luff. The other things on the list are minor - change the oil in the main engine and both the outboards lower gearcases, get our VISAs for Mexico, buy lots of groceries, as we're planning on only one stop from here to La Paz. We've got some medical supplies to drop off in Turtle Bay, but there isn't much there to buy, so we'll pack 3-4 weeks worth of food. Rough plan is to leave around the 14th. The other boats that we're pal-ing around with have been trickling out of here, a few a day. We're getting pretty excited about heading out "for real". It seem rather funny that we feel that the last 2 months of sailing has been just to get to where we feel the trip really starts! I passed the tests and got my HAM radio General Class license this past Saturday. My callsign is KE7CDS. Now we'll be able to use the Winlink network over our SSB (Single Sideband) radio to do the BLOG updates and other critical e-mail. For general corespondance, and certainly for any attachments, please continue to use the pete or petekellie at imaginecruising.com addresses.