THREE WEEKS IN...

We stayed at Half Moon Bay a little longer than originally expected; it's a great anchorage and a wonderful low-pressure first stop after leaving San Francisco Bay - though while we had fun, we also had a bit of stress over our power supply. Our first week was spent on the hook as we settled into life on the boat away from a slip. There's plenty to see and we enjoyed watching sea lions, harbor seals, pelicans and other seabirds living their lives around the boat. We had our very first cruising visitors too; it was great to host Lambert and Esme who scored the very first stay-aboard polaroid! The kelp flies were pesky but not unbearable, though we did decide that we need fly swatters aboard to keep the little buggers on their toes.

Unfortunately, after 8 nights at anchor our generator started overheating and couldn't be used to charge the batteries. Not usually a big deal - but our battery banks are pretty old, and we'd planned on nursing them down to San Diego where we'd replace them as part of our pre-Mexico preparations. We'd known they'd need regular topping up from a combination of the alternator and generator, as their age meant the solar couldn't do it alone.

No worries, we thought! We planned to do some diagnostics on the generator in Monterey (where we plan to spend some time) and in the meantime run the engine to charge via the alternator. Of course, the very next morning our newly installed alternator stopped working. We were now on 3 strikes (the old batteries being strike one) so we grabbed a slip in the marina to have shore power to charge the batteries while we sorted things out.

Andy jumped on the phone with our electrician Ed and ran some diagnostics on the alternator. We figured if we could get that going, we could continue south and get to work on the generator in Monterey. It became clear we had a wiring issue; it's true that wiring should always be checked first as discovered an old ground wire that had been soldered, and the soldering had broken. Thanks, Ed, for the fix! With the alternator sorted we were good to get going again. We did meanwhile make the best of having a slip, enjoying exploring excellent coastal trails on our bikes, and having a meal on the beach with Zach and Leanne. Weirdly for us, though we felt we'd sailed some distance, we were still only just over an hour's drive away from our old slip - handy for catching up with friends!

We set out for Santa Cruz on September 8th and had a nice day, mostly motoring apart from a couple of hours sailing with the main and Yankee flying. The 10 knot northwesterly winds were not quite enough to keep our sails full given our southward heading (we'll look forward to putting on the genoa once we're further south). We saw a couple of pods of dolphins, lots of sea lions out fishing, plenty of jellyfish, and had a relatively rare look at a sunfish basking as we sailed by. We call that a good day! We dropped anchor just west of the pier and settled in for the night.

Alex and Morgan stayed with us for the next couple of nights and treated us to a slip which was a lot more comfortable than the rolly anchorage (thanks guys!). We enjoyed hanging out together at the beach, exploring Santa Cruz and triumphing at pickleball (Ha! We weren't not going to mention that!). We also enjoyed watching our neighbor at the slip, Tim "the sea lion whisperer" gently train the local sea lion family to be quiet when he clapped at them. A nice goal given they'd settle in for the night on a neighboring dock finger and did like to bark.

With Alex & Morgan heading back to Tahoe, we spent a couple of days on chores (laundry takes a lot of time) and prepped the boat for our next leg, across Monterey Bay and into Monterey itself. We've been looking forward to that, more in the next update!