Songline has been sold. There is a lot of truth to the old saying that the two happiest days of a boat owners life are the day he buys and the day he sells. I loved Songline, she was a very big part of my life. However the very act of keeping her tied me down in a way that overwhelmed any freedom she empowered me with. One of life's many paradoxes. So now she becomes someone else's dream. Better than sitting and dying in some marina while we move forward with our work and studies. My best wishes to Fred and his wife of Juneau Alaska, the new owners of Songline. May she take to all the places -- emotionally, spiritually, physically, geographically -- that you ever wanted to go. 

The trip pushed me in ways that I'd never experienced. There are so many memories that are forever etched on my brain. I'll never forget how amazingly blissful it felt to lie down after reaching Crescent City in California. We dealt with an awful lot prior to getting there and just 6 miles out I started the engine after the winds had finally calmed, and the it stopped 15 minutes later. I wanted to run to the bow and just scream. It was a simple enough problem, I forgot to turn on a fuel pump and the day tank ran dry. But that single event seemed so daunting at the time. Almost impossible to deal with. Then you get some sleep and dry out and start thinking it wasn't so bad. Next thing you know you're off again. 

It's really a shame we didn't get to do the trip as planned but I know we did our best at the time. There's always the should ofs and could ofs that creep in later. But if I think about it for even a short while I realize it was a grand experience as it was. 

Nadia I and went to the Red Bull Air Races. The skill of the pilots zipping around, 60' and less off the water, moving at 250 mph, while doing 180 degree rolls in less than 0.5 second and pulling as much as 10g is incredible.

Brenda organized a really good trip to Julien. It's a small mining town known for their pies of all things. And they are good. We stayed at a BB with an observatory. The owner takes people out for star gazing tours. It's off season now so we had the whole place to ourselves. We had a chance to see distant galaxies, star clusters, nebulae, Uranus, carbon stars, core of Andromeda galaxy and the moon through a 14" telescope. We had also planned to tour the wolf rehabilitation project but the lady who does the tour got sick. We toured a botanical garden and picked oranges earlier in the day as well.

We toured the San Diego Zoo. We bought tickets from the local hotel and arrived at the zoo to find that it was free admission day. Looking at the crowds we decided to leave and come back the next day. Brenda and Nadia also went to Sea World.

I stripped and varnished all the toe rails and rear trim. Lots of work.
We also spent a day at a beach cleanup as did thousands of other people all over North America.

Now the big news, we are back in Canada. It's hard to explain the number of times we have changed our minds on this trip. As the time went by we saw that it would be more and more difficult to get down to La Paz or San Carlos. If everything went right we would have easily made it. But since when does everything go right? We flew to Seattle then took a bus to Anacortes and had the boat trucked there. It took a couple of days to get all the rigging apart and wrapped for shipping. Dudley Trucking arrived as promised and all looked fine until Songline was put onto the truck. We were about 6" over the legal height for a direct route up I5. I had to make a decision on whether to try and take the hard dodger off or pay more money to hire a couple of pilot cars and have the truck run a much longer route through Nevada. I paid the money. The driver of the truck was none other than Max Dudley himself. Max is 73 old trucker who knows a lot about trucking and although I can't say everything he did I can say he delivered our boat in the same time as he said he would on the shorter route and charged us only about a third of the original extra quote. We had planned to re-rig and get on our way. We have known since we bought Songline that we would have to get the bottom completely stripped and new epoxy and urethane put on. With the rig off this is so much easier to do. So we left her in Anacortes to have this work done for us. With nothing to do there for a month we decided to hop on the ferry and head for Sidney and Ron and Cheri's place. The folks who rented our house have just purchased a house and will be moving in 2 weeks so we get our house back.

A couple of weeks and it's life back to normal. Both Brenda and I want to write a blog entry about our feelings about the trip. What we liked and didn't like, what we would do differently or not and just our general feelings about the whole trip.

Peter

We spent several days at Balboa Park.

Brenda's parents, Pat and John, flew in from Vancouver for a visit and to be here for Nadia's 6th birthday. Nadia was really missing them and enjoyed their visit a great deal.