The view from above

Climbing a 50+ foot mast can be unnerving, but a lot easier when you have fold-down steps on the mast! I've been up three times now, only in calm waters (and always with a safety harness on the main halyard). We had some great views of the Delta from up here. Boys were initially fighting over the chance to go up, but got strangely distracted by other events as soon as the harness became available...

Tastes great, less filling!

Here Jan is tasting water from the watermaker (it tasted great, though a bit flat after running through the watermaker twice, which is what we do to make distilled water for the batteries) . On this trip we tried the watermaker running on fresh water (basically to keep the thing working); a month later we had graduated to making it from salt water. Much harder!

Fortunately, water from the main tank tasted just fine when run through a nice little activated charcoal filter. So perhaps we've got that one settled, at least for teh California legs of our trip!

Wake-dragging on the way down the Delta

Another popular sport was wake-dragging. Best speed about 2 kn - below that is boring, above that it gets hard to hold on, let alone pull yourself in. Top speed while dragging was about 3.5 kn - that elicited cries of dismay - but also excitement, let's try that again!

No, we didn't try this with the engine running...

Well, it works great OUT of the water!

So here the mighty Valentino prepares to battle the murky depths. Guess how long the snorkel and fins lasted before they broke/sank/leaked ;-(   But they did have a good time while it lasted.

Delta Doo-Dah Deux - pole swinging

As I write this Patti is yet again packing for the big trip.  She has been so amazingly strong these past few weeks, I am a basket case much of the time (OK, so my dad just passed a couple weeks ago...)

So to get us into a mellower mood, here are some shots of our second "cruisers rally to the Delta", a sort of baby version of the Baja Ha-Ha.  Here is Valencio swinging over clear cool water on a whisker pole swing.  Man this boat has some big equipment - at least I don't have to keep telling the boys not to pull on something in case it breaks.  If they can break a piece of sailing hardware on a 42 footer something's seriously wrong.