And so it begins....

Wow.. I am sitting here at anchor in Santa Barbara!!!
The trip from San Francisco to Santa Barbara was a lot of fun. With me were Rob, Michael and Jessica. We motored a lot. We sailed a bit but mainly it was just great to be out on the water.
We left San Francisco on Saturtday morning. Eve waved goodbye from the docks and then we started our motoring out the channel. The forcast was for really light winds so we knew we would motor at least till we were out the gate. Michael, Shannon, Holly and Shannon's sister and partner (and Homes!!) followed us out under the Gate on their boat. When they finally turned back, we were on our own. Rob and Jessica decided now would be a good time to figure out their new lifejackets. After a few hours and a couple of group votes it was decided that it was "good enough" and all the instructions were tossed in the garbage. Rob fired up some cocktails and Michael got the fishing lines ready. We knew that the wind would eventually come so all we had to do was relax and enjoy the ride.
Well, we went by Half Moon Bay and still no wind. The swell was also really small so we let Otto (our autopilot) and Tommy (our atomic four engine) keep doing all the work. Actually not ALL the work. We also kept Rob busy whipping up cocktails and picking CD's to blast out on the stereo.
Later in the day we passed the chance to turn off to Santa Cruz. The wind was still non existant as we motored off into the Montery Bay so of course we fired up more cocktails and music. Our luck fishing so far was about the same as our luck with the wind (although we were getting quite skilled at hooking kelp....)
Day turned into night and still no wind. We did get a pretty sunset to go with our drinks though. I think at this point we had devolved into talking like pirates on a full time basis. Why are pirates grumpy all the time? They just aarrrgh. Did you hear about the new pirate movie?? It's rated aarrrgh...(And all other words aaarrrgh) Maybe that's what scared the fish off our hooks?? Anyway, Otto and Tommy weren't complaining so we stuck to our little routine. Cocktails, music and pirate talk deep into the night. !!
After a few hours sleep I woke up and joined Michael at the helm. Still no wind. Still no fish.WAIT!! One of the lines was JIGGLING!!! Excited, we reeled in a huge mackerel. He put up quite a fight and so it took almost a whole minute to reel him in. We flipped him into the boat and there he was (all eight inches). We actually felt really bad for him as we had hooked him in the eye!! We aren't sure if he was really stupid, really slow, or just trying to get a close look at our lure. Well now we had to finish him off. we took out our little club and proceed to club him in the head - over and over. He would not die!! He was a tough little fish.. Well finally he died and we decided that we would use him as bait to help our fishing record. So on a hook and back over he went.
Later in the day we did a wind dance that consisted of making cocktails and playing music. It didn't work...
We did see some whales though. Maybe they had all the wind.
Actually I am lying. There was some wind. For about 10 to 15 minutes at a time we would have just enough to try sailing. When we finally got everything trimmed and going. It would all die out. We even had the Spinnaker out for a little bit. Then we got tired of putting things up and down over and over. Back to our routine. Drinks, music and aaarrrggh deep into the night.
When I awoke the next morning we were almost at Morro Bay. We had decide to stop as we should have been out of fuel several hours before but were magically still running. Thankfully we made it with fuel to spare and a $120 later we were back under way. On our way out of Morro Bay we saw some Sea Otters, but even more impressive we saw WIND!! We cautiously got the sails up and gave Tommy a much needed rest. Tommy had been running over 44hrs out of 48 hrs at this point. We finally slipped into a great little sailing groove. Even Otto was happy even though he was still doing all the work. We decided to celebrate by having a few cocktails and playing some music :-). Sailing is Hard....
We managed to sail the whole day without waking Tommy up. We saw seals, and dolphins and we were never hasselled by having to reel in and clean any fish :-) Our next major obstacle was Point Conception, the Mt Everest of West Coast sailing in the United States. Of course as we approached it the wind died out. We didn't give up though and eventually did pas by under sail!!I went down for a few hours of sleep and when I came back up the wind had filled in nicely. Michael had been sailing solo for a while and needed help getting a reef in. After this was done he went down for some well deserved rest. Unfortunately for me the wind kept building. It was one reef after another until finally I was down to just a fraction of my jib and no headsail. At this point I was still doing over 5 knots!! The wind started to die down a bit but I was too tired to set more sail. At this point I had only had about 7 hous sleep total in three days. We weren't going as fast as we could but we were still moving forward and this let everyone else get some sleep. A few hours later the wind died right out. I woke Tommy up and took down all the sails. We started a steady motor towards Santa Barbara in the last of the night hours. At this point we were visited by a pod of dolphins who were playing off the bow of the boat. The water was pitch black but there was bio-luminesence everywhere the water moved. This meant that the dolphins were wrapped in a glowing sheet that left a trail behind them. It was a very spectacular display.
Soon the light was peeking over the horizon and Rob poked his head up for his shift. A little more sleep for me and the next thing I knew we were in Santa Barbara!!