Happy Australia Day

Here's the girl flying her true colours!
More pics uploaded today to Picasa, link on right

Aussie girl...

As of today Fully Involved is now officially an Australian registered yacht and will soon be proudly wearing the home port of ‘Fremantle’ on her transom!

We wanted to put ‘Hillarys’ but the added complication in paperwork and time involved precluded that option, but we will be investigating changing it once we are safely back home.

So now we can start making final plans to depart San Diego on Feb 1^st for Mexico.
*UPDATE* Here she is wearing her Freo sticker :-)



Mexican recce

We did a quick recce trip to Tijuana for the day - no, not by taxi! We parked on the San Diego side and walked across the border. What a fabulous place - so full of life and colour, I can't wait to get there and stay for a while.  Whilst having lunch (enough for 6, less than US$22) we were even serenaded by a mariache band, so wonderfully tacky and out of tune but so much fun.
I bought a poncho and a couple of hand woven bags, plus a tee shirt - got change from US$30 too!  Here are a couple of pics just to give you an idea.



Mexican hats of course!




The Border



Slightly over the top

We have completed the first leg of our voyage, namely Long Beach to San Diego, via Dana Point. Although only just under 100 nautical miles, it was for us the longest sail so far. Fully Involved behaved herself admirably, we even managed all three sails out for some of the time, but I'm afraid the average wind speed was about four knots and that was on the nose so we made our way forwards using the iron sail for the larger part. Dana Point was a sweet little place, wonderfully sheltered but at $45 per night you wouldn't want to spend a month there. We met up with Keven, who is doing all of our electricals, at Dana Point.  He's fitted an AIS for us and has been invaluable helping out with our myriad of questions. On to San Diego!

About 1 Hour after departure we came accross a pod of dolphins chasing fish, there must have been 400 of them even took time out to ride our bow wave slowing us down by .4 of a Knot!!! About halfway there, whilst 8 miles offshore in 1785 Ft of water, we came across a broken off mast, sail and boom floating in front of us...we circled a couple of times to see what else we could see then decided to contact the authorities via VHF as, in our opinion, it warranted at least a securite...To get hold of anyone proved to be a bit of a mission, broadcasting on 16 and 22...finally got a reply from US Coastguard out of Los Angeles who patched us onto Marine Police who handed over the conversation to...and so on and so on...we described what we had seen exactly and where it was, and answered several questions, we carried on and waited to see what transpired, expecting to see a boat heading out to the wreckage at some point.  Imagine then our surprise when we heard a Pan-Pan announced, stating that a semi-submerged sailing vessel had been sighted at co-ordinates blah blah blah!  Huh? We told them we had seen a MAST not a whole boat! We then saw a boat in the distance heading for the wreckage and listened incredulously whilst the whole story got bigger than Ben Hur!  In time of course the rescue boat reached the debris and was able to clear up the confusion, and the Pan-Pan was changed into a Securite.  Before you ask, yes we did try to get hold of them to tell them they had it wrong but to no avail....Anyway, that night when discussing the days events we both fell victim to fits of giggles. You see, over here, they pronounce it "Porn-Porn", which, after a couple of gin and tonics so easily becomes Prawn Porn, which in turn led to an hysterical conversation the subject of which included just how exactly do prawns have sex anyway....answers please, in a plain brown envelope...hehehehe :-) In the morning Mike spoke to one of the water police who told him that a Helicopter
had even been scrambled to search for any survivors!!

Photos

After much hair pulling out here is a link to all of our photos - you can always get to it by clicking the link on the right. Please check often as we will be uploading photos whenever we can.

Safely tied up in San Diego Police dock!

Just a quick post....
It's 20.00 Friday, we are safely tied up in San Diego after a 12 Hour sail down from Dana Point....Lots to tell of the sail down with pictures, we will update everyone in the next couple of days...Mike.

What a difference a send off makes!

While we were in Long Beach we had great neighbours.  Deb and Don Fox lived on the power boat next door and we had the pleasure of their company for Sundowners 2 days before departure. We must have made a good impression as this morning we found a 1.75 Ltr of Smirnoff Pomegranate Martini on the side of Fifi !!! We departed the slip with a cheerful send off from Deb who took some pictures, so hopefully when we get them we will post one.

The sail didn’t happen as the sea was glass smooth with no wind so we motored 40 NM south to Dana Point Marina N 33Deg 27.631’  W 117Deg 41.929.... Its amazing to us that 40 NM south of a marina housing 3,000 slips, there is another housing 2,500 Slips, and it's like that all the way down the California coast line, an marina every 40-50 NM!

While here we can get the work finished on the AIS as this is where the Electronics guys have their office. This will take tomorrow up so it is looking like San Diego on Friday.

And so it begins...

Our shipment of 2 tea chests Jan sent from Perth in September  arrived today,  so it’s all systems go.Today we gave FiFi a good soap wash down. We will depart Long Beach for San Diego tomorrow morning .

For sundowners  we cracked open a bottle of champers and watched the sun setting over the Queen Mary and the island waterfalls start for the last time.....

NYE in LA

Back from Canada in time for New Years Eve in Long Beach - the quality of the photos isn't great as it was midnight (duh) and I had my iphone set on daytime....but it was really pretty watching an hours worth of fireworks going off next to the Queen Mary from the comfort of our stern!

Had a wonderful Christmas time in Canada with my rellies, we stayed with the amazing Gail and Heather (Gail is my 3rd cousin) and their little dog Toshie who won our hearts. Got to see other family on boxing day which was neat. Also neat was spending time with Gary, twin brother of Gail, who has a very very wicked sense of humour and made me giggle like I haven't giggled in years (remind you of anyone you know?)

We are just a couple of days away from leaving for San Diego now, and getting very excited. Unfortunately the weather is absolute crap so we are now awaiting a window which should arrive Tuesday or Wednesday this week. To our kids, Peter and Hanna - should you happen to read this WE MISS YOU! Didn't realise how much until Christmas Day :-( Hope you both did ok without us there. To all of our friends HAPPY NEW YEAR, shalom and may your God go with you.