After she was recommissioned by the crew at Rigworks on Shelter Island, and with much oversight and help from Hollis, we three, Hollis, Jimena and I, set sail from Shelter Island at 0500 on the fourth day of January 2017. It was with something of a frisson that I realized, as we headed down the channel toward Point Loma and the Pacific Ocean, that we had NO GPS; NO Radar; and NO AIS. I had only had enough money to upgrade the radar itself, plus a depth/speed instrument and a tiny readout at the nav station below, barely visible at the helm wihtout craning one’s neck. So we had no chart plotter on which to display the radar we did have. And there simply was no GPS or AIS installed. We did have an iPad with nautical charts of the area and GPS, and we did have paper charts thanks to Hollis’s foresight, but had the weather gone bad, it would have been rather a nail biter. “Better to be lucky sometimes” as the saying goes.

We sailed close hauled all day and into the night in fairly light wind but against a knot of current, so by 2100 that evening we were only abeam Oceanside and knackered. We decided to put into Oceanside Harbor for some rest. I felt okay with doing this since I did most of my sail training out of the militray side of the harbor. We got into a transient slip without incident and racked out for the rest of the night.

Next morning we cast off around 0900 and sailed through the day and into the night. I would not have recognized the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles but luckily Hollis did. To me they just looked like a mass of orange sodium lights. We turned north from out past the oil platforms Edith, Elly, Ellen and Eureka and sailed into Shoreline Marina. We tied up at the transient dock around 2300. I had just gotten everything buttoned down and gone below to hit the rack when a rainstorm broke and it raind for the rest of the night and the next day. “Better to be lucky.”