Santa Barbara

We ended up spending 4 nights here, on a long dock at the SE corner of the marina. It seemed like everyone sailing south that we had met so far had converged on Santa Barbara – Bruce and Dawn on Lady Jane, Michael and Laurie on Laura, Simon and Susan on Encore… We spent most of our time just relaxing, playing some music and liars' dice aboard Lady Jane, eating a nice curry dinner aboard Laura, and visiting. We did manage to do laundry, grocery shop, and the required visit(s) to West Marine (conveniently located right at the harbor).

So we were able to do a number of boat projects. We found that when we were anchored at Cuyler Harbor, the snubber had actually worn fairly deep grooves in corner of the teak toerail just below the rubstrake which was intended to prevent this. So we sanded out an area of the toerail, reapplied the finish, and put additional rubstrakes just below the existing ones. We also finished putting together a bridle system for the PortaBote so that we can hoist it up on our davits. The bridles were made of pieces of lifeline looped around carabiners on each end (and swaged to hold the loops), and then swaged to a metal ring in the middle where we would attach the lines to hoist it up. When we tried it, we realized the u-straps we had riveted into the side of the PortaBote (where the carabiners were attached) pulled inward too much and deformed the side of the boat a little more than we wished. So after some thought and comments from everyone on the dock who happened to walk by, we decided to put new u-straps just above the seats so that the seats could take the compression load – requiring borrowing Michael’s riveter, and making a new bridle strap as it needed to be longer now. Boat projects are never as simple as they seem… but hopefully this is now a workable system. For those of you who are not familiar with PortaBote, It’s a 10 foot dinghy that can fold down to the size of a surf board. In heavy weather we can fold it down and secure it to a side deck, or even stow it below if necessary.