06.23.06
Time Flies….

Wow. I can’t believe it has been well over a month since my last post. I have been really busy! I did end up passing all my scuba tests, and am now a certified scuba diver! Which somewhat leads into what I did this past weekend. I spent the entire last weekend playing in/on/around the ocean! Friday night after work, John, Joe, and I went up to Ventura to spend the night on a dive boat and scuba dive the next day. The boat was The Spectre and we did 4 dives at Anacapa Island. It was awesome. We saw a lot of marine life included a few sea lions! I hope to get a camera/underwater housing soon, so that I can share pictures of the things that I see! After the dive boat returned to the dock, we headed over to the harbor at Oxnard where John’s community yacht club has a Catalina 400. (A 40 foot sailboat.) We stayed the night on the boat and left early the next morning for Santa Cruz Island and a tiny little harbor called Potato Harbor. For a little while, it was just us and a few sea lions! We ate lunch, relaxed, did a little diving. Joe and I saw a bat ray. It was pretty cool. We also made a couple of new friends. Two guys had been hiking on the hills above us and managed to fall down it and get stranded on the beach. They swam out to us and asked for a lift back to their campsite, which was pretty far away. Look closely at the pictures. I cannot believe they made it down with barely a scratch!! We dropped them off and headed home. But the adventures weren’t quite over! As we came into Oxnard Harbor we had a little engine failure. Ok. So the engine completely died. Not a huge deal since we are in a sailboat, but not an easy task to bring a 40 foot sailboat that weighs over 20,000 lbs, into a busy harbor, down into a slip and to a complete stop without hitting anything! But that is what we did, and also why we hang out with John. He is a really good captain! We made it safe and sound and I was off to work the next morning. I have a few pictures of the trip here. Enjoy! Oh! Also on the way over we had a couple of different pods of dolphins join us. I got some video of that and will post it at a later date. Keep checking back for more updates!