The sun was just over the horizon.
I wanted to leave Half-moon Bay early to even have a slight chance to arrive in Santa Cruz at daylight..
First thing.. launching the dinghy and drop Rebecca at the beach.. she’s driving BEAST and I am sailing ZERO. A fallback to my SOLO times..? Just to reduce the amount of travelling with a car and a boat at the same time.
The anchor chain was completely packed with mud and it took me ages to clean it. I couldn’t be any happier about myself that I finally replaced the broken wash down pump. Without the pump I would have gone nuts ..
Once I was out of the breakwater and passed the two buoy’s which mark the small channel through the reef, it took only a couple minutes for the wind to set in and I hoisted main and Genoa.
We just made around 3 knots but the morning sun warmed the air and I decided to enjoy a little more time, grabbed a book and placed myself on the sunburst spit on the foredeck.
Early afternoon I was blessed with a couple more knots wind which ZERO willingly transformed in 6-7 kn boatspeed.
A dream.
Even when I lost the race against the short summer day and dropped anchor in complete darkness it was an awesome day. These kind of days they promise you when they try to sell you a boat..
Picking up the quartermaster was way easier then I estimated it and so we can call this day a huge success..
Tomorrow we’ll check out what all the colorful lights are in reality, from here it looks like a huge funpark.
Aloha.
I used to live in Santa Cruz. The lights you are seeing are the amusement rides on the boardwalk. It’s a very fun place if nothing else, to just people watch. You should be able to get some good footage there. They have a cool historic wooden roller coaster there too (if you’re into that sort of thing) The municipal pier is right there too. There used to be a whole lot of good restaurants there and always good seal watching. Santa Cruz is the town where they filmed the movie Lost Boys. Just south of Santa Cruz is Capitola, that’s a fun little town to check out too! I don’t know if it’s still there, but we always used to go to a Mexican restaurant there that was right on the Capitola Beach waterfront. They had the best Mexican food in the area. There was also a really good pizzeria there.