Follow us in pictures from Sausalito to Santa Barbara.
We spent 4 days in Monterey fixing the leak at the exhaust system thru-hull, and testing Plume in the Bay. We also enjoyed the visit of several friends and had incredibly good weather: the “Monterey Indian Summer”.
Well, we start to love this little city of fishermen, with everyday fresh fish at $1 per pound on the wharf, beaches for Kenzo and a delicious french bakery! However we are now ready to move on and wait for a weather window to sail south again. But this window is slow to come!
You can follow us in pictures on our photo gallery .
We finally cut the tie with our marina in Alameda on Halloween day, October 31!
Our plan: Sail PLUME, our Norsea 27, south along the Pacific West coast. Starting in the US from Alameda to San Diego, we’ll continue along the Mexican coast. There we’ll sail down the Baja Peninsula and then explore the Sea of Cortez and/or the Mexican mainland coast.
Our first anchorage was Richardson Bay (Sausalito) where we experienced gale force winds and heavy rain for two nights. But our anchor hold very well in these gusty winds. We had then one day with a little bit of sunshine before another gale and… a nice dinner on Oberon, our friends’ 40ft sloop bound to French Polynesia.
We finally set sail for Monterey, and passed under the Golden Gate Bridge (Youhouou!) on November 6. The first night at sea with Kenzo was cold, windy and foggy… But Kenzo enjoyed the experience of sleeping and living at sea and arrived all rested after a good night sleep! The bad news however was that we discovered a leak at the thru-hull of the exhaust system…
You can follow us in pictures on our photo gallery .
During three intense weeks we tried to make some progress on multiple projects while trying to “move-in” our small sailboat. We were growing more anxious each time we unloaded stuff from our pickup truck on the boat and were seeing the boat sinking more and more… Well, we are not fully loaded yet, but now we start to be accustomed to see the new super high waterline;-) This was a difficult period since mixing several projects with organizing our new live aboard was not easy. Alas, we completed some items of our list.
- Installed a flat rope roller on the stern pulpit
- Had some welding done to mount the liferaft on the stern pulpit
- Had a stainless steel ”faux” boom gallow made to attach a navigation awning [need picture]
- Lot of sawing for various projects [more later]
- Added a spinnaker and a pole to our sail-robe [not flown yet]
- Re-redo the stuffing box (back to the basic, no more drip free packing)
- Lowered the exhaust waterlift
- Replaced the two 105Ah flooded batteries with 2×80 Ah AGM house batteries (GPL-24T) + 1×870CCA AGM starting battery (GPL-2400T) [switching for flooded batteries to AGM implied a series of other changes, but I knew that I did not want go cruising with moving acid in my boat]
- Replaced the stock alternator with one high output externally regulated alternator (Balmar 60 Series)
- Installed a new smart regulator (ARS-5)
- Replaced the old battery combiner with a combiner with real charge profile (Duo-Charge)
- Replaced the old 15A battery charger with a 20A – 3 stages battery charger (Protech 1220i)
- Installed a 50W solar panel (Kyocera KC 50) on the stern pulpit [and moved the stern running light on the panel]
- Installed a solar panel regulator (ProStar PS-15M)
It took us 8 long days to move our small 2 bedroom house into a 8ft x 16ft x 8ft container… This was hard work since we did not realize how much has been accumulated during the 5 years we rented our lovely home. The trucker who came pick up our Portable On Demand Storage (PODS) asked what we had put inside: we were grossly overweight! Here is how we did it: pods-filling 
Thanks to all of you who helped moving furnitures, cleaning, babysitting, cooking and more!