I spent most of yesterday traveling down to San Diego – something I’m used to taking about an hour and a half by plane.

This time was a little different. Because I would be bringing down a lot of items in preparation for passage back up to Martinez – including a rented life raft, spare engine parts, electronics, my sailing gear, and leftover provisions from my recent ASA106 certification sail – I felt it made more sense to drive a rental car down here.

I had a bit of a late start, but by 11am, I was heading out from Alameda after having picked up the life raft. The drive went smoothly aside from all the trucks that think its acceptable to play leap frog with each other, blocking all other traffic on a two-lane interstate, just so that they can go less than 5mph faster than the other truck.

I hit L.A. just in time to experience rush hour(s). I have no love for L.A., but it’ll give it to them this time; the traffic was in keeping with the theme of my trip: Festina Lente means, “Make haste, slowly,” and that is exactly what I was doing.

I arrived at the marina around 7:30pm. After offloading everything from the car and onto the boat and spending some time on the phone with Amelia, I began exploring systems and storage and figuring out just where the heck I can stow everything I brought.

I had an ambitious list of things I hoped to address before beginning the passage home, and I’m starting to identify things that can wait.

Exhausted, I prepared the aft cabin and got to sleep around midnight. This morning I woke to the sound of seagulls and accomplished my first real boat task: figure out the LP gas system and stove/oven to boil water for coffee and heat up a breakfast sandwich. The gas was tricky for me, as in addition to the solenoid switch on the panel there’s also a button one must press and hold to actually open the valve.

Today is mostly work-work, hopefully from our San Diego office for a portion of the time, then tonight it’ll be back to work on the boat. While the boat’s in great shape, there’s a lot I want to do between now and Sunday!