LA to San Diego and onto Mexico

From Moro Bay we headed off to Los Angeles. We had originally planned to stay in Marina del Rey, however the marina was expensive and when I called they where a bit snooty and required no end of documentation sending to them before they would take a booking, one thing they wanted was the purchase/sales invoice from when I bought the boat. I don’t know where I have put this, but in the end I decided I didn’t want all the hassle, so we booked a place in Oxnard, which is an hours drive north of LA and Venice beach, and with the money we saved, we hired a car for 3 days and did a bit of exploring. First off we visited Venice beach

Above you can see me buying a limited edition hand drawing of a theme around ‘Satoshi was here’ on the sidewalk at Venice beach. The guy selling them was a bitcoin nutter who had a plan to sell these limited edition sketches (100 off) and then for each one sold another ten would be made, but at double the price, which I could purchase at the same price as one of the first 100, which was $10. I lost his plot after ten minutes of him explaining how a building would be built with the proceeds, and the sketch would entitle me to a place on the first floor, but if I bought more of the next batch, I could move up a floor. All of this was recorded on a private blockchain. Basically it was like a pyramid scheme, and was unlikely to come to anything, but for $10 I thought I would support this guy’s enterprising vision, and you don’t get much for $10 in this part f the world. A few days earlier a guy pushing his life along the road in a shopping trolley asked me if I could spare him ‘a twenty’, I was some way along the road past him before I got over the shock of it! $20, Am I getting really mean in my old age, or is $20 the amount people give to homeless when asked these days?

Next we headed off to find the ranch where Charles Manson lived before it burnt down. Basically I was going to walk around a field for an hour while Kathy would be exclaiming ‘Amazing’ ‘ I can’t believe we are here’. She will explain in her blog I’m sure, but I think it’s connected with murders and the houses we visited in San Francisco.

Of course it’s halloween here and all over Venice Beach people had put on great shows in their gardens and windows.

Venice beach was lovely, I posted a video of some great public skating on our facebook page, you can see that here

From Oxnard we headed onto Redondo, en route we passed Magu point where there is a military firing range, I must have missed the warnings sent out on the VHF radio as we were steaming into the firing range but were intercepted by a fast patrol boat that instructed us to change course to 180 degrees (south) and to stay on that heading for 3 miles before turning east again. I think it’s actually quite hard to get into a live firing range.

Bow & Stern moorings are required in Redondo, I haven’t used this type of setup before, but it was actually very easy. Kathy brought the boat up alongside the pick up pole, something she can do much better than me. I grabbed the pole, and as usual wondered why I forgot the gloves. Poles and ropes that live in the sea are not usually nice things to hold, slime/barnacles etc

Redondo was a bit like Venice beach, but without anything happening on the beach. It had a great pier complex full of funky restaurants and shops.

Even the pontoons don’t escape halloween here

We headed of to Santa Catalina next. Santa Anna winds were forcast so we popped around to the west side of the island to get shelter there.
It was funny that I had just updated the operating system on my macbook a few days ago to the latest release, known as ‘Catalina’ Apple name their releases after famous places in California, such as Mojave and Yosemite. I took this picture below as we rounded the eastern end of Catalina Island and was reminded of the login screen on my laptop

This is the icon Apple use for Catalina which I’m pretty sure is the same bit of the island. They have a better angle, but I got a bluer sky.

We picked up a mooring in Catalina Harbour, the west side of ‘two harbours’ and went ashore to pay. They charged $50/night to tie to a mooring ball, so we payed for one night and the next night moved to the anchorage which was a bit further out. Below is the ‘anchor art’ from our chartplotter that shows how we swung between two locations as the tide turned.

Our next destination was to be San Diego, but to break the journey up into two 7 hour daytime passages, rather than a 14 hour overnighter we called into Oceanside for a night. Here the seals had taken over our end of the harbour and at one point I had to have very strong words with the biggest sea lion you have ever seen. He was blocking our path back off the boat and everytime I approached him, clapping and shouting, he lurched towards me with a wide open mouth full of very sharp teeth. He wasn’t going to move. Eventually he backed down, it turns out he was all front, no substance, but very scary all the same.

VIDEO: Somewhere in Southern California we had a school of dolphins joins us.

So on we pushed to San Diego. The plan had been to avoid the Baja Haha. The Baja Haha (pronounced bar hah, hah hah) is an annual rally for about 150 sailboats that sail down to the sea of cortez from San Diego. I wanted to miss them as I expected marinas to be full and noisy, so quite how we end up arriving in San Diego 4 days before the start is beyond me. Of course everywhere was full, we got two nights on the police/public dock before we had to move out and anchor in a designated spot for the weekend, then I managed to snap up the last berth on the the dock for another 4 days. The boat had to be inspected before we could use the anchorage.

Approaching San Diego
Our Berth on the public dock

San Diego is a great place, and like LA and San Francisco, is a mecca for watersports, especially sailboats. There are thousands of them here in scores of marinas. It’s also home to a huge military base, loads of warships, submarines and airplanes and helicopters. The choppers are constantly flying out to sea and returning, often 2 or three at a time in close formations that remind me of war films I have seen. Its also a cruise ship port.

One of the Disney cruise ships, Kathy said there were some famous ears stuck on the funnels.

Our first job was to pickup the new raw water pump I had shipped out from the UK. It cost more in the uber cab to get to the DHL collection point than the postage from Southampton! but once there I was relieved to find it was the right part, there are two similar but incompatible versions of the pump.

We had a good walk and cycle around town, I managed to buy a stack of gifts which I later posted home as Christmas presents to be distributed later. I’m not sure how reliable the parcel service from Mexico would be so played it safe with USPS.

We had just missed the Day of the dead festivities, but there was no shortage of deadish looking things around!

Here is the said pump, it’s now fitted nd doing sterling work.

Back at the police dock we had a visit from a local Perry boat owner, Harvey. He runs the Tayana group, which is very similar to our Baba group, of which I am a moderator. He has cruised the Pacific Northwest for many years and we had a great chat about sailing there.

Before we left San Diego, I had to visit the Maritime Museum, but we were running out of time, so we just visited the USS Midway, which is a massive aircraft carrier, commissioned in 1945, and was the lead ship in the desert storm war.


It’s always a conflict for me with military sites, as on the one hand, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer scale of creativity and industry that went into these ships design and construction, but also accepting that they are giant killing machines that sometimes mistakes wedding parties for terrorists with horrific consequences.

Kathy preparing for a quick exit down the runway
now where do i plug my ipod in?
Now this is the kind of workshop I would love to have onboard. They also had steel fabrication and welding rooms
Helpful Vets are all around to explain how they worked things back in the day.
Kathy was caught trying to make a quick getaway in the F-14

Finally a bit of boaty stuff, I bought some Dyneema rope and a round thing. Apparently this is the future and all racing boats have gone this way. I will post a picture of the finished item when I have spliced a loop in the rope, but basically this will replace the damaged car/block for the yankee sheet.

We left San Diego around 16:00 on the 7th November, finally we had had a call from the marina in Ensenada that they had a berth for us, we had an uneventful motor down after the wind died three hours into our sail. Mexico is much closer to Malaysia than San Diego, in terms of wealth, infrastructure etc. But I got a great feel from the place as we approached our berth and the manager and his assistant were waiting for us and took our lines with a very smiley welcome. Victor, who runs the marina side of the facility, as it has a much bigger operation as a boatyard, took us downtown, helped us find an ATM, and took us to immigration, harbour master, customs and TIP offices. He very quickly got us signed into Mexico and now we are all legal and here for 2 weeks to chill, refresh our basic Spanish language skills and acclimatise to the hispanic way of life.

Paul Collister.

4 thoughts on “LA to San Diego and onto Mexico”

  1. Read your blog in bed in a hotel in Austria and Bruno couldn’t understand why I kept snorting with laughter, you do make me laugh Paul, especially the Manson bit and Kathy on the Midway. Great photos and I loved the Dolphin video. Xx

    1. Glad you enjoyed it Bobbie, I’m getting used to walking around sites where murders happened or where planned.
      Say Hi to Bruno and have a great birthday over there.

  2. It’s a great blog post. I like how you had a stand off with a sea lion. San Diego looks amazing!! Great pictures as well. Look forward to the next one!!

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