S/V Pacific Mystic - We're in San Diego, CA, USA

We're in San Diego, CA, USA

S/V Pacific Mystic

Eric & Valerie Wagoner

Wed 21 Oct 2009 00:00

Quoting our pilot book for Mexico: "San Diego is the port of departure for most vessels sailing South. It is the southernmost West Coast port and the last place to obtain stores and fuel before entering Mexico."

This pretty much sums it up for us. We arrived in San Diego on Monday evening intending to spend every last few minutes of our time tracking down the last few items we will need to get before we leave the US on Sunday morning. I'll spare you the details of what it is we're tracking down. You can read about it later in my memoirs. :)

In the last 2 months since we left Seattle, we've been tried both emotionally and physically beyond limits neither of us could have imagined, on the one hand honing our sailing skills dealing with the less than ideal conditions the US West Coast presents, while also dealing with unexpected bouts of seasickness, and on the other hand trying to define the new "norm" for this new "lawless" life we've started. Since first cutting off our home ties and making a permanent move onto the boat after we rented our house, and then letting go of the work tether a month later, we've been making our own rule of the day-to-day operations and life aboard the boat. As a few things seemed to have normalized a couple months into it, we've now reached the edge of the US West Coastline and are preparing to cut off our last tie to the mothership and plunge into more unknown in foreign land. It is both exhilarating and as scary as imaginable!

Here is a summary of our US West Coast legs and a few pictures and highlights:

Seattle, WA --> Port Townsend, WA 8/20/09 - 8/21/09

Departing Seattle

We're off! Yeah, ok, it's like 5 pm on a Thursday - about 5 days after the date we were working towards last year. As slips go, it's not large. I can't help but think that if those were whips

and not dock lines in Valerie's hands, we'd have shipped on time. : )

Ok, so maybe we weren't really ready to go when we untied from the dock in Seattle. Maybe those who love risk would have continued without GPS, without hatches screwed down,

without our one and only liferaft tied down, without provisions, without seasickness countermeasures. But not us! Upon turning the corner to the Straight of Juan de Fuca and getting

thumped on the nose by counter wind and sea, we chickened and turned around for Port Townsend.

At 00:30 on the second day, we dropped anchor for the night and used the next day to scour the boat for the GPS, tie things down and question what it was we had undertaken.

Port Townsend, WA --> Newport, OR 8/22/09 - 8/24/09

Early morning arrival in Newport