Aye-aye Captain, full speed ahead!

There's something intensely satisfying about buying a one-way plane ticket, 2 days before you plan on being somewhere. Especially if that plane ticket ends up being retardedly cheap. Such is what Don and I have just done, getting our tickets to San Francisco for this Friday; trusting that our man Greg has gotten the engine up to snuff; hoping we won't have to buy too many new doohickies and whatchamacallits at the local West Marine; praying that nothing major impedes our progress down to San Diego; and crossing our phalanges that Captain Mark Kocina will be as cool as he sounds on the phone and on paper, and is right about Sunday, our planned shove-off day, being cold and wet, "but nothing we can't handle. The rest of the week looks good, with a rising pressure front." Let's see if I remember this from my sailing textbook: high pressure = not stormy? Low pressure = stormy?

Okay, sweet.

Saves the environment, searches for cancer cure, looks like a good egg!

By the way, picking a captain who can put up with your vague schedule and murky maintenance updates is hard work! And for someone like me, a chronically indecisive Libra, choosing between over a dozen applicants who all sounded pretty damn good was rough stuff! I liked Mark because he's sailed this route a dozen times before, has an impressive on-the-water resume, has a mutual interest in our type of boat for his family cruiser, was reasonably priced, does not adhere to the yelling method of teaching, reminds me a bit of my dad in this picture, is highly invested in cleaning up the oceans, and...oh yeah, is trying to find a cure for cancer?!!! He's like, the best human ever!

Besides being indecisive, I also harbor that hard-to-scrub-off Catholic guilt thing. Therefore, I'd like to point anyone who needs to (or knows someone who needs to) get their boat somewhere, to the following runners-up in our Mr. Captain Beauty Pageant: #1.) "The Twins." The one I talked to sounded like a lot of fun, very exuberant, and would allegedly sail our boat even if all it had was a mast and two giant mumus for sails; #2.) Thomas Todd (no link) offered to show us around Catalina, get us a slip in San Diego for free, and buy us a pony; #3.) Dave Brotherton offered to negotiate a package deal and not charge us for weather delays; #4.) The beloved Jose Miranda, Lisa's and my sailing instructor, only lost out for living in Fort Lauderdale and having a packed schedule (because he is so awesome and sought after). My apologies to all you sea dogs, but I'm very excited to break a champagne bottle over the bow with Mark this weekend!

Mood report sign-off: I'm listening to Beirut right now, and "Rhineland" in particular is fitting in perfectly as the soundtrack to the imagined movie in my head about this boat trip, if you replace Rhine with Aldebaran. It's not about the words anyway, so much as the sweeping, epic, monotonously uplifting feeling of this song. Yeah, I know monotonous and uplifting don't seem to fit together in a sentence, but from what I've heard, that is essentially what cruising the high seas manages. More about our sail to San Diego soon!

 Life, life is all right on the Rhine
 No, but I know, but I know
 I would have nowhere to go
 No, but there's nowhere to go, to go...