Aldebbie's Smooth Move, Part Deux

or, Part Two of The Heartwarming / Heartbreaking Holiday Tale of Moving Aldebbie Out of Sausalito, Told Semi-Backwards.
by Leslie, photos and captions mostly by Don

Five hours and 57 minutes until 2011 comes crashing through the snow, on a four-horse open sleigh, screaming for the start of our own mini apocalypse; the end of our New York/Seattle/Colorado lives as they once existed in 2010. Don has already waxed sentimental on this note, so I'll go ahead and get to the point.

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Aldeberan will be hanging here for a few more days

Don and I sit before our tempura and sashimi platters, oddly reverent and with a peculiar, dumb-founded expression on our faces. It's not so much that we are hungry for a meal that isn't larabars or canned tuna; it's more that this particular meal is a celebration for what we had accomplished. This was the first sake cup and Sapporo pint ever to clink over the entwined thoughts: "Holy crap, we made it!" and "Holy crap! We have a boat! We are doing something huge with this boat in less than two months!" This was the first time that our proposed adventure really became really real to us.


Santa Barbara has a lovely harbor, but it is retardedly expensive to stay here, and, I'm sorry Lauren Henkel (my sister who went to school here and loves this place), the people are kind of...weird. On the way to our Farewell Captain Mark breakfast, a gaggle of middle-aged joggers wearing reindeer antlers came bounding up to us. "Chocolates!!! Have some chocolates!!! Merry Christmas!!!", shoving little foil-wrapped balls into our hands with manic grins. Now, some might call this wacky, fun, festive behavior, and that's all well and good, but what do you call the woman who lets her little dog sniff all over Don while he's sitting on a bench trying to talk on the phone? Weird. That's what you call that. Weirdly entitled to have your dog rub his snout all over strangers. Yikes! Let's shove off! 


It's t-shirt weather in SB, which is indeed a notch on the nice side of "reasons for staying here," but not enough of a nice reason to outweigh the cost of staying here. So hey! Let's motor out! Let's...bump our bow into the dock? Oof, Aldebbie's got quite the off-kilter prop walk on her! Okay, okay, we're off the dock, oh no, the reindeer women and their little dogs are coming!!! OH MY GOD LET'S GO! Wait! No! We forgot to unplug the shore power! It rips out of the socket and drags behind us like long, sinewy yellow entrails. "Pull! Pull like your life depends on it!" screams Don. I do. It's back on board, apparently undamaged, and all is well. Now, out into the sunshiny sea! Maybe we'll strip down to our u-pants just because we can, finally! Break out the sunscreen! The tanning oil! The...um? Don?! 

This is actually just off of point conception
but you get the idea

Don is down in the cabin, skillfully plotting our course on a newly purchased GPS. He tells me our heading and I steer to it. I squint far ahead of me. I take my power stance atop the helm bench just to be sure. I ask Don for the heading again. Yep, it's correct. Goodbye sunshine, hello never-ending fog bank, dead ahead. Ok...no worries. The Atari-looking radar works. I yell at Don every five minutes to check it, half-expecting little space invaders or centipedes to come peew!-peew!-ing up the hatch. Thankfully, we are as alone as we'd been the previous nights with Mark; which is both reassuring, and slightly eerie. You get to feeling a bit like Will Smith in I Am Legend out there, wandering around the ocean with nobody else around...and yet...we have the feeling that just beyond the fog, there are things out there. And of course, there are. But not zombies. Not even killer whales, great white sharks, or giant squid. The unseen creatures of the deep still aren't as scary as an unseen boat, buoy, or rock.  No matter what the radar tells you isn't there, not being able to see that "nothing" is unnerving to say the least. 


Eventually though, we get comfortable in this soup of fog obscuring all but 100 ft. of water all around us. Primarily because Don and I get into our new found trick of zig-zagging our heading to avoid all the rolling waves intent on hitting us abeam and making Aldebbie toss side to side like a drunken freshmen at her first kegger. 


That is to say, we were comfortable. 


The radar began showing us channel markers and land that we couldn't see. If navigating out of Santa Barbara Harbor this morning was navigation 101, then welcome to navigation 201! The next hour was spent moving at what has to be the most fast-paced 3 knots imaginable. One wrong turn into the shallows, and a quick correction. Knees shaking from what I then attributed to the cold (it might of been that, too). Trying to find our slip with a fishing boat in hot pursuit! Not finding our slip, but finally, after what felt like an hour (and may have actually been), tying off at a fortuitously available end tie. It was like the first time you ever tried to parallel park, except this time it felt like all coordination and reasoning skills had gone overboard in my last bucket. Again, the fault of a little dance called "the prop walk." But, at the end of it all, there was Japanese food, hot showers, real restrooms, and the incredibly sweet harbor office people with their mom-like reassurances and healthy supply of cookies, candy, tea and coffee. 


Nuts. I've somehow time-travelled back to the beginning (which is, of course, the end). So let's zoom back (or forward?) in time to the high point of the trip: that gorgeous, two-or-so hour stretch of time when Captain Mark was still on board, the winds were with us, the fog had lifted, the sun was shining, and we were sailing! Over the course of this trip, we learned that Aldebbie sure does move, even in light winds. In strong winds, however, despite her sturdy demeanor, she's all lean muscle! It was exhilarating, feeling the boat heel a bit leeward, charging through the waves at what felt like record speed, under full sail. It didn't matter that both our heads were now clogged and unusable; that a bucket was our only friend; that we'd each gotten between one and four hours sleep; that sailing at over 8 knots surely couldn't last, and that we wouldn't be making it to San Diego with Mark. We'd finally felt a taste of things to come, the good, the bad, and the bucket. And somehow, the good, in this case, the sailing part of all this nonsense, outweighed everything else. 

There was actually a lot of good to be mined from this trip, in spite of all our waiting and whining in Part One. Learning from Mark was a priceless experience. On a clear night, the first of our journey, he showed me Orion, Aldebaran, Hercules, and other constellations and planets useful for navigation. He informed us of the uselessness of 16 out of 19 of the life vests on board; the best way to fish; helped us figure out how things worked (or didn't) on our boat; and generally, showed us how to have a good time, even at 3am, with oil derricks that never seem to get any closer, shining in the distance, and a cold wind making Aldebbie whistle a lonely dirge. Oh yes, Aldebbie makes her own music, including video game peew-peews! from the rigging. 

Super sweet

And of course, the highest of highs: leaving Sausalito! Crossing under the Golden Gate! Maneuvering crab pots in choppy grey waters, while harbor porpoisi frolic behind us! That wonderful 30 minutes of steering remotely from midships, sprawled out in the sun, before the wheel spazzed out on its own and made us do donuts. But before all that...
The fog horns have finally stopped, so we uncleat the dock lines and toss them up on deck with a jaunty flourish. I've got my watchmen's cap and deck shoes on. Don's got his beard. Both of us are wearing nearly every warm article of clothing we've brought. We either look like sailors, or we look like people who think they look like sailors. We're way too Brooklyn-pale to actually pull off the complete nautical look, plus everything we're wearing was made by snowboarding companies, but we feel like sailors, at least. At last!
And so we are. Happy 2011! It's all beginning. 

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...