Rusharound

After all the fun we had at Jess and Dan’s Wedding, Sarah and I took it easy the next day. Luckily for us, it happened to be Rochester’s Park Avenue Festival, a once-a-year showcase of embarrassing made-at-home handicrafts the region’s rampant cottage nick-knack industry. Now ten days later, I can’t think of much memorable to say of that day, except that we had a great time remembering all the fun of the night before.

The rest of the goods – with photos! – after the jump.

Early Sunday morning, we flew to California, [long story omitted here], checked into a great little hotel in Marina Del Rey, and spent some time with my old friend Per Saari. My dreams were answered when we got aboard the boat on Monday morning and zipped through the boat orientation class in less than 30 minutes. (I’d been worried that this orientation might take forever — lucky our California-casual instructor was okay with, “the oil goes here, the key goes here” kind of instruction.)

Soon we were motoring and sailing to Moonstone Cove, located next to Whites Cove, about 4 miles west of Catalina’s only town of Avalon.

Moonstone Cove

The land part of Moonstone is leased to Newport Harbor Yacht Club, which my parents have been members of for a long, long time. Some family members have even hinted that my earliest personal history may be closely tied to this cove (lets just leave it at that.)

By the time our little 6-knot sailboat got there, mom and dad and their zippy powerboat Kairos had already arrived and set up shop.

Kairos at the mooring in Moonstone Cove. The tilt-down transom is a rare and wonderful feature of this this 38-year old boat.

Kairos is allegedly Greek for a “Special Moment in Time” and my family has had lots of them aboard this boat when it was my grandfather’s and again when my dad found the boat for sale a couple of years ago. To us, Kairos meant “food delivery barge” because Mom and Dad offered to help with our weekly grocery needs, and even brought the meat which we barbecued ashore that night. (But not before Dad invented a new kind of salt water marinade accompanied by verbal expletives and a quickly-invented recovery technique.)

The next day kicked off some serious relaxation.

The scene from the beach

Also ashore was a bocce-ball area (guess who won!?), ping-pong table, horseshoe pit, Moonstone’s famous-to-us-ring-game, some bathrooms, and the previously-mentioned barbecue pits.

The next day we visited the city of Avalon.

Avalon Harbor

Avalon is famous for barely escaping fires earlier this year. To us, it became famous for overcrowding and a cruise-ship populace that lined up in droves for the t-shirt shops. Though we planned to spend the night in Avalon Harbor, we took in all we needed of Avalon in just a few short hours and headed back to Moonstone Cove.

The next morning we sailed back to the mainland, and visited Marina Del Rey’s next door neighbor, King Harbor (also known as Redondo Beach.) Here we discovered some of the nicest people ever to wear top siders; they let us stay on their dock (no charge), take nice long hot showers, use their wi-fi network, and even let us join their post-racing dinner on the veranda.

La Cometa tied up at King Harbor Yacht Club

The next morning we had an easy motor sail to Marina Del Rey, filled up with diesel (3.8 gallons!), dinghy gas (0.7 gallons!) and returned the boat, all before noon.

See the rest of the pictures.

Next chapter: My cousin Lindsey’s wedding in Pasadena.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 11:59 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.