The Schooner Californian

One of the things that I have learned about San Diego is that it is more of a sailing town than San Francisco.  I don’t think there are more boats here, but there are more boats per capita, and way more boats per square mile of bay water.  Here are a couple of examples:

First, the Californian.  A topsail schooner, she is a replica of a ship built in the 1850’s.

Beautiful.  I had first seen her when she was based in San Francisco in the early 2000’s. She is now associated with the local Maritime Museum here and regularly sails the bay

The next boat is rather different.  It is certainly the most complex wing sail I have seen.  These can be amazingly fast, but to my eye they lack charm, and as an engineer I am not sure they are appropriate for open ocean conditions.  I think it is worth noting that as fancy as this rig is, we have never seen it underway, only sitting at its mooring.

On our boat we have been making steady progress.  All the major things are now done. I have been unable to avoid taking advantage of the incredible marine infrastructure here and been doing a number of “want-to” projects in addition to the “must-do” ones.  A few more things of lesser significance and we’ll be off again for Hawai’i within 2 weeks. It will likely be a slower trip to the islands than we had expected since the trade winds have been become less steady as the tradewinds have become less reliable as the el Nino weather pattern builds.