I saw hundreds of these jellyfish as I was going along too.... ( I took this pic at the Monterey Bay Aquarium though....)
This is the Monterey Harbor. The place is absolutely chalked full of seals and sea lions....You definitely want to be upwind of these guys.....
Sunrise coming out of Monterey.....
A little friend I found taking a break on a clump of seaweed, about 6 miles off the coast.
My neighbor in San Simeon Bay. It's just below the Hearst Castle. I got in just before dark and it was an unexpectedly gorgeous anchorage.
I dropped the hook, and as I sat outside with a rum n coke, these dolphins came over to say hi... (Actually, they were just swimming around, but I decided it was all about ME!) It was awesome just sitting in this wild place, watching the sun set, and having these dolphins splashing around the boat.... This was my favorite anchorage on the coast....
My other neighbor...
I left San Simeon Bay in the dark, and about 15 minutes after the sun came up, I was engulfed in fog. Visibility was down to 200 feet at times, and never more than 1/4 mile. So I sat looking at a radar screen for the next 12 hours until I got to San Luis Obispo. I came into the anchorage, and all of a sudden - I could see! It was sunny! Wow.... cool..... in the photo above you can see the thick fog just beyond the sail boat.
This was the highlight of my day..... a fog rainbow....
So, one of the things that happened on the foggy trip down, was the toilet broke.... The LAST thing I wanted to do once I got to San Luis Obispo, was take apart the toilet.... but no one else was going to do it, so, grumbling away to myself about "the stupid fucking toilet".... I took it apart. Well, what I found was this little guy clogging the intake....and I started laughing.... just when I thought MY day was not so great, I thought of the odds of this little guy, swimming miles offshore, with dolphins, tuna, and sharks the whole way, surviving all of that, to get sucked up a toilet intake! Now that's what you call a bad day!
Leaving San Luis Obispo the next morning was the same. I was ready to go at 5:30am but waited until 6:00 because I literally couldn't see 10 feet in front of the bow to get out of the anchorage.... by 6:00 I could see about 20 feet so crept, very slowly, out. This pic was taken a couple of hours later once the sun was up.
The fog started to lift in the afternoon. This is the first oil platform I came across, just before Point Conception
This is a group of dolphins that came to play in Merkava's bow wave for about 20 minutes. I went and sat on the bow to watch them....
I was pretty happy.....
This is a pic of coming into San Miguel Island. The most northern of the Channel Islands. I was pretty jazzed when I saw there were sand dunes!
The first time Merkava had ever been anywhere where there were sand dunes! How cool is that......
