Sailing

When we moved to Santa Cruz and we were renting a house in Santa Cruz Gardens I decided to get a sailboat. We got a Cal2-24 and took sailing lessons. Every Wednesday night we had races in Monterey Bay. Carl White and Dan Motarangres crewed for us. It was really fun and we ate out afterwards.

In 1978 we bought a bigger boat, a C&C 34. We went to Oakland to pick up our new boat. We sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge in fog so thick we couldn't see the bridge. We didn't have radar and we used charts and a depth finder to work our way down the coast. We were always worried about getting in the shipping lances and getting run over by a freighter. Every little while we could hear their fog horns, but we couldn't see them. we had a problem that we didn't think about. We stayed close to the shore, but didn't know that the big freighter's coming up from the south used that route as as short cut by Pigeon Point to save time. We put ourselves in danger and didn't even know it. It was foggy down to New Years Island. We were really relived to see again. Kaye was really scared all those hours.

The bigger boat was really nice, but we didn't use it as often because we tied up with Little League. Dan got his own boat and Carl started to sail with him so we lost our crew.

One thing that was really fun was to go out and anchor down and watch the fireworks on the fourth of July in front of the boardwalk. We would take the kids and once we took Sis and Laurence and their family out with us. It was really beautiful. Fireworks in the sky and reflected in the water.

In the harbor often many of the boats would decorate with lights and decorations for different holidays. Sometimes we would sail to Monterey and tie up, eat there and come back. We kept the sailboat for several years after we moved to Oregon. Finally I went down to Santa Cruz and fired the sailboat up and sold it. We really didn't miss it because we had motor boats.