SailingKnitter

Ta-da! I completed the pink lacy baby blanket that I was knitting for my younger son's roommates. The baby is due at the end of this month - can you believe I finished it before the kid went off to school???

I didn't use a pattern as such - just put together elements from things that I've knit in the past and from some of my books. Elizabeth Zimmermann's PI concept combined with the bleeding hearts design from Barbara Walkers "Charted Knitting Patterns" resulted in the middle section. The outer section is from Meg Swansen's Feather and Fan shawl in "The Gathering of Lace". The center section is just a simple off the top of my head spiral.

Wow! There was sure a lot of math involved in putting this together!!! I had to dig out my trusty calculator. At one point I ripped out over 10,000 stitches!!!! Yikes!!!! But I just can't live with an Old Shale (Feather and Fan) pattern that is leaning to one side - all lopsided. So into the frog pond I went.

Wasn't I supposed to be in Catalina sipping umbrella drinks this past week? Yes. But after 24 hours of sailing and motoring we ended right back into our home berth in San Diego.

The Big Rudder Disaster
After a great day sailing and motoring up the coast of California, we headed into Dana Point Harbor to anchor for the evening with plans to sail to Catalina in the morning. Unbeknownst to us, there was a special event and they had six TALL SHIPS out giving sailing trips and they all had to come in and anchor. No room at the marina for us.
So we decided to just head out into the sunset and sail all night, arriving in Catalina in the early morning. The wind was up - the sails were full - and we were trucking right along at about 6.7 knots! Hours went by... it was very dark. Then the autopilot shut itself off. We fixed a previous problem already - this was different. The steering wheel was hard to turn - kinda balky.

I went down and pulled up the mattress from our berth so that I could look at the steering mechanisms. Yowza! There was water streaming into the bilge from around the rudder post - not good. Think "Sink". The post itself was moving slightly in the hole (the hole that goes to the outside of the boat!). Thank goodness Jones had repaired and upgraded the bilge pump system so the seawater was being pumped back out!!!! So, we turned around, took down the sails, and motored back to our home port. Bummer. 24 hours of travel and this big homing pidgeon was back in her slip.

Some time this week, we will be hauled out of the water for the repairs. We'll be living on the dirt mass again. The shipyard has us scheduled but some commercial fishing boats had emergency repairs so now we are "on-call" for the haul out. We can live aboard while they work on the boat - hmmmmm....have you ever been in a commercial ship yard? This should be interesting.