We took a trip out to Catalina Island last week with 2 other Montys, 9 Potters, and an O'day. Although the sailing was minimal due to windless conditions we did have quite the adventure. Some of the video you'll see quite a bit of wind which we tried to sail in, however, it was a local phenomena, as the isthmus on the island forms a venturi effect. As soon as we would get away from the isthmus, the wind would die. Bummer! The trip over (26 miles) was supposed to have "morning patchy fog".....I guess "patchy" means 22 solid miles of heavy fog, cause that's what we got. When we broke out of the fog, though, we were greeted by awesome groups of really playful dolphins. That was way cool! Some lessons were learned along the way. One of the group lost his way in the fog and ended up 26 miles northwest of the island before he was located and put back on the right path. We were all kind of worried about him for a while until the Coast Guard rounded him up and let us know that he was OK and on the right path now....He made it into Two Harbors at Catalina at 11:30pm ( we left LA Harbor at 6am and for most of us the trip across was about 6 hours) Needless to say he was cold, wet, and exhausted. I'm going to post more on what caused the whole deal on my website in the hopes that it might prevent somemone else from the same circumstances. Suffice it to say it was a number of errors (all small) that added up and could have had a bad outcome. Fortunatley, they didn't. Much of it had to do with GPS coordinates, a lack of complete understanding of the different coordinate value systems, blind faith in the GPS as a sole navigation reference, and lack of having the proper charts. The video is posted in a site called tinypics. It works OK however sometimes when you load it it says "video not found". If this happens, move the bar at the bottom of the video forward until a picture appears. If the video not found message is still there, hit the refresh on your browser and it usually loads correctly. hope it works....this is a low budget operation!! there is no sound to the still photos, but the video clips have sound (sometimes not synced too well.....again...low budget!) I took all the video with 'Jo's pocket still camera so its of so-so quality. Enjoy Here's the link _http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=e67uyb&s=3_ (http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=e67uyb&s=3) Sean M23 Dauntless
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