Saying Goodbye and into the yard
After a wonderful day with Gary, Susan and Pammy, learning about Pisces, crawling around in nooks and crannies and a tearful goodbye, Pisces is ours.
The first step is to take her to the yard to get some work done to ensure that we sleep well at night up in San Francisco while Pisces sits in Oxnard. Jacob is in Chicago for work, so I fly down to Los Angeles and hire my Dad as crew for a day (for the cheap price of breakfast) to come help me move Pisces to the yard (picture to the left includes my crew and Pisces in the travel lift).
We leave Los Angeles as the sun is rising, stop at Coogies for our traditional father/daughter breakfast (Dad's been taking me there for years whenever he used to pick me up or drop me off when I was a camp counselor in Malibu), and make it to Vintage Marina by 8:30am. I've been cramming my head with diesel knowledge for the past week, trying to forget everything I knew about the Atomic Four in our Cal to make room for the diesel saavy I know I will need.
I have images of us somehow sinking the boat in the middle of the harbour, or ramming full speed into a multi-million dollar yacht; effectively crushing any possibility of cruising.
Once we get to the boat, it's a beautiful day, the engine is perfect, and Dad has claimed his spot on the cabin top for his lounging purposes. We get out of the slip no problem and spend a few minutes turning figure eights in the harbour so I can get the feel of the tiller before taking the boat into the hoist slip at Anacapa Boatyard.
We putter up to the boatyard, I'm feeling confidant, everything's going great (we've been here before for the pre-purchase haul). Johnathan the yard guy yells: "Reverse in!" I instictively yell "NO!" before realizing he's telling me what to do, not asking me. As a good sport, I make about four attempts to reverse in (bear in mind I've never reversed a full-keel 18K lb boat in my life, and have no clue which direction the prop walk is), and Dad says to me "want me to do it?" I shoot him a look of death, and continue in my futile efforts.
Finally the yard takes pity on me and I slowly come up to the dock in forward, throw them a dock line and they haul me in by hand.
Dad and I mooch around until the boat is set and blocked, and we head off on our next adventure home via ouija for a wonderful lunch, the cactus shop and singing rock and roll as loud as we can.
Out of the yard!
Three weeks later and only a few surprises (the boat has no blisters after all--but we do need a new shaft), Jacob is back from Chicago and we head down to take Pisces back from the yard to the marina. Anacapa Yard has been remarkably friendly, un-sexist, reasonable in their rates and accomodating to our need to deal with issues from San Francisco.
This time Jacob takes the tiller, I cast us off. We get to our fairway and back into the slip with no major mishaps (although we must've looked like we were going to hit the concrete piling, becuase a nice gentleman ran over and offered us a hand).

We had to pack up sooner than we would of liked to get back to Los Angeles; but Pisces now has a new packing gland, new bottom paint and no blisters. We'll be back very soon to spend our first weekend crawling around the boat, fixing some stuff, selling some stuff and going for a sail!