We've been in San Diego longer than we expected so we figured it was about time to mention some stand out moments.

San Diego = Crazy-town
San Diego seems to have an unusually high proportion of crazy people on boats (CPOBs). This ranges from the jackass tearing through the harbor on a high-speed jet boat all the way to the guy drinking a Natty Ice on his busted up kayak near the dinghy dock at 10:30 AM on a Monday morning. The concentration of CPOBs could be due to where we have been hanging around (first the municipal dock, and now a mooring field near the airport), but we both are getting near our limit of people running busted generators at all hours, half sunk dingies, major boat projects at public docks, filling up water jugs at the pump-out station tap (okay yes, just because the sign says 'not-potable' doesn't necessarily mean that it's not potable, but it's the pump-out station! It shouldn't matter how convenient it is, you really really should find somewhere else to get your drinking water), and on and on.

As far as we can tell there's a lot CPOBs who are just using their boats as floating junkyard castles, one step away from homelessness. It's strange because San Diego is a fairly locked-down harbor, with strict time limits and permit requirements for every single anchorage. The weather is nice though...that could be it...


Bucket from the future
Over the past month the bucket-as-toilet has proven slightly less ideal than you might imagine...I know! Shocking! But before you go running around patting modern civilization on the back, let me clarify what exactly the shortcomings were.

1) Emptying the bucket overboard while underway didn't feel entirely safe, especially at night. I think we both felt that if there was a time when we were vulnerable to going overboard, it was while we were standing at the rail emptying the bucket (generally a two-handed operation) or trying to drag it in the water to clean it.
2) We just weren't savage enough to use the bucket method in most places. To make the bucket method work reasonably well you really have to be willing to use it in anchorages even if you aren't the only human being within 200 miles. Even in situations where we could have gotten away with emptying directly overboard, we felt pretty bad about the idea, and instead ended up using Wag Bags.
3) Wag Bags are expensive, and if you are using them frequently (see point 2 above) they will quickly outpace the cost of a head.
4) Certain people were using the lack of a head as a major negotiation point in their likelihood of visiting us (you know who you are).

The 'grossness' factor wasn't ever an issue, and in reality the bucket-and-chuck-it method and the head with holding tank have a very similar ultimate outcome. However, the pendulum swung back and we have gone ahead and installed a fancy Lavac head. It was pretty awful to install as it had an intermittent failure of the vacuum which caused us to dismantle every element in the system several times before getting customer service on the phone who kindly pointed us to a hard plastic ring on the lid that needed to be pressed down, 'click', and all was well.

The longest time we've been away from Pisces
We spent New Years with our friends Scott and Rochelle at Scott's apartment in Del Mar. They picked us up from Pisces on the 31st, and we spent a wonderful New Years with them, enjoyed eating out for only the second time since we left the bay, showered twice (each), and did piles of laundry. By the middle of the day on the 1st, we were wondering how Pisces was faring back at the municipal docks.