Monterey

We got to Monterey yesterday afternoon. When we first called for a slip assignment, they put us in H28, which sounded fine until we came around the corner and realized that it was a 25' slip. We called the office back to remind them that we are 44 feet long, and they gave us another slip, this time the correct size. Now we just had to get the boat turned around, which involved a lot of backing and filling in the very narrow channel (25' boats don't need a ton of room to turn around, but we do) with the wind on the beam. Luckily, Art's gotten quite good at turning Arione around in tight spaces over the years, and we made it out of there and over to our new slip without hitting anything. Big fun.

Today we broke out the foldy bikes and went in search of a grocery store. Not that we needed groceries, but we were getting perilously low on chateau de cardboard (don't want to drink up all of the good stuff from Sonoma too fast...), and since we plan on being here for a couple of days, it seemed like a good idea to find the store. On the way back, I stopped to take a few pictures. It really is beautiful here - this is looking northeast across Monterey Bay:



There are sea lions all over the place. When there are a lot of sea lions in one place, it can smell really bad (as we discovered passing the sea lion covered breakwater on our way into the harbor - blech). Luckily, we were upwind of these guys:



These three didn't even bother with finding a rock to lie on - they were just lolling around on the bottom in the shallows, having a slap fight:



Then we got back to the marina to find that we had a new neighbor:





We're planning to leave here Tuesday evening for either San Simeon or Morro Bay.