Leaving Santa Cruz | Sailing Avocet

Previously on Sailing Avocet. It's Santa Cruz right behind us. It's my home. It's my home waters. Good morning friends. It is Marissa and Cleo here without Chris. Chris didn't leave us and he didn't leave Avocet long term anyways but he is actually in LA shooting a car commercial so we put the boat in the Santa Cruz Harbor just because it was a little bit easier than if I was dingying myself to shore and back so my parents can come get me and things like that so we're gonna knock some stuff off our to do list since it's just us on the boat so first thing first we're going to get some oil on the bulwark. When we were in the bay it was getting splashed with salt water and the salt has seemed to leach some of the oils out so I'm gonna get some new coats on there and then we'll see what else we can do so cheers to progress. Of course all the things I needed were buried at the bottom of the lazarette but once I got my materials I was good to go. Don't worry I'll spare you from all of the torture of watching me sand and skip ahead to the good part. Alright so the sanding is done now it's time to oil. I blew up my paddle board so I could paddle around to the port side making it a lot easier on myself. Work smarter not harder people. Also a funny side note all of our brushes are so old they keep breaking so being cheap and also not having a way to get to the store I was looking for blue tape to tape around it but then I was like that won't work but you know what will? A rubber band. Always keep some rubber bands on board. This is a good showing of what it looks like right when it's sanded. So I just wiped it down with mineral spirits you can see that it's really really dry so that's what that looks like you can see where all the salt leached all the oil out this is what it looks like with one coat on we got a lot more to go. While I finished oiling the bulwark I watched fleets of sailors head out to the breakwater for the weekly Wednesday night sailboat races. The Santa Cruz Yacht Club is very active and a few of their members even recognized Avasette while sailing by and admired her freshly oiled bulwark. It was a long day in the sun but it felt good to check the first thing off my to-do list. On today's episode of Boat Tours with Marissa we are going to wash the boat so it's time to scrub it all down and make her look like a proper dock queen again since we're here at the dock. Since Avasette's topsides are painted with all grip we use a special soap specifically made for the paint. Don't worry it's ocean safe. My mom stopped by on her way home and somehow I managed to convince her to help me swab the deck. Thanks mom! It is day 14 without Chris. Cleo and I have been getting along just fine visiting with friends, family, crossing things off our to-do list and most of all trying our best not to freak out with how surgy this harbor is. I have all of the dock lines out, the big fenders and I've been watching our bulwark bend back and forth. Chris assures me that it was built to do that but still watching it is very unnerving. Chris actually comes home tonight so the two of us are very excited to see him and welcome him home so we can continue with the rest of our adventures. I think we're going to try to get some mountain biking in maybe tomorrow so we'll see but yeah that's an update from your favorite crew of two. Let's go mountain biking. In our last video you may remember our friend Paul Merrill mentioning how the pro skateboarder Rob Roskop founded Santa Cruz Bikes. Well after biking around my hometown I totally get it. This place is full of manicured trails for beginner and expert riders. Fortunately we weren't going into the scene totally blind and our old pal Austin volunteered to show us around one of his favorite spots called the Demonstration Forest. I had a full squish bike but it's fine. I'm cheating Chris and I had so much fun on our ride with Austin we decided to venture out the following day and explore a new trail ourselves. We are biking up in De La Viega Park today. There's usually a lot of disc golf going on but we are here at Mountain Bike so from what we read online it should be a pretty easy trail. Only like a couple miles but we're recovering from a almost 20 mile bike ride yesterday. Getting the legs moving is good but we are definitely tired. Looks sus. Why? There's no signage and everything's kind of overgrown so we're going to forge our own path it seems. So it's like getting us ready for Mexico. Yeah. Putting a hard hard tail. Although we were exhausted from our ride we wanted to know more about the bike culture in Santa Cruz so decided to pay my mom a visit at work where she introduced us to Ariel. Hi my name is Ariel Linsley. Welcome to Fox Racing Shops here in the background. I've been biking my whole life. A good part of my year racing professionally mountain bikes and other bikes. So the mountain bike culture in Santa Cruz kind of goes back to almost the start of mountain biking really. Since the late 70's early 80's people were here and riding mountain bikes and most of those were just on old hiking trails and as time went on more and more of those became bike trails or other trails got built. So Santa Cruz has a long history of mountain bike racing, cycle cross racing. So for a long time mountain bikes were kind of a spin off from road bikes and cycle cross bikes and they were rigid. They had no suspension on them. But as tires got bigger and the brakes got better and people rode harder and harder trails it became pretty obvious at some point that someone needed to make something that took the edge off a lot of the bumps. It's a rough world out there on the trails so one of the first suspension products for the front of the bike the suspension fork was actually developed locally here in Santa Cruz and some of the people that work at Fox now were part of that company back then. So that was pretty cool so then eventually a suspension fork came out. There were some other people working on similar products in other locations at similar times probably. But that was kind of the first stepping stone to getting people to adopt and put maybe a little bit of extra weight on their bike for a little bit more comfort and control so they could ride harder trails. Pretty quickly after that Bob Fox being who he was and being an expert in motorcycle suspension at the time was probably approached or decided it would be good to approach people with getting a rear suspension product on a bike as well. It had been done before in the motorcycle front suspension was being accepted on mountain bikes now and so over time it became obvious that let's try to make it work with the rear of the bike. Weight is always a concern with bikes so that was kind of the big pushback initially and pedaling efficiency. Bob actually designed and made some of the very first rear mountain bike shocks. Those did go on a few production bikes and that was kind of one of the earliest production rear shocks that were getting made for mountain bikes. We like to feel like we're a big part of our biking community here in Santa Cruz. Almost everybody that works at Fox rides in one form or another which is awesome and participates in that. We make suspension that goes on bikes that goes all over the world for mountain biking but locally a lot of the people here participate with their local advocacy group do trail dig days, help keep the trails up and running. We also donate a lot of money to our local advocacy groups to help develop new riding areas such as the Coast Dairies Project which is going to happen up the coast a little ways and that's just a good way for Fox to give back to the scene that we all like to live in and why we like to live in Santa Cruz if you're a mountain biker. So yeah, if you're coming to Santa Cruz if it's your first time and you've never been here to ride and you're looking to get out and try some of our local trails, there's kind of three main areas you can try out one of them being Wilder Ranch on the west side of town up along the coast. There's some great views there, it gets you into the redwoods not super difficult trails so if you're not an expert rider you'd have a great time just going and checking it out and pretty well marked trails as well. Also up in the mountains if you want more of the deep dark redwoods flavor the Soquel Demonstration Forest has a lot of great trail loops up there with a little bit more difficulty, a little bit more technical. My chain fell off and I fixed it just like you taught me. Good job! Soon there will be the Coast Dairies Project even farther up from Wilder to check out as well. As well as some other small areas like De La Viega close to the harbor but the other ones are kind of the bigger riding so there are some smaller little trail networks in town but yeah those would be the main two. So sailing with your mountain bike that's a cool concept I'm sure a lot of people have done it. There's a lot of good trail access I'm sure coastally you can get to that sounds like a lot of fun. It's a great way to get around a town if it's not too big and you know I like seeing things from my bike even when I'm not mountain biking I ride around town a lot. Yeah I think there's a lot of adventures to be had on a bike that's why I do it. Seems like it would only add to the adventure if you were sailing and wanted to get off and go see the surrounding area so it makes sense to me. So the Santa Cruz Harbor is just a jump over from the Santa Cruz Anchorage which you can still see from right here right at the harbor entrance. It's right over there right behind this big dredge that just came in because it's officially dredging season in the harbor. Santa Cruz Harbor pushes in a lot of sand and silt and swell. It can create a shoal which boats can't navigate over. So, dredge. Where are we going? We are headed up to the Harbor Coast Cafe for the second time because the first was so good. Um, breakfast. That's where we're going. After breakfast we made our way over to Steamer Lane to cheer on my Uncle Bud in the O'Neill Cold Water Classic. A surf competition that recently returned after a seven year hiatus. Although watching the surfers was fun, Chris and I couldn't stop watching the sailboats on the horizon and decided to invite my family out for an evening sail. Lucky for us, my Papa Ron was visiting and could check out our floating home and experience it on the water. I mean, I've never been out on a boat while I have. Our final evening in Santa Cruz was spent beachside with my friends from high school around a cackling fire sharing stories, memories, and our plans for the future. It was the perfect way to close out our time in my hometown. And we were ready to get some movement beneath us again, even though we wouldn't be going too far. It's departure day. We are leaving Santa Cruz Harbor right now after an entire month of being here on the dock. It was a nice little interlude to our cruising adventure. Chris had work, I got to spend time with family. So it all worked out, but it is another bittersweet goodbye. We've had so much fun with family and friends, but it's time to keep the movement under our keels, so we're a southbound boat once again. That's my dad. Right there. The first and last time I sailed across the Monterey Bay was in 2014 aboard SV Prism with my now-brother-in-law John and his partner Shannon. I was only 16, and the thought of owning a cruising boat hadn't even crossed my mind. And now, nine years later, Chris and I were sailing nearly the same rum line aboard our own boat. Our next video is all about Monterey, and you won't want to miss it because it's the beginning of our very long engine saga that will hopefully have a happy ending. But there's only one way to find out. Keep tuning in to what's next on Sailing Avocet. Narrow little entrance. Oh my gosh, that is a swell.