Brothers on Boats – June 11-12, 2009

Since my younger brother wasn't going to get into San Diego until about 4:30 in the afternoon, we spent a leisurely morning in the hotel in Las Vegas. Writing some more of our blog and processing pictures, we left for San Diego at 11:30 in the morning. Not much to say about this trip across the desert. It was pretty much uneventful travelling south on I-15 and I-215. We stopped for gas after entering California which was a big mistake. Gas was a dollar more a gallon in California than it was in Nevada. We had an elegant lunch of pita bread and bologna in the parking lot of a closed bar next to the gas station. Once again Dave drove all the way until he became very tired about 80 miles north of San Diego. We switched drivers on the side of the highway and he immediately fell sound asleep. After sweeping up gorgeous vistas over the coastal mountains we dropped down into Mission Bay and pulled up at the marina. Good timing, my brother Marc had just arrived and escorted us onto his boat. Marc owns a 36 foot Grand Banks. It is a wooden boat that takes a great deal of care with twin Chrysler diesel engines. My nephew, Jeff, has a sailboat which is docked next to my brother's boat. It is a cutter, three sails, also wood, the same make as the sailboat that held a central place in the book “A Perfect Storm”. Jeff cooked us up a perfect storm of roasted chicken, corn and carrots. As the sun set in the Pacific, Dave and I completely shifted gears from America's neon playground to a mellow California mood. Helped along by pleasant conversation, good smokes and better bourbon, we rocked to sleep.

The next morning we were awakened by the world's most expensive alarm clock. Flight operations at San Diego airport, only a few miles from the marina, begin promptly at 6:30 A.M. Directly in the flight path, no one in the marina sleeps past 6:30. My older brother, Richard, flew down from northern California and Marc and I picked him up mid-morning. After laying in appropriate supplies, both liquid and solid, we embarked on a cruise around the bay in the afternoon. With Jeff at the helm, Marc in the Admiral's chair and Richard, Dave and I serving as auxiliary swabbies, we sampled the best of Southern California's sun, sea and sand.

Pulling back into the slip what happened next was surely an anomaly considering our location if not our home town. The seventh and final game of the Stanley cup was being played that evening between the Detroit Red Wings and the Pittsburgh Penquins. Since the game was on the Red Wings home ice in Detroit where they had previously frozen out the Penquins 5-0 in the fifth game, we were confident that the Wings would prevail. There are no televideo devices of any sort on my brother or nephew's boats but two slips down, John, a native of Toronto and an avid hockey and soccer fan, had a brand new 27 inch flat screen TV. John brought his screen up on deck and we gathered on the aft deck of his sailboat and watched the game in the middle of Mission Bay in San Diego. Unlike the sixth game which we watched in Las Vegas, all the cheering was in favor of the Red Wings. Despite the cheers, the weather and the company the Wings fell in a well played game that was in doubt until the final seconds.

We returned to Jeff's boat where I set up my computer to show family pictures to Jeff, Marc and Richard. These were no ordinary family pictures. After my mother passed away, I was cleaning out her condominium and came across several albums of old family pictures. My father was an avid and talented photographer so this did not surprise me. However, when I opened one of the albums, it was filled with hundreds of pictures that were taken by my grandfather. These snapshots were more than a hundred years old. Never having known either my grandfather or grandmother on my father's side of the family, they died before I was born, I was now in possession of many pictures of both my grandfather and grandmother at a young age both before and after they were married as well as their families and friends. That evening, I shared the result of scanning these pictures with my brothers. We spent the evening speculating on the identities of the subjects and the surroundings. A shared past brings the present closer.

Next: Fishing the High Seas.