A Treb Lincoln novel that follows Treb and his friends from the docks of King Harbor in Redondo Beach, California to a remote island in the Pacific where they end up saving the lives of hundreds of islanders. Excerpt from King Harbor As I climbed aboard Lost Soul I remembered why I hate boats! No matter how you baby and pamper them, they never seem to get enough of your attention. They just seem to find ways to remind you that they are the important one in the relationship.
When I was younger I often wondered why it was they were referred to as she. After a few years of living aboard and crossing a few oceans, I started to understand the similarities. Like a woman, they seem to get jealous if you spend any time with another boat, and if you don’t come home just one night they will make your life miserable. It was a typical King Harbor morning in King Harbor Southern California. The sun was shining, the seagulls were soaring overhead, and bikini clad cuties were rolling along on wheels on the road in front of the marina. After spending the previous cou132 D O R F ple weeks delivering a new Catalina 42 sloop up to the Bay area, I was real glad to be back where the sun shines. Four hundred miles uphill is never a good sail, but this delivery had gone pretty much as planned.
I was delivering a new Catalina 42 from Marina Del Rey up to San Francisco for a broker I did a lot of deliveries for. After leaving Del Rey I sailed up past the Channel Islands in perfect weather. I sailed on a tight reach up to Point Dume, and then made a few tacks up past the Islands. I pulled into the Cojo anchorage and sat there waiting for a good weather report to make it around Point Conception. I timed my arrival at Point Conception for just before dawn, when the northeast tradewinds were the lowest, and once around that notorious landmark
I’d just hugged the coast for the rest of the voyage. It’s a long stretch of beautiful coastline as you make your way up, sailing past Big Sur and Monterey. It’s beautiful, but dangerous, and with absolutely no place to pull in if you hit any trouble. It’s about as rugged as a coastline can be. I found myself enjoying the trip, watching as I paralleled Highway One.
In my previous life, when I was riding motorcycles, this was my favorite getaway; throw a sleeping bag on the bike and ride up Highway One. It doesn’t get any better, and I relived a few of the trips as I sailed passed Lime Kiln Cove and Big Sur.
After dropping off the boat at the dock in San Francisco, I picked up my paycheck from the broker who’d hired me to deliver the boat and grabbed a taxi to the airport. I couldn’t wait to get back home. 133 Bob Bitchin Of course, on my return, my baby made it known to me that I had better stop staying out for weeks at a time.
Being left by herself, she always seems to get a real attitude. The longer we’ve been together, the more attention she wants when I neglect her. After this voyage up north, she was particularly displeased with me. “My baby” is my home, a 56-foot stays’l ketch I named Lost Soul. I’d saved her from the bottom when she was about to be scrapped. After she’d gone around the world a couple times she’d been abandoned for a few years, and was in pretty sad shape when I found her. Since her shape pretty much matched my bank account, it seemed we were destined for each other.
