My O’Day 22 Sailboat Blog

Last weekend I brought my Walker Bay Dinghy down to the city of San Pedro for the weekend. I had only sailed out of Long Beach in the past and wanted to check out the other end of the Port of LA. The launch ramp area was rather small for a town that makes most of its living through the port and it showed. The ramp was crowded basically all weekend long.

The sailing was great and the jetties of the Port of LA stretchs for miles which makes the water nice and calm as in a lake but the winds are relatively consistent.

The little area where I spent some of Saturday and Sunday of last week.

I had a twinkling of an idea that I was going to try to make it to the Queen Mary but later I found out that it would be way to out of reach. It would probably take a good 10 hours to get there in my little 10 ft dinghy.

Walker Bay 10 RID with sail kit unmounted

Looking toward the ramp on the way back

Good to know the life guard is near.

Sailing down wind in the sea of glass.

When I got back to the ramp, I saw the most bizarre thing ever. These 2 guys were trying to load a Coronado 25 with a fin keel up to a flat bed trailer with old tires strapped to it. I realized their attempt was futile and just assumed that they would give up sooner or later. However, when I got my boat out and was ready to drive way, I heard the most awful grinding noise coming up the ramp. Looking over I saw that same Coronado 25 being dragged on the asphalt up the ramp behind a Ford Explorer towing a flat bed trailer.

I was utterly shocked to see what had just happened. To make it even more ridiculously amusing, one of the man who had earlier been cursing up a storm about why his winch couldn’t haul a 5000 lbs boat up a ramp gets out of the car and managed to produce a chain saw. He pull started the saw and proceeded to try to cut the keel off of the boat!!!!!

I knew something was going really wrong and at that same moment, the yellow life guard truck pulled up next to him and ordered him to stop what he was doing.

Notice the chain saw on the ground.

Once the Port of LA Police arrived on the scene, he somehow convinced them that he had a plan to get this boat off of the pavement and on to that trailer as he restarted the chain saw again and began hacking away at the boat.

I might not be as bright as him but I just couldn’t see how he was going to do what he needed to do with the equipment he had. Two guys, a car, a trailer and a chain saw. I hung around for a minute watching him hack away at a perfectly good boat with the Port of LA officers and just decided that I couldn’t stand to watch it anymore.

I went back the next day and to my surprise there most of the boat was gone. I wouldn’t be surprised if the police just sited the owner of the boat and brought in some heavy equipment to get the job done and will be billing them later.

Sometimes I wonder why sailing ever even appeals to me. You wouldn’t understand it either if you saw what I saw. Those guys and I actually have it in common…..

*** UPDATE 6/4/2008 ***
My friend Josh from Carrboro Yacht Club posted this story on the O’Day Owners Forum and I have been getting little traffic spike from it. For those of you who want to see more photos of the incident at the launch ramp, here are a few more I snapped with my camera phone…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danlin/tags/cabrillolaunchramp/

Here is an action shot of the guy half way through his keel job