Monday memories...

(photo of me next to our boat circa 1968)

My dad bought a boat...and I loved every moment on it. Actually, he bought two boats. The first boat, an 18ft Uniflight, braved the high seas of Long Beach harbor when the Queen Mary came in to stay...and I do mean high seas -- my mom filmed my two younger sisters and I clinging to the railing inside the cabin, sobbing as the hundreds of boats hailing the arrival of the huge ship created such wakes that we thought for sure our little boat would be capsized!

The next boat my dad bought is pictured above, a 28ft CrisCraft. Every summer we spent three weeks on this boat over at the Isthmus at Catalina Island. We spent the night before we were to set off sleeping on the boat so that we could leave before daylight for the three hour crossing to the island. Those nights were interesting -- our boat was docked in a small 'marina' on Terminal Island in San Pedro -- during the day that made for interesting cruises around the LA and Long Beach harbors, speculating about the contents on the freighters from around the world -- but at night, the place got a little scary with the not-so-sobers who lived on their boats. My mom and dad slept inside the cabin, while my sisters and I slept in sleeping bags (head-toe-head) on the deck. After we stopped kicking each other "accidentally" and stopped accusing each other of additional assaults, I would listen to the lapping of the water on the sides of the boat and to the sounds of drunken singing off down the dock and to the cling-cling-clang of the sailboat halyards.

(our boat is the cabin cruiser right in the center)

Catalina offered three weeks of swimming from the boat to the beach and back again...countless trips to the snack shack to drop quarters into the juke box for the upteen-jillionth listen to "Brandy" by Looking Glass...daily lunches of french fries and ketchup (with an occasional buffalo burger on the side)...hiking to the other side of the island which at that time was absolutely desolate...walking over the hillside to try to catch a glimpse of the buffalo...sunset spectaculars every evening (and one year a bagpiper who roamed the hills playing for us all) and then rousing games of Yahtzee. And then, again each night, after we stopped kicking each other "accidentally" and stopped accusing each other of additional assaults, I would listen to the lapping of the water on the sides of the boat and to the cling-cling-clang of the sailboat halyards.