Wookie Maiden Voyage                           page 4 of 6

A few days later we made it to another great surf spot, this one shall remain nameless since it's somewhat off the L.A. radar. I love this spot: far beyond the easy San Diego/Los Angeles window so the people camped there are from all over and generally much more friendly, and it doesn't turn into a brutal windswept wasteland in the afternoon. Plus the place is literally teeming with fish - I swear there's fish jumping out of every wave.

Speaking of waves... Mind you that's bath-warm water, and soooo clear. The first time I caught one I couldn't even tell since none of the visual cues were there: it was just an invisible force lurching me forward. When I stood up I could see the bottom passing through the face of the wave, it's like being Wonder Woman in her invisible jet.

That's Nardo, who collects the $4/day per vehicle camping fee. We first met Nardo in 1997 so at this point we're old friends. At night he'd bring lobsters and oysters, we supplied the cervesas and guitars and we'd hoot it up deep into the night, sometimes as late as 9pm! That brings up an interesting point about life at this place: the sun was setting around 5:30 (Baja Sur is an hour ahead of San Francisco) and by 6:30 I'm dead tired, usually asleep by 7, and up right before dawn. Compare that to my life in San Francisco, where I'm often still awake at dawn...

A little timelapse of the full moon rising. I'm kicking myself for not changing the batteries first since the camera ran out of juice right before the moon rose out of the frame.

And the Wookie, under all that moonlight.

Lets turn on the rear porch light, which is a car breaklight stuck inside an empty 1 gallon water jug at the end of a piece of driftwood. Its funny how resourceful you get down here, everything turns into a building material. For example, I didn't have any lightbulb sockets so I tried soldering the wires directly to the lightbulb but they wouldn't stick very well, so I made a mold out of silicone to hold the wires in place. Normally I wouldn't go to all that work for something like this, but down here, as they say, labor is cheap, even your own.

Here's some other lights I made on the trip. I really like LEDs for mood lighting, mostly because they use hardly any electricity, and also because they cast a really cool light. On the left is the red light above the rear door of the Wook, and right of that is the coolio blue light above the sink.

Here's another red light, over the diner nook.

I installed some blue LEDs inside the gizmo shelf in the dashboard:

And our shade structure got a ring of blue LEDs: