Biking at Catalina Island: Madman on a Folding Bike 6×8 Scrapbooking Layout by Amy Solovay

When it comes to sailing, my husband Mike and I are mostly a couple of goofballs. We pass for capable sailors because we’ve completed impressive ocean crossings, but that could just as easily have been from dumb luck as it was from any kind of real proficiency. It takes a lifetime to truly master sailing, and we’ve only invested about five years’ worth of full-time effort in learning the sport.

Mountain biking is a different story, though. Mike is a skilled mountain biker. He can keep up with most guys ten years younger than him. A guy who’s out of shape and ten years younger than him, Mike will blow past that guy on the trail like he’s standing still.

Not long before we moved aboard a sailboat to go cruising, Mike told me he was selling his mountain bike and buying us folding bikes. I had a hard time wrapping my head around that, because Mike without a mountain bike is like a cat without its purr. But he made the decision to do that because our sailboat, Typhoon, was only 24’ (7 meters.) There wasn’t any easy way to store a couple of mountain bikes aboard the boat.

There were bunches of times we sailed out to Catalina Island and found that real mountain bikes would have been super useful to have. We’d be anchored, with bow and stern anchors set, and we didn’t want to pull them up or give up our spot in the anchorage to go get mail or groceries or whatever. So Mike, being Mike, decided he’d ride his bike from wherever we were to wherever it was we needed him to go — never mind that the terrain in between Two Harbors and Avalon is gnarly.

If you were to ride a bike across Catalina Island, you’d want it to be a mountain bike, not a crappy folding bike. But Mike didn’t let that stop him. He is the guy who rode a folding bike from Two Harbors to Avalon and back bunches of times. And frequently, he then rode back to our anchorage with a backpack full of groceries on his back. Once when he was in transit, he even got chased by an angry bison.

I usually stayed aboard the boat and crocheted while Mike went on those solo adventures. I don’t remember taking these photos of him, but I guess there must have been at least one time I went ashore with him AND the bike AND the camera. It might not seem like a big deal, but rowing anything ashore in those days was a pain in the neck. Looking back at these photos, I marvel that there was a day when we motivated to get both a bike and a camera ashore at the same time in our 5’ sailing dinghy. I am glad we did, because now I am working on scrapbooking our adventures.

Thanks so much for taking a look at my project. I appreciate your interest!