Albatross across the Pacific


Mexico
Kym and Brian arrived in Huatulco Mexico on the Oaxacan coast on April 3rd and happily boarded Albatross at her dock. Checking in with Pedro and Enrique, brothers who caretook the boat while we were away, beginning provisioning and stowing gear took up most of our time. Charlie and Ella, our crew from the Bay area who signed on for the crossing, arrived next day and Kym’s brother Wes a bit later. Charlie and Ella brought the new Jordan Series drogue and storm jib, Wes brought parts of the new windlass, spare water jugs and other miscellanea. Now the prep work began in earnest. We had to remove the 30 year old windlass from the foredeck and custom fit the new Lewmar we brought down with us. Big job: thank you Charlie and Wes! The spinnaker pole was corroded and not functioning well and Ella, hard core racer that she is, took over rehabbing it. Many trips to town and, unfortunately on one bike venture, Brian, stupidly not wearing his helmet in the heat, crashed. Oh --just a mild concussion and fractured facial bone, but after hurried phone consultations with an ENT back home, the preparations went on. Self-applied acupuncture and intraoral cranial treatments [coached by Brian's daughter via phone] helped the healing. Then Wes took a spill getting off the boat onto the dock and wound up with a very fat ankle. We learned that shipboard is not a bad place to be with an ankle injury [all the handholds] and healing was quick. Ella did hours of computer work getting us connected via Iridium Sat phone to Sailmail and restoring connectivity for our weather Grib files. More work getting a good purchase for the top down spinnaker furler on the bowsprit, gluing down sections of the Vetus deck which were coming up, sealing the foredeck hatch which was leaking badly, installing stainless rails and boards to the stanchions to lash our on-deck fuel jugs to, and a myriad other small tasks took lots of time. Great boat fixing expertise from Charlie.

Alas when finally ready, a Tehuantepecer was forecast to start blowing. A recurrent phenomenon where the isthmus of southeastern Mexico is it’s narrowest allows periodic winds sweeping southwesterly over the Sierra to accelerate to 70 mph at times. The blow can last for several days and build up a nasty steep short sea within miles from the coast. Thus conventional wisdom is to hug the coast even though it adds miles to the transit across the gulf. Although we’d be on the western edge of it the prospect of forecasted 35-40 kt winds and 15-20 ft seas on our first few days cooled our enthusiasm a bit and we waited it out giving us more time to provision and store. Let’s see: Kym says we need 120 eggs, 160 potatoes, 100 onions, 80 heads of garlic, 10 bags of blue corn masa for tortillas---etc…(thank you Pardys for your book on provisioning for long passes )wow, major provisioning for a guestimated 21-24 days at sea once we would leave the Galapagos.

So Mexico: altogether 8 days on the dock, 2 injuries, lots of repairs and installations, many pounds of food--- boy were we ready to go.