Tomorrow is the day
31 January 2011 | San Diego Harbor Island West Marina
Dennis and Virginia Johns
We must apologize for slinking out of Santa Barbara like thieves but we were still completing preparations up to the minute we had to shove off to avoid the ire of the SB Harbormaster. We also just needed to get out of town as the call of house projects kept luring us away from our boat projects. We would have loved to invite everyone to the boat to show off all our new gizmos but time just did not permit. We've been in San Diego for 3 weeks and made so much progress on the boat items.
We have finally completed all critical projects (after only three weeks!?!), provisioned, and are looking at an attractive weather window for leaving Harbor Island and heading south Tuesday morning, Feb 1 (Santa Ana conditions -offshore breezes into the 15-20 kt range should send us scooting down to Turtle Bay, our first stop in Mexico.
Last Friday we took the boat out of the harbor to test out two of our critical boat projects - the SSB radio and the watermaker. We have tested the email capability of our SSB radio which Dennis installed and all is functional (this is significant because most vendors recommend installation by experienced technicians). This critical piece of communication/information equipment stymied us for a while as we were getting an excessive amount of background noise which we couldn't eliminate, preventing us from hearing anyone clearly. Fortunately we had several experts to consult with (it's not who you are, it's who you know...). A local guy advised that Harbor Island Marinas are notoriously noisy, making reception virtually impossible. We needed to get out of the bay to test our watermaker, so we motored out beyond Point Loma and turned on the radio to discover that we could now hear an operator in Hawaii loud and clear. Problem solved! BTW, the watermaker worked perfectly as well, magically turning salt water into good-tasting fresh water.
As many of you know, Libertad, has gobs of storage space. This turned out to be a good thing and a bad thing. A good thing because we could bring an amazing amount of "stuff" to make our voyage comfortable and make us prepared for most contingencies (system failures). A bad thing because we needed to create an inventory spreadsheet to remind us where we stashed things!
We plan to start with an overnighter, if the winds and sea conditions are good, down to Punta Baja. Our second leg will be to Turtle Bay.
Since we are starting 3 months later than originally planned, we are thinking we will delay on crossing the pacific until next season. Those of you that might have been contemplating joining us for the puddle jump will have to wait until Spring 2012. This season we will take more time in Mexico, Central America, and northwest South America - as far down as Ecuador or Peru. Those of you interested in joining us for parts of the trip in those areas, let us know! We'll leave the boat 'somewhere down there' and fly home for a few months in summer/early Fall. But....we'll see how things go...gotta remain flexible!