Sun at Last!
01 November 2013 | The Deep Blue Sea
Gene and Gloria
Sun at Last! 13 55N 103 52W TGIF Nov.1, 2013 The low whose skirts we have been riding E and N has matured into a numbered tropical storm, #18, and is moving off NW. We are exiting "a la derecho" or stage right, steering 28T, pretty much toward Zihuatanejo. We have changed our arrival port from Acapulco to Zihua, 105 nm N of Acapulco. This is on the recommendation of John and Pat Rains, author of Cruising Guide to Mexico, who we have been in touch with via email thanks to arrangements by our friend Cindy in SLC. We hope that check in and yacht services are readily available there. We are about 250 nm SW of Zihua and hope for a Sun or Mon arrival. We had many squalls yesterday and last night, night squalls can be very exciting�... We are glad to see the sun for a while to air out the boat, dry the squabs, and charge up the batteries. Not to mention cheer us up! Arrival is starting to seem real as we contemplate arriving in Mx in 27-28 days for the trip, far better than we expected. Especial thanks to that wonderful Low that gave us our last 700+ miles of sailing with no motoring. We have only started the motor 3 times; we start it more regularly after that one night it did not start-that scared us a bit. We think it had something to do with fuel availability after all that rocking and rolling, plus not starting it for the previous 2 weeks. Starts good now, whew!!! We've only used the generator twice this trip, over 3000 nm so far, a record for us. We have today 20-25 kt winds, SW, with 3M seas, but the grib weather shows we will be motoring a lot in the last 200 nm with light and variable breezes most of that way. Ok with us, with flatter seas we can transform Pincoya from voyager to home: Defrost the freezer, get all the stuff out of the bow stateroom and reclaim our bed, mount the small outboard, do some cleaning, writing down our repair list, much more. We'll try for one more fish those last 2 days; maybe a mahi mahi (dorado in Mexico) or a nice tuna.