Never a Dull Moment
20 April 2007 | West of Isla Cedros
Paul
We left Turtle Bay last night at midnight. We are making good time and happy to have made 40 miles of Westing in spite of the large seas. We hope this is our weather window to get us all the way to Ensenada. From there it is just a hop, skip and a jump to the good ole USA. One other boat also left with us - Molida. The other boats "vacationing" (i.e., stuck waiting for good weather) in Turtle Bay decided to wait a bit to let the seas calm down more. Hopefully we'll connect with Dick and Rick from Solitude, Chris and Gary on Sophia, Sean and Adrienne from Tiki Iti and Mike and Ralph from Grey Spirit in either Ensenada or San Diego. As you might expect, sharing weather info and discussing passage strategies is the prime focus among cruising neighbors in anchorages while awaiting weather windows.
Murphy has been at it again. Shortly after dawn we picked up some kelp and lost engine RPM. Despite our best efforts to back down, go forward, back down, etc. we could not clear it. We surmised that the kelp must have been wrapped securely around our prop shaft - ergo the RPM problem. So it was over the side for me to clear it. You kinda get the hebe jebes (sp.?) jumping in the water 40 miles offshore in 8-10 waves. Fortunately the wind was down which made it a bit easier. To our surprise the shaft was clear and the kelp gone. It must have been coincidental that we got kelp and the engine issue at the same time. OK - so now my analytical mind tells me it must be a partially plugged fuel filter. So we dig out a spare, shut the engine down and change the filter and clean up the mess.. Alas, no joy - we still had our RPM problem. So we gave up and decided to be thankful the engine was still running, albeit, at a lower RPM.
Right now we are making about 5.5-6 knots on a straight course to Bahia de Todos Santo/Ensenada. If all goes well we should be there on Sunday. Keep your fingers crossed.
Hasta luego!