2010 Hola Mexico - Missive 3

December 5-7, 2010: Yeah, there was some wind once we exited Turtle Bay; good enough that after a couple of hours we had to reef down the sails. But as luck would have it around 10 or 11 pm we had to start the iron sail. What a bummer! The seas were rather unruly having swells out of two different directions, but it calmed down to milk pond flat with the rest of the night just a long grind. It sure is dark even with all the stars out; hard to distinguish the horizon from the sea. After 42 hours and 232 nautical miles we arrived at Bahia Santa Maria in pea soup thick fog. Sure didn't need to have this challenge coming in to our anchorage dead tired. But we prevailed and made it in safely around the other boats. After a quick check-in with Odessa, we sent out our position report, emails to family and friends, ate breakfast and hit the sack.

December 8, 2010: It takes at least a day & one-half to recover from these 2 nighters. Every part of my body aches after trying to move around the boat in pitching seas. I missed one step going down into the cabin and wrenched my right knee; it was not happy with me and made sure I knew. The knee is fine, it just got stretched more than usual; hopefully, it broke up some scar tissue. The crew of Odessa came over for breakfast this morning. Hard to believe it's the 8th of December and we are sitting in the cockpit in shorts with temps in the 70's. I had Christmas music playing and decorations up in the boat; but the scene just doesn't compute looking out at the hot dry desert mountains and beach.

We took a dinghy ride around the bay judging our ability to land the dinghy in the surf. We chickened out, don't need that experience just yet. Besides we are leaving tonight at midnight for our next leg to Cabo San Lucas. We want to round Lands End in the early morning and we will probably stay at marina in San Jose del Cabo for a couple of days. There are some 30 knots of wind predicted out of the east on Sat & Sun.

Listening to the radio nets has been interesting. What an incredible community of boaters watching out for each other. It's very comforting! I did a few quick calculations. So far we are 594 nm from San Diego, 2,120 nm from Seattle and with the Alaska trip we have traveled 4,875 nm. Whew, that's a lot of water under our keel