Well things are looking good for a departure tomorrow morning. The winds are expected to be in the 15 to 20 knot range inside of 60 miles offshore. So we are planning to travel about 30 off. If things are going well, we are going to try to get to San Diego in one jump. If we are finding ourselves too tired or things get rough, we will come in and find a safe harbour. There are a few along the coast to choose from so we have several options.
If we do it in one jump it should take us around 4 to 5 days. It's about 450 miles from San Francisco to San Diego by boat. Since we no longer have our crewmember, this will be a good test for Ian and I (me especially). We will probably do longer shifts in the day and shorter ones at night. We expect to see more traffic on this leg of the trip as there are so many more major ports here with freighters and fishing boats.
We finally got the AIS working on the computer with the help of our friend Veronica from Vida Nova. For those who don't know what AIS is it stands for Automatic Identification System which all commercial ships are required to have. It gives you a ships name, heading, lat and long so you can track them in relationship to your own boat. It's like radar only better as you get so much more information. It also takes way less power than radar. And since you can see a boats name, it makes it easy to call them on Channel 16 if you need to and because you are calling them by name they can't ignore you. It's just nice to check and see if they can see you as small boats are hard to see in the waves.
So this afternoon, we are going to be getting the boat snugged down again with everything stored away. We have had the dingy out all week so now we need to bring it back on board and tie it down.
I've got the frozen soups and dinners ready to go and we have fixed some of the things we thought were deficient from the first leg of the trip as well as fixed the few things that broke.
If the waters are calm enough, my next blog should be via ham radio. If you don't hear from us as usual it's because I'm too sea sick to sit in front of the computer.
Thanks for all your messages, I love reading them when we have internet and I can see the blog.