Leaving Manana for Hawaii!

View of Marina Costa Baja from above, where we are currently moored

Paul Doing Last minute washing of boat and most importantly cleaning our solar panels. Our whisker pole is at right angles to the boat- Paul just set up an after guy to hold it in position aft. We are hoping to be able to use it to pole out our headsail (Genoa) on our passage. We look forward to setting our sails and not having to make sail plan changes for several days once we are truly out there. Before that, we have to round the cape (San Jose del Cabo at the tip of the peninsula) where it may get a bit choppy for awhile before the winds settle.

5/2 Approximately 3000 nautical miles ahead of us. We are super excited. Weather looks great. Boat is ready. We are ready to try our sea legs. We will try and slip out of the harbor early….Not particularly interested in getting stopped by the Mexican navy who are patrolling the coast. The level 3 lockdown here restricts movement of all vessels except for limited commercial reasons and for leaving the country.

Looks like we will be onboard for 5 weeks- 3 weeks of passage plus 2 weeks of quarantine in Hilo unless they lift the restrictions at the beginning of June. We will be allowed off every 3-4 days to get groceries only and it sounds like that is being actively enforced. We have TONS of books, a guitar waiting to be played, language learning tapes, games, comfy beds and ridiculous amounts of food with plenty of water.

FYI, A nautical mile is based on the circumference of the earth, and is equal to one minute of latitude. It is slightly more than a statute (land measured) mile (1 nautical mile = 1.1508 statute miles ).

We are looking forward to watching the night sky and getting to know Tomten better (not to mention ourselves). I am looking forward to celebrating my 56th birthday at sea. I trust there is some chocolate hidden away on board.

We are hoping to catch up with friend Mark on Estelle in Hilo and after our quarantine we hope to be tourists for a little while…But for now, lots of last walks, games of Kubb and frisbee on the beach and catching up on sleep before we go on to round-the-clock 4 hour watches (Which will give us all approximately 8 hours off in between) Cruising friend Hellmuth gave us some good advice on adding a “dogwatch” which will be an hour for dinner all together- that will allow us to slowly adjust the watch schedule each day by one hour so no one gets locked into the same schedule.

We have a new cruising log and will be keeping our log on the hour of each watch, recording weather, barometric pressure, wind, waves, lat and long, course steered etc as well as anything unusual that comes up. We will be getting our weather predictions from Predict Wind using our Iridium Go satellite system as well as downloading weather gribs (see below) and NOAA weather forecasts in text format. Luckily for us Mark left 4 weeks before us and was able to give us an idea of what to expect out there.