It's about that time.

Well, we seem to have a tendency toward tardiness. Here we are, really really close to ready to go, but still pushing back our departure day by day. We were going to leave on Tuesday, but the weather was better for Wednesday. Then on Wednesday we were finishing our last projects and it was quite busy- the weather was just as good for a Thursday push, so we put it off a day. Now, here we are on Thursday. I'm writing this at Huanacaxtle Cafe in La Cruz. We just ordered our second round of beers.

The list of preparations has largely been semantic, but these things take time in Mexico. Especially for such prolific beer drinkers as ourselves. We've had to get temporary overseas medical evacuation insurance so that we can be admitted to French Polynesia (this is a new rule this year- we used the Diver's Alert Network, which provides the necessary coverage for the $35/year membership fee). We also decided to throw down a bit of cash to have our immigration taken care of for us in FP. This means we won't have to provide an $1800 per person repatriation bond (the bond is recoverable, but only at certain islands), our paperwork is taken care of for us when we arrive (we don't speak French, so this is a matter of convenience) and we have a permit for duty free fuel in FP. The company we're using will also take care of the paperwork for our crew change in Tahiti. But, it has meant dealing with logistical considerations over the computer, and internet connections here are finicky and slow.

Trying to get something done at the marina restaurant. It's tough
with bad internet and ceviche and beers only 15 pesos each.

We finished our final projects yesterday: fixed the lazarettes, re-wired the stern light, added a topping lift, etc. We managed to buy a liferaft, so we wrapped our dinghy up and now have an actual cabin top to enjoy. We also got a ton of provisions: a hundred or so eggs, lots of beans, flour, and other dry provisions. Plenty of vegetables. Lots of canned goods. And, of course, beer. Six cases to be exact. Five of them are on the cockpit floor... but it's a small price to pay.

Provisions.

Definitely necessary.

Now we will be pushing off as soon as possible, but it's hard to say whether that's Thursday 4/12 or Friday 4/13. The weather is as good as it has been this year, which is nice vindication for our slowness- we were getting some grief from friends in La Paz about our general lateness, but it turns out to have been a late year anyway, so those who left earlier have had very slow passages. Now we're looking at a fairly strong (1026 mb) high pressure system sitting near Hawaii, which is an indicator that the summer trade winds should be getting stronger to the South (the high pressure system there pulls the sub-tropical jetstream North, taking the variable pressure systems that confuse the tradewinds with it). A cold front is passing through northern Baja as well, which helps create down-flow, providing a good connection from where we are to the trades. The ITCZ is relatively narrow still and north of the equator (typically it has widened more by this time of year and moved South, but we're lucky that it has remained more March-like this year). Below are some of the NOAA weather images that we use for route planning and passage tactics; they are all obtainable on the internet at: http://weather.noaa.gov/fax/marine.shtml. We are currently using charts broadcast from the Hawaii station. All of these charts are also available on high frequency radio, which is how we get them at sea. Just in case there's any interest on how we pick weather windows.

24 Hour Surface Pressure Forecast: Central Pacific.

24 Hour Wind/Wave Forecast, SE Pacific. The little flag-looking things show wind direction and speed.
Each full bar they have coming off the back counts for 10 kts breeze, each half bar for 5 kts. The numbers are wave height in feet.

24 Hour Surface Pressure Forecast, Southeast Pacific. We are currently just southwest of the "L",
a low pressure system that has come down from northern Baja.

48 Hour surface pressure forecast for SE Pacific. Note the cold front (line with triangles) in norther Baja,
the 1028 mb high pressure system in the top left, and the northerly, broken ITCZ near the equator-
all good things for Ardea.

48 hour wind/wave forecast SE Pacific.

It takes a while to get used to these images and their interpretation, but I assure you, we are in good shape. The great circle course to Hiva Oa, Marquesas is 2722 nm. We'll end up sailing a bit more than that, since we'll route more to the West at first to clear the Baja Penninsula for more favorable wind and swell. Then, around 130 deg. W, we'll make a course perpendicular to the ITCZ to try to jump from the North Pacific trades to the South Pacific trades as quickly as possible. The South Pacific trades are still pretty weak (see above image), but they'll hopefully strengthen by the time we get there. We expect to take thirty days or so to make the crossing, though if we can manage to hit the weather well, we may come in as quick as 25 days. For some perspective on that- our best day of sailing so far (i.e., 24 hours) has been 165 nm. Our worst has been down in the realm of 60 nm.

Some way or another (i.e., through the SSB radio nets we're using or by calling my Dad on the sat phone and having him submit), we'll provide position updates to YOTREPS, so our position should be viewable on www.shiptrak.org. My HAM callsign is KJ6TNX, but I will post a link on the blog so that the callsign is automatically entered (http://shiptrak.org/?callsign=KJ6TNX).

Anyway, we're all pretty excited with a healthy dose of nerves as well. I've never been more confident in Ardea. She's held up incredibly well so far and I suspect she'll be rather indifferent to the passage at large. So, without further adieu, we bid farewell to North America. Mexico has been better than good to us and we'll miss it for sure. But exploring about Oceania sounds pretty great too.

So, to all our family and friends, we send all of our love and best wishes. We are deeply grateful for the support we've had. Know that we will take good care and stay safe and not lay it over and catch hella monsters.

Love,

Connor

Listo.

Bahia de Banderas: The Last Stop in Mexico

Despite our affinity for the place and the fact that I could continue indefinitely describing its charms, we eventually had to depart from La Paz. It was more than a few times I considered following in the footsteps of those meandering before us and holing up there for a year or so. I suppose, in the end, the drive to complete a crossing was greater than that to post up as a cruiser and explore the Sea of Cortez for the summer. In any case, Mexico seems so accessible to us by boat that by now we're confident we can return here in the future more easily and on a greater variety of vessels than can we cross to the South Pacific. So we pressed on, slightly heartbroken. The day before we left, though, I bought a little outboard for our dinghy. It's a seventies-era Johnson two-stroke- a whopping four horsepower- and it dominates the road. Really, it runs perfectly and the release from paddling from anchor has been revolutionary.

Becalmed in the middle of the Sea, we shot the
 first in a new series of throwback
'Me and My Johnson' photos.

The crossing to Bahia de Banderas, home of Puerto Vallarta et. al, was exceedingly slow. It took us four and a half days to cover the 350 nm passage. We were totally becalmed a great deal of the time and barely moving for much of the remainder. And it was hot out. We did enjoy a swim in the middle of the Sea of Cortez, which was pretty cool. Motoring along one day, we decided to shut the engine down and jump in to cool off. The sea was perfectly glassy, not a drop of wind and not a semblance of swell. Dana stood on the cabin top declaring Shark Watch, before we all dove in. It can be pretty disorienting to be out of site of land on a boat, but this effect is amplified significantly when you dive in the water and are surrounded by a totally three dimensional environment with the sun as the only reference point anywhere. The water was the bluest blue and it felt fantastic to dive deep and look around at total uniformity, but it's hard not to find the immensity at least a bit irksome. All the shark talk didn't help, either.

There were few highlights of the passage. We caught and ate a bonito, which was nice but by now is considered a lesser of the potential fish we might take out there, so it didn't quite come with the pure joy we experience with our first bonito, back near Bahia Tortugas, when we were there a thousand years ago. We almost had a highlight experience fishing on the passage, but it turned to disappointment. We hooked a short-fin mako shark, maybe four feet long, on a squid plug with some cut bait (a bit of the aforementioned bonito). It had a pretty good set of teeth, so we wanted to make sure it was good and dead before we brought it onto our little boat. Thus we set forth rigging snatch blocks to our mizzen so we could hoist the shark out of the water to suffocate. That made it pretty mad, so we got out the bow and our only two arrows and shot it to accelerate the process. Dana took the first shot and got him in the gills. I took the second and got him in the top of the head. We thought we were sitting on Easy Street with shark burgers as good as grilled, but our severely incapacitated friend gave one last fight for life and managed to break the lines tied to the arrows and pull the fishing line attached to the hook still securely in his mouth in between the roller and the snatch block housing so it pinched and snapped. It was an impressive effort, but the shark was too far gone to have survived. We swung the boat around and tried our best to find him so we might get him back with the gaff, but, like I said, it's incredibly difficult to orient offshore and the shark got enough below the surface that we couldn't find him again. It's still a fairly sore subject and I probably wouldn't have shared it if I weren't so compelled to post a picture of the guy. Hopefully we'll catch another later. We're still working on making up lost karma having killed a fish only to lose it in such poor fashion.

The one that got away.

Here he is getting angrier.

After arriving at La Cruz, a bit north of Puerto Vallarta, we attended the last of the Puddle Jump seminars organized by Latitude 38 magazine. The topic was weather routing- different sources for weather information were discussed as well as interpretation of offshore patterns, mainly from looking at pressure systems. We also talked about strategies for getting across the ITCZ (Inter-tropical convergence zone, also known as the doldrums), namely finding and using squall systems to get to the southern hemisphere trade winds. It was definitely worthwhile and we all feel we learned something.

Still eating pretty well...

The rest of our stay here is a bit of a whirlwind. My parents came down for a visit for four days. We had a blast with them up in Sayulita, only a 20 minute or so drive from La Cruz. We managed to tour about Puerto Vallarta, get out for a little sail, and get some solid relaxation time during their stay. I must say, too, that it was quite nice to get off the boat for a few days.

A little daysail with the rents.

Dana and I had to find something to do while
my Mom perused the trinkets in PV.

Dana, Chittick, Anna, David, Camille, Connor

Anna also came down for a visit followed by Robin, so we were pretty busy touring about for a while. Chittick and I managed to get a couple kite-boarding sessions in, which were fantastic. It was pretty cool to be kiting in warm water again, and this time with sea turtles and dolphins splashing about only a few feet away. We did have a propensity to stay out a bit long, so had more than one slow swim to the beach when the wind shut down. The breeze here is a solid thermal like San Francisco Bay, though it hasn't been as strong as at home. Still though, it kicks up in the early afternoon just about every day.

Two night herons being friends in PV.

We also had a great trip out to Las Islas de Las Tres Marietas, which are a group of small islands at the western end of Banderas Bay. Robin came along and, though we didn't manage to catch any monsters on the way, we did discover a cool cave and had fun wandering around the island looking at boobies and enjoying a very sheltered beach.

Our own private beach. Connor's mad dinghy driving skills and our sweet
Johnson got us through that cave- it was a bit of a tight fit.

Ardea sits off the island. Boobies whistle and mob in the foreground.

Dana and Robin scrambling on the rocks.

Blue-footed boobie.

Robin's fishing!

Our last week here has been full of preparations. We're busily trying to get ready to push off as a positive weather window is coming upon us. More on our final projects and provisioning soon!