Bouncy night last night. The wind picked up enough for us to use it but the seas followed suit and picked up, too. Wearing foulies that are too big for me and trying to maneuver around the cockpit, I felt like an astronaut. And not one of the sleek new space shuttle astronauts. No, this was like a John Glenn era astronaut with the big puffy soace suits. When I could finally get in a spot to plop myself down on a cushion in the cockpit I was fine but invariably I would have to get up to do something and every movement was awkward. Hoping not to need them tonight.
But, that aside, we had a good night. Had a 4 inch flying fish land in the cockpit.
Whoops! Bloggus interuptus. As I was writing the stuff above I started getting queasy. Weird, since I just installed a new Scop patch this morning. I went topside but that didn't help very much. Eventually I removed the old patch and installed a new one. Lulu and I have had a couple of instances where we used a patch that must have been outdated or faulty because there was no protection from mal de mer noted. In my previous experience along this line, replacing the patch worked great. While I was removing the old "new" patch, I may have found the problem. Seems that I had done a poor job and it was mostly sticking to hair and not my skin. Anyway, a new patch and a nap and I'm all back to normal, such as it is.
We finally got to shut the engine off and sail today. We're doing a respectable 6 knot average with the main and jib. And, come to think of it, the main still has that first reef in it. The seas continued to be bouncy but the sails helped dampen some of it. Right now, we're about 45 miles from our next turn at Cabo Falso. This means we're actually 100 miles or so south of our destination, La Paz. If you bisected a line from Todos Santos to Cabo San Lucas, we'd be due west of the midpoint of that line, about 35 miles out to sea. If all goes well, we plan to round the tip of Baja sometime tonight, probably mid-night-ish, unless Keith's more exact calculations say otherwise.
Been a great trip so far. Would have been nice to have better sailing weather but we're happy anyway. Now, if the northers don't beat us up too bad going up the Sea, we'll be looking good. The GRIB files look like we should be OK if we can stay on our projected schedule.
Oh yeah, this morning, while we were bouncing along through the ocean, we were visited by a bunch of dolphins. They seemed dead set on entertaining us. Some did full-body vertical leaps in the air before flipping their tails skyward and diving back in. Others just surfed the bow wake and one, at least, did some backwards juming out of the water. That is, he came out and landed dorsal fin down. All quite cool.
That's about it for today so far. Hasta la pasta.
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