So, we are now definitely and finally underway, as is evident by the fact that we can no longer see land! After a great evening at anchor last night, we weighed anchor at 730 am and headed for El Arco, the famous natural rock arch on the end of the point of Cabo San Lucas. We were immediately hit by 20knots of wind, from directly where we wanted to go! The past 8 hours we have rocked and rolled first parallel to the Cabo coast, then finally settling into a starboard tack and headed away from Land. The heel of the boat is something to get used to, as the brain slowly begins to adjust itself to being tilted over by 20 degrees 🙂 Looking at the weather, we will probably be on this tack for the next 10 days at least – it will be pretty humourous when we finally do tack: After 10 days, everything gets set on surfaces that are friendly to this tack – shoved into little corners, balanced up against bulkheads etc. You can imagine when you take this tilted world onto the other tilt – SMASH, CLANG, BASH!! everything crashes to the floor!
Another big event of the day was getting our wind steering device, the ‘Hydrovane’ up and running. Using the wind, this ingenious device will steer the boat relative to a wind direction and keep you on course… all the while not using anything but the wind to power it! I was dubious to how well it was going to work, and i have to tell you, it is incredible! We have not touched the wheel since we handed over the helm to our new crew mate, “Casper, the friendly ghost”
One more thing I should touch on briefly, is a little experience we had last evening. After provisioning in Cabo and getting all ready to go, we decided to depart. Yes, that’s right, we actually TRIED to leave last night! We stowed everything away, got the sails up, sailed around the point into a borderline gale. Now, this should not deter us under usual circumstances (we are going to hit many on this passage), but it was a good learning experience! We immediately identified a bunch of stuff on the boat that needed to be modified/moved/adjusted. We turned around, anchored in Cabo and set to the task of running a new halyard, splicing a new eye on the end, rerunning all the reef lines, getting rid of a portion of our shade cover at the back of the boat, fixing the mainsail etc…. We completed our tasks at sundown, inhaled a quick meal while watching 4th July fireworks explode over Cabo, then retired for a death sleep. We are all looking forward to having a good nap tonight, and right now I need to get to cooking our first dinner at sea! The plan is for some sauted onions with peppers, chorizo and spicy tomato sauce on the side, with a few slices of avocado as garnish 🙂 The scene of board is very relaxed, we are listening to sublime, sipping mint tea, and waiting for the sunset.
Till tomorrow then,
Ryan, Brys and Hugh