The engine is off. We are only making about two and a half knots because the day is so calm. We have more time than fuel. We have more time than endurance for another jarring push, with diesel shattering the calm of the day and the rhythm of the waves. We’ve come to learn that the seas are calmer and kinder when you ride the winds that create them, like shaving with the grain. We need this. This trip down Baja is going to be over 1,000 miles in total, with the first leg representing a third of that. Since Portland we’ve traveled 1,200 miles total, and this time we don’t have three months we’d like to spare to make the trip less grueling.
The hope is La Paz by Christmas, but by the middle of Day 2 (December 10th), we’ve only covered 60 miles. Yet, today has been restful, even pleasant. We sat in the sun and read our books over lunch. We put an album on the radio. We took off our heavy clothes for an hour with our sails down in a windless sunny calm. Something undefinable made me look up from my book over at Harmony to see her scrunching up slowly more and more around her own book, goosebumps rising on her arms and legs like flags, pointing out what should have been obvious.
“Are you cold?”
“Yeah, it got chilly all of a sudden.” She seemed almost perplexed.
I stood and looked out on the horizon all around, the small ripples fluttering on the swell like the depths were shivering with their own gooseflesh.
“Do you suppose that’s because the wind finally came back?”
She looked up. “Oh yeah. Probably,” and she went inside to nap. It was my shift, so my problem to deal with. I don’t mind. These days we’re both getting pretty good at raising and lowering sails by ourselves, so as not to disturb each other’s peace if we don’t have to.
I raised the genoa and looked at our GPS. The speed crawled up and stopped at 2.5 knots. At this rate we’ll hit La Paz around New Years, assuming we don’t stop.
We have more time than concern.
Once we get to La Paz though, we aren’t going to move for a month.
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General Update: We lasted without it for a whole week and a half, but we finally broke down and got a broadband card. In theory this means we’ll be able to keep up to date a bit more, but we lack the impulse to sit on our computers while out sailing.
Today is the 16th and we leave our anchorage in Turtle Bay for Magdalena Bay, which is about 2.5 days hence. Our short hop here from Cedros Island saw us in a 35 MPH storm, and the drenching waves over the cockpit technically qualify as our last shower. We’re both fighting colds. The cat is starting to look a little fat, but I can’t blame him. The shoe bin wasn’t quite the refuge in the storm that he probably hoped, with the shoes flying into him like a dozen phantom kicking feet.
If we could we’d stay here another day, but with our new Internet comes better knowledge of the weather, and staying one more day will actually mean staying four more days. Away we go.