It took us 26 hours to motor to Cabo San Lucas from Las Paz in wind too light to do any sailing. When it did finally build it was in our faces. So we kept on motoring and arrived at the Cabo fuel dock shortly before 5 PM.
With 150 gallons of fuel in our tanks, we set off into the waning light. The advice of the professional weather forecaster hired by Mark before leaving was to aim for a lat / lon of 18° north 120 west. So we created a waypoint on the plotter at that point and pointed the boat toward it. The strategy was to dip south into the trade winds before proceeding west to Hawaii, approaching from the southwest.
The problem with that strategy was that it immediately put the wind in our faces again. The wind was at our nose and blowing hard. The seas were uncomfortable. It felt like the weather was constantly feeding us crap. We couldn't keep using the engine or we'd quickly run out of fuel. We didn't know what to do. Cabo was receding behind us as we pondered the question.
Suddenly dinner sounded like a good idea. Maybe if we had something to eat while we motored away from the influence of the Baja land mass, the wind would rotate from a better direction.
After dinner things did start to look a little better, enough to pull out the sails and shut down the engine. We were still going farther south than we would have liked, but at least we weren't burning fuel.
Next up was to manage our electrical consumption. We shut down much of our electronics and fired up the wind generator, which stanched the outflow of battery power. With that, we sailed into the night, crashing into waves at a reasonable pace and in roughly the right direction.
----------
Sent via SailMail, http://www.sailmail.com
Been running a number of weather routing simulations and it looks from the numbers (though I don't have a polar for Quijote) that you're moving in roughly the right direction, Rod.
ReplyDeleteSo wish I was with you, but as much as I can, living vicariously through your blog!