First Passages

Marina Mazatlán

First passages for any season of cruising can be a bit “over the top” because you may have lost your sea legs in the four or five months since you left the boat for the summer. This year we added to the issue by having a small party the night before leaving port by way of inviting Steve and Kristin from Nautilus and Michael from Sea Venture over for dinner. It turns out that everyone thought they should bring wine and for the most part we had way too much of it! Leaving port with a bit of a hang over is a tradition for some but not so much for us. Definitely a habit to be avoided. One of the things that I enjoy is a send off where someone pops over to see us off and hands us our dock lines. It saves me hopping aboard Faith from the dock… the boat has a pretty good freeboard so “hopping” aboard can mean quite a leap; that might just be a leap of Faith. Anyway, Ken and Linde from Rosebud handed us lines and we backed out of the slip and into a new adventure!!

Abby enjoying the boat NOT moving

This year, of course, we have the new boat dog, Abby. She gradually gained her sea legs but the real test will be the next time we are going somewhere. Will she vote to get off the boat? Anyway, it took awhile but she did very well on our three day passage from San Carlos to Mazatlán. By the third day she was frisky again and liked being in the cockpit part of the time. There is a better post about all this on Sandy’s blog. When we left San Carlos the boat needed cleaning, again, but there just was not enough time to do this, again. Most of the major jobs had been done but that is almost always the case for us. Get done what is safety related and keep the list for the next port! This is such a great life… follow the sun and keep it easy and fun!! There is always work to be done but do not do too much at a time. That was something of the thinking when we left San Carlos.

One dinghy... AZ registration??

We checked the grib files and knew we had a good weather window for a longer passage. The gribs said calm for most of the first day and no wind over 15 knots for the whole trip. As it turned out we may have had a bit of wind around eighteen knots (that’s when the white caps start looking large) but it was from a direction pushing us nicely along at 7 knots then we surfed the boat up to around 9 and 10 knots!! Wheee!!! That’s when you can feel the surge pass under the boat as the wave passes… just before the wave gets amidships there is a definite power up as the boat accelerates trying to keep pace with the wave. We needed only the jib (forward sail) to run the boat. That is a fairly forgiving point of sail so you do not worry about accidentally jibing the boat and causing damage to your rig. As we went along about the end of day two the fog closed in on us with a smack of colder air and we played dodge boat with the shrimp boats keeping our radar on. It cleared for awhile when we hove to for a nicer dinner and bit of sleep so that we would reach Mazatlán in daylight. This we did thus arriving about daybreak meant seeing the jetty at the entrance was much easier. Another passage completed and a new day to see the world in a fresh light!!