Sail Cutthroat

So far we’ve had the idyllic trip south.  The winds are very fair out of the North to Northwest at 15 knots…just what the cruising books all say.  Today was a picture book day with blue skies, and perfect winds and seas – it couldn’t have been better.  We saw a few fish – dolphins and Carol saw some flying fish.  I adjusted our course slightly to sail more on a broad reach making it a little more comfortable with the swells – we are lazy sailors as well.  This also lengthened our route by several miles but that works out fine since we were moving a little faster than planned and I don’t want to arrive in the dark.

By sunset the winds and seas died to where we couldn’t maintain our 5 knot minimum threshold so it was on with the iron genoa (the engine for those of you unfamiliar with that term).  While I truly love to sail – creeping along at sub-5 knot speeds is just not in my makeup.  For those of you non-sailors that sounds absolutely ridiculous, but you’d be amazed at the feeling of power 8 knots gives you.  There’s a tremendous amount of energy and mass on the Cutthroat under sail – absolutely incredible.  The ride gets down-right thrilling in 25 knots of wind.  We’re so heavy anyway with all our “stuff” on board.  Roger and I joke if we ever sold her we’d need a large moving truck to haul everything off and the water line would rise by 4-5 inches.  Much of our weight is in our 300 gallons of fuel and 340 gallons of water we carry.  It gives us tremendous cruising range and the reverse osmosis desalinization aka -watermaker allows us to replenish that supply as needed.  It’s really a feeling of independence on both counts.

We had a beautiful sunset albeit quite early – it was only 5PM or so.  Then darkness is upon us.  It’s close to 1 AM now and the stars are abundant.  We haven’t seen another boat all night long either but earlier we did see a Norwegian Cruise Ship – the Norwegian Star which we sailed on in Hawaii several years ago.  We are less than 60 miles from our first destination – Bahia De Tortugas ~ Turtle Bay.  I can see the light at Isle San Benito off to port now.  We should arrive around 9 AM depending on wind in the morning.  We’re not sure how long we’ll stay but we’ll keep you posted in tomorrow’s update.

Until then we wish you all well and appreciate your many responses.  Thanks for keeping us updated and informed.  Congrats to:

Granddaughter Megan for winning her three Volleyball games…

Grandson Riley for getting no “gigs” on his ROTC uniform inspection…

Nephew Charlie for getting two more college acceptances – - – go Boy, go!

The Texas Aggies for not getting outscored too badly by OU

Pat for making it safely to Tampa and unpacking Carol’s sewing machine!

Robert Schmidt for offering to get my Google Earth working (I’ll get that email back to you when we get to TB tomorrow).

Oh yes – ChKogge for figuring out where we were from the lat/lon in the last email and for the Spanish translations – we didn’t know you could do that…