Monday, December 22, 2014

December 20, 2014 - Cabo San Lucas

We left Bahia Santa Maria just before dawn with a 28 hour voyage plan south east to Cabo San Lucas under ideal conditions.  If all was well we would get to Cabo and round Cabo Falso after dawn and arrive to anchor at 10am or so.  The voyage plan as far as timing was as good as could be.  We crossed over the Tropic of Cancer just as the sun went down.  We are officially in the Tropics!
 
As we crossed over the Tropic of Cancer

Cindy's artwork

The seas decided to throw us a curve ball.  After an entire day of smooth sailing (ok motoring) where our bow was the main location for all of us, Steve even got to take a nap on the bow and at times I sat on the bow, read and did my watch.   We are always looking for wildlife or debris in the water; which by the way we see wildlife but not any debris or hazards to navigation.  Conditions deteriorated at about 9:30pm.  So seas became choppy with wind waves hitting our port side.  When reviewing the chart, the wind was from the north just as forecast, even though we feel like it is an east wind as the land is to our port side.   Forecast was 10 knots and we were seeing constant 20 with gusts to 25 or so.  We feel this mostly when it is a beam of us or coming toward us.  Had it been to our stern we would not have noticed.  While Kathy was on watch, suddenly the stabilizers overheated, and since they are pretty smart devices, they shut down to protect themselves.  Without these operating, we started a pretty large rolling motion.  Steve was quickly up to assess while items are falling all over from different parts of the boat.  We had this happen four times between 2-4am.  At first we turned into the waves and then start the hobby horse effect.  The stabilizer pump had sucked in too much air and needs water to maintain temperature.  Steve got it restarted within minutes which felt more like a half hour.  This had not happened in our four months at sea and of course it then happened several more times in one evening.  We got smart and turned to the sea so that we had following seas while trying to get them operating again.  It's a  much smoother ride when the waves are on your stern.  One the last shutdown, the kids came up from our stateroom a bit concerned about some books falling on them that are above the head of the bed.  They then slept on the salon settee (we put the table down and cushions on it for overnight passages or watching movies while at anchor).   Most of the day and evening we often spoke with SV Namaste as they were running east of us closer to shore and also headed to Cabo.  Quite a few of the other vessels in our "group" were also leaving that day or the following day headed to Cabo.


Seas began to calm down at about 5am and Steve and I switched watch so he went down to the stateroom for a nap.  The sun was coming up as we were approaching Cabo Falso.  Beautiful morning and excitement as we got closer to the anchorage and turned the corner.  It was also nice to  see SV The Red Thread anchored and not yet off to Mazatlan.  SV Namaste came in just before noon and by the next morning we saw that SV Kai, SV Astrea, SV Kha-Khan, SV Kialoa had all come in.   Most of our group had arrived.

Sunrise and Cabo Falso up ahead

Cabo San Lucas is just behind those rocks.  One more
left turn and we are done with the Pacific Coast,
We've been here in Cabo San Lucas for a couple days.  It has changed a great deal since we were here 14 or so years ago.  We will write about what we have been up to here in our next blog entry.  

2 comments:

  1. Can you still rent quads and play in the sand near the Light House? Chris

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    1. Hi Chris,

      There were still ATV rentals in town and I assume they headed out to the dunes and the lighthouse. We did this when we were here about 14 years ago, but did not do it this time.

      -Steve

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