Day 2 – Hunting for wind

We left Puerto Vallarta a couple of days ago on March 10th. The plan was to depart in the morning and use the land breeze to get out to sea, but various Things transpired to delay us, as Things are wont to do. New bilge pump, changing Pesos to Dollars, final trip to the hardware store… So we finally ended up casting off the dock lines at about 4pm. The fuel dock on the way out of the marina was busy, so we loitered around for about half an hour before we could take our turn to fill the six extra jerry cans I’d bought for the crossing. We’ll have about 280 litres of diesel, which gives us around 120 hours of motoring.

Instead of heading straight out to sea, we sailed up to Punta de Mita on the northern end of Banderas Bay to spend a night at anchor and get a couple of final things done. I changed the engine oil – a hot, sweaty, tiring job in the belly of the ship. It’s not like changing oil in a car, where you just put the empty container underneath the sump and open a drain plug. Since the engine sump is right at the bottom of the boat, there’s no space underneath. I have to pump it out manually through a small pipe inserted into the dipstick hole. But my pump sucks. As in it’s cheap and won’t suck properly. Which means almost an hour of non-stop hand pumping to get two litres of old oil out… but the job’s done, and the engine is grateful for a fresh load of oil.

At noon yesterday (11th) we hoisted the main, hauled up the anchor and sailed out of the bay in a nice breeze. Westward ho! Pretty exciting to finally set sail. After a great start, 106 miles noon to noon, we’re now over a hundred miles offshore and away from the land breeze. Sea is flat calm and glassy. No wind. The forecast was light, so we expected this. The engine has been running for a couple of hours, and I plan to keep going under power through the night if the wind doesn’t pick up. I’ve downloaded a weather report, and it looks like the trade winds kick in about 110 degrees west – another 150 miles from here.

The food is all organised into various lockers, and written up on the provisioning list that we’ll update as we eat through each cupboard. It’s going to be interesting to see whether we have enough, and whether it’s the right mix of ingredients. We’re bound to run out of some key ingredient early on, but hopefully we’ve planned well enough that we don’t end up eating just pasta and milk powder… Dave made a huge batch of chilli con carne on the way across to Pta Mita, which we had for the last two evening meals and will probably last another two more.

It’s coming up to 1830 (UTC -6); about supper time, but it’s hot and the sun is still high in the sky. Our westing is really making a difference to the time. The sun is setting later – maybe tomorrow we’ll have to update our clocks and hop across to the next time zone.

Crew and boat doing well, let’s hope we find wind in the next couple of days.