Et c’est parti.

Wednesday, February 28th, 2024, 11:28 PM.

This is my first Vampire Watch (11 to 3PM) of many more to come. The moon is playing peek-a-boo with the clouds, and I feel all bright-eyed and bushy tailed. We are moving south along the Baja Panhandle, making sure to keep enough distance between O2 and the Mexican coast. We have completely cleared out of Mexico, and we don’t want to get boarded by nervous coastguards patrolling their territorial waters, looking for bad guys. Or for visa-less gringos. We are going south before turning west to avoid too strong of a blow that is about to form out there.

There’s a spot near Ensenada called La Bufadora, ‘bufar” meaning “to hiss and growl like a wild cat”.  There people gather to marvel at the power of crashing waves shooting meters high through a couple of blowholes. In the open ocean, waves roam freely, uninhibited by obstacles. That’s why we always feel safer mid-ocean rather than near a rocky coast. Unless the waves build up too high and collide with each other of course, or come slamming sideways onto our hulls as is often the case. Then, it’s our cat O2 who starts hissing & growling. But not tonight. Tonight, we relish the luxury of an ocean in slow motion.

It’s been 37 hours and 189 nautical miles since we waved goodbye to Mark & Serena, who cast off our lines amid last minute chores on SV Pegasus, their 53-foot monohull. They’ll likely catch up in a couple of days. Our journey so far has been slow, at an average speed of a mere 5 knots. Slow, but oh so steady and comfortable thanks to our wing-to-wing set-up on a broad reach run. Engines silenced, a bonus day from the leap year, dolphins paying us a visit, blog issues solved (we got locked out of our own blog and it took several phone calls and many anxious attempts to get back in), the weather getting warmer by the hour, all contribute to the good cheer onboard O2. Just another 300 miles down South and we can make our right turn to the West and into the deep blue.