12/06/2004 - Sailing Downwind (Punta de Mita, Mexico)

Well, how do I put this? I'll make a long story short. It did not take us two weeks to Punta Mita. It took us only two days! We got here on Saturday, December 4th. The trip was 260 miles long and took us 51 hours. We are at a gorgeous anchorage in a small village just 30 miles north of Puerto Vallarta and we plan to call this "home" for the next 3 weeks. Why did we get here so fast? Well, the wind simply was not blowing in the direction of Mazatlan. We could have made it to Mazatlan but we would have gotten beat up. Real bad. We ran into what are called the northerlies. That's when the wind rips down the Sea of Cortez kicking the waves up and force you to turn back or go down wind. So we really went where the wind takes us. After the first day we covered 120 nm and the wind and waves settled a little more and we were able to cover 140 nm the next day. This was fun because we kept a good pace of 6 to 8 knots giving us runs up to 12 to 13 knots surfing down the following seas. At the end of the stretch we had to fix only a couple of things on the go and Cathy saw a whale within spitting distance ( about 10 ft ) from the boat. After a day here we saw Profligate, for those of you who don't know who they are, Richard runs the Latitude 38 magazine out of San Francisco. It was nice to see a boat from our home port. --Jake, reply to jasonpruette@yahoo.com