Pazifik crossing – day 1

Finally we got away from the Galpagos !! As always, we announced to leave but didn’t manage and it took one more day to get going. The reason was that we had a nice little farewell-party with the crew of the SY Red Sky Night and the captain of the Rancho Relaxo had a nice little hangover the next day.
We actually expected the coast guard to show up because we didn’t leave on saturday as we should. But they also had a party on friday, so I guess we shared the headache.
Today in the morning then we started final preparations, jumped into the water a last time and baked a nice big loaf of bread before we lifted the anchor at noon local time. We were just ten minutes away when again the engine went out. But luckily we had a nice breeze from SSE and the sails were already up. So we left the Isla Isabela under sail while all kinds of birds circled around our boat as to wish us good bye.
The wind was very light and quite often I looked around to check the distance from the coast, where a very long swell coming from SSW broke violently on the lava coast. But the wind stayed with us and increased as we gained distance from the island. Right now we look at the last volcano in the SW-corner of Isla Isabela and our distance from the coast is about 10nm. The wind is steady at a force 3 from SSE and we glide along with 4.5 to 5 knots. The sailing is wonderful as the ship is nearly without motion and there are little to no waves. We’ll continue to sail a bit too much to the south for the next one or two days after which we’ll continue somewhere between the three or five degree line.
Everybody is happy and feeling well. Our plotter tells us we’ll be in Fatu Hiva in 620 hours with 2881 miles to go. Hehehe.

LATITUDE: 01-13.43S, LONGITUDE: 091-17.38W, COURSE: 251T, SPEED: 4.1, WIND: SSE2-3, DISTANCE: 2879nm