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12/15/2005 1:15:00 AM
Outside Turtle Bay, MX
Just outside Turtlebay heading south

Many firsts on our way south to Turtlebay

During our first long journey, we sailed a lot and motored little and then we had to anchor, was the motor going to hold!?

Let me start with a few 'household items':

-          First, in case you get confused with all the names of places and where we are, you can always go to our website www.Lawur.com <http://www.lawur.com/>  and check out the worldmap on the homepage or click on the area and you get a more detailed few . kind of nifty since it gets automatically with these emails I sent (see attached XML file for the detailed coordinates in case you want to use Google Earth for example).

-          Second but not less important, despite the fact that it is stated now on the bottom of ALL our emails (I know these reports are too long for the average male professional reader and you never make it to the bottom, here is a stereotype if there ever is), please when replying DELETE THE ORIGINAL text; this automated feature of most email clients is great for regular users but with our email connection, we are back in the stone ages . remember when we all thought a modem with 56KB was way too slow . well we are receiving and sending email at up to 1400 baud if we are lucky. that is BAUD not kilo baud . but as they say don't look into a gift horses mouth (did I screw this one up again Jan Frisk!?) . so please remember to DELETE the original but please don't stop writing back because of this inconvenience . no words from friends and family are too long to download!! Ok now on to the interesting parts .

It is Thursday morning 1:30am, we were escorted out of Turtlebay by dolphins (or as Benjamin calls them now 'sea angels') to Ascuncion, a place friends of ours are anchored right now and we are eager to meet up with them. Before I get ahead of myself, let me look back first at the earlier part of this week. We had a trip with many firsts, a few records and just a great time sailing.

This was by far our longest trip we have ever done and the first time we sailed consecutively without starting the motor except to charge our batteries for over 30 hours. Once we left San Diego, it was pretty mild though somewhat rolly for about 20 hours, we motored all the way past Punto Colnett, the point we turned around the last time but that evening the wind picked up and we were able to start sailing . it got actually pretty windy and we had winds blowing all the way from that evening until 2 hours out of Turtlebay, the first stop on the way South after Ensenada where you can take on fuel . an adventure on it own, but to that later.

Lucky us though that the wind picked up because right around there the motor started acting up; the good news is that we are collecting more and more data of what is exactly going on but I promised Frank no more troubleshooting until La Paz, so I keep my motor 'sad talk' for a later time. The sail was pretty awesome despite some pretty choppy and confused seas . we were constantly making over 5 knots at times all the way to 7 knots; during the next day (that would be Tuesday by now) we were even doing 8 and a random 9 at times when we pushed her . I actually went and tried some different sail combinations and played around with different setups depending on wind direction and speed but then again flying our gennaker (a fairly big sail that is a combination of a large jib and a spinnaker, the big colorful sails) into gusts of over 22 knots was a bit to knarly . good practice but not quite the cruising way of sailing always on the edge of rounding up . we broke our previous trip speed record though and got the boat up to 9.25 knots . ;-). For most of the night, we had a much more conservative sail plan of a reefed main only and we were running before the wind of 15-18 knots throughout the night.

We were originally planning to stop at the Islas San Benitos however due to the way things worked out with speed and wind, we got there too late to anchor and so we decided to move on to Turtlebay and make it a 3 night and 2 day trip, a first for the longest overall trip for us. Wednesday morning we finally saw land again after being pretty far off-shore (up to 78 miles) and it felt good to know, we would be somewhere anchored pretty soon . as I said before, the wind died about 2 hours out so here we go again, engine on and the waiting game for the motor to die started . and lucky us it didn't happen right up to 30 feet before we wanted to drop the anchor . no problem we anchored a little bit more outside then we wanted and this time around we kept the main sail up which usually gets lowered before anchoring and used the main sail to push us backwards to make sure the anchor is set properly . VOILA we just finished our longest passage on Lawur TheSchmids family has ever done, the longest continuous sail we have ever done, the furthest south we have ever gone on our sailboat and the happiest we have been in a while . CRUISING IS ON!!!!

Ok, ok, the margaritas didn't really come out quite yet since we had a bit of cleanup to do considering we lived for 3 days 24h a day within confined quarters but within 2 hours we were cleaned up, the boat that would be . I am starting to look like Niki says Pezibaer (a German cartoon character) with my facial and head hair at about the same length, and fueled up. That by the way is nothing what you ever experience in the US marina world where you drive up to a fuel dock that is super clean . here in Turtlebay they have a pier where you can throw a line . focus pier NOT dock . and then throw an anchor off the pier and they hand you jugs of 55 liters down to the boat floating up and and down in the tides. With our motor situation or shall I say un-motor, that was not an option so the guy comes out with his little boat, lifts two 55 liter jugs onto the boat, stacks them on top of each other, puts a hose in it and gravity does its job from there . no meters, no clinical oil rags, no dock . just very simple and in slow motion . what an experience. By the way, if you think fuel is much cheaper here, think again . $2.48/gallon.

After a bit of hanging around and decompressing, we went to town or whatever a place like this would be called . we are literally a few hours south of the border and you feel like time is turned back by quite a bit. The people around were super nice and we had lunch at what I am having a hard time calling a restaurant but more like a family place that put a few chairs and tables out for people to stop by and get food . we had lobster burritos . not bad for starters but man we needed a dictionary badly . felt like a real fool ordering since I am sure you had guessed by now there were no menus, so not even my best India ordering etiquette of pointing didn't get me very far. On our way back, Niki suggested that instead getting a whole night of sleep for a change, we stick it out for one more night and start heading south to Ascuncion to meet with Ralph and Glenda on their boat 'Our Country Home' (see www.ourcountryhome.org <http://www.ourcountryhome.org/> ) early in the day rather then before sunset . said and done, it is in the middle of the night and I seem to get stuck now with the grave yard shifts from midnight to 3 am . actually I really don't mind and I would have never imagined I like that time slot . we are making good progress south just on the verge of turning off the engine . I am just waiting for the wind to hit 15 knots before I do so. The weather forecast for the next few days is that we will have good north to northwesterly winds in the 15-25 knot range which makes for good passage making south and we might take advantage of that. However for the next 2 days, relaxing is forecasted for TheSchmids family . Ascuncion has a reputation of being a time hog due to a couple that decided to make this place a cruising stop over by offering a lot of hospitality . maybe I even get my dive gear and windsurf board out.

That's it for now, time to go and stop that damn motor and rollout the jib, it is up to over 15 knots. We had a great first week of cruising so far, the little maintenance projects are starting to get pushed on the 'manjana list', our nick name for the list that is of the not MUST ToDos .not sure they will ever get done . LOL.

Happy Sailing,

Robert

TheSchmids Family Sailing on Lawur

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