New Pacific plans?

Sunday 25 November, Bermuda day 5, St. George’s: Beautiful day. Boat juggling, talking Pacific plans, walking St. George’s and the good company of Gale’s crew.

Quite a storm last night. Heavy rain with winds gusting 30kts at the mast head. There is a full orchestra in our back cabin: lines squeaking like out of tune violins and wavelets beating like drums on the hull! But our ear plugs do a good job to suppress the conductor’s efforts to keep us awake 🙂
From the security point of view, we are fine. We are doubled on all lines plus multiple lines from boat-to-boat across the harbour holding each other off the quay sides. The low pressure “eye” came directly over Bermuda at 7am followed quickly by a 180 deg wind swing from east to west and then wonderful clear sky.

Betelgeuse, which is buried in the corner of the harbour, wants to leave this morning. So there is a lot of shuffling of lines to let her out. By 11am we wave them goodbye and lines are re-tied across the harbour.

Today is so bright, sunny and warm that we wished we’d gone early and hired a scooter for the day. It might be the last bright day for a while to get a look at the island in the sunlight it deserves. But we decide to defer till tomorrow and hope for another nice day.

Later in the morning, Christian, the skipper on Gale (Swan66) comes onboard and Glen shows him around. Like most people, he is quite impressed by the size of the engine room.
We then get chatting to him about routes, timing and islands trans-Pacific. And we end up with a world map spread over Gale’s cockpit table, and beers in hand. But before not long the conversation has turned from Pacific to the west coast USA and even Alaska! Christian is very enthused by the cruising ground in SE Alaska and Canada.

We had laughed when Pete Goss had told us of his own Alaska plans, but here we are now getting quite tempted (well, Glen is, I am not keen to repeat another cold foggy summer like we had in Maine!). But it does look like we could almost fit in this NE Pacific circuit while we would otherwise have been waiting, sweltering in Columbia or Panama for the right time to start crossing the Pacific.

It would go like this: through the Panama Canal in May; a 3 week passage to Hawaii; a few weeks in Hawaii then another 3-week passage to Alaska to arrive 1-July. Then saunter southwards with wind and current: Canada, Washington, California and be in Mexico by October. Cruise Mexico then start Pacific crossing from there in Jan’20 … about the same time we were planning on leaving from Panama anyway. Hmmm.

Christian has set our imagination on fire with stories of amazing fjords and wildlife in Alaska and Canada, sailing into Vancouver and San Francisco and the warm hospitality and scenery in Mexico. “All not to be missed” he keeps saying.
So now our minds are in a whirl! Dare we do these 2 long passages? Will Alaska be too cold? (well we can always abort and head south quick we guess). Decisions decisions! Let’s just put on the back-burner for now, before our heads explode!

To calm us down we take a stroll through St.George’s again. This time in bright sunshine and wonderful light to capture the picture perfectness of this historic and colorful little town.

Back on the boat, Glen re-engages with Gale’s crew. This time with Christian’s brother Sean. It turns out that he and his wife have written several pilot books on cruising the west coast of Mexico, so he is quite an authority. Again he says “don’t miss this opportunity”. Hmmm.

The rest of the evening we put the finishing touches to the Herrington Harbour yard-work video after I have been working to compile and reduce its content for several days now. This one is going to be over an hour long, no matter how I try to reduce it. But it should be interesting for those who like to see this kind of yachting activity, which is an essential part of cruising. As usual with video editing, time speeds up and before we know it, it’s 1am. Time for bed!