Latitude 30 north, longitude 122 west

I am on morning watch, drinking a cup of coffee as we are off the coast of Baja Mexico headed toward Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands.  We have 4 hour rotating watches all day long with a couple of 2 hour dog watches at night. The rule being that you scan for any traffic every 10 minutes but we haven't seen any traffic for the last 2 days. We have an auto pilot so no one needs to steer 24x7.

We finally sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge late Wednesday afternoon, the 19th. The provisioning & preparation for the trip took much more than we expected & we could not have done it without the help of our good friends & crew Anne & Peter Alston.

We had a good going away party at the marina with local friends. An overseeing the line handling gurus in the blue jacket is fearless night watcher Edie who crewed on our shakedown cruise up from San Diego the week before.  That was a rough ride "uphill". Thank you Edie!

The highlight for friends & their children was a boat ride to the fuel dock!

We have sailed about 500 miles so far & the total for this passage is about 3,000 miles.  The Marquesas are just below the equator at 100 S latitude 1400 longitude. Though some of you may know of the Marquesas from the Survivor show, others of you may know of them as the islands that Norweigan ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl sailed to in 1947 aboard the raft Kon-Tiki from Peru to prove that the Pacific Islands were populated by people from the East. We are living much more comfortably than they did on their balsa raft. Or boat is 40 feet with a 13 foot beam with all the modern amenities you could imagine (except a washer/dryer, though I do have a collapsible bucket & washboard (!) for those times when we can’t find a local Laundromat or laundress).

We are cruising along at 6 knots with a wind of about 10 knots. We expect the wind to pick up in next couple of days as we cross the Pacific high pressure system. Our large spinnaker sail has helped a lot; with its stars & stripes design, we hope to only visit islands that are currently friendly with the U.S.

We have now settled into passage mode & expect this passage to be 24 days. We are eating well as our stores are still fresh & refrigeration is working well. To be sure, we are consuming more calories than we burn with good French cheese & apple crumb but Anne & I manage to do an exercise video in the boat’s main cabin everyday. (yes, we do have a TV with DVD & will be kept well entertained at anchorage as our friend Charlie sent us about 50

DVDs!) We do look forward to lots of swimming & hiking when we make landfall.

A little on the Marquesas: they are volcanic islands with 2,000 ft vertical spires & vegetation that ranges from dessert to lush jungles. There are many archeological sites including the largest ancient stone tike in French Polynesia. The islands were originally populated between 500 to 300 BC. The islands have been the setting of Melville’s Taipee & Somerset Maugham's Miss Thompson. Gauguin also left Tahiti for the Marquesas in 1901 to get away from the local clergy who disdained the savagehood that he aspired to. At his house in the Marquesas, he put a plaque over the door proclaiming it “Mason du Jouir” (House of Pleasure) & he outraged the locals with his seduction of young girls. He died there & his grave is in the town of Atuona which we hope to visit. The only official port of entry for air travel into the islands is Papeete, Tahiti which is 700 miles away. So, anyone flying there must go through Tahiti. Since the islands are way off the beaten path, the 200-300 boats that arrive annually are really the island's only visitors.

More to come, Courtney