That was a long and hard one.

Long passages can be like endurance training. When the day is divided into either on or off watch, this feels like work. We are as far away from away from work as one can be, yet we still get used to 30 hours of either concentration or relaxation. But we were pounded yesterday, jolted to 11 knots and stopped down to 5. That dance was more like a tango than the gentle waltz of our last sails.

We were in a 25 degree angle to the waves, large waves, building to 8-12 feet and were at their mercy. The Imagine wasn’t fazed at all. Her full keel and led base acted like a counterbalance of pendulum against the force of the wave’s current. Performing beautifully, she held up strongly, swung us back just in time and never even let the toe rails dip into the sea. We were just trying to hold. The waves moved us a bit like a comma, first propelled us forward to then suddenly stop and turns us eastwards in a swirl. 30 hours of that was long. We were tethered in and held onto the boat with both hands and often lodging one leg against the steering column. Helmut, the autopilot, held course. Luckily, because hand steering would have been very hard.

We are building stamina, the ability to sleep on a dime and getting in shape. The body balances the constant movement onboard at all times, yesterday it acted like a gimbal, keeping the head up and center was a whole body workout! Strangely enough I don’t feel sore neither today nor after a night of hand steering when the current was too strong for Helmut to handle. When hand steering, we go down to two hour watches, yesterday we were tired after three and in easy weather we like 4 hour watches. Below tucked safely behind the lee cloth we propped our body sideways not to fly around too much. The washing machine motion of the waves shook everything loose and plenty of stuff ended up on the cabin floor. We will revisit our storage strategy for the cabin very soon because the next passage is again 30 hours long to San Jose del Cabo. Frankly not looking forward to that one right now, but maybe after a couple of good nights of sleep in protected Bahia Magdalena will be enough to head out again and face the elements again.

I can’t say yet if sailing or motoring is the better strategy in conditions like that, but the best would be not to have direction or schedule and sail to where the winds bring us. We didn’t have that luxury so far and we were biting time and needed to be places. I hope this pressure will over once we will have reached our safe haven for the summer the Sea of Cortez. Outside of the reach of hurricanes, we will have time to enjoy. It will be very hot and I am so looking forward to not doing anything for a while and feeling even to hot to think!

The cold fronts over the Pacific have prevented hurricanes to form so far, but once this lifts, cold and hot air masses can hit to form those massive air movements again. We are in our foulies, padded with fleece, special socks to keep feet hot and dry and gloves, and still get cold after too many hours exposed to the cold wind. Mind you that we are in Baja California, a desert landscape in the end of May. But we are not complaining as this cold front buys us time and we will be able to hang out at the lower part of the sea a bit longer than expected, where we will meet our friends Debbie and Phil from SV Coastal Drifter. Fun times ahead.

So, we will bite the bullet and hope the winds and waves will be a little more gentle in a couple of days when we will leave Bahia Magdalena and get out there again.