Journal Entry – Monday October 25, 2004

Author: Scott

It’s here, the day to leave the country. We woke up at 5:30 am with a list a mile long of last minute business to take care of before leaving with the Baja Ha Ha at 11:00 am. We took our last shower in the states and perhaps our last conventional shower for a couple of months. We headed off to the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in the misty rain to sit in the lobby and connect to the Internet. We respectively plodded through the life details that needed dealing with, how did we still have such a list. After spending time in the lobby and going to the hotel’s business center printing, mailing and faxing we set off for the dock to leave. By now we had missed the 11:00 am departure with the group by three and a half hours, but that was ok we were never keen on being with a pack of 150 boats, which for us would be more stressful than exciting. We left the dock at the Cabrillo Island Marina at 2:30 pm with the sun shining brightly and headed to the fuel dock at the Marina’s entrance. At the dock we ran into (not literally) our new friends Amy and Abe on Eleytheria, they were also getting a bit of a late start. We were not alone after all. We headed out of San Diego Harbor going on 4f:00 pm, not without getting kelp wound around our prop for a few moments of moving at 0 knots. After a couple of minutes we were on our way. Pam was frantically making last phone calls to her Mom and sister with very little battery power left and almost no signal. The moment the cell phone died Pam experienced the awareness from that moment on everything about our life was about to change, including the problem of how to cancel cell phone service from Mexico. Oh well, no worries as they say in San Diego. After two hours into the sail, we heard a radio transmission from the other Valiant 32 Mildred Kane, they were heading back to San Diego with transmission problems. We were sad to hear we would not be sailing with the only other boat just like ours. It was a beautiful evening and night and we were off to Turtle Bay, Mexico.