sailing casita

Well after 1 1/2 months in Hawaii we are finally getting ready to head back to California, we expect to leave on July 1st. The plan is to sail north through the Kaiwi Channel (between Oahu and Moloka’i) to about 40 degrees north latitude. We will check the weather every day and make a decision on where and when to turn east toward the mainland. We are headed to the SF Bay, probably Alameda.

The distance between Honolulu and San Francisco is about 2100nm, quite a but less than the approximate 2800nm from La Paz to Honolulu, but we still expect this passage to take about 3 weeks. Partly this is because we expect to go a bit slower this time but also because way the winds blow in the North Pacific means we can’t sail directly to SF. The route we are expecting to sail should be about 2500nm.

The trick is to make way sailing around the North Pacific High, a big region in the middle of the ocean with no wind. This year the High is very disorganized so far, it may be a bit early in the season for our route. We wanted to leave in mid June, we just did not see a good weather window for the three week trip. The tropical storms start heading toward Hawaii in a couple of weeks (mid July), so we are casting off and taking our chances in light wind in the unstable high pressure.

Hopefully we will have calmer seas on this leg of the trip.

Hawaii has been great. Aloha attitude pretty much the whole time here. We hiked, snorkeled, walked miles, and drove around the island. We met up with a few other cruisers, all the boats are headed to different parts of the world.

There weren’t too many big projects or fixes we had to do to get ready for this next passage, mostly minor repairs or improvements. We installed a seawater hand pump in the galley to make doing dishes and conserving water easier. We had a local cellphone repair place repair the charge port on our Iridium Go! and we switched out our genoa (large jib) for the working jib (smaller sail that has a better shape when reefed). We made weather cloths for the cockpit sides to keep boarding waves from swamping the cockpit, trimmed down our Strong Track because it was chafing our main halyard, and we reversed (end for ended) our main halyard due to said chafe. We also reworked our reefing lines to make reefing the mainsail easier and faster.

As with the passage to Hawaii we don’t expect to update the blog but you can follow our progress using those same links found in this post from before we left Mexico.

We have a crazy amount of food onboard already but tomorrow we will pick up a few last minute grocery items. Then we will get everything tidied up and stowed away in preparation for 3 weeks of non-stop motion!