Moonrise

Our trip from La Paz to Mazatlan on a Passport 40’ sailboat with Christine and Alan.
We left La Paz at 8am and motored 55 miles, as the wind was very light, to Bahia los Muertoes, Bay of the Dead. We got to tour a beautiful vacant private resort and ate dinner at Kyle Turley’s Restaurant (former Rams football player). The next day we left at 5:30am on a 33-40 hour trip to Mazatlan.
I really can’t describe how very surreal it is doing a night watch while sailing after dark. I try, but I just don’t seem to do it justice. Well, I am going to try again. This time I hope to get a few things corrected first, like the nautical mile verses the road mile. I said before, it was shorter, but was wrong, it is longer. A nautical mile is 1.2 regular miles. With that cleared up, back to my point. It is so clear out on the water, and as cliché as it sounds, the stars are so much brighter. They are so bright they cast a shadow. There are so many stars it is like you are looking at the entire universe and beyond. You can see so much and the shooting stars happen constantly. Speaking of the universe, Alan being the brilliant scientist (world famous high energy physicist), mentioned harnessing “dark energy”. Ooo, it’s like right out of star wars -Luke, the force is with you, crap. So cool, and I only profess to understand just the basics like the universe is not constant, it is ever expanding and at an accelerating rate which changes Einstein’s constant in E=mc2. Way cool stuff, way over my head. Hopefully, I got that somewhat correct. Anyhow, this is the stuff you start to think about while roaring along in 20 knots of breeze, sitting under the stars. Then you watch the moonrise up over the water, illuminating the sea. Everything just seems right in the world at this point.
I never really thought about moonrises before, maybe because you don’t really see it happen on land. The moon just appears, but it does rise, as it chases the sun down and vice versa. You get to thinking about that relationship, always chasing each other, always opposite. Opposites attracting, stuff like that.
Okay, so maybe this is too philosophical, maybe I am just really sleep deprived. We did get up at 5am, again, go figure, to start our journey to the mainland Mexico from Baja. We had great weather for our sail over, averaging about 8 nm/hr and hitting 9.5 knots through the water and 7.5 SOG (speed over the ground). The boat’s hull speed(max) is 7.8 so we were surfing a lot. So not much current but 8 to 12 foot seas in our favor. To put this in perspective, however, this is like driving across the state of CA at 10 mph! It is just a different pace of life! We arrived in Mazatlan at 10 am the next day, completing the trip in 28 hours.
Take time, enjoy.