23 Jan 2022 – Tempus Semper Fugit. That seems to me to be the one sure thing in this life. Today I passed into my sixth decade, and like everyone else I am sure, I wonder “How the hell did this happen to me?” Apart from marking the day as I nearly always do, which is to say ignoring it, nothing much happened. Jimena wished me a happy day and we had some Walker’s shortbread cookies with our coffee in the morning as a special treat.

Jimena made me a lovely breakfast then I tried to solder some wires to temp repair our port solar panel which I tore up with the preventer line. I was not successful, so we are down to 2/3 of our already meager solar input.

In the early afternoon we napped a little bit, Jimena made us Lunch-Dinner and we prepped the boat to depart. The Michin took that as his cue to disappear into his shark.

We weighed anchor right at 1630 in order to arrive Punta Abreojos with all its attendant hazards just at morning light. We raised the mainsail and put a reef in it for the night, which proved a very good thing in the offing.

The sunset was a brilliant red and orange, the night came on cool but not particularly cold. The moon did not rise until nearly midnight so the first half of the night was black as pitch and spangled with stars.

We encountered another vessel coming toward us near Punta Hipolito, probably a fisherman. We could see her on the AIS and we could see her navigation lights showing she was headed right toward us. We maneuvered around her then the wind started to blow hard and the seas built. Eventually we saw winds of 18 -20 knots, gusting to 25 knots, with seas probably 6 feet or so breaking around us. I steered into the morning when we were arriving off Punto Abreojos in the dark. In order to waste the couple of hours ‘til sunrise, I steered us into the big bay SE of Punta Abreojos, then we came back around to approach the anchorage from the east to avoid all the hazards, with easing winds and seas.

SV Isabel M skippered by Les was departing as we arrived, and SV Sparkelmuffin was in the anchorage still, though she departed soon after we arrived.

We anchored in front of the town in about 20 feet of water around 0730, cleaned up and covered the boat, then had a brilliant breakfast and went to sleep until about 1500, when we woke up, ate lunch-dinner, then went back to sleep again.