Greetings from the big big Pacific.
The wind speed has gone less than. Not a zephyr disturbs our sweaty daydreams. Thirty five C/94 F in the cabin just now, an hour past noon.
All going well, we will in a few weeks cross our outbound track from San Diego and thus complete our circumnavigation of South America.
And what an odd continental circumnavigation it will be. All the way around, and we only visited one South American nation - Chile.
Our mates on Mollymawk, who have mastered the slow-travel pace, spending YEARS in Brazil and Uruguay and Argentina and Chile along the way, would doubtless be aghast.
But everyone finds their own speed. That's one of the joys in this life afloat - how many ways there are to do it.
Still, though we do love that part of sailing that involves busting out the big miles, lately it seems that we have been passing up more than we would have liked. All that time in Panama, for example, and we still never birded the Pipeline Road, we never visited Boquete or any other place in the mountains.
So, when an idle glance at the plotter the other day showed Isla del Coco only a few hundred miles off our track, interest was kindled on the part of the Captain and the Morale Officer.
Let's go to Coco! we thought. When are we coming this way again, after all? It's a place that you can likely get to only with your own boat, which are widely known to be the very best places in the world. And Coco can stand in for Tristan de Cunha and the Galapagos and Lord Howe and Easter and Pitcairn and all the other wonderful places that we have somehow missed visiting along the way.
A quick note to our indefatigable agent ashore (thanks, mom!) requested the background info that more organized yachties would have likely have looked up before going to sea, when they were writing up their passage plan...or whatever it is that those people do.
The answer that came back was a bubble-burster. No vessels allowed from foreign ports (Coco is Costa Rican), permit required, must be applied for at least 15 days in advance with notarized forms, etc. etc.
No Coco for us.
Hawai'i or bust.
Now if only Elias would catch us a fish, already.
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This post was sent via our high-frequency radio as we're far from internet range. Pictures to follow when we reach internet again. We can't respond to comments for now, though we do see them all!
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