June 16, day 16

We’ve cleared Bishop Rock, a subsurface mountain 100 miles west of Tijuana, Mexico, that barely reaches the surface. There’s one shipwreck there already. We don’t want to be the next. We snuck around it by a mile at 4:00am without much affair. Now we’re on to Guadalupe Island, 190 miles away.

“So, what’s our speed?” I ask Joel. He’s keen to check coarse and bearing every so often to measure progress.

“2 knots!” he exclaims. We’re making roughly 30 miles per day, which is better than expected considering the current and wind are not in agreement. The wind has been consistently coming out of the west, 90 degrees on our starboard beam.









In 1958 DeVere Baker and crew of three rafted across the Pacific aboard the Lehi IV in an attempt to show that Mormons could migrate across oceans, and were likely the original settlers of Polynesia. Though his theories didn’t win praise, he proved that the California/Hawaii route could be made on a long float. Don McFarland was one of the crew. He found us online and came to bid us farewell on June 1st.


“We had to deploy our pilot chute to avoid hitting Guadalupe Island,” he said, adding, “and bring an extra harpoon.” They fished, collected rainwater, and sat for 69 days to get from Redondo Beach to Hawaii. We hope we make it sooner.






©Peter Bennett/Ambient Images

From here it’s 650 miles south to get to the latitude of Honolulu, and 2000 miles on longitude. As a crow flies it 2100 miles. We can’t help going south. The current and wind have decided that. Our goal is to make the most of our sails. We keep beating west, hoping to make the curve into the tradewinds.
Then, with the wind at our stern, we should make good time.