Tehuantepec

3-8-2002 11:00 am Tehuantepec

N 14 49″	Sunny Clear Air 89F Water 78.5F
W 93 43″	Motoring 5 knots no real current

What a difference a day makes! Woke up this morning and had a shower to wash off the salt from yesterday. Back feels almost 100%. The seas are FLAT calm. There is almost no wind. We are now out of the Tehuantepecer area. I took advantage of the flat water to move the diesel from our jerry cans to the tanks. After I put the first 6 galon jerry into our port tank I checked the level and found that we had much more diesel then I thought. It had looked like we burned 12 galons of diesel in the first 6 hours or so. This would have been a lot of fuel to burn but the engine is rated to be able to burn that much and more and we were pushing hard into big seas. Well it turned out that we burnt about 6 galons in that time. My tank gages use air pressure to tell the tank level. Sometimes a bit of diesel gets in the air vent and corrupts the pressure in the tank. Turns out that is what happened. I was surprised that it didn’t clear itself with all the bouncing we did yesterday. I guess the bouncing caused it. Well, adding the extra 6 galons seems to have flushed enough air through the vent to break the bubble and it is reading fine now. I calculate that we have about 75 galons onboard right now and the computer thinks we will need about 55 to finish the trip. The computer also thinks we have about another 70 hours to go. The computer doesn’t take current (good or bad) into account and assumes we are going to motor at just this speed for the duration of the trip. I assume we will have some wind and I set up the computer to be a bit conservative. So, I think we will be fine. Now we just need wind to save money.

The sea temperature is rising again so I guess we are moving away from the up welling. There is a lot of sea life around here. We are moving in the midst of a pod of spotted dolphins and motoring by a lot of sleeping turtles. The turtles are prime real estate for birds and they look like a bird perched on a floating rock. Every turtle has it’s bird. With all the life, and the fact that I feel quite rested, I thought I would try a bit of fishing and just dropped 2 meat hooks over the side. I hope the fish that live here aren’t as wary of fishing lines as the ones that live close to the sport fishing parts of Mexico. To fish this bit of water you need to travel through the Tehuantepec and back. Or start from the very south of Mexico where there isn’t much tourist infrastructure. So I am looking for some dumb fish.