//WL2K And we are off.

We pulled up the anchor at 11:30am on Thursday the 9th of April. Straight line distance from Isla Isabela, Galapagos, Ecuador to Fatu Hiva is 2923 (approx.) nautical miles to the southwest. However, we will actually cover a couple hundred miles more since we are going to sail south for two or three days to pick up the trade winds before making our turn and heading for Fatu Hiva, which of course is an island in the Marquesas, French Polynesia. Best case scenerio, if everything weather/wind wise works in our favor we could be there in 21 days. That however will not be the case. I expect it to take us 26+ days to get there. 30 minutes out of the anchorage and we had the sails up and motor off. We do not have enough fuel on board to motor all the way (or even 25%) of the way to French Polynesia. So we have to sail the majority of the way. However, currently the Galapagos is sitting in a big windless hole. So we have given ourselves a 48 hour limit of motoring time. After that, it is race rules. Sails only till we get there. There is wind, the trade winds about 300 miles south of us, so that is our short term target. We are aiming more south than west till we get to 4 or 5 degrees south of the equator. Then we should have picked up the trade winds and we will more than make up for the extra miles. As usual, keep an eye on the tracker (www.shared.delorme.com/kevinmidkiff) That little device will post our postion every 10 minutes, as long as it is not acting up. Like it was this morning. I can only update via my HAM radio, so no pictures. I’ll try to put an update here on the site every couple days or so……. ===== This message was sent using Winlink, a free radio email system provided by the Amateur Radio Safety Foundation and volunteers worldwide. Replies to this message should be brief using plain text format and any attachments kept small. Commercial use or use of this email system for monetary gain is strictly forbidden. See www.winlink.org/help for additional information.