MEXICO-COSTA RICA: T-MINUS 1 DAY & COUNTING
After the most punctual arrival of a full crew ever yesterday, we’ve managed to get our comprehensive safety briefings done in a very efficient manner. Within a couple of hours we will have slipped lines and will be heading south to Costa Rica!
As always with 59º North, we seem to have an excellent crew, playful ribbing has already started and they’re all ready to cheerfully wave goodbye to Cabo Wabo.
Delaney did a great job of finding a nice joint for dinner last night, made even better when we saw they had mezcal flambé cheese on the menu.
The weather is looking pretty light for the first 24 hours before filling in for hopefully some kite weather. The Tehuantepec winds are the big navigational hazard on this trip. Cold fronts in the Caribbean cross over the isthmus of land south of Oaxaca, funneled through the mountain range before blowing at full force into the Pacific. This can create 40-50 knot constant winds, with even stronger gusts, and an unpleasant sea state of high waves with short intervals. Marvelously for us it looks like we’ll arrive at the gulf of Tehuantepec just as one of these periods ebbs and should be able to make the crossing without being too much of a vomit comet. Keep your fingers crossed that it keeps this way! If not we have plenty of time to loiter waiting for a weather window.
Past there it’s looking light again, before possibly increasing to upwind conditions in 20-25+ knots as we approach Costa Rica due the Papagayo winds - a similar, but slightly less volatile, weather phenomenon as the Tehuano winds. As always, that’s a long range forecast so things may change but always good to be prepared.
If anything I don’t think we’ll be bored this trip!
That said, strict instructions have been left for Mission Control to keep us updated on the Super Bowl and Rugby Six Nations results.
Nos vemos México!!
// Mary
View more passage logs
”For some things, we will never be ready.” - Moana 2
After 852 miles of open ocean sailing, the crew of Falken dropped anchor in Moorea's Cook's Bay—not with a quiet glide in, but surfing down waves in a squall, breaking speed records and cheering each other on through the rain. What started as a plan to "just dip a toe" into offshore sailing turned into something harder to explain: the worse the conditions got, the more alive everyone felt. Turns out the question was never whether the crew was ready—it was whether they even needed to be.
Kauehi conundrum
Kauehi atoll was always on the itinerary—until the forecast made it a gamble not worth taking. Squalls, bommies, a tidal pass, and no clean escape route: sometimes the hardest call in sailing is the one that keeps you out of a place, not in it. The Tuamotus will have to wait.
Hove-to!
Falken is too fast—a problem most sailors would kill for, yet here we are, tacking back and forth across the Pacific just to kill time. A rogue low pressure system south of Tahiti has stolen the trades and scrambled our timing for the tidal window into Kauehi's pass, leaving us hove-to 45 miles short of our target in the Tuamotus. Salt licorice, dream sandwich debates, and a philosophical question about mermaid reproduction are helping pass the night.