Fueled up!

A lot of boats had planned on joining the Pacific Puddle Jump (PPJ) rally this year from all up and down the west coast of North and South America to places all over the South Pacific. With SP countries now closed, scores of boats that had already left the Americas were forced to leave their boats and fly home. Many choose to reroute toward Hawaii instead, with the result that Hawaii is now overrun with yachts returning from foreign countries and seeking entry and safe harbor. We've heard from some of those boats via the PPJ network that Hawaii has closed at least one port to arriving yachts and is enforcing a two week quarantine on arrivals without regard to time spent on the yacht enroute. As I understand it, this is a directive from the governor of Hawaii. A similar policy may be in effect in California. We won't know until we get to San Diego whether we'll be stuck there for a couple of weeks before we can head home. So far we've been on the boat for over three weeks, so it's pretty unlikely that we're carrying, but I guess they don't know that.

We're in Turtle Bay now. It's the first anchorage in Mexico that we stopped at on our way south. It took us four days non-stop going south. This time it'll probably take us a couple of weeks of bashing up wind and anchoring along the way. So: two weeks to get to San Diego, two weeks quarantine, and a few days to drive home puts us there toward the end of May.

When we arrived here, we were met by a local in a Panga who sold us diesel and told we are not welcome to go ashore. Apparently there are police and military personnel who are posted to intercept us if we try. We assured him we were happy to remain on the boat. Refueling without having to go ashore was exactly what we were hoping for. Now we can proceed to San Diego without having to stop and without worrying about running out of fuel. Yay!

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