Today’s the day

It’s been challenging deciding our next step. We had a long range plan firmly embedded in our brains and with the dismasting all of that flew out the window and we had to rethink the entire coming year. Of course the first step is to get rerigged. With the help of our insurance company and others we knew what our options were and we’re completely comfortable with our decision to go to Costa Rica. What’s more, we’re actually getting excited about it. For one thing, we’ve never been there. And for another, I have a whole branch of the family there I’ve never met.

Long term blog readers will remember that one of my obsessions is family history research, and that one branch of my mother’s family lived in St. Thomas in the early 1800s. From Charlotte Amalie our diaspora includes New York, Philadelphia (where I was born), Puerto Rico (we met some of those cousins in January), Spain and Costa Rica. I’ve been in email and Facebook contact with the patriarch of the Costa Rica branch for many years and now we’ll get to meet him and the rest of the mespuchah. Arturo is an incredible photographer and we’ve been looking at his beautiful pictures of Costa Rica for a long time. Now we get to see and experience the place for ourselves.

We’ve been watching the winds and sea state over the past week, and while the conditions aren’t exactly as benign as we’d like, we decided that today is the day to start this long slog of a motor to Central America. We’re confident we have enough fuel. Jack has serviced the engines and we bought a bunch of extra fuel filters in case there’s any gunk in the Galapagos diesel. We’re still provisioned to the gills for the trip to the Marquesas. Our Nooks are full of ebooks, our TV’s full of movies, our IPods are full of audiobooks and podcasts. Jeez, it’s only a week, what are we waiting for? Let’s go!