Thursday, June 21, 2007

The Milky Way, The Southern Cross, and Shooting Stars

Wow, what a beautiful night we had! We had half a moon until about midnight and then just "billions and billions of stars" (I can't ever look at a star without thinking of Carl Sagan, the guy who had the great TV show about the Universe on Discovery Channel. His favorite saying was "billions and billions").

They were ALL out last night, every one of them. When you live around lights, you forget what the heavens really look like. If everyone went on top of a mountain somewhere and looked at the stars every now and then, NASA wouldn't have any funding problems for space exploration...

We had a good 24 hours, though we did have to motor for quite awhile to keep a reasonable speed up. It seemed to go on forever though (more than 24 hours between waypoints!) We passed close by the southeast end of Chinchorro Bank about 4am. I remember having a "Pizza Cookoff" there with 3-4 cruising boats 10 years ago, on our way back to the States from our Caribbean trip. My favorite was Conch Pizza. There were lots of conch at Chinchorro. (Dave promises fresh seafood soon, but we haven't
had any luck with the fishing pole yet).

Anyway, we are about 25 mile east of the north end of Belize. We are aiming at a pass in the reef about 35 miles ahead of us (north end of Long Key), and we expect to arrive there about 3:30pm. We'll stop somewhere between there and Belize City for the night, and get into Belize City fairly early tomorrow morning. We have a lot to do once we get there (Customs/Immigration, fuel, water, laundry, groceries, INTERNET) and we want to get out of there by Sunday and get out to the outer reefs.

Weatherwise, it's nice now. 10-15 kts out of the East. Typical 'tradewind' day. However, a Tropical Wave is forecast to come through here tomorrow, so we expect some showers in the next 2-3 days.

Current Position: 18-01N 087-32W

1 comment:

  1. Hey, remember us? Awesome adventure that you are having. I think that you two are about the luckiest two people on the face of the earth. I am trying to get our blog up to date with our most recent adventure. I gave you a mention in our last post. Cheers!

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