A gale of a time sailing offshore

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The 25th was a lovely night at sea. The next day we caught a tuna and Amanda made a nice fish pie.

The 26th after my midnight watch the winds picked up to 25-30 knots. I still slept fine, but woke to help reef. My next watch I wore my foul weather gear and needed it as waves were routinely dousing the cockpit.
The windvane steering is pretty cool. It's my first time with on, but uses no power and the stronger the wind, the better it works which is good because we have very little power, and lots of wind. I got a little seasick feeling yesterday. I'm using a tranderm patch since we started to help. We have been on a course that puts us out to sea a bit more that we would like, but now we are running at max speed to tor to avoid a predicted storm. We hope to be out of the big wind by noon tomorrow. We are about parallel with Pyaya del Coco which was an intended stop, but we are 50 miles or more offshore and getting farther out as we point to run at our fasted point of sail to move from the storm.

27th Evening
We went through the shit from about 9pm till 3am the next day. Wow! Big seas, 45-50 knot gusts. We ran double reefed main and a storm staysail up front the whole time and we still did 6-9 knots in the "wetsnail". When some waves hit the boat I could swear we collided with something by the powerful abrupt crash. This happened several times. It was hard on everyone, but the boat didn't seem to care a bit or have any trouble. I felt good to know you're in an overbuilt boat with an experienced captain in this kind of gale. Poor Amanda was in the V berth and the hatch had a leak and here mattress was soaked

28th 10:30AM
I'm not writing very regularly due the heavy weather, so this may be out of order, but yesterday evening when the crap finally died to 20 knots of wind, but still pretty big seas. I was laying down to abate the seasickness. Paul was at th wheel. Out of nowhere the window gets shaded and before I can understand why, a huge wave comes over the coach-roof. A wall of water dumped in the open companion way and the cockpit was filled and full of floating odds and ends until it drained. Just one wave like that. Quite a surprise. Last night's watch was easy as there was a steady wind and the windvane worked well holding the course. This morning we were sailing nicely until the peninsula of Costa Rica. We were all so excited to get to shore. "Palm trees and tiki bars" what's what the trip was to be, right? Then the wind died and it looked like we wouldn't be able to make it to port because of the light wind and right on the nose. Paul and Jesse tried to get the sad engine started by bypassing the cylinder they suspected was scored. We made it less than 2 minutes and then a sound like a bucket of bolts falling down the stairs. It was the block getting a hole punched through it. The motor was finished. Then to top things off, we are becalmed and carried by the current ever so slowly toward the tantalizingly close Costa Rica. I cooked lunch as we were drifting away in a sweltering heat waiting for a breeze to change our luck.
4PM we have tried several sail combinations but are pretty much in a same place about 30 miles from port, or not really a port, but an anchorage w/o customs. We have no choice but to wait for favorable wind and current.

29th
We got the boat ready for emergency anchoring as we had no motor, little helm control and were making for land. We flaked the chain anchor on deck, set the anchors for quick release, added rode to the secondary anchor and prepped a stern anchor just in case.
Pretty light air, with the boom and sails banging as they slap back and forth with the waves for hours on end, got to within 14 miles of the destination, but drifted back out and worked our way back all day in the sun but made no real progress. Paul took the helm most of the day, bless him, as trying to keep the boat in the right direction and from loosing ground in this is torture. Amanda and I took the night watches so Jesse and Paul could try to catch up on sleep to be ready for sailing into a strange anchorage with no motor the next day. My first night watch started at 6:30pm and the wind and waves picked up and I needed foulies and caught a soaking by the waves about a dozen times. I'm pretty salty at this point. By my next watch the air had dies and we were fully reefed, so we weren't going anywhere but back but others needed to sleep and I wasn't going to change sails alone at night as jr crew. Next watch 2-4pm I was pretty tired, the wind vane doesn't work well in the light air, then neither does the rudder. I went to bed wet and crabby. Tough work with little progress, very depressing.

30th
In the morning we got a fair wind for an hour or two and made it to within 10 miles so with the wind which was forecast to come at 2pm, it should only take about 3 hours to get to land, so there was hope as we were all ready for some time ashore. Then the damn calms hit again and the sun started to bake. The water was 85 degrees so we went for the first swim since the boat wasn't going anywhere. At 2:30 a breeze started, but it was a land breeze when a sea breeze was forecast. We tried to sail the very most efficient way possible, constantly trimming and doing all we could to make way as it would be a race with the sunset in an unfamiliar anchorage with waves breaking on giant rocks and steep rock cliffs. We cleared the deck of anything in the way and uncovered the dingy for the first time as we raced the sun at 4 knots. With an hour of light left we looked to be able to make it. Then as we approached, we saw that what we thought was the breakwater entrance to the marina was just some rocks to wreck upon and we still had a couple more miles to go and the wind was shifting to the nose and dying as we were bearing doing 1 knot. As it was getting dark, it slowly sunk in that we were not going to be able to sail in tonight. A silent sadness slowly replaced the joy of the anticipated landfall long overdue and that we had been so close to, sailing to and falling away from for 50 hours now. None of us could stand the idea of spending another night at sea, while so close. What the captain decided was to put the dingy in and do a hip tow. We only had a gallon, perhaps two of gasoline, despite the 100+ gallons of useless diesel. We may need that to keep us off the rocks and we didn't know we had enough fuel to tow all the way to the anchorage and it was a bit of a risk to give it a try and not have it as an option in an emergency, but we could see the outlines of boats at anchor, we just had to try. It was a hazardous operation to launch the dingy in light, let alone dark. We lowered the fiberglass dingy off the deck with the halyard using the mast like a crane tower. Paul muscled the 6hp outboard handing it over the lifeline down to Jesse in the dingy being careful on to drop it in the Pacific. We tied up the dinghy to the stern quarter of Koae and at about 1/2 throttle motored the dinghy while Jesse helmed Koae's massive rudder and the others were on lookout and anchor duty. We made a glorious 4 knots to everyone's great satisfaction. We motored for what seamed like a long time, but made it to the anchorage around 7:30pm, dropped the hook and had a congratulatory beer.

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