We’ve been preparing to exit the bar at Bahia Del Sol (Estero de Jaltepeque). Wave heights permitting, we’ll escape on Tuesday. Every day we go over the hotel on the beach at high tide to observe the wave heights. Friday looked pretty gnarly, but yesterday and today look totally doable. In fact I ran it in the porta-bote with life jacket and gps. It was pretty scary because not only is the porta-bote down right dangerous in a chop it can be hard to tell if a wave is going to break when it starts to build. I cannot take a breaking wave in the dingy. It would swamp and I’d ruin our outboard (our only motor). It’s hard to describe but it is necessary to run parallel to the beach with waves breaking on both sides. In the right spot the waves on the outside start to build like they will break but then fall off again at the last minute. This is where we need to go (yellow track on chart). I plan to do it again tomorrow before the real thing on Tuesday. We will judge it visually but it’s nice to have a gps track of a known good course as an extra check. Interestingly, I saved the track from our original entry for comparison (white track on chart). As you can see, the “pilots” missed it by 3/4 of a mile! Directly over a shallow breaking bar.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 4:58 pm and is filed under doings, El Salvador, TimeMachine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.