The crew was very excited to head up the Rio Dulce and all spontaneously were awake and ready to go by 0600. Livingston is a high-energy party frontier town with the fishing fleet coming and going 24x7 and seemingly endless firecrackers at 0400.

We weighed anchor and immediately felt like we travelled back in time. On either side of the bank were amazingly cool, but rusted out riverfront enterprises from the mid 20th century.

For the first time I did a facebook live video event as we started up between the 300 foot tall jungle covered limestone cliffs on either side of us.

Belize

Chinchirro to Half-moon Cay is 97 nm just east of south at a bearing of 176°. I was anticipating the wind being more true east than south of east, but even so, 176° made me grimace in disdain thinking back to the roll of 191°. I went back to the charts and kept exploring different ideas, after a half an hour I had a new plan: We would not go the shortest route to Half Moon Cay - but instead the longest route - hah! We would first do a u-turn around the northern tip of Chinchurro Bank under enginer power and earn 10 nm of easting the hard way, then on a single straight line sail 197° to the west side of the chain of cays that had Half-Moon Cay on the south end. This would increase our journey from 97 nm to 130 nm - a 33 nm increase, maybe the first time I have consciously increased our planned passage distance. But we would be sailing at 197° - that is a huge 20° difference.

Hauled up the anchor and we started to beat our way east with the iron canvas, the seas were about 1.5 m and the winds were about 20-22 kts.

We left Puerto Aventures at 10 am on Wednesday for the 17 nm trip over to Cozumel. Having run down our lists over the previous few days it felt great to be organized.

After Kyle release our last stern line, I eased Ad Astra forward so that he could release us from the forward mooring ball as we were med-moored. The breeze picked up a bit and I was sideways to the wind with a small fishing about down wind from us. I re-directed Kyle to use the dinghy and help make sure that we stayed off of the fishing boat while I maneuvered Ad Astra deeper into the marina channel and presented her stern to the wind where it is easy to keep her to the wind.

Then is when I noticed that we were not getting depth readings, what happened? It was working yesterday.

Planning our Passage to the Rio Dulce

Ad Astra will spend the hurricane season tucked up the Rio Dulce, Guatemala.