Syzygy Sailing

News flash from Vicki, Karen’s mom!!  Vicki put up a comment on the last post, that I felt deserved it’s own special attention. Syzygy has made the local TV news in Las Vegas! Next come the broadcast networks, then a little cable documentary, all leading up to Hollywood big screen! Or maybe not.  Either way, check out the blurb on Syzygy at Las Vegas Channel 13 ACTION News!

Thanks Vicki for sharing.  So cool!

Jonathon here.  I thought I would post a couple of screen shots of Matt and Karen’s progress.  I know a lot of you have clicked through to the marinetraffic.com website with AIS tracking to try and find Syzygy.  Like Matt has said, if they aren’t in AIS range, you won’t see them.  But here’s two pictures of where they have been.

The first is from when they departed until I went to bed around midnight California time.  They had been sailing about 13 hours at that point.

The second is a somewhat overlapping track of their progress until about 6 am Thursday morning when they dropped off the map.  At this point they had gone about 110 miles in about 18 hours.  If they keep going through Thursday night they might be in the Santa Barbara/Los Angeles area Friday during the day sometime.  I imagine they will keep pushing through since wind and wave height seem to indicate good weather all the way down the California coast and Baja Mexico for at least the next 7 days. There are a number of AIS stations in Los Angeles and San Diego areas, so they might pop back up!

Pete and I believe that we fixed the engine, and Pete replaced the capacitor and rebuilt the fried portion of the ssb circuit board (our long-range radio), so barring other obstacles, we will be heading over to the fuel dock in an hour, and then departing.

As we leave, you should be able to watch us sail out of the bay in real-time on this website.  Stations on shore pick up our AIS signal (while we’re in range) and track us.  I added a link to the sidebar that will take you to our AIS signal (if there is one at the moment that is).  Whenever we are within range of one of these stations on the coast, you’ll be able to see exactly where we are, what direction we’re headed, and how fast (or slow!) we’re getting there.

Disclaimer: I don’t know how many other stations there are down the coast, or how often we’ll be in range, so don’t worry about us if we rarely show up on the tracking site.  Mainly, I don’t want family and friends fretting about us on account of this AIS thing.  The AIS takes power to operate, too, so we may power it up only occasionally.  But see if you can catch a glimpse of us leaving the bay at the least!

Karen and I took the boat out to fill up on fuel over at the berkeley marina.  The engine overheated.  We will not be leaving tomorrow.