Aloha Costa Rica!

This afternoon, we're heading out of the Costa Rica Yacht Club, taking the first step on our passage to Hawaii. Tonight we plan to stay in one of the anchorages in the Gulf of Nicoya. Tomorrow morning, we'll head to the Tortugas to clean the hull and make one last check of everything. If all goes according to plan, we should be on our way to Hawaii before nightfall.

We leave Latin America with heavy hearts, knowing that it may be some time before we will return. Our experiences here have been more rich than we could ever have dreamed. It is very difficult to say goodbye to such a wonderful place and such wonderful people.

Given the magnitude of the passage, we've engaged the services of a professional weather router. According to current forecasts, our best sailing route will be a Great Circle route from the Nicoya Peninsula to Hilo. As of the last report, conditions look very clement. He expects the passage to take about a month, but of course, this estimate is highly dependent on actual conditions encountered at sea.

Once we are underway, we will have only satellite and HF radio for communications. We expect to be corresponding primarily using text-only email over the satellite connection.
 
Our plan is to send out daily reports to the list (http://groups.google.com/group/samadhi-followers) sometime in the mid-morning or early afternoon (Samadhi V time). These will be copied to our blog as well. We apologize in advance if they're late. Sometimes on a passage things come up that must be dealt with immediately. We'll do our best to send them around the same time every day. We will also send regular reports to Yotreps. You may follow our progress using their site at:

http://bit.ly/Samadhi-Yotreps

For those of you who are hams and would like to reach us on the HF, please drop us an email. We'd love to set up a time and frequency to meet. Our call signs are N6VKJ and KI6JFY.

Hawaii, here we come!

Phillip, Kelly, Alexander, and Nicholas