on our final leg up Baja from Turtle Bay to San Diego. Seeing that vertical north profile of North Coronado Island even at a distance of six miles, gave me a profound feeling of doom, sadness and more, thinking about the way those guys must have died. I suppose we'll never know what really was the cause.

As others have said, anyone sailing in this area is aware of these hazards, especially someone who has done the race many times. I wonder if they were sailing to a waypoint at the top of the island with a plan to alter course either side based on conditions when they got there. Junior members of the crew might not have had the full picture, but were left as watch captains, the skipper expecting to be on watch to make the change decision. That could lull the rest of the crew into not being on top of the navigation plan. The next link in the disaster chain could have been a crew member falling asleep for an hour or so. If the sailing conditions were routine, and they had powered down most instruments to conserve power, and the night was dark, even an awake, but ill-informed crewmember might not have realized what would happen next. So many disasters are the result of multiple small mistakes which all must happen before a price is paid. We're all human and try as we might, we make those little mistakes every day. I feel for those guys and their families and friends.

All of this got me thinking...

Thoughts about navigating safe.....We met Tim and Constance aboard "Lady Midnight" a Formosa 51 while in Turtle Bay. In his other life, he's a maritime pilot out of Victoria, BC. I thought it interesting that he described being "hyper-vigilant" during their year in Mexico. Linda Greenlaw in "The Hungry Ocean" also describes a similar level of hyper-awareness about weather, equipment, crew, etc. Oh, and there's Eisberg's homunculus who tells him when: "This is dangerous, asshole!" All of these make me feel a little better about my own state, verging on paranoia for a lot of our time in Mexico. Perhaps it had something to do with the Cmap chartplotter display showing us anchored on land. Or the iPad Navionics display that "disappeared" Cedros Island at a scale more than 80 miles. It required both of those sources plus Sean and Heather's guidebooks and spot-on waypoints, plus depth sounder, and of course the Mark 1 eyeballs, to make sense of it all. Generally, the Mexican paper charts were not very helpful. The Navionics charting was way better than Cmap, and we had the iPad on deck most of the time, zooming in and out, measuring distances, and otherwise corroborating other sources. Jon Eisberg take note: we devoted a lot of time to shielding instruments at night so we could see out through the windshield, and yeah we did poke our heads into the real world regularly as well.

Then there's the other dimension, superstition and luck. We didn't start long legs on Friday, we did start the trip with a libation to Neptune. We were lucky we didn't hit that dead whale, a sleeping live one, or some other unlighted object at night. In return we enjoyed some beautiful and remote places, met a lot of nice Mexicans and other cruisers, even sailed by the light of the Super Moon. Worth the effort, for sure.

-----

I wish the guys on Aegean had another chance to undo any mistake or oversight that might have broken the disaster chain or that the luck factor had gone their way. We'll probably never know what was really the critical cause.