S/V Equinox

Living the Dream

This site was last updated 07/07/08 

Home
About Us
About Equinox
Trip Logs
Road Trips
Food
Favorites
Photo Gallery
Feedback
New:          

Food Section A whole new section with some of our favorite recipes.  Check it out!

Favorites.  Lots
of new links about Mexico have been added.

Trip Logs:

Zihuatanejo to
Barra de Navadid

Barra to
Puerto Vallarta

Road Trips:

San Miguel de Allende--May 16- May 26

Home | About Us | About Equinox | Trip Logs | Road Trips | Food | Favorites | Photo Gallery | Feedback

 

Welcome to our Web Site!

Welcome to our sailing home page.  We are Hank and Betsy Martin, formerly of Auburn California. We  began our dream of sailing for a few years, this past summer.  We purchased an Island Packet 440, hull No. 22  that we took delivery of in July 2006.  We spent the summer in Canadian waters getting to know Equinox up in the Gulf Islands, what a great place to cruise.  Our only regret was we didn't get to spend more time there.  We then sailed down the west coast and began the Baja HaHa in October and are now on the Pacific coast of Mexico.  Just in case you wonder why we call the site S/V Equinox the S/V means sailing vessel. 

 

 

We are now in our second season cruising Mexico.  We love it down here, the people are wonderful.  Our Spanish is getting better and we have taken intensive lessons in La Paz.  Betsy is much better than Hank but he vows to catch up.    What can you say about the weather, but fantastic, well most of the time, it does get a tad warm in the summer.  The scenery, especially in Baja is unbelievable and most of all the abundance of sea life is fantastic.  We have had dolphins surrounding the boat, whales, sea rays and sea turtles are also abundant.  The fishing is great, so far we have caught dorado (also known as mahi mahi), yellowtail, sierra (mackerel), bonito, and unfortunately too many of the inedible black skipjack.  We have had billfish smacking at our lure but so far no trophy for the den wall of a house, we don't own.  Our best catch so far has been a 48" dorado, what a fun time bringing it aboard. 

NOTE:  We are currently up in the states and visiting friends and relatives.  We'll be back on Equinox in Oct where our plans are not yet set.  Hopefully we will sail south and head down through the canal, but who knows? 

 

The most frequently updated part of this site is the Trip Logs portion but we have recently added a Road Trips section as well as a Food section.  We recently completed a cooking class in San Miguel de Allende and as a result we added a whole new section to share so of the wonderful recipes and tips we have learned.  All of the most recent stuff is shown on the left and highlighted in yellow.  Enjoy and please give us some feedback if you like the new Food section.  We have placed photographs of our adventure throughout the site, that are in thumbnail format.  If you wish to see the photo in greater detail you can do so by double clicking on the photograph. 

We had intended to update this webpage frequently but as they say the best laid plans!  We are new at creating WebPages so bear with us while we learn.  Our first site was created with MS Publisher but we felt it limited us too much so we have switched to MS Front Page 2003.    Now as we publish this site I've found that MS is no longer publishing Front Page and have issued a new set of web authoring tools with different functionality.  Such are the trials and tribulations of trying to keep up when away. 

In the future we hope to keep this site updated so our friends and family can keep track of our adventures.  Maybe then they will recognize we are not nuts and want to join us.  Throughout these pages we have included hot links to other sites we reference, where we recommend their services.  We have joined the fraternity of John and Amanda’s graduates to fulfill our dreams of casting off the dock lines and going for it. More on our training can be found on the “About US” page.

Here is  Betsy sailing in
Alaska during the summer of 2005

How to Contact Us

By Email:

By Radio

We will continue to use our terrestrial email address but will only look at them when we are ashore. 

hank(at)hb(dot)martin(dot)name

betsy(at)hb(dot)martin(dot)name

To avoid span we have put the necessary symbols with (at) and (dot) you may either click on the hyperlinks above or replace them with "@" and "." where appropriate. Thanks for understanding.  

For those of you who know about Winlink, we are both hams and receive HF email when the internet is not available, as you know we cannot accept attachments while using Winlink so please keep the messages short, but we would love to hear from you.

Ham Band: We both hold a general class ham license and will be using our ham radio our call signs are as follows:

  Betsy KE7HTI (Kilo Echo 7 Hotel Tango India)

  Hank  KE7HTJ (Kilo Echo 7 Hotel Tango Juliet)

In case you were wondering we took one of Gordon West’s classes, a grueling 3 days and passed with flying colors, even the dreaded Morse Code section.  You can find more about Gordon West here.

Betsy and our friend Ollie Cordray with a their new General Class Ham Licenses and a surprised Gordon West.  We actually passed the dreaded Morse Code section ????????

 

Ships Radio Call Sign (Marine SSB or VHF):

   WDD 3066 (Whiskey Delta Delta 3066)

MMSI #:     367123390 

Skype

If you who haven't heard of Skype you are missing out on a fantastic way to phone home.  Skype allows you to make a phone call to another computer or phone number from anyplace you can get a decent internet connection for pennies a minute.  From Mexico we call the US for $0.02/min.  Our Skype number is:

  • SVEquinox06

Snail Mail

Where Are We?

You can send us mail at the following address, we only receive it however when we visit the states or a friend or relative visits us.  Junk mail is tossed. 
                          Hank and Betsy Martin
                          11852 NE 162nd Lane
                          Bothell, WA  98011 USA

 

When we are sailing we try to file position reports on a daily basis on Winlink.  Try clicking here on FIND US or you can go directly to Winlink   and type in Hank's call sign, KE7HTJ in the find window and you will be show our location.  Once you have gotten to the map that shows where we are click on the satellite option in the upper right had corner and you may get to see where we are in great detail depending on the Google map coverage.