Panama City to Chile and back. The Pacific coast of the Americas — a completely different ocean, a completely different story. Whale sharks and mobula rays, the Humboldt Current, the Sea of Cortez, and coastlines that have never seen a Hobie Getaway.
🇵🇦 Panama Pacific — Coiba NP • Gulf of Chirique • Pearl Islands
🇨🇴 Colombia Pacific — Bahia Solano • Nui • Gorgona Island
🇪🇨 Ecuador — Machalilla NP • Puerto Lopez • Humpback Corridor
🇵🇪 Peru — Paracas NP • Ballestas Islands • Sea Lions
🇨🇱 Chile — Pacific Coastline • La Portada • Atacama Coast
🇨🇷 Costa Rica Pacific — Osa Peninsula • Corcovado • Gulf of Nicoya
🇲🇽 Mexico — Sea of Cortez • Baja California Sur • La Paz
🇲🇽 Baja California — Sea Lions • Pacific Swell • Offshore Islands
People ask who this expedition is meant to impress. The answer is one person — me. Not the sailing community. Not social media. Not institutions, sponsors, or strangers with opinions about what constitutes a worthy adventure. Three decades of work — on submarines, in boardrooms, on the water, and in the kind of places that reshape how a man sees the world — have produced a value set that doesn’t need external validation. The standard is internal. Always has been.
What that means in practice: the planning is meticulous, the preparation is relentless, and the execution is measured against one question — did I do this right? Not fast. Not impressively. Right. The sea is an honest judge and a poor audience. It doesn’t care about the narrative. It rewards preparation, punishes arrogance, and has no interest in anyone’s personal brand. That suits this expedition perfectly.
The highest loyalty here is to humanity itself — not to a tribe, a nation, a religion, a politics, or an ideology. The mission underneath every mile of this route is the advancement, protection, and survival of human civilization and the natural systems that sustain it.
Turnagain Arm, Alaska — Where 4 Tides Was Born
4 Tides Cantina — The Onboard Bar
Every expedition needs a bar. This one was named at Turnagain Arm, Alaska — one of the most geologically dramatic stretches of water in the world, and the place where the Alaska to San Diego run found its rhythm.
Turnagain Arm got its name in 1778 when William Bligh — sailing master for Captain James Cook, later infamous for the Bounty mutiny — was sent to survey the inlet looking for the Northwest Passage. He had to turn around. Twice. He named it Turnagain in exasperation. The arm generates the largest tides in the United States — up to 40 feet — and twice a day those tides collide in the narrow channel and produce one of the largest tidal bore waves on earth: a wall of water up to 10 feet high, moving at up to 15 miles per hour, stretching the full width of the inlet. Local surfers ride it for miles. Harbor seals ride it in. Beluga whales follow.
Four tides. Two bores a day. The same water, returning. That's the bar. Named at the place where Cook had to turn around — because this expedition doesn't.
Rim Run Pac begins where the Caribbean circuit ends — in Panama City, on the Pacific side. Shamrocket portages across the isthmus and enters a completely different ocean: colder, deeper, wilder, and in many stretches almost entirely unsurveyed by small-boat expeditions. The route runs south to Chile, then back north along the Pacific coastlines of Central America, through the Sea of Cortez and Baja, to the circuit’s northern terminus at the Canadian border — then south again to Panama where the expedition closes.
This is not a repeat of the Caribbean experience with different water. The Humboldt Current runs cold off Peru and Chile, supporting marine life assemblages that have no Caribbean equivalent. The Sea of Cortez — called the world’s aquarium by Jacques Cousteau — is a closed system of extraordinary biological richness. The Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica is where jungle meets Pacific reef in a zone that has almost nothing in common with the Caribbean side of the same country.
Same boat. Same sailor. Same methodology. Completely different ocean.
The Pacific coast of the Americas is one of the least-documented stretches of coastline on earth from a small-boat perspective. Commercial vessels follow offshore lanes. Dive liveaboards concentrate on known sites. The inshore zones — the kelp forests, the rocky reefs, the estuaries, the mangrove edges — are largely passed over. Shamrocket goes exactly there.
Hawaii is not just a stop on the Rim Run Pac. It is the spiritual center of the entire Pacific leg — because of one man: Israel Kamakawiwoʻole.
Israel Kamakawiwoʻole was born on May 20, 1959, in Honolulu, and died on June 26, 1997, at the age of 38. In the years between, he became one of the most beloved musicians the world has ever produced — not through industry machinery, but through a voice that made people feel less alone. He played ukulele. He sang in Hawaiian and in English. He was a founding member of the Makaha Sons of Niʻihau, one of the most important Hawaiian music groups of the modern era.
His 1993 medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World” — recorded in a single late-night session with only his ukulele — went on to appear in more than 60 films and television programs and has been streamed billions of times.
When he died, the State of Hawaii flew its flags at half-mast, and his body lay in state at the Hawaii State Capitol — an honor extended to only a handful of civilians in the state’s history. His ashes were scattered into the Pacific off Mākua Beach on the Oʻahu coast, watched by thousands from shore and from canoes on the water. He went home the way Hawaiians go home — back to the kai, back to the land, back to the sea.
These are the waters Shamrocket sails into on the Rim Run Pac — the same Pacific that received him. When the boat reaches Hawaii, the baritone ukulele comes out. “Please” — written as a tribute to Izzy and the spirit of aloha he carried — will be performed live at anchor in his ocean. That moment has been planned since the first note was written.
I play baritone ukulele because of Izzy. It was his music that put the instrument in my hands, and it is his spirit that I carry every reef I dive and every coastline I sail.
Aloha isn’t a greeting. It is a way of moving through the world — to give when nothing is coming back, to carry kindness like a lantern, to leave a little light along your track. That philosophy travels with this expedition from the first anchorage to the last.
Jacques Cousteau called it the world’s aquarium. One of the most biodiverse marine environments on the planet, with a thermal and biological profile dramatically different from the Caribbean.
Where the cold Humboldt and warm Panama Currents converge. Machalilla NP is Ecuador’s premier marine protected area. Humpback whales congregate here seasonally in numbers rarely seen elsewhere on the Pacific coast.
One of the most productive ocean systems on earth. Cold-water upwelling off Peru and Chile supports sea lion colonies, penguin rookeries, and marine communities that have no Caribbean analog.
Corcovado National Park borders one of the most biodiverse coastal zones on earth. Pacific jungle meets reef in a system almost completely distinct from Costa Rica’s Caribbean side — same country, different planet.
Panama’s Pacific crown jewel — a UNESCO World Heritage site with whale sharks, hammerheads, and reef systems that rival anything in the Caribbean. The circuit’s southern Pacific entry point.
Bahía Solano and Nuí sit at the edge of the Chocó bioregion — one of the most biodiverse places on earth. Humpback whales calve here. The jungle runs directly to the water’s edge.
Rim Run Pac • Catamaran Dan • Nevado Raiders