While talking with Del and friends before this trip, he mentioned that the route we were taking was what his coworkers (who are airplane pilots) called the Happy Shark Route. Pilots call it this because it jumps far away from the coast, so if a plane takes this route and goes down, the sharks are happy! Sailors don’t tend to think in terms of the happiness (or well-being in general) of sharks :). Sailors think in terms of avoiding the land (ie avoiding being driven ashore or wrecked on the rocks) and taking the easiest path between two points which, (in an ocean-going type of sailboat), is usually an offshore route.