Canada!

We are just back from sailing the Southern Gulf Islands of British Columbia. The weather was great, though we did have some days of rain and low clouds. Bad weather up here means rain and fog and WIND. Sunny days are typically windless. So you take the S*** with the sugar! We cleared Canadian customs at Bedwell Harbor on South Pender Island, then sailed north to the tip of Saltspring Island, then south thru Sansum Narrows. We stopped in Ganges Harbor and Canoe Cove to gas up...and eat lunch in restaurants! Thought of family as the local marinas had their year-end regattas: would have loved to be at the Lake George Club eating steak and lobster. Instead we had vegetable stir-fry topped off with a few shots of Kahlua. On Labor Day weekend, we were on Sidney Spit, an island off Sidney, British Columbia. The rain sent everybody else running for home. We stuck it out another day, waiting for the winds to diminish so we could cross Haro Strait to get back to the US. We did that Sept 7, 30 miles in one day, putt-putting along with the outboard on glass-calm seas. Cleared US customs at Roche Harbor, just as the sun was coming out. Had a bowl of chowder, filled the gas tank, and got back to Peggy and Rolf's cabin after about 8 hours on the water. Pulled the boat out of the water directly and enjoyed hot showers and a fire in the woodstove. Yesterday, took the ferry back to the mainland, with Valdesca in tow. Now we are in Seattle. Now we are off for home--New Mexico. Since the boat is already salty, maybe I can get Tim to stop at the Great Salt Lake and drop her in for a spin. The sailing there is supposed to be fab.

Here are some photos of the Canada part of our trip.


We are setting our right now for New Mexico, towing Valdesca the whole 1500 miles. We should be home by about Sunday August 12.

Barcelona 2010

Just back from two weeks in Spain with Tim and my sister Jean and three of her kids, Hannah, Mariah, and Liam. Here are some photos.

Pacific NW sailing

Back in Seattle after two weeks of sailing in the San Juan Islands. Tomorrow, off to Barcelona! Enjoy the photos. Sorry no blogging. Trying to preserve my wrist from further tendinitis induced by Baja blogging and journal writing.

The Keeper of the Eddystone Light

Oh, me father was the keeper of the Eddystone light
And he slept with a mermaid one fine night
From this union there came three
A porpoise and a porgy and the other was me

Chorus:
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free, oh for the life on the rolling sea
One day as I was a-trimmin' the glim
Humming a tune from the evening hymn
A voice from the starboard shouted, "Ahoy!"
And there was me mother a-sittin' on the buoy

Chorus
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free, oh for the life on the rolling sea
"Oh what has become of me children three?"
Me mother then she asked of me
One was exhibited as a talking fish
The other was served in a chafing dish

Chorus
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free, oh for the life on the rolling sea

Then the phosporus flashed in her seaweed hair
I looked again, but me mother wasn't there
But I heard her voice echoing back through the night:
"The devil take the keeper of the Eddystone light!"

Chorus
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free, oh for the life on the rolling sea

Oh the moral of the story you'll learn when you find
To leave God's creatures for what nature had in mind
For fishes are for cookin', mermaids are for tales
Seaweed is for sushi and protecting is for whales

Chorus
Yo ho ho, the wind blows free, oh for the life on the rolling sea


··· Peter, Paul & Mary Lyrics ···

Peace

Peace flows into me
      As the tide to the pool by the shore;
      It is mine forevermore,
It will not ebb like the sea.

I am the pool of blue
      That worships the vivid sky;
      My hopes were heaven-high,
They are all fulfilled in you.

I am the pool of gold
      When sunset burns and dies --
      You are my deepening skies;
Give me your stars to hold.

-Sara Teasdale

Exhultation is the going

Exultation is the going 
Of an inland soul to sea, 
Past the houses — past the headlands — 
Into deep Eternity —

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

-Emily Dickinson

Reprise of 2009 commencement speech

I thought I'd share here a speech I gave last year at this time at the Albany Academy for Girls commencement. My niece Hannah was graduating. I was celebrating my 35th reunion. My father, his 70th from the Albany Academy, the boys' school across the road. Brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces have also graduated from the two schools. The reason I think this is relevant here is it expresses some of what drove me to find Valdesca and sail her this winter in the Sea of Cortes. This morning, I dug this out to remind myself.

AAG Commencement Address, June 8, 2009
by Claudia J Lewis

Today, I’d like to put out there some themes that have emerged in my life in the 35 years since I sat here in MY white dress. Hopefully, those of you graduating today will find something of value here as you go about your lives and make all the decisions ahead of you about what courses to take in college, what major to declare, whether to continue beyond a bachelor’s degree, whether to have a career or family or both, whether to be a hippie vegan back-to-nature dirt farmer or a suit-wearing, Lexus-driving, banking maven. The themes I’ll put forward—that I’ve come to value—are perseverance, self-reliance, community, and Nature, as in that thing we think we’ve conquered but in fact we depend on for our very existence.

I’ll start out with what I don’t want to talk about—cancer. Although I have been fighting cancer for 5 years, I don’t want to be defined by cancer. In fact, I’m trying hard to find definition beyond cancer. I live with it every day—an endless cycle of doctors’ appointments, treatments, annoying side effects, medical tests, reports to friends and family. An endless cycle of ups and downs—but surprisingly more up than down.

I also don’t want to be defined too narrowly by my resume, or my biography. Sufficit to say, I am privileged, as all of you are. Yes, I have worked hard. But up to a certain point, accidents of birth and connections make more difference than hard work. Going to the Academy gives you a leg up on college admissions. And once you go to, say, Brown, that helps get you into a Cal State Los Angeles master’s program with no background whatsoever in the sciences. And having done that, it’s not that much of a reach to get into Harvard. And in my interview for a Fulbright Fellowship, one of the evaluators (who was at Caltech) said, “Well, you seem to have come out of nowhere scientifically. But if you’re good enough for Harvard, I’ll put you forward for a Fulbright.”

All of which isn’t to say that training for my profession was a cake walk. There were plenty of 70-hour weeks. However, in some ways it has been a matter of just putting one foot in front of the other. As Woody Allen once said, “Ninety percent of life is about just showing up.” To get a PhD takes perseverance more than IQ. It takes believing in yourself, believing that you are capable of original thought.

For a scientist, I’ve actually had a rather checkered career. No straight and narrow for me! In college, I chickened out of majoring in geology because in my FIRST geology class the professor wrote some differential equations on the blackboard and said that those of us who hadn't had physics and calculus yet didn't really need to worry (I worried).I didn't even know what calculus was. So I majored in American Civilization. It wasn't until after college, while I was working at a small wood energy research lab in Santa Fe, that I discovered I could do science. One task I had was to run experiments on creosote buildup in different kinds of woodstove chimney. I set up 6 identical Fisher Baby Bear woodstoves with identical lengths of chimney but different kinds of insulation. Then I fired the 6 Baby Bears for two months straight, loading each one with an identical, weighed quantity of newspaper, kindling, and cordwood. This required chopping cords and cords of firewood, taking care to get all the pieces the same size. At the end, I dismantled the chimneys, dried them in a low-temperature oven, weighed them, and compared them to their original weights to get the creosote accumulation. And we published a paper in 'Mother Earth News'. I realized that there was no mystery to doing science. I was good at it! So I took evening courses in College Algebra, Calculus (!!!), Physical Geology, and Chemistry. After that, I knew I was ready to get the geology degree I always wanted.

I finished my master’s degree at Cal State in four years rather than the more typical two years because I had to do all the undergraduate geology courses and physics, chemistry, and calculus. I then went to Harvard for a PhD, which took five more years. For anybody counting, I went through 26th grade. I did my thesis research in Baja California, which took 11 months to complete, 11 months of camping out in the Sonoran desert. With a field assistant, we’d drive up a dry wash in the mountain range I was studying and find a place protected from flash floods, where we’d set up camp. Then for a week or so, we’d hike out every day in a different direction to map the rocks before changing camps. By now I think you can see how sticking with it can get you to your goals, despite your doubts about your abilities or how many times you have to move across the country.

One characteristic that ties it all together for me is that I have an openness to experience that isn’t unique but HAS determined my trajectory and impelled me through life. I’ve been willing to take risks, to follow my heart, to think for myself, and ignore the expectations of other people, though I had to learn to do these things. If you don’t open yourself up to making mistakes, you close yourself off to learning anything new. If you merely follow a pre-determined path, you’ll never really know what you’re made of.

More than anything or anyone, the wilderness, or Nature with a capital N, has been my guide and perpetual source of peace, inspiration and strength. My appreciation of the outdoors began a long time ago—camping out on islands in Lake George, waterskiing on a glass-calm lake not long after dawn, picking blueberries and swatting mosquitoes on Prospect Mountain. My first real experience of what nature could teach me about myself was the Outward Bound course I took at Hurricane Island after my junior year at the Academy. Twenty-one days of rain, sleeping on oars, navigating in pea-soup fog, rowing despite the blisters taught me I was pretty tough. I didn’t love the rain but I figured out how to stay warm and dry.

At some point, likely senior year, I came across a book in the Academy library that someone had had the good sense to buy. It was called “On the Loose” by Terry and Renny Russell, two brothers (not much older than me at the time) who put together a book of their photos, quotes from other authors, and wisdom of their own from their travels together on rivers, in the desert, and in the mountains. They rattled around in an old pickup truck and ran whitewater rivers and climbed peaks and played the guitar on the beach. “On the Loose” became a kind of prescription or exhortation for me. I wanted to do what they did, but in my own way.

After my freshman year at Brown, I had a summer job at Hurricane Island doing logistics from a subsidiary island base near Bar Harbor, ME; I had to provide all the food and gear for 36 students and 8 staff. Mind you, I was 19 years old and I had no idea how much 17 year old boys eat. I nearly caused a mutiny. After working two summers at Hurricane Island, I signed on for a 3-month trip sailing and rowing from Maine to Florida, with other Hurricane staff, on a 30-ft-long, open boat (basically a glorified coast guard life boat). We left Hurricane in early October, in the late afternoon, and ran smack into a storm. We sailed all night, waves crashing over us as we huddled in our foul weather gear. I remember sunrise vividly; the wind had died down and we made a pot of coffee on our two-burner gas stove and dug into the brownies we had made before leaving Hurricane. Fortunately, things never got MORE exciting than our first night, though we had lots of adventure.

As a junior at Brown, a group of kids I didn’t know found out I had worked for Outward Bound and asked me if I wanted to join their Group Independent Study Project on the Colorado River. We would get academic credit for two semesters. And we would spend 45 days in July and August on the Green and Colorado Rivers. The idea was to study the archeology, history, geology, environmental policy, art, music, and literature of the Colorado River drainage, a river that provides life-giving water to 7 arid western states, has some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet, and has seen history-making whitewater descents. After the river trip, we would synthesize what we learned and prepare an hour-long multi-media presentation for the Brown President’s Colloquium Series during commencement week.

As you might imagine, we had a blast. The six of us did the river in two inflatable rafts and a little hard plastic boat called a Sportyak. We had so much time—45 days!!—that we were able to hike up many side canyons and even take a backpacking trip into the Maze, in Canyonlands. We had so much time that some days we would decide just before sunset that we really were sick of this camp and so we’d throw everything in the boats and float a mile to a new camp. In retrospect, that was an amazingly unpretentious trip. It wasn’t about gear at all. We wore cutoffs and sneakers. It was about being on the river. It was about learning what the desert had to teach us. Was it worth 6 credits?

Aldo Leopold, in his book “A Sand County Almanac,” expressed the power of wilderness travel to teach us unforgettable lessons:

No servant brought them meals; they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they misguessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes, which firewood made clean coals, and which only smoke. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts…against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.

Terry and Renny Russell, from their experience of wilderness, learned a few things, too. Here’s a piece of theirs on wilderness travel from “On the Loose” that still sticks with me today:

So why do we do it?
What good is it?
Does it teach you anything?
Like determination? Invention? Improvisation?
Foresight? Hindsight?
Love?
Art? Music? Religion?
Strength or patience or accuracy or quickness or tolerance or
Which wood will burn and how long is a day and how far is a mile
And how delicious is water and smoky green pea soup?
And how to rely on your self?

And how to rely on yourself. I’ve learned that in spades. Like the time in Baja California when we had both batteries, the main one and the backup, go dead. We felt that kind of uh-oh you feel when you realize this might not turn out the way we planned. There was just a thin veil of technology between us and total doom. We had to hike out 12 miles across the burning desert to the main road and hitchhike into San Felipe to get a new battery and find somebody to take us back to our vehicle, which was way off in the hinterland. The guy who took us back in was visibly nervous when I kept getting out of the vehicle to find the tracks we made in the sand on the way in.

So what does wilderness offer me at this stage of my life, if not the chance to be ever more self-reliant? For the last few months I have been reading books of nature writing—Edwin Way Teale, Ann Zwinger, Terry Tempest Williams, Ed Abbey, Ellen Meloy—most but not all writing about the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest desert. I’ve been feeling a deep need to connect to the natural world, but it’s a little hard to do on a chaise longue in my dining room. So I started reading about other people’s trips to wild places. Within the nature writing genre, there are different flavors and not all of them suit all occasions.

Some years ago I started a book by the author and naturalist Ann Zwinger. The book was called “Down Canyon”, about a year in which she took 12 trips through the Grand Canyon, one a month. All those years ago, I didn’t get very far with Down Canyon. I wanted to read about whitewater, the big rapids that drive the pace and tenor of most days on the Grand.

But Zwinger scarcely mentions rapids. Her focus is near, detailed, contemplative. She describes the patterns of light on the water, the sound of birds just before dawn, the peregrinations of bugs on a sandy beach. When I read Down Canyon recently—really for the first time!—I realized how much of the Grand Canyon I didn’t see on my 4 raft trips through there. I was always focused on the whitewater—balancing the load on my raft each morning and tying everything carefully so that even upside down I wouldn’t lose a soda can; scrutinizing the river guide so I always knew where I was and what rapids were coming up; stopping to scout the biggest ones and throwing sticks in the current to plan a bombproof route past the big recirculating holes and stopper waves. I spent so much of each day in taut suspense at outcomes that I didn’t have time to really see.

These last few months, I’ve really longed to be on the river. Not just the Grand. Maybe the Grand least of all. Contemplative stretches, where I can float, and just look, and listen.

Since I’ve had cancer, I pay more attention to the details. Not the details that I used to obsess about in order to ensure the outcome I wanted. But the details of this moment—all the things that make this moment unique and lovely and worth living.

I bought a canoe recently. A 14-ft forest green-faded-to-teal Mad River canoe. A few weeks ago, Tim and I, with a couple of friends, floated a flatwater reach of the Rio Grande I’d never floated before. The banks of the river were lush with spring green. We saw ducks and redwing blackbirds and some goats in a pen, and blooming fruit trees, and a guy firing up his woodburning hot tub. We took out at Embudo Station, a restaurant right on the bank of the river, and had dinner and watched the river flow by.

The amazing thing about my illness is how much I’ve come to love and appreciate my friends and family. My cancer isn’t just about me. It affects, or afflicts, my whole community—my friends, my family, and my co-workers. As a self-reliant person, I had a hard time accepting help. At one point this winter, Tim and I were frazzled with trying to find anything I wanted to eat. We were down to about 8 things that I found appetizing. A friend of ours offered to organize cooks to bring us meals twice a week. What a difference that made! Hungarian mushroom soup. Salmon chowder. Moroccan lamb with melon balls and mint. This food tasted great; it was wrapped in love. And in a thousand other ways now, I know that I am loved.

So I’ve learned to be self reliant, but I have also come to appreciate the value of human community and, through my travels, the interconnectedness of all things in the natural world, including humans. As I have come to regard myself as a part of something much bigger than me, I feel like I get saner and make better decisions about my life and my needs on this Earth. Who needs more stuff? How about more time on the river with people I love? The writer Bill McKibben is a passionate advocate against the pursuit of MORE. The pursuit of ‘more’ does not make us happy. He prescribes a deep connection to nature as the antidote to the quintessentially American pursuit of more. McKibben says, “Interconnection is anathema to a consumer notion of the world, where each of us is useful precisely to the degree that we consider ourselves the center of everything. Advertising and hyperconsumerism are designed to make you crazy. Nature, like close-knit human community, is designed to help you stay sane.”

So the advice I have to offer you, senioritas, for what it’s worth, is to stick with your passion, don’t let anyone talk you out of pursuing your dreams, believe in yourself, help to build a resilient community around you, and look to the natural world for peace and sanity.

Best of luck on your journey.

Another bump in the road

It's been a while since my last post. I have been busily transcribing my journal from our Baja trip. I wrote so much I got tendinitis in my wrist, which means I have to go the chiropractor three times a week and the acupuncturist once a week. I was writing in a 3" x 5" notebook for much of the trip, using a ball point pen. I used to like the resistance of a ball point, that friction on the page. I guess I'll have to change to something else that moves more smoothly for the Pacific northwest trip.

This voyage of the intrepid Valdesca and her captain and first matey has been nothing but bumps in the road, as faithful readers will recall from previous posts. Yet another faces me now. I got back my most recent PET/CT scan results yesterday and they show a new tumor in my abdomen. I have to do something about it, and fast, because the last time I had a recurrence the tumor grew from the size of an avocado to the size of a grapefruit in three weeks. It's a lemon now. So next week, I'd like to think I'll start chemo again. It's not that I like chemo, oh no. It's nasty. But chemo has gained me some precious time, time enough for trips to Brazil and Peru, Spain and Mexico. Time to sail Valdesca in the Sea of Cortes. Time to write and think. Time with my nieces and nephews. And hopefully time to sail again in the San Juan Islands and the Inside Passage.

The fitting out continues apace, despite the bumps. Tim has made the new thwarts. They are hanging in his studio, each day sporting a new layer of polyurethane. We have begun mounting new hardware. First, deck chocks for the Danforth. Kind of hard to know exactly where to put the Danforth. It's such a spikey, pokey thing. We're trying out the deck to port of the tiller, forward of the main sheet horse. It seems to be mostly out of the way of mainsheet and mizzen sheet, and body parts for crying out loud.

The new genoa jib has arrived. It's a beauty, in a deep dark port wine tanbark with Sunbrella along the foot and leech to protect the sail from the sun while furled. It will be sweet to have some extra canvas in those light airs up north. The spinnaker arrived, too. It has panels of light and dark blue and red corner patches. It was a racing sail for a Flying Scot. I am making a spinnaker launch bag out of red nylon, using a kit from Sailrite. And I just got the spinnaker halyard and sheets from a company that had short pieces of Staset polyester braid for half price as they were the ends of spools. This is a great path to consider when rigging such a small boat. Buy the end pieces of line and save a lot of money. None of the sheets or halyards on Valdesca are more than about 35 ft long. I found remnant line out there up to 60 or even 80 ft lengths.

Well, it's going to be in the 90s here today. Wish I could put up the sails on my little boat and sail away.

I'm sailing away

set an open course for the virgin sea

cause I've got to be free

free to face the life that's ahead of me

On board, I'm the captain

so climb aboard

we'll search for tomorrow on every shore

and I'll try, oh Lord, I'll try to carry on

-Styx

More gearing up

I needed to discover how many ways there are to be intelligent, how many ways of being open to the world.

–Abbott Gleason

I enjoy the getting ready part of a trip, perhaps as much as the trip itself. It's part of the adventure, especially if you need, as we do, to make changes to your rig and re-orient for a different climate. We learned a lot of things about our rig in Mexico that we are trying now to fine tune. Before I talk gear, I'll show you some maps of where we are headed.

My friend Andrea asked me to post a chart of the area where we will be sailing in August. She, too, is a sailor and wants to see where we'll be. It's fun to ponder the difficulties of a new area, the tides and currents, anchorages, crossings, and shipping lanes. The basic idea, as of 10:45 PM Tuesday May 11 (could change tomorrow or the next day), is to start in Bellingham and sail to Lopez Island, stopping perhaps at Lummi Island, and Sinclair and Cypress Islands. From a base on Lopez, in Mud Bay (south of Spencer Spit), we'll hopefully do some circumnavigations, of Lopez and San Juan and Orcas, with side trips out to Patos and Sucia and Matia. And there are some other interesting outer islands, Stuart and Waldron. We might explore part the Inside Passage as well, but I need to explore routes some more.



Map from yachtpals.com

Here is a link to an interactive chart of the islands where you can zoom in and sail around and look at all the navigational aids and the shipping lanes. I'll try later to upload another interactive map that shows landforms.

I have been devouring books on sailmaking and rigging, learning how to splice double-braid rope and how to rig a spar catcher for the gunter, the stick of wood that holds up the top of the mainsail. That stick of wood tends to bat you on the head whenever you lower the sail in a breeze. This trick will make sure it stays upright and out of the way when we reef or scandalize the main (a slick way of saying dropping the main in a hurry). Today, I rigged brass thimbles on the luff of the main, which is to say the edge that abuts the mast. I want to try lacing the sail to the mast in lieu of the hoops we have been using. I found a way to lash the main that makes it easier to raise and lower the sail, which has been a problem not only with the hoops but also with a basic lacing. It's hell when the wind is blasting and you have to reef but you can't get the bloody sail down. So you get out the boat hook and push on the hoops or the laces and try to get them moving. Swearing all the while like a buccaneer.


Spar catcher
Photo (and rig) by Jerry Barnett

My plan for the lacing comes from a great old book by Colin O'Brien called 'Sea Boats, Oars, and Sails.' This method allows you to pull the sail off the spars easily so that you can store them away in a warm dry place. This should be useful in the Pacific northwest. Sails are particularly vulnerable to rainwater. It makes them rot. This method also reduces the turbulence created by air flow around the mast. You get a better airfoil if the sail is not cinched in tight; O'Brien says several inches between the sail and mast are fine, even a foot. And the sail tends to make a nice smooth surface instead of wrinkling at every grommet. The ease of raising and lowering means that we'll also be able to adjust the downhaul for light airs and stiff breezes. This kind of fiddling can make your boat go a lot faster, important not only in racing but in light airs, which we expect to see many days in the San Juan Islands.

Our new sail with the thimble and whipping, ready to be laced to the spar.

Beachcombing finds

I just posted an album of photos you can access via this link. But you have to go to Facebook...until I figure out how to import the photos with captions over here.

A taste of things to come

Last year in late July, Tim and I went up to Seattle to visit our friends Peggy and Rolf, who have a cabin on Lopez Island. I was just reviewing photos of that trip and thought I'd post a few here as that trip really got us rolling on the idea of sailing. Peggy and Rolf bought their property some years ago with their friends Chris and Nancy, who built a second house on the property right next door. Both are right on the water in Mud Bay. They all share everything, like a family compound--a vast barn full of sea kayaks and bikes, a bunkhouse that could sleep an army, a pile of crab pots, and an oar-powered dinghy to set the pots and collect the crabs.

The week we spent on Lopez was full of beach combing, hikes, bike rides, crabbing, eating crab, sea kayaking, and sailing. Tim and I arrived during crabbing season. I bought my license, which entitled me to go out in the boat and watch Peggy and Rolf sex the crabs, throwing back the females and juveniles, and then prepare them for the pot by ripping off their backs and separating the edible parts from the seagull food. I didn't want to interfere in what was clearly a professional operation. These guys know their crabs. This year, though, I'll do some of the dirty work, at risk of getting pinched.

One day we organized a sea kayaking expedition to Spencer Spit, about 6 miles up the coast of Lopez. Some of us kayaked and some sailed. Then some of us traded places after a walk on the spit. Chris has a 23 ft sailboat that he keeps on a mooring by their house. In that 6 miles back to the mooring, in which I became enchanted with the GPS chart plotter and fish finder, I realized that I really missed sailing. And that was all I needed to get me going again. Next thing I knew, I was looking for a boat of my own.

This summer, we'll tow Valdesca up to Washington and sail her over to Lopez. With a base at Peggy and Rolf's, we'll sail all around the San Juans, hopefully circumnavigating Lopez, San Juan, and Orcas Islands and getting out to Patos and Sucia.

Whaddya gonna do?

View Larger Map
Playa Bonanza, Isla Espiritu Santo, Mexico

Tim and I have had many debates these last few months about keeping in touch with friends and family. In the old days, you wrote a postcard if you wanted to brag about the white sandy beach you had been laying on. With the advent of GPS tracking instruments, on our Baja trip we were able to send updates on a daily basis to a list of 10 e-mail addresses. Each person on the list received a message like this:

Valdesca SPOT
Latitude:26.1191
Longitude:-111.2865
GPS location Date/Time:02/27/2010 18:29:58 MST

Click the link below to see where I am located.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=26.1191,-111.2865&ll=26.1191,-111.2865&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1
Message: All passengers aboard Valdesca are OK.

If you go to the link (OK, go there, I'll wait), you'll see the beach on Isla Coronados where we camped on the night of Feb 27. As you can see, it's a magnificent crescent of white sand on the flanks of a volcano. If you zoom way in, you can even see the texture of the bottom and a boat entering the big cove to the southeast. We sent these OK messages out every day. It was a sort of safety system in that we could also have chosen to push the '911' button which would have activated a search organized out of Houston, Texas. For the service, we paid something like $100 on top of the $100 cost of the SPOT tracker we carried with us. It's portable (a little bigger than a cell phone) and waterproof so in the event of a wreck we could have called for a rescue. The great thing about the SPOT was sending the OK messages. It was like sending out 10 postcards a day. Those 10 recipients could see exactly where we were, nearly in real time. They could find out the name of the place and look up more information if they wanted to. They could check the current weather in that location and the forecast to see what the winds were doing. They could figure out if the next day was going to be slack or frisky or if we'd be pinned down by a big blow. The SPOT messaging system turned out to be stupendously useful for the times when we had scheduled to meet Peter. He could watch our movements over the course of several days and see where we were in relation to the pre-arranged meeting place. He could tell if we were going to make it or not. And if not, where he would need to meet us in a rental car. We figured out that we could send a repeat OK message at an unusual time of day to make the point that "We are HERE!" and Pete figured out that it was our way of telling him where to find us.

Another way we stayed in touch was via this blog. In the flurry of getting ready for our Mexico trip, I figured we'd send e-mail messages now and again to a few select people. Then I realized it was going to be really easy to use Facebook to post updates. Some people, who shall remain nameless, were adamantly opposed to Facebook as they fear their privacy would be compromised by initiating a Facebook account (which is required in order to read our Facebook page since we only make it available to pre-approved friends). OK, OK, so I decided to start a blog. This, as it turns out, is easy as pie. The only hard part is that within eblogger there doesn't seem to be any easy means of sending out an e-blast every time you add a new post. The followers need to visit the site every so often to see if there are new posts. Since we sometimes had long lapses between posts (due to lack of internet access out in the middle of nowhere), I imagine this got tedious for some followers.

I tried to keep blog readers apprised of the SPOT Adventure site where they could track our progress. The only problem was that our OK messages with locations were not automatically logged onto the site; I found out at the end of our trip that I have to personally upload the SPOTS I want the world to see. And only the locations from the current month had been saved for me to upload. This is something that SPOT needs to fix in the future. The user should be able to make this automatic. If anybody out there has this figured out, let me know.

On our way home, I realized we were going to be overwhelmed by people wanting to know how the trip had turned out. One way to inform people is to have a slide show soon after you get home. That way, you can tell all the stories once to bunch of your friends. Even better, we thought, was uploading a slide show to Facebook. There, people could see a culled selection of photos of our trip, a lot more than we could offer via the blog. Of course, there was a great hue and cry (by people whose names I will not mention) about how they don't do Facebook. So I figured out a way to upload the slide show to the blog. What we hoped to avoid was having to spend hours on the telephone recounting our adventures, to the delight of our friends perhaps but turning the trip into a fossil for us. For the most part these techniques of staying in touch have worked, except for my sister Anne who just told me she no longer does email. She has an assistant digest all her email into bullet points. All the email from family goes into a folder titled "Family-to read later." Or maybe never, she said. All those beautiful Google Earth postcards I sent her from Mexico ended up in a dead letter box.

The voyage isn't over

Valdesca sits under a tarp in the driveway, looking rather dejected with no spars, sails or rigging up. It was blustery here this morning, nice sailing weather, but the nearest body of water is about the size of an Olympic swimming pool and has a fence through the middle--our pond. The nearest ocean is the Sea of Cortez, about 3 hours south of Tucson, so an 11-hour drive from here. I have to content myself for now with planning our next big adventure--sailing in the Pacific northwest.

We had to come home from Mexico because I had to get back on my Chinese herbs and see my oncologists for a check-up. As you can imagine, I didn't want to go there. I wanted to stay in La-La Land forever, permanently forgetting about my precarious health. Coming home meant finding out where I stand. Could have been good or bad. The last time I had a recurrence of cancer, Tim and I had come back from a month-long trip to Peru where we trekked at elevations as high as 18,000 ft near the 21,000-ft peak Ausangate. I did fine on that trip, although my conditioning at the time prevented me from hiking up the high passes; I rode a horse instead, which has its own charms. When we got back, I scheduled an appointment with Dr. Carolyn Muller, my surgical oncologist. Normally I see her in Santa Fe, where she has office hours every other Friday, but to get in more quickly I opted to see her in Albuquerque. She asked me if this was a routine appointment, concerned that I came to see her in Albuquerque, suggesting urgency. I told her, no, just routine but I wanted to get in sooner rather than later. They did a blood draw for the Ca125 tumor marker that tracks my cancer quite well. Then several weeks went by and I didn't hear anything from them. One Sunday night I had a dream I was back in graduate school. Dreaming about school for me always signifies I have something to learn. I was there with my friend Debra, who was an undergrad at Brown with me. We had an apartment together. In the course of the dream, four friends of our undergrad days came in the door. I was surprised to see them all and asked what they were there to study. The first said, "Hematology." The second said, "Hematology." The third, "Hematology." And the fourth, "Hematology." I woke up from that dream in a panic and said, "I have to find out my Ca125 result!" I called the doctor's office, and they told me, "It's 22." Ca125 is considered in the normal range if it's 22 or below. But mine throughout the previous two years had been in the 5-8 range, and 22 signified it was on the rise. I knew then that I had a recurrence, which turned out to be the case. They never reported it to me because it was normal and my records were up in Santa Fe.

This past Monday I had the Ca125 draw and by Thursday was in a funk waiting for the result. I asked Tim, "I see Lopez (Dr. Tim Lopez, my medical oncologist) on Monday. Should I wait until then to find out or should I call?" Tim said, "Call." So I called, although I have always made myself wait to open up college admissions, grad school admissions, academic test scores, and grant decisions. Wait for what? Oh, I don't know, to draw out the hope a little longer in the event of bad news. In this case, it wasn't like I was going to have a good weekend waiting for my Ca125 result. I was just going to be in a funk. So I called. It was late in the day, though, and I didn't get a call back.

Next morning, I walked into the house (from the tower, where we sleep) and Tim said, "Ah, there's the lucky number 7!" A 7!! Fantastic. That's "normal."

Pressure drop,
oh pressure,
oh yeah pressure drop'll drop on you-u-u-u.
-Jimmy Cliff

Now I can move on. Planning is in full force. I can go on another trip.

We are going to the San Juan Islands, which I discovered last year on my first visit to the Pacific northwest. Our friends Peggy and Rolf have a cabin on Lopez Island. Tim and I flew to Seattle, which was in the middle of a heat wave with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees in the city. Even Anacortes, where the ferry leaves for Lopez Island, was hot. We had a fantastic week of crabbing and eating and sea kayaking and eating and biking and sailing and eating. I decided I could move up there, but Peggy said, "I think you should come up for a week during winter before you do anything drastic." I guess it's not always in the 80s and sunny in the San Juan Islands.

Many northwestern sailors in the Sea of Cortez told us our boat was perfect for beach cruising in the Puget Sound area and the Inside Passage along British Columbia up to Alaska, including a NOLS instructor, Coco Hess, who lives in BC but spends part of the winter teaching sailing in Baja. With our connection to Peggy and Rolf and a place to stay on Lopez Island, we decided to go there next.

The conditions will be quite different from Baja. Peter says we need full foulies and sea boots. Not having a cabin will be more inconvenient, given the higher probability of rain and cold temperatures. The water is a lot colder, more like the Colorado River at Lee's Ferry where the water comes off the bottom of Lake Powell, a breathtakingly chilly 46 degrees. Tim won't be so blase about daily swims to and from the boat at anchor. And down-stuffed gear is out of the question.

I have already ordered the charts and current tables and some cruising and kayak guides. Tim has a new North Face 3-season fiberfill sleeping bag. We ordered him a pair of waist-high breathable waders with neoprene booties attached that he can stuff into his deck shoes. I ordered myself some Bogs knee-high neoprene boots with flowers and vines on them so they're cute as well as practical. We figured out a circular anchoring system that will allow us to unload on shore and then pull the boat out by means of a loop of line on a carabiner 'pulley.' When we need to access the boat, we untie the line that leads to shore and reel in the boat like a clothesline. Unless the shore is subject to surge or surf, we should be able to stay reasonably dry.

Another necessity for the northwest is a tent that we can mount on the boat, obviating any need to go ashore at all. Campsites are somewhat limited in the San Juan Islands by the density of development and regulations regarding landing and camping. In Baja, it seemed we could land and camp just about anywhere. That won't be the case in the San Juans. There is another option for us--mooring to Washington State Park buoys, which are located in protected anchorages in state-owned Marine Parks. To moor out, though, we need to be able to camp aboard. We actually have a workable system for sleeping on board but we need to figure out a tent system. We have a beautiful, carefully thought-out tubular canvas tent that came with Valdesca. It fits over the entire cockpit with window and door openings at both ends and on the sides. It makes for luxurious accommodations. The problem we have is that it takes up too much room on the boat and weighs too much for the number of times we actually want to sleep on the boat. In Baja, it just wasn't necessary. We slept out under the stars whenever we were on the boat all night.

The system we are considering builds on threads I have read in the Drascombe Association web site forum. Other Drascombe sailors have mounted small camping tents on a platform of boards placed crosswise to the boat's length on top of the side benches. We made a set of boards for the Mexico trip but opted to leave them in the car because they were too heavy and took up too much room in the cockpit. My new idea is a webbed plastic cargo-net floor like used on catarafts for whitewater rafting. The cargo floor is slung between two aluminum sidebars and stretched tight as a trampoline with aluminum crossbars u-bolted to the sidebars. We'll size the floor to fit the tent, a North Face Big Fat Frog. The tent assembles in minutes and the floor should too. Yes, we're back to the little camping tent, the one we had to forsake for the Minibus because Tim gets claustrophobic in it. He told me he'll deal. The minibus is just way too big to fit on Valdesca. We'll carry it along for shore camping, however.

Another upgrade we've made is beefier oars. The oars that came with the boat are 8-1/2 ft long traditional varnished spruce oars. Accustomed to rowing rafts as we are, these oars feel like toothpicks, and perform about as well. We worried we were going to snap one in Mexico and have to resort more often to the motor, the 'Sea Horse,' as it says on the motor cover. And everything I've ever read about Drascombes advises never getting your boat into a situation in which you have to depend on the motor to get you out. We learned that the day we had to make a quick exit through pounding surf and ran out of gasoline on a lee shore. The oars and the sails got us out of there.

The new oars are carbon/fiberglass/epoxy composite shafts with detachable carbon/fiber blades. They are 9-1/2 ft long and fit along the side benches where we used to keep the old oars. The extra length does not seem to be a problem. These oars have bigger blades than our old ones and will take a lot more torque. We should be able to make a wake with these puppies! In order to keep the 'look' from getting too moderno I chose off-white shafts and black blades with subdued graphics.

We are in the process of replacing all of our running rigging and changing out some of the deck hardware. Much of the existing rigging is as old as the boat (vintage 1985) and once impregnated with saltwater gets stiff and hard to handle. I have ordered new halyards, new sheets, a new mainsail downhaul, new centerboard gear, and a new jib furling line. All are yacht braid and should have a nice hand. We have already traded out the cotton sail ties that came with the boat for nylon webbing that takes up less salt and remains more flexible.

Storage of the Danforth stern anchor was a problem in Mexico. We needed it handy on deck for quick deployment; we used it every day. I jury rigged a rubber dry bag to hold the anchor and rode, but I am upgrading to chrome hardware that allows the Danforth to be mounted to the aft deck and a true flake bag for the rode. This system will keep things better organized on deck and less likely to mildew.

There are a few more other upgrades still to come. We would like to order a 140% genoa jib to allow faster sailing in light airs. We'd also like to replace our worn cast aluminum tiller head with a bronze one. At the same time, we'll install a curved tiller handle, which allows the helmsman to steer without crushing the knuckles of the rower. Part of the package will be a tiller extension so we can get our weight forward, closer to the center of effort of the sails, without having to re-e-e-e-ach for the tiller.

The garbage cans of Baja California

Riffing on a theme started by Dianna Quinn some years ago in Barcelona (her photo essay was titled 'The pigeons of Barcelona'), I made a point of shooting the 55 gallon drums used on the beaches of Baja as garbage cans. Each one has a personality of its own.

Even more photos!

Take a look at the first cut of our photo album: Sea of Cortes 2010.

Home again home again jiggety jig

Here are some photos just received from friends Connie and Rick of Dana Point, California. These first two were taken in the San Jose Channel in big seas but forgiving wind. We had just escaped an anchorage on a sweet beach that became a hell hole when the wind changed. Once we got through the crashing surf, we realized we were out in some pretty big conditions. But it was a norther that was calming back. The worst part was the residual swell. Nobody else was out there but us and about a thousand dolphins. Then we noticed Rick and Connie coming up behind us, under power, in their boat Rhino. They pulled alongside and said, "Nice day for a sail!" Yup! We held our course across the channel, reaching at 4-5 knots all the way to Isla San Jose, a run of about 10 miles that day.

Connie and Rick were on their way to San Evaristo, where we were headed too but we couldn't make it there in a straight line. We finally caught up with them a few days later in the magnificent bay on the south side of Isla San Francisco. They shot a few more photos of us and Valdesca and while we were on a hike left some chocolate chip cookies for us with our camera battery they had charged for us. Thanks to them, we have a few great photos of this part of our trip.
 

La Paz

After weeks without access to the internet, we are in La Paz (the big city) and I have wireless on board Valdesca! I'm sitting here in the sun and wind tapping out this update. First of all, this is officially IT, the end of the trip, at least the part by boat. We made it some 500 miles in 54 days (wow, that's a coincidence; that's how old I am). Excuse me while I take a sip of the ice cold Modelo Tim just brought me. Aaaaaahhhh! Which reminds me that I had cause to pronounce the Budweiser beer propaganda that my brother Steve taught me when I was about 14: 'This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no other beer produced by any other other brewer that costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive beechwood aging produces a taste, a smoothness, and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any price.' What a lot of hogwash (to use a favorite word of my father's. One night around the campfire on Isla Espiritu Santo with Peter Schoenburg and his son Ben and Ben's college friends Henry and Paul, and our friend AnitavStalter, I had cause to dredge that up. I must say it took a while for the random access memory to find that. I hadn't looked for it in a long long time. It was at the back of the closet.

Uh, starting to hear crunching beer cans on neighboring boats. The sun must be over the yardarm. Let me look... Yup! A few years ago when Tim and I were getting our diving certification in the Yucatan, the dive shop had a clock I rather liked. Over every hour of the clock someone had pasted a "5" so that it's ALWAYS after 5.

I don't know how I got on this jag but there you go.

We have encountered a lot of amazed sailors here in La Paz--amazed that we came so far in such a little boat. They don't even have slips this small in the marina. The smallest slip is 36 ft. The only other boat near our size is a 27 ft Catalina named 'Willful Simplicity.' The other day coming into the marina there was a strong breeze and some current that made it kind of hard to maneuver. We knew from talking to marina personnel over the VHF radio that we were assigned to slip 321. As we got inside the breakwater, under power, we doused the mizzen and pulled up the rudder. I slowly motored towards the slip and told Tim to get ready on the bow line (oops, packed away in a locker; hadn't needed those yet). Oh, just use the jib sheet! He turned around and asked me, 'Are you going in stern first or bow first?' 'Yeah, right!' I told him. Backwards? You've gotta be kidding! The last time I docked a boat I think I was 17 years old. With a whole bunch of people ogling us in this teeny weeny boat, I did a flawless docking, kind of like Mom used to parallel park the car. I told Tim, 'I bet you thought I'd bang the dock. Well, I wasn't a dock boy for nothing all those years ago!'

Photos: Karin Cope, Quoddy's Run

Sittin' pretty

Knee deep in the Pliocene

Wow, where to start? Peter just departed in the back of a pick-up truck bound for the Loreto airport. We are docked at Puerto Escondido, the best hurricane hole in the Sea of Cortez. Thankfully, it's not fixing to blow a hurricane. There is a gringo yacht club here called "Hidden Port Yacht Club." Apparently, we can join and then flash our cards at places like the 'Real Club Nautico de Barcelona' or the 'Yacht Club de Monaco' and get reciprocal privileges. Might be worth considering.

We had a fantastic week with Peter aboard. Having Pete along made light work for us. He toted all the barges and lifted all the bales. Unloaded the boat and loaded it up again. Washed dishes. Pulled the boat out at night and swam out first thing in the morning to pull the boat back in. Rowed when we needed rowing. Sailed when we needed sailing. And taught us a lot about sail trim and balancing the load. We will miss him, not just because he was a hard worker but for all the talk and companionship. I told him yesterday he seemed to get younger every day with us. He got more and more like a kid as he got farther and farther from work and the demands of life back home. He'll be back down here March 20th with his son Ben and one or two of Ben's friends.

Tim picked up Peter at the Loreto airport a week ago. Tim ran the last errands, filling the propane tank and the water jugs, buying fresh food and cold beer. Then a friend we made, Norm, drove our shuttle for us, dropping Peter and Tim off at San Bruno, where Tim and I had been sitting out a big blow from the north. We organized food and gear and set off from San Bruno the next morning bound for Isla Coronados, about 9 miles away. It had been blowing for days out of the north, perfect for cruising down to Coronados, but by the time we left San Bruno it started blowing from the south. So we beat upwind all day to Coronados. We found a magnificent camp reminiscent of the Caribbean on the southwest side of the island--an idyllic little cove with a white sand beach and aquamarine water. The cove faced south, making it iffy for a blow from the south, and sure enough the wind picked up in the middle of the night and Peter and Tim had to move the boat to a more protected part of the cove. Fortunately, they had a full moon to work by as it would have been hard to row around the rocks and set the anchor again using headlamps. From the warmth of my sleeping bag, I could see their two full moons moving around the boat. I was praying I didn't have to get out and help.

The next day, we set out for Isla Carmen, about 13 miles away, including crossing a wide channel between the islands. We first had to clear a long sand spit on the SW side of Coronados. As the wind was pretty slack, Peter rowed. The water shoaled as we approached the tip of the sand spit. In the distance I could see, through the binoculars, a stripe of rough water from the spit all the way to the channel over to the west. As we got closer, we realized it was a tide rip. As we approached, the current picked up, pulling us toward the rip. As we got into the rip, all of a sudden the current was against us and we started surfing like crazy to the west. Where the two tidal currents, one from each side of Coronados, came together, they collided and water was forced to go sideways. It was surreal, seeing rocks in the sandy bottom flash by. We cranked up the motor and pushed through to the other side of the rip. We motored along for a while along the south shore of Coronados, hoping for wind to help us across the channel between the islands. Slowly, the wind picked up and we started across. By the time we got to Isla Carmen, it was really blowing a stiff breeze and we were flying along at 5 knots with waves splashing over the bow. We could really see how kayaks get in trouble doing that crossing. You start out in calm conditions and the wind blows up and builds big waves and it's a toss-up whether it's better to go forward or back.

We sailed along the north shore of Carmen, at this point a lee shore with the wind out of the north, looking for a campsite that I had read about in the kayak guide. We couldn't believe we were going to find anyplace where we could land and unload. The whole coast was nothing but cliffs and crashing surf. We keyed into what looked like the spot, based on the satellite imagery in the kayak guide and the GPS locations. And finally a narrow little slot opened up with a white beach at the back. The entry looked dicey, and Peter later told us he was highly dubious about going in there, but Tim and I were all for doing it. After all, there weren't many options, and we had made some difficult approaches before. We got in there fine on the jib and mizzen and finally oars. Dropped the hook and rowed to shore. There was quite a surge on the beach, causing the boat to rise and fall rather dramatically. We worried about getting dropped on a rock but it never happened. The beach was phenomenal, a strip of white sand backed by a huge dune in the middle of a small canyon. The waves rolled up the beach and made loud reports as they came up under ledges lining the cove. Peter swam out early the next day to get the boat back in and loaded before we missed the rising tide that would help us get around our next point, Punta Lobos. The exit from our protected cove was hair-raising. The long narrow shape of the cove causes the incoming swell to reflect off the walls, creating a confused sea. We bounced and yawed our way out, under power, until the waves got more or less predictable, and then set sail for the point.

More later. I need to set up some electronics for recharging while Tim hikes up the road to the Modelorama store for fruit and vegetables. OK, now I am sitting in the yacht club with electronics plugged into all the available outlets. We are having issues with our camera. No photos for the last week. I finally figured out how I can download photos to my laptop without using the camera itself, which is big. I still can't figure out why the camera batteries won't charge. We may have a large gap in our photo coverage while we wait for Peter to bring a camera down to us on March 20. Next, a couple photos from along the way.

We have had some incredible camps on this trip. The top so far was Arroyo Blanco on Isla Carmen. Another slot in a cliff that only revealed itself at the last second as we approached. The walls of the slot were white. They are Pliocene marine beds deposited in an extensional basin about 3 million years ago, very like El Refugio on the north end of Carmen. We hiked along white ledges with waves lapping below in later afternoon light, marveling at the fossil scallop shells that made up a significant fraction of the rock. It was like wading in knee-deep water in Pliocene time. I remembered a calculation from Markes Johnson's book in which he figured that in there must have been a billion oysters in a deposit on another island. I figure that we were marching across a billion scallops. We could have made a fortune on Pliocene scallops!

You're makin' me dizzy

We're in a whirl of getting ready for another leg. Peter arrives tomorrow. I have the permits to camp on the islands in the Loreto Marine Park. Our clothes are clean. The wind has backed off. And I'll do the shopping in a little while. We realized a few days back, when the VHF radio's battery needed a charge, that I had forgotten the charger. Oops. That's kinda key. It's our only means of making a mayday call, should such a need arise. We turned the car and boat inside out looking for it. It turned up at home. Think of that. I had about 1000 details to organize and I managed to forget the one thing that was going to save us from being marooned on a desert island. Our housesitter, Lee (bless his heart), is taking the train to Albuquerque today to bring the charger to Peter, who will bring it down here. Gotta love it.

Last night I got us take-out from "Gran Pollo." Translated that's "Big Chicken." They have all these barbecued chicken places down here. You get chicken, corn tortillas, french fries, salsa, and salad for incredibly cheap. And it's awesome, even cold, as we ate it last night after I drove all the way back to San Bruno. I got us the makings for spicy drinks too. I got back to our beach in the dark and there was Tim sitting next to a nice little Indian fire. When I was at Gran Pollo waiting for my order, I heard the rooster crowing out back. I kid you not. Right at the turn-off to San Bruno (leaving Mexico Highway 1 for a bumpy road down an arroyo), there is a military checkpoint I keep having to pass through, in both directions. They think I am kind of a hoot, a gringa who actually speaks Spanish. That's a novelty. Last night when they stopped me and checked the car (for drugs), I told them they could look in the car as long as they didn't eat our dinner. The car reeked of Gran Pollo. Along the 4-mile stretch of arroyo out to San Bruno, in the dark, I saw two bunnies, one hawk, a fox, two bunches of startled cows, and 5 burros. The other day, when Tim walked out to the highway, he said he freaked out the cows and they took off running, bouncing off the fences that border the road. Only a few more trips on the San Bruno road and we're outta here.

Blowin' in the wind

We are sitting out a big blow from the north at San Bruno, north of Loreto. San Bruno is nothing you would dream about. It's sort of a hell hole of a fish camp with the heads of decapitated manta rays laying all over the place and a few pangas pulled up on the beach. But let me tell you we like it just fine because the hillocks on the point (an andesite flow planed off by a Pleistocene wave-cut terrace, to be precise) are affording us from protection from the wind. You can't trust this Baja weather. It can turn in a heartbeat. A day can make all the difference in the world. The day before yesterday, we were sailing down the coast at 2 knots with all the sails up about 100 m off a lee shore, just poking along looking at the rocks, a beautiful cross-section of a rhyolite dome where the viscous lava had smooshed up over some white block and ash flows and then on top of all the light-colored rhyolite layers and layers of black and dark red basalt scoria and thin flows. The conditions were so benign we could have hopped out and swum alongside the boat. We pulled into Bahia el Mangle (meaning 'mangrove') about 3 PM in the afternoon and scoped it out for sitting out the norther that was predicted for that night or the next day. The harbor looked good but besides the abandoned partially constructed hotel and two abandoned houses there was no evidence that anyone goes in or out by the road. We didn't want to get stuck there in a blow and get to Loreto late to pick up Peter, who is coming in on Friday, Feb 26 to sail with us. I was being lazy and didn't want to go any farther. Tim decided we should. So we put the sails back up and poked on down to San Bruno, arriving at about 6 PM, a little before sunset. And it was none too pretty. Tim said sometimes you have to sacrifice aesthetics for protection. A fisherman and his son drove up as we thought about parking there for several days. They had a teeny little aluminum skiff they were about to launch in order to fish all night. We asked them what they knew about the weather. Predictably, they didn't know anything. We asked them if they had heard if it was going to blow. The fisherman looked out at the water and said, "It's calm." These guys live in the moment. Tim told me to ask him if we would be protected from a big north wind if we moved our boat a little farther down the beach. I told Tim, "Look, these guys are going out fishing all night in a 12 ft skiff. They are just going to laugh at us worried about moving our boat 50 ft." So we moved the boat. The guys went out fishing. They came back in around midnight. The wind started blowing like fury at 3 AM. And at 7 AM I looked out the tent to see Tim bare naked moving the boat back up the beach.

I am in Loreto right now. You may wonder how I got here since the boat is 20 miles up the coast. Yesterday AM Tim walked 4 miles out to the highway and hitched back up to Bahia Coyote, where we left the car. He drove back down with the trailer. At high tide last night, around 9 PM, we thought we'd pull the boat out of the water so we could go into Loreto and run errands without leaving somebody tending the boat up at San Bruno. However, come 9 PM, we had a failure of nerve. The boat was bucking like a bronco and it was dark and we were cold and it just looked impossible for the two of us to get the boat on the trailer without causing ourselves harm. Today, the winds have backed off a bit (enough to fool some cruisers into making the passage from San Juanico to Puerto Ballandra on Isla Carmen, bucking some huge rollers and likely causing some unhappiness among the crew).

A few days back we anchored in a cove on the south side of Punta el Pulpito, a looming point that juts out into the Gulf and messes with the currents and the winds. Some years ago, several students on an Outward Bound course died as they tried to kayak around el Pulpito in a norther. One of the crusing guides we are carrying refers to the "obsidian vein" on the south side of the point. Ha, they should have asked ME. Obsidian vein, my you-know-what. The whole thing is made up of rhyolite lava flows that are still totally glassy and therefore black. Obsidian is volcanic glass. We hiked to the top of el Pulpito (which seems to mean 'the pulpit' but in Spain would mean 'little octupus') and got an incredible 360 degree view. NOLS has their students camp up there in calm conditions. We had the calm but my knee has been killing me for some reason, so we opted to stay in the boat. The boulders on shore were giant rounded blocks of volcanic glass and wobbly. Not good for making camp. We left the cove after two nights there and sailed down to a small cove with a stretch of white beach called La Ramada Cove on some maps and Caleta Almeja (Clam Cove) on others. There were three boats that arrived before us but we sailed past all of them and anchored in the primo spot in two feet of water and made camp on a beach backed by low cliffs of mocha-colored rhyolite block flows. Mind blower of a camp. We weren't there long before I set off on a little walk. I wasn't gone five minutes before Tim was whistling and calling me back. I couldn't figure out why. He said, "You'll never guess who just showed up on the beach. Markes Johnson." Markes Johnson is a professor of geology at Williams College who has written extensively on the Pliocene marine deposits of the Sea of Cortez. I have been reading his papers this whole trip. Tim noticed this bunch of people in engineered clothing (Anne's term) peering quizzically at the rocks. "You must be geologists," he said. Markes introduced himself and Tim recognized the name. I told him, "I read part of your book about Punta Chivato." One of his colleagues laughed and said, "Only part of it?" "Well, the guy I borrowed if from on Coyote Beach wanted it back." Markes was there with his wife, also a geologist, a geophysicist who lives in Loreto, and two colleagues from Lisbon, Portugal. He said his Mexican colleague, Jorge Ledesma, was back at the house where they were staying. It turns out they were staying at one of about three houses on Bahia San Juanico, the next bay down, a favorite stop of cruisers and sea kayakers. It oughta be a national park. It is so striking. I mentioned that I'd like to see Jorge, not having connected since 1993 at a meeting in Ensenada. They invited us to the house, saying "You have to see the house." We drove over with them to find that they were staying in a magnificent home built by a Spanish marquesa but now owned by an American developer, who has an interest in geology and invited them there for a couple days to see the geology. Well, one thing led to another and the owner, Tom Woolard, invited us for dinner. He had a chef and staff there at the house (which has a long narrow mosaic pool on the vast patio fronting the bay). They were preparing cabrito (baby goat) with a panoply of chile sauces for the guests. We sat down (us salty dogs, encrusted with two weeks of salt) to a huge square table on the patio covered with a giant white cloth. We were offered sangria, red or white wine, cold beer, as well as the cabrito and beans, tortillas, chile, and chopped lettuce. About 8 PM, we remembered we had just up and left out camp, totally unsecured, and didn't even think to bring a flashlight. Somebody lent us one and off we trooped, picking our way back to camp in a tiny spot of light over boulders awash at high tide. We got back to camp, and I sat down in a chair, looked out at our lovely little bay and said, "That just happened for a reason. I don't know what it was yet, but that was not an accident. If Tim had gone fishing five minutes earlier, we would never have made that connection." If we had been any number of decisions differently, we would not have made that connection. Jorge Ledesma had recognized me immediately. We hadn't seen each other in 17 years. We chatted about Baja geology at dinner and I told him about some curious cobbles I had seen on a beach up the coast. He told me about a fault near those cobbles that brought that rock to the surface. I told him about some marine beds I saw on Isla San Marcos and he told me about some at San Ignacio that show that there was a trans-peninsular seaway 12 million years ago that connected the northern Gulf with the Pacific before the southern Gulf had even begun to form. He put so many ideas into my head, it's still spinning. He told me about outcrops I have to visit on the islands off Loreto, places we'll go with Peter this next week. The fun just doesn't stop.

Have to go do laundry now. Believe me, I HAVE to do laundry. Had lunch at McLulu's Tacos. Baja fish tacos. Got our permits for camping on the islands in the marine park. Once we do some shopping and pick up Pete, we'll be ready to sail up to Isla Coronados, a Pleistocene volcano (really young, probably has flows a few thousand years old) with a fossil marine bay on its south end.

One more thing. We were invited to a beach potluck the other night at Bahia San Juanico. We didn't have a way to get there as we have no dinghy. Our friend George had said that everybody wanted to meet us. I told Tim that we'd see just how much they wanted to meet us. And a little while later a couple of dikes from Nova Scotia came around the corner making a hullaballoo to pick us up. We laughed all the way there and all the way back. They said something that captured my fancy, "There is no bad weather, just inadequate clothing." Something somebody from Canada would say.

Valdesca's bottom

Here are a few photos of the day Valdesca got her bottom painted as well as one of the NOLS boats in their boatyard at Bahia Coyote.

Our GPS track

You can follow our progress on the SPOT Adventures site where our GPS tracker records our location whenever we tell it to.

Like living a dream

Waiting out a blow

We are now in Mulege, having landed here the day before yesterday. Those of you following our SPOT GPS track will see that we are staying in what looks like a little port tucked behind the lighthouse. Actually, the google image predates the last hurricane that swept thru here in October. We are pretty much all there is at our GPS location. We are camped next to what was once the port captain's office. It's a little cinder block building that clearly got reamed by storm surge. The swath of storm damage from surge alone extends well up the estuary and through town. Apparently, the surge topped the bridge by 3 ft, which is impressive because the bridge is rather lofty. Where we are, the surge was only about 2 ft deep but quite broad. We are here for a few days as the wind is blowing strongly from the north. Too big for us to be out and about. We sit and watch the herons, egrets, osprey, pelicans, and gulls feed on shrimp and crabs and minnows in the estuary. We watch the tide come in and go out. We watched the stars last night, which were bright and beautiful after the winds blew all the clouds out.

Sailing into Mulege was quite a ride. We set off from Punta Chivato the day before yesterday with a lively offshore breeze. We were flying across Santa Inez bay. Then the wind died. I started to row. We put up the sails, hopefully, a couple times. Ate lunch. Felt a puff and put the sails up again. And started beating UPWIND towards Mulege, as the wind had changed about 180 degrees. Slowly the wind picked up and pushed us south. I kept telling Tim that we should be heading on a course of about 174 degrees. He said, "You mean towards that island out there?" "No," I told him. "That's not Mulege. Mulege is more to the north." "Well, how about that gumdrop shaped point?" "OK, shoot for that for now." We sailed a course of more like 150 degrees for a couple hours. I played around with the tennis ball on a string that I made for gauging our speed through the water if I lose the GPS. And I lay on the side bench in the sun to soak up some rays. I fiddled with the GPS to see what more I could learn about all its functions. I realized that I could move the pointer to the Mulege lighthouse and it would give me a compass heading. That's cool. I watched the bearing on Mulege go from 175 degrees to 196 and then to 213. I wondered what I would see if I looked out there at 213 degrees. I looked under the sail off the starboard beam and saw a lighthouse. I said to Tim, "Is THAT Mulege?" Yup. So we hopped to and changed direction to run downwind wing and wing straight towards Mulege on a course of 213 degrees.  We were 2 miles out but got there pretty fast because we had a lot of wind behind us from the ENE. I saw the shrimp trawlers get bigger and bigger. And I could pick out some rocks near the lighthouse. Some pangas were running in and out of the estuary near the light. Finally, when we were about a half mile out I told Tim I thought we should take the whisker pole and sprit boom down and reach up towards the lighthouse. We got there pretty fast in a big sea and force 3 winds pushing us onshore. We doused the sails, fired up the motor, and realized we were getting really close to shore. I saw some barely submerged rocks and pulled out around them to get us closer to the lighthouse, where the channel was, but not before dragging the rudder on the bottom. Good thing it's a pop-up rudder. Oy! Once we got close to the light and into the lee somewhat, we killed the motor and Tim got on the oars. We rowed in to the panga beach and asked about going upstream to town. Didn't get much helpful advice. And it was really shallow. So we opted to anchor off what looked like a good beach by the light with some protection from the wind. As it turns out, this is where we have stayed for the last two days. It's a comfortable anchorage for Valdesca. She just rides the tides out there about 10 ft off the beach. On the other side of the spit between land the and lighthouse island, there is a magnificent beach where the waves crash in, bringing all kinds of shells ashore.

After Tim got back yesterday from running errands (2 gallons of water, 2 8-lb bags of ice, a qt of milk, a six of beer, vegetables, fruit, 3 packs of tortillas, 4 empanadas, two guava-filled cookies, and assorted other things), I took a walk across the puddles at low tide to investigate the area around the estuary. I wanted to find the church we can see from our camp. I finally found it, with some direction from a kid playing with a ball near the river. I took some sunset photos from up there of the church with the Golf behind, in full fury of wind-whipped waves. Then I started back to the boat. Right near where I needed to turn from the road to cross the tide zone, I stopped at a little restaurant to see if I could get us dinner to go. I ordered some shrimp tacos and some Tecates. They put it all into a bag for me. By then it was totally dark, and though I wasn't far I knew Tim would be worried because there was no moon and my knee had been hurting me the whole day. The owner, Francisco Villa, asked me if I had a light. I didn't so he lent me his. And then said he'd escort me over there. We walked down to the bank of the estuary, he picked up a paddle, and shoved an aluminum rowboat in the water and took me across. Ah, sweet! And there was Tim with a flashlight looking for me. We ate our tacos with pineapple salsa and sipped the Tecates under the stars while I told him about my adventure. Now, here I am back at the restaurant (Francisco picked me up in the boat again and hauled me and my laptop over to use his wifi!). I took a shower in the campground (I don't exactly see where it is but the sign says there is a campground). And when I pay for the shower, I'll pay for last night's dinner too. I only had a 500 peso note last night and they didn't have change. They told me to come back tomorrow and pay. Gotta love this place.

Sail away, sail away...

Today we start for real. We are packing Valdesca, who sits on her trailer, and the car and heading north to San Lucas cove, near Santa Rosalia. We have some friends who will meet us there and shuttle the car and trailer back to Mulege. From San Lucas, we will cross to Isla San Marcos and spend a few days maybe circumnavigating the island. There are apparently some sweet coves protected from the wind. There is also interesting geology there--the type locality of the San Marcos Formation, which is a stack of relatively young marine deposits (beach sands, shell beds, and the like) from an earlier era in the Gulf's evolution. I hope to do some hiking out there and see some sights.

We came back a couple days ago from a 3-day shakedown cruise in Bahia Concepcion. We went with another Drascombe, believe it or not. Anita Stalter lives in Bahia Coyote, a beautiful cookie-bit of a cove in Bahia Concepcion. She lives in the summer in Santa Fe, with her husband Tap Tapley (of considerable fame in the outdoor education world as a founder of Outward Bound and then NOLS). Anita has a Lugger, same as our boat but 3 ft shorter. It was a blast sailing with another boat for a few days. Anita will meet up with us again in a few weeks once we get to Loreto. On our shakedown, we sailed across the bay to the other side, to a protected beach called Amolares. Then we motored (no wind) up the east side of the bay to Punta Guadalupe, where we arrived just as a squall moved in. There is a defunct fish farm there and a lone fisherman invited us to use the high-tech PVC palapa with roll-down curtain walls. Boy, were we ever lucky! It absolutely poured rain that evening. We all set up our tents under rickety wooden structures and even inside the PVC palapa! What a godsend. The next day was beautiful, with wind, so we beat to windward for a couple hours up toward Punta Santo Domingo, where we had intended to camp the night before. In the end, we never made it as storm cells swirled around us and we decided to run back down the bay to Playa Coyote. We raced Anita and Bob home. They were braver than us and kept all sails up as the winds built on the edge of a squall. We opted to drop the main, then hoisted it back up with a reef, then shook the reef out as the wind died. We managed to find some wind, as we rounded a point, and sailed slowly back into Coyote Bay. Didn't quite make the anchorage before the wind died completely. Part of the beauty of Coyote Bay is the protection by headlands from the northerly winds.

We learned a lot on our shakedown. We figured out that the built-in bilge pump works. We blew out some stitching on our mainsail, which I had to repair. First time I repaired a sail and did a pretty good job, if I may say so. We had to tune up the oars a bit, too. All the copper brads were falling out. Also, I had added some turk's heads (a special kind of knot that is tied around an oar to make a stop that keeps the oar from sliding through the oarlock). The turk's heads needed to be secured with a few tacks. I tied them with pink parachute cord so they look mighty jaunty on Valdesca. We learned how to tie things down, finally, which was big progress. Until the shakedown, we had been doing day sails and never had to find a home onboard for the stove, the Paco pads, the dry bags of gear, the water jugs, the cooler and dry box, and propane tank. We tied some pieces of webbing through scupper holes in the bilges and up through the floorboards. Hopefully, if we capsize (please no!) the floorboards and all the gear will stay in the boat, and as a bonus displace a lot of water to reduce the bailing.

The gulf is beautiful this time of year. Perfect weather. Temperatures in the seventies by day and high fifties at night. The pool temperature (as the local weatherman likes to say) is about 64 degrees, which is pretty tolerable. Lots of birds around, including a brown thrush who is lucky to be alive after Tap's cat raked some feathers off its back the other day. The bird's mate came down squawking at the cat and she dropped the other bird, who flew off and sat on a wall for while thanking its lucky stars.

We also have Oscar, the pelican who has forgotten how to be a pelican. He has become a beach begger. He likes to sit next to us as we wash dishes. When that giant beak comes at me, it makes me a little nervous.

Out little cat friend Bicho has abandoned us. I guess that's what we get for abandoning her when we left for the shakedown cruise. She hasn't been back to see us, likely because we haven't been cooking shrimp in the past few days.

Signing off for now. Will likely not reconnect until we get back to Mulege by boat in a few more days.

Valdesca goes to the beauty parlor

We pulled Valdesca out of the water today and took her over to NOLS where Rogelio, their boat guy, will sand and paint her bottom with anti-fouling paint. This paint slowly dissipates with time, kind of like soap, and contains a biocide that keeps critters and algae from attaching to the boat. This helps keep the bottom clean to maximize speed through the water. We had to totally de-rig her because Rogelio needed to careen her (meaning flip her upside down). We are buying the paint from another gringo who just had his own boat painted. Total cost for the paint job: $100.

Speaking of prices of things, I find the pricing down here kind of intriguing. Some things cost less, some cost the same. Almost nothing seems to cost more. Of course, there are lots of things you just can't get very readily, so their cost is infinite I suppose. A pack of 10 tortillas costs about a dollar. Eight gallons of reverse osmosis water and 8 lbs of ice cost about $1.25. A fill-up at the gas station costs about $40, similar to home. A kilo of shrimp (2.2 lbs) costs $10. That's an especially good deal. They trawl for the shrimp right here in the bay. Of course, we really shouldn't be eating shrimp at all because trawling is environmentally destructive (lots of by-catch) and the shrimp take is way beyond sustainable. A six-pack of beer (Dos Equis lager) costs a little less, about $.75 per beer. I figure a good working man's beer like Tecate in cans costs less. We'll see what more we can find out about that. Limes are practically free. Avocados are cheap.

Today was hot and sunny and calm. Light winds in the morning as we were pulling out the boat. I saw a few small sailboats venturing out into the bay. Then the winds died totally and all the sea kayakers went out. The tide is especially low right now as we approach the full moon. More beach than ever was exposed at low tide this afternoon and the birds were loving it. We had great blue herons, reddish egrets, gulls, snowy egrets, and eared grebes feeding right out in front of us in the shallows. Now and again a magnificent frigate bird would swoop in and try to steal a fish from a smaller bird. Lots of squawking and diversionary tactics would ensue.

While we were at NOLS, we got to talk more with some of the staff. They gave us tips on rigging a sea anchor when conditions get rough. They told us the Drascombe will actually sail under bare poles in a big blow, allowing you to use the rudder effectively. They said to try it out. We got from them the frequencies of the radio transmissions that will keep us up-to-date on weather. And besides that we met some nice people who were amazed to see us sailing a Drascombe.

The bottom of the boat wasn't as perfect as we had hoped. Rogelio pointed out some gel blisters in the fiberglass. He says it's typical for these boats as they spray on the fiberglass and typically don't get a great coat in corners of the hull. He'll repair the damage with patches on the interior before he paints. That way, we won't be delaying necessary repair. He is also going to replace a piece of brass along the keep that was missing. All in all, it's a good thing we stopped here first as these guys have been an incredible help to us. We have learned a lot about the boats, their rigging, and their maintenance in addition to getting sailing and cruising pointers.

I'll try uploading photos tomorrow. I have a slow connection for some reason. My wi-fi hot spot is a little tepid tonight for some reason.