Friday, April 30, 2010
Beachcombing finds
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.
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.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Whaddya gonna do?
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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.
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.
Monday, April 19, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, April 2, 2010
La Paz
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!'
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