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