Cabo San Lucas to Alameda

Sadly, I have no pictures from this part of my journey. My camera malfunctioned and the memory chip with the few picture I took was corrupted. Not a huge loss – the sea looked pretty much the same from one day to the next!

Departing Mexico is not quite like departing the USA. If I had any hope of ever returning to Mexico, I needed a document called a “zarpe.” This is a document that says I have discharged all my debts in Mexico and I have permission to depart. Despite warnings about the difficulty of obtaining said document, it turned out to be fairly straight forward.

First, I went to the Cabo San Lucas Port Captain's office about 5 blocks from the marina. The Port Captain informed me that I needed to go to Immigration first. That turned out to be about 7 blocks back in the direction I had just come from. Though it was only a little after 9 AM, it was already fairly hot and sticky. The air conditioning was broken at Immigration.

It required about an hour and two trips to the counter to complete the formalities. On the first trip to the counter, I launched into my request in English. The agent listened to me and teasingly replied “You aren't even going to try speaking Spanish?” I fumbled through an apology which he brushed aside and proceeded to tell me in excellent English what form I needed to fill out.

I took the form and retreated to another nearby counter. The form was, of course, in Spanish. I spent the next 20 minutes or so consulting my Spanish – English dictionary and filling out the form. The second trip to the agent's window rewarded me with the necessary papers.

The first order of business after that was to stop at a convenience store and buy a bottle of water. It was quickly turning into a hot, sticky Cabo day. At the Port Captain's office, the Port Captain scanned my paperwork, turned to an assistant, issued rapid instructions and shortly afterward, asked me how I wanted to pay for the zarpe. If I wanted to pay cash, I would have to go the Bancomer office just across the street from Immigration, pay them and return with a receipt. If, however, I wanted to pay with a credit card, I could do that right here in the office. I handed over my credit card and then waited for another 20 minutes while the credit card transaction was processed.

Zarpe in hand, I returned to the marina area. The plan was to start sailing as soon as I got back to the boat but knowing that I was going to have to eat my own cooking for the next 30 or so days, I stopped at Alexander Restaurant on the edge of the marina. After consuming a beer and a burrito, I headed back to the boat.

Shortly after noon, July 16, I started up the engine, cast off from the dock and departed the marina. There was a comfortable 10 kt breeze blowing out of the northwest. I got the sails up, cut the engine and spent the next hour dodging Cabo tourists on jet skis, kite sailing, etc until I was past Los Arcos and point of land known as Cabo San Lucas.

The plan was to head out toward Hawaii, keep the North Pacific high to starboard and sail the whole trip on, at worst, a beam reach (wind coming from the side) or downwind. If I were to follow that plan, I would have been sailing mostly South once I cleared the cape. The wind and seas were moderate so I elected to sail close hauled (as close to upwind as possible) and wait for the wind to shift.

I ended up sailing almost the whole trip close hauled. Conditions were fairly mild for most of the trip. Winds were 5 – 10 knots most of the time. The worst was a 48 hour period of winds 15 – 20 knots. The North Pacific High was so poorly defined that I would have had to sail almost as far as Hawaii before turning toward California. I was too eager to get home to consider that option seriously.

Let me try to describe what it is like to sail close hauled on the open ocean. The first thing to remember is that the open ocean almost always has one or more swells running. A swell is just another name for waves of roughly the same height coming from some direction with monotonous regularity. On the average, the dominate swell was 3 – 6 feet from trough to peak. They are well enough spaced that they wouldn't be a problem except that there is rarely only one swell running. Careful observation of the wave patterns will normally show swells from two or three directions simultaneously. When two waves coincide, they interact. If the crests match up, they are additive – yep, the crest is higher than either of the swells individually. The same goes for the trough. Since the pattern of matching crests and troughs is irregular, the sea surface becomes “lumpy,” for lack of a more precise technical term.

Intermittently, the matching peaks will form a breaking wave. This becomes more pronounced as the wind picks up. “Whitecaps” is the technical term for these breaking waves. Observed from a distance, they are innocuous. When they happen to break against the side of the boat, they are somewhat more dramatic. If I happened to be below, the sound was rather like being on the inside of a bass drum smitten by a giant with a humongous drumstick. If the wave broke at just the right time and it was tall enough, it would bury the bow under a ton or so of water. I could feel Laelia stagger, rise to the next wave and continue on. I could hear water running down the deck along side the cabin for 15 – 20 seconds following the break.

On the other hand, when the troughs would coincide, Laelia would launch herself from the preceding crest, fall into the trough and slam into the oncoming wave. At times the collision with the oncoming wave was downright brutal. It felt like she would come to a full stop. The collisions were sharp enough that the sliding hatch over the companionway ladder would slide forward an inch or so.

Fortunately, these were the extremes. For most of the 31 days from Cabo to Alameda, the boat motion was not violent. Most often, Laelia was heeled over 10 to 15 degrees and going up and down about three feet at a time. That meant that I was always hanging onto something to keep my balance.

Cooking under these conditions was something less than fun. The stove is on gimbals so it stays level when the boat heels side to side. When she pitches (front to back), the stove does not stay level. Most of the time this is not a problem. The stove has pot rails that help keep the pots from sliding about. I never did have a pot spill its contents – much to my amazement. Nevertheless, cooking was enough of a chore that I didn't fix anything fancy. By the end of the trip, I was thoroughly sick of my own cooking! Too simple and too monotonous! Most of the ingredients came from cans. I did my best to be creative in my use of spices. Especially toward the end of the trip, I was craving anything with strong flavors. Dill pickles and pepperoncinis were among my favorites.

On the day before last coming into SF Bay, I knew I would be too busy to cook so I made “Three Can Stew.” Recipe: ½ cup of rice, 1 ½ cups of water. Bring to a boil for about 10 minutes until rice is the desired consistency. Add one can of corn, one can of black beans and one can of diced tomatoes. Stir and leave under low heat for another five minutes. By this time in the trip my craving for something other than “bland” led me to add about ½ jar of pepperoncinis. It helped. For the next two days, the Three Can Stew was what I lived on.

Lest you think that the trip involved heroic battles against wind and waves, sail changes in howling winds and other extreme measures, let me set your mind at rest. Early in the trip, I noticed that the wind strength changed often enough that I would be changing sails several times a day if I tried to fly the optimum sail at all times. I elected to put up the working jib – a moderate sized jib – and never change it. It worked well. There were a few times when the wind dropped that I thought briefly (very briefly) about changing sails but managed to restrain myself. I tacked twice the first day out of Cabo and then hardly touched a sheet for the next 15 days.

My strategy evolved from trying to do a downwind trip to a decision to stay on the same tack until I was on the same longitude as the Golden Gate 122 degrees, 35 minutes, i.e. directly South of the Golden Gate. After that, I would sail on the tack that came the closest to a direct course to the Gate. See the resulting track on the tracking site at

https://share.delorme.com/RalphLewis#

There were a few times when the result of tacking netted only a few miles toward San Francisco in a 24 hour period. To say the least, it was frustrating. I estimate that most days, I sailed 75 to 100 miles but gained maybe 50 miles toward my destination. During this time, the wind was consistently from somewhere between northwest and north. It wasn't until the morning of the last day that the wind shifted to the south and allowed me to sail directly toward the Golden Gate.

A typical day at sea started off with fixing breakfast – usually oatmeal with something in it to give it some flavor. This was essential to keep me “regular.” The rest of the day, I read. By the time the trip was over, I had read 1½ shopping bags of paperback books – mostly science fiction, spy thrillers and mystery novels. I did most of my reading sitting or lying on my bunk. Occasionally, if the weather was nice and there wasn't too much spray flying about, I would sit in the cockpit behind the steering wheel and read. Every hour or so, I would check weather and sails. At noon every day, I would turn on my handheld GPS unit and get my current position. I posted the position, distance sailed and distance remaining on my Delorme tracking page. At 5 PM each day, I would set the telltale on the barometer to the current barometer setting. At 8:30 PM, I would check in with the Pacific Seafarer's Network on 14.200 Mhz via the ham radio setup that Terry Hoffart had provided. Sometime shortly before or after the report, I would fix dinner. Then I slept. Most nights, I set an alarm for two hour intervals. When it went off, I would check to see that I was on course, weather was OK and the sails were properly trimmed. Occasionally, I would have to tack. I reefed the main only twice on the whole trip. I spent a total of about eight hour hove to (parked – sorta) when the wind picked up into the 20 kt range. That was my trip – not too exciting. Twice during the trip, the AIS warned me that a ship might pass within a mile of me. Neither of them actually came that close.

For additional entertainment, I had music on my iPhone. As I got up toward Southern California, I could sometimes hear FM radio stations. On a good day, I could hear a classical station. Other days, all I got were obnoxious commercial stations that played commercials for 10 minutes at a time. I turned them off!

I saw relatively little sea life. Several times, dolphins played around the boat – mostly in the last few days as I approached San Francisco. One time, the dolphins were accompanied by several seals. One time, I saw two fins close to the boat that were triangular shape much like Orca fins but way too small to be an Orca. Sharks? I never did see their bodies.

The first two days out of Cabo were quite warm. After that, the air cooled to comfortable sweatshirt weather. The last two weeks, I wore my foul weather gear most of the time after dark - for warmth.

On August 15^th, I sighted land for the first time in almost 30 days. I could see Pilar Point, just north of Half Moon Bay. With a light breeze out of the south, I covered the last 90 miles to the Golden Gate. At first, I thought the breeze would not hold to get me home that day, but my luck held. At about 4:30 PM PDT, I sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge.

It is hard to describe the feeling as I looked up at the bridge. There were numerous times during the trip when I was haunted by the feeling that I would not finish the trip – I would be run down by a big ship or fall overboard or meet with some other catastrophe that would end my trip and my life. But here I was, home at last. If I hadn't been so busy trying to keep out of the way of shipping, I would have been jumping up and down, screaming with delight. Home at last!

Well, almost. There was the matter of clearing Customs since my last port of call was outside the USA. I had no idea how I was to do that. I contacted the Coast Guard on marine VHF. They referred me to Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) on a different channel. VTS gave me a phone number to call. That number referred me to another number. Eventually, I talked to a person who seemed to think that what I wanted was MOST unusual and, by the way, did I have a Crusing Permit. I have never heard of such a thing. The person took some information and told me to come to Jack London Square. I was to call them to come to the boat and inspect it.

The trip from the Golden Gate down the San Francisco waterfront was exhilarating to say the least. The wind was blowing 15 knots from almost directly behind me. Laelia tore along at close to six knots for most of the distance from the Gate to the Oakland Bay Bridge. A few miles beyond the Bay Bridge, I dropped the sails and motored on up the Oakland Inner Harbor to Jack London Square. By now, it was a little after 6 PM. There was no one at the dock to take a line so I jumped off the boat, line in hand, and came close to falling flat on my face. The dock was not going up and down like my inner ear expected. I managed to get tied up without looking like I was anything worse than mildly intoxicated.

My call to Customs ended up at an automated announcement that the counter was closed and if this was a small boat arrival, I should leave a message and they would call me back. I was admonished that I MUST speak to an officer! I left a message and called back at 15 minute intervals for the next hour. The final call got me to a live person. She took some information and promised to call back shortly. True to her word, she called back about 5 minutes later and told me I was cleared and could proceed on to my destination.

By now, it was 7:30. I stayed at the dock long enough to check in the the Pacific Seafarer's Network and let them know that I had arrived.

It took another 15 minutes under power to reach Grand Marina. Judy had made arrangements with the them earlier and I had been assigned slip A32. I had no trouble finding the A dock but there were no visible markings to tell me which was slip 32. I motored along until I found an empty slip and started to pull in. Someone on a nearby boat came to help me get tied up. I asked if this was slip A32. Nope. It was A46. I backed out, resumed motoring along the dock, counting slips as I went. The one that looked like it should be A32 was vacant. Again, people appeared out of the dark to help me tie up. I had to wait for someone to come move a dinghy from the slip, then I was in and tied up. Diana and Bob on the trawler in the adjacent slip welcomed me home. We talked about the trip for a while, then retired to our respective boats.

I was tired, but even more, I wanted a shower! Since I had arrived outside office hours, I couldn't get a gate key to get me into the shower. I spend the next 15 minutes digging all the things out of Laelia's shower that I had stored there for the duration of the trip. Since I had been running the engine, there was plenty of hot water for my first shower in five weeks. What a wonderful feeling!

A glass of wine and a bit of the rest of my Three Can Stew and I was ready to crash. Judy would be there in the morning to pick me up. I slept. Soundly. I did not wake up to check sails or weather. It was heavenly!