Not all dreams come true

From the beginning, when I told people I wanted to circumnavigate the reaction was something like “At your age?” My response was something along the line of “I’m in good shape and I have experience doing this.”

I was wrong. The first four days out of Ensenada were enough to show me that. I have given up the idea of circumnavigating. I am going to spend some time in the Sea of Cortez, then head back north to San Diego. I will probably sell the boat there. I think my sailing days are fast coming to an end. Read on for details.

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The big day finally arrived. Sunday, March 9, I departed San Diego heading for Ensenda. As I was sailing out San Diego Bay, I reached for my phone to call Judy. AT&T had turned it off a day earlier than I wanted – so no phone service. That was when it really hit me. No more 9 PM phone calls. Fifteen to eighteen months of little or no contact. I had, of course, known this all along but somehow the emotional impact was unexpected.

With that sinking realization I watched San Diego disappear over the horizon.

Getting the boat down to Ensenada, through Mexican bureaucracy and back out to sea took my mind off the separation for most of the next three days. The hard part of getting to Ensenada is that it is almost a full day (24 hours) sailing time. Being that close to land and sailing through an area where I had been warned that there were lots of unlit fishing boats operating at night meant that I got very little sleep between San Diego and Ensenada. The sleep that I got was in 20 – 30 minute naps terminated by an obnoxious alarm that I set to make sure I didn’t sleep too long.

I got into Ensenada mid-afternoon on Monday. I checked into Cruiseport Marina and was informed that it was too late to go through the entry paperwork for bringing myself and the boat into Mexico. I wasn’t entirely sorry to hear that. I was so tired that I could hardly make sense of what was going on. I went back to the boat and slept for a solid 18 hours.

Tuesday, my first job was to get Mexican liability insurance for the boat. That entailed a walk of about a mile through the area of Ensenada that is immediately adjacent to the cruise ship dock. As you can see from this picture, the entrepreneurs in Ensenada have figured out what gringos want the most. I saw a number of shops with similar offerings.

I found the insurance office. I speak almost no Spanish and the woman who handled my transaction spoke limited English. It got comical at times, but in the end it all worked out. I walked out $250 poorer but with the needed insurance. When I got back to the marina, one of the marina staff drove me to the building where the entry paperwork was done and walked me through all of it. After all the horror stories I had heard about how complicated it was, it was a relief to make it in and back out in less than an hour.

I had done a lot of shopping for food in San Diego but I did not buy any fruit or vegetables since I had read that they would be confiscated. No one ever asked about fruit or vegetables or anything else I might have on the boat and no one came to the boat to inspect. I had planned to buy the things I thought I couldn’t bring into Mexico when I got to Ensenada but for some reason, I felt the need to get out of there as soon as possible. Partly it was a matter of not wanting to spend another $45 to stay another night. I paid for that dearly over the next days. A diet of canned food gets monotonous very quickly.

Departing Ensenada was no easier than getting in. It involved sailing all night through  Bahia Todos Santos (All Saints Bay), past some islands and (once again) keeping a sharp lookout for fishing boats. To complicate matters, the wind was light and variable. I was busy all night steering and managing sails. By the time I got out onto the open ocean, I was pretty tired again. The good news was that I was getting far enough away from land that I could safely sleep for longer periods of time – up to an hour.

It didn’t take long to discover that Laelia has some very unattractive characteristics sailing in the big swells of the open ocean. One is that when she is going down wind and the seas are coming diagonally from behind, she is very difficult to steer. Her short keel and beamy (wide) hull combine to cause her to yaw (slew from side) wildly. The Monitor windvane could not keep Laelia on a straight course. Her heading varied through a range of 20 t0 30 degrees each side of the desired course. Precise navigation is difficult under those circumstances. Her wide beam also made her lift very quickly as wave passed under her. Keep in mind that the waves were coming from the sides as well as from behind. That meant that one side would lift before the other. She would roll – and roll very quickly. It was a most uncomfortable ride.

I had a problem with my new jib ripping along the leach (trailing edge) of the sail on the leg from San Francisco to San Diego. I sent the jib back to Hood Sailmakers and they repaired it. Neither they nor I had any idea why it ripped. Now, I was seeing the same problem with the main sail. Two panels had rips along the leach seam. There was plenty of wind so I figured that I could get along without the main and sail under mizzen and jib until I got to a place where I could patch the sail. Shortly afterward, the mizzen started showing rips as well.

I contacted Hood via my inReach communicator and after several days of trading emails, they said they had run some tests on the batch of cloth the sails were made from and the cloth was defective. The cloth is not what Hood normally uses. They make their own cloth for normal sails but I asked for tanbark (reddish brown) sails. They bought the cloth from another vendor.

Hood is replacing all three sails – jib, main and mizzen. The interesting part is how to get them to me. Apparently air freight is not as reliable in Mexico – and there are probably some problems with customs as well. I may have to fly back to California to pick them up and bring them back as baggage – at Hood’s expense.

By the fourth night out, I was getting pretty tired. I had to make a sail change after dark with the boat motion being especially lively. The effort was about all I could manage. It was frightening to realize that if something else happened that required physical effort on my part, I might not be able to respond.  I was also feeling very lonely - with no prospect for change on the horizon.

My memories of my previous sailing experience were based on having a 30 year old body and no intimate relationships. Things have changed. I have a 70 year old body and a wife and children I miss very much. The 70 year old body does not have the stamina of the 30 year old.

To add to the misery, the boat motion was especially violent. It felt like a ride on a rubber ducky in a washing machine. Locker doors were flying open. It was hard for me to stay in my bunk even with the lee canvas in place (see the Rock and Roll posting if you don’t know what a lee canvas is.) This all came at the end of a day when I was feeling especially lonely. Single handing a boat is something like solitary confinement. At some point during the night, I decided that this isn’t what I want to do for the next 15 – 18 months of my life.

At first, my response was to turn around and go back to San Diego – immediately. I spent the next four days working my way north against the wind and currents. I saw a lot of the kind of scene in the picture to the right. At times, it felt like Laelia was airborne before she slammed into the next wave. At the end of four days, I was only as far north as Turtle Bay well less than half way back to Ensenada where I would have to check in to do the paperwork for exiting Mexico. The rips in the mizzen were getting larger so I decided to stop at Turtle Bay and see if I could patch them.

Turtle Bay is a nice, quiet little place with a small village on the north side of the bay. It is a secure anchorage with little wave action to rock the boat. After anchoring, I slept – a two hour nap followed by a wine and spaghetti dinner and another 14 hours of sleep.

The next day, I started in on the sail repair. The top picture shows the kind of damage I was trying to repair. I couldn’t really repair the rips. The best I could do was to cover them up with patches that would keep the wind out of the rip and (hopefully) keep the rip from spreading. The bottom picture shows my solution. This involved taking the main and the mizzen off their respective masts, spreading a portion of each sail out flat enough to work on and hand sewing the patch. This took most of two days.

When I announced that I was turning back, a spirited dialogue ensued between Judy and myself leaving me wondering if I had a place to come back to. The dialogue was carried on via my inReach satellite communicator which restricts emails to 160 characters. It is not a format that allows a lot of descriptive detail. We were later to figure out that there was a lot of miscommunication in that dialogue.

Considering all those factors rest, dialogue, sail repair and the problem of getting the replacement sails, I decided to continue on to the Sea of Cortez. I hate to turn back with nothing at all to show for this trip. I had friends (Dan and Dee on Rocket Girl) who had left about a week ahead of me, headed for La Paz. I also decided to try to make life easier for myself by breaking the trip up into shorter legs with rest stops.

The next stop was Bahia Santa Maria, just outside Bahia Magdelena. That was a two day and two night leg. On arrival at Bahia Santa Maria, the patches appeared to be holding up. I got a good night’s rest and continued on toward Cabo San Lucas.

I rounded Cabo San Lucas on the morning of March 28. The difference was immediately noticeable. For the first time in almost three weeks, the air was warm. I could shed my foul weather gear and be comfortable in tee shirt and shorts. A whale watching boat passed close by and I could see the whales they were following.

I elected to bypass the city of Cabo San Lucas on the grounds that it was morning and I didn’t want

to stop yet and the reputation of Cabo as a very touristy, expensive kind of place. I put in to Marina Puerto Los Cabos just outside the city of San Jose del Cabo. To my surprise, it is more expensive to get a slip here than it is in San Diego - $60/day here vs. $45/day in San Diego. It is a nice facility, fairly new, has wifi Internet connectivity and is well kept up, but certainly not fancy. The boats here are mostly sport fishing boats and mega yachts. It is obvious that there is a lot of money around here somewhere.

Once again, I fixed a wine and spaghetti dinner and crashed for a 14 hour nights’ sleep. Yesterday, Saturday, March 29, was mostly devoted to catching up on all the things I haven’t been able to do because of the lack of an Internet connection – pay bills, answer email, catch up on the news.

I had planned to spend only one full day here before moving on but I realized last night that I need another rest day before I push on. I will be on my way north to La Paz starting tomorrow. I will probably make stops at three anchorages along the way with a days’ layover in each before getting to La Paz.

So, that’s the story to date. I don’t know when I will have Internet again – certainly not before La Paz. I am looking forward to continuing at a more relaxed pace. I want to spend a couple weeks recuperating before I turn around and start the trip north. I will be a rough trip – against prevailing winds and currents. It is referred to by sailors as “The Baja Bash.” From what I saw in the days I was trying to go north, it is quite appropriate. But, more on that when the time comes.