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
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 15th, 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!
