I Sail Away

6am came really early this morning. In fact, it was so early, our alarm clocks even missed it (and we all overslept). But, rise we did, and as a race crew, we are already intimately familiar with rigging the boat on the way to the startline. Fortunately, we discovered that the Grand Poobah responsible for the the start had, in fact, overslept, as well. Suddenly, we were like students who were late, but not really–the teacher was behind us . . . .

We had, in fact, rigged most of the boat the day and night before. All of the boat chores were completed. Things were secured. Other things were stowed. It was a pretty tight ship to begin with. In the darkness, however, I spotted the topping lift tha had snaked its way part of the way up the mast–and, that problem required sending someone aloft–and, Nathan was our guy.

After retrieving the topping lift, the wind was already following us and we wanted that spinnaker up as soon as possible. The Grand Poobah informed the fleet that we would have a rolling start, and we got that spinnaker up and the motor off immediately following.

What would transpire over the next few days had a dreamy, surreal quality to it. Nathan caught a second Yellowfin Tuna for the boat–not 45 minutes after sunrise. (We cleaned it immediately, but saved it for lunch/dinner. Sushi at 7am is a bit much.) The wind held steady at the low end of Marishanna’s performance range, and continued to build over the course of the next day and a half.

By the time our nighttime racing came around, the winds were blowing a steady 18knots. The waves were perfect. The angle of the wind was just right. We were holding at a steady pace of 10knots–it was phenomenal. We were smoking.

And, so was the entire fleet. We were all enjoying this perfect sailing weather: high speeds, comfortable rides, warm weather. All of us were ooohing and ahhhing each other on the radios . . . .

As we pulled within 20 miles of Cabo San Lucas, the wind came to a halt. Zero. Nothing. The water became a mirror. Our sails were limp. There wasn’t even a dark patch of water to chase.

In situations like this, the symptoms of someone affected with the racing affliction become most evident. The cruisers would say something along the lines of, “Hey, that wind was good while it lasted and got us really close. Time to turn on the engine. We’ll be there by breakfast.” It is a simple and practical statement. They are thankful for what they got.

Our response is akin to that child sitting at the table who won’t eat his brussel sprouts. “We are NOT turning on the motor. We’ll be disqualified from the sail-only division.” Period. Final. No arguments–from any of us.

And, so we sat. We watched as the cruisers motored past us. Fortunately, no one was close enough to wave, or say kindly things. But, we watched all the boats that he had worked so hard to overtake motor by and beat us to the showers and to breakfast.

And, we continued to sit. After about an hour, we got about 1 knot of boatspeed. And, then it was up to 2.5 knots, and then it was a little higher. All in all, it took us 6 hours to finish the remaining 20 miles to the finish line–our record-shattering attempts were in shambles, but our principles were intact.

We turned on the motor, gave the steering to Otto von Helm (our Auto Pilot), and the four of us sat on the foredeck, cracked beers, poured our offerings to King Neptune, and toasted a fantastic sail from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

As beautiful as Bahia Santa Maria is, it is blighted with poverty. The unimproved shacks of the people who live here permanenty are barely habitable by any standards. It is what they have, so I am not passing judgment, but it also the reason why the Baja Ha-ha organizers started fundraising for them each year.

To make things even more difficult for the people of Bahia Santa Maria, one of the hurricanes that missed Cabo San Lucas this year, veered north and hit this little village directly. So–what little they had got washed away by torrential rain and 100+ mph winds.

As a group, the Baja Ha-ha fleet offers some serious buying power (relatively speaking). There were 198 boats, and approximately 1000 sailors. So, this year, for the fundraising party, the locals hosted a fresh shrimp dinner–for 1000 people. We paid $15 and got a plate of locally caught and prepared food and we bought as much beer as we wanted at the same time . . . .

The surprise about the fundraiser this year was that the music has historically been a set of speakers and a DJ. But, between Baja Ha-has, a band contacted the organizers and asked if they could play the gig. And, they were awesome. Rolling Stones, Beatles, Neil Young, America, The Who, Led Zepplin . . . these guys could play music. The guitarist ripped off some great solos, and the singer hit all the notes . . . . It was spectacular music.

So, with a belly full of food, a cold cerveza in-hand, and good music, we danced until it was dark . . . . It seemed a little self-serving to be charity work, but that thought may have just been my Catholic within . . . . 😉

Over the Single Sideband Radio, we had been hearing about a Singles Party. I thought it was a bit odd, but was waited to pass judgement until I learned the details. That morning, over the daily check-in, and after all of other business was concluded, we heard a bit more about the party.

The holder of the party made a direct pleading to boat owners. He said that this party is organized on your behalf. You have picked up your additional crew members to sail with you on the trip. Tonight, would be a great time to take those crew members, send them over to the three rafted-up sailboats with a bottle of booze, and in return, give yourselves a couple of hours of privacy. If you know what I mean?

Once the encrypted words floated on the airwaves, I understood.

Send your kids. Send your crew members. And, you get to have the boat to yourself . . . it’s been a few days, and your on vacation, right?

Nathan and I went over to the party–as we were the only ones who were single, but we quickly found out that we may have also been the only boat adhering to the “singles” part of the party. It was a party for everyone with a lot of alcohol, loud music, and a little dancing on three rafted-up boats (complete with sparkly Christmas-party lights) in an absolutely gorgeous setting . . . .

Bahia Santa Maria is pristine–like a postcard, actually. It is less than a 100 miles from the larger Mexican port, Magdelena Bay, but rather than deal with all of the bustle and crowds, Bahia Santa Maria is quiet–idyllic almost.

After catching up on our sleep, we awoke to a beautiful, peaceful bay. I popped my head out of the hatch (before even having a cup coffee) and went up on deck. The water was like a mirror. A dorado (Mahi-mahi) was chasing a school of smaller fish, and he/she (couldn’t tell) came swimming by as if it were a dolphin: breaking the surface of the water, down into the water, out of the water again, and back down again. The dorado in its rhythms did this between our boat and another one for a couple hundred yards. It was beautiful.

Apparently the town was hit really hard by hurricane this summer. The recent rains associated with the storm are what caused the hills to turn green. The local fisherman, to my understanding, fish here during the week and stay in some improvised housing, and on the weekends, drive back to wherever their homes and families. Of course, there are some who live her permanently, but not many. The only sign of humans from the harbor, in fact, were these dozen or so improvised buildings and a slightly larger structure that I believe was the “town bar.”

We were excited about 2 full days of rest and relaxation (while the rest of the fleet catches up). There were a few chores (our dinghy needed a bit of repair), and, a couple of social events. But, for now, we were excited to take in the scenery and relax.

Somewhere during our first leg of the trip, we had forgotten that this was a race. We had started joking that “we are cruisers now,” and as we would collectively make decisions, we would posit, “Are we thinking like racers or cruisers?”

The two groups are not mutually exclusive, nor are they in confrontation with one another. For example, there was a green-hulled boat only a few feet longer than ours who smoked by us, and it looked like a pretty comfy ride. Turns out that it was a custom-designed Farr 44 purpose-built to cruise comfortable AND go really, really fast while doing it. The point is that on the first leg of the trip, all of our little-racers-within were lulled into a sweet nap while we “enjoyed ourselves” in the cruising mode.

On the second leg–something snapped. Or popped. Or awoke. In all of us. Maybe it was the adrenaline from the start. Or, more likely, it was pulling into the Bahia de Tortugas with 60 boats from the fleet already waiting for us. I, for one, thought a we pulled into the last anchorage, “Wait a minute. We are down here on a RACE boat–with no insulation, exactly ZERO exquisite staterooms, with a two-burner stove and a one-holer toilet seat for which we fabricated a CURTAIN to give us the illusion of privacy, and weighing roughly less than the diesel, water and provisions you are carrying on-board . . . and, YOU beat us?”

Regardless of what the motivation was, each of our little-racers-within awoke from their nap, and they were hungry. No motor. Spinnaker through the night. No set the spinnaker to a conservative setting and forget it. This was war–or, better, this was a RACE! There isn’t really a trophy, per se, but we wanted an illusionary one. We wanted “bragging rights” which has its own HUGE currency in the superstitious, over-indulgent, beer-swilling, story-telling world of sailors. And, race we did.

The winds picked up and were blowing around 25 knots during the end of the first day, and Nathan hand-drove for hours–keeping the boat on the edge to drain every ounce of speed out of her . . . because Marishanna shines in these conditions: downwind, big seas, and 25 knots of breeze. If it wasn’t for the warmer water, she might have thought she was at home in San Francisco.

With the spinnaker up and sailing downwind, a racing sailboat can do magical things. If the driver knows what he/she is doing, they feel the wave approaching (there is also a rhythm to it), and they turn the transom of the boat to sit firmly on the wave, and for a few brief moments, the hull partially pulls out of the water and basically “surfs” down the waves. By definition, sailboats should only be able to go a certain speed calculated by the length of the hull. In these brief moments, however, a light, fast, raceboat with a large spinnaker sail up, properly-designed stern, a powerful wave, and a good driver, and you can reach speeds above your hull-speed (Marishanna’s hull-speed is in the mid-to-high 7 knots).

With Nathan driving and the conditions right, we peeled off consistent 10’s–for awhile, doing it with almost every wave. We hit some pretty regular 11’s and saw numbers as high as 15 knots. And, that is how you win races.

Sailing to Bahia Santa Maria was about 280 nautical miles. We ripped off the first 180 miles in about 20 hours, and as the wind died from 25 knots to 15 knots and down to 10knots, we continued to drain every ounce of speed we could get from the boat.

Somewhere in the early hours of the morning (around 4am), a bit more than 2 days after we started, we crossed the finish line. We weren’t the first to arrive, but at least we were respectable (in the top 20) and, had our pick of the anchorages.

And, yes, the green boat was already there . . . .

Perhaps it was the way the we had prepared for the trip. Perhaps it was the delivery down to San Diego. Regardless, I had all sorts of expectations about this trip and none of them included the “party” functions from the official Baja Ha-ha calendar.

Our first full day of rest included this 1pm blip on the radar of a potluck party with all of the other boats and crew. It barely registered anything at all.

That morning, at 7:30am, during the morning roll-call of ships and ship positions, we spent an extraordinary amount of time on the “potluck” rules for cruisers. Time-tested favorites like, “bring more than you intend to eat,” and “no silverware, cups or utensils will be provided, so unless you intend to eat with your hands, you will need to bring some,” gave me a peek into the “cruiser” world . . . .

I had drempt about a way to cook lasagna on-board that wouldn’t be too painful and would be our contribution. But, somewhere along the way, the grocery list actualized in a way that deviated from how it was potentialized. In short, I sent it too late and some of the items got omitted from the list: namely, all the lasagna ingredients.

So, we punted. Where there was one loaf of bread on the shopping list, we ended up with three loaves on-board. We had eggs, some ham, bell peppers and onions–as well as milk and cheese. All the ingredients for quiche lorraine. Real men may not eat quiche, but I discovered that sailors at a potluck will (in fact, it was gone quickly enough to where I didn’t get to sample it myself–I’ll have to make it again so I can be sure of the success or failure of the recipe).

We hailed one of Enrique’s water taxi drivers and motored over to the East side of the harbor to a HUGE party on the beach. To explain the enormity of the event let’s talk some numbers. This year, there were approximately 200 boats. One boat hit a whale and sunk (everyone and the whale was fine–it wasn’t a whale ramming like the news reported, but rather it was most likely a sleeping whale in a wave and two giant things in the same place at the same time that caused damage to the boat’s rudder, which caused it to fill up with water fast–AND, they got into their life raft and were picked up by coast gaurd immediately), but other than that–the fleet had mostly arrived. And, roughly 1000 sailors were lined up on the beach to participate in this potluck. The locals provided beer for sale, a portable toilet, and some REALLY loud music . . . and voila–we had a party! It was great.

We drank, talked, danced, and ate until roughly sun-down when the water taxis ferried us back to our boats. Well done, Baja Ha-ha organizers. THAT was a great party!

We waited a few hours, regrouped, and . . . then organized a “scouting” party into town to see about the Dia de los Muertos celebration in the town zocalo and to see if there was any more dancing at the Hotel Veracruz . . . .

Lunch lasted about 4 hours. We kept ordering more beef and cheese tacos and ice cold beers–even though we were all obviously envious of Nathan’s lobster. The patio was filled with other sailors also on the Baja Ha-ha.

The length of lunch was a combination of things–the most obvious of which was that we kept ordering food and beers. The other part was that two food servers were serving a patio filled with roughly 100 sailors, and the food was being prepared by a kitchen who perhaps serves this many meals in a week (I think–it could be less), not in a few hours. In the restaurant business, we lovingly referred to this time in our serving lives as being “in-the-weeds.”

There are some tell tale signs of a food server being “in-the-weeds.” Here are a few of them:

• Big, deer-in-the-headlights eyes mixed with momentary washes of visible guilt. It is the natural effect of not having enough capacity to remember every single detail of all of your TWELVE tables (each with 4 to 10 people who have their own needs to be met).
• A frantic walking pace . . . even for short distances . . . of say four feet. This is a psychological reaction to KNOWING that everyone is getting poor service. It sends a signal to all of your customers that says, “Hey look, I am really busy right now. Would I walk this fast if I was taking it easy in the back station?”
• Nodding frequently during actual conversations with a customer. This is a food server’s stalling trick. At this point, they are skimming what YOU are saying because they are processing the backlog of todo items and unprocessed data. If you were to heat up the conversation and really turn the screws down on them, they would immediately stop nodding and look at you directly. Note: I recommend NOT doing this. If you can go easy on them, and they can get caught up, you will be remembered as the gracious one and treated really well for the rest of the meal.
• Avoidance of eye contact, tempered with big smiles. When fighting fires, you have to put the ones out that are going to do the most damage (I am no expert firefighter, but speaking metaphorically, this is the only way to work). If your server walks past you and is clearly avoiding eye contact with you, it means that some fire is burning pretty big right now–and, it has to be extinguished.
• Sometimes, there is visible sweating. Well, being in-the-weeds sucks. Many servers take their job seriously–it is their business to give good service and when you can’t do it, it sucks. Mix that with guilt, hurried walking, mental processing overload . . . well, it is a giant anxiety sandwich and you just gotta take a few bites.

Well, our server was exhibiting all of the signs . . . and, we were gracious about it. No worries. Later, we would learn a phrase that describes it perfectly. We were already on “Mexico time.”

After our meal, we walked the dirt roads of town a bit, looked through some of the neighborhoods, found a market or two, and made our way up to the Hotel Veracruz where there was supposedly a “get together” planned for the Baja Ha-haers that evening.

When we got there, we found the place was packed with bunches of sailors who had arrived (there were still plenty of boats still at sea), and again, we found ourselves consuming more beer (no food this time) and telling sea-stories with some of the other sailors. Fortunately, we had NOT consumed enough beer to start singing sea shanties . . . (it takes a LOT of beer to hit that level).

But, as the evening progressed, we noticed this little dark room off to the side that oddly enough had a bar in it, and chairs and tables surrounding this open area. I wondered why it was so dark in there . . . until the lights came on, and music started to play.

As it turns out . . . the owner of the Hotel Veracruz (before he passed a few years ago) loved the Baja Ha-ha sailors so much that he built a dance floor for them. I kid you not! A DJ stepped into the booth, the lights came on, the Baja Ha-ha veterans were already wearing their dancing shoes–and, we’re back to “Play that funky music, white boy!”

At this point, Hendrik turned to us, pointed to the dance floor and said, “THAT must be the Ha-ha of the Baja Ha-ha.”

Here’s a map of the Bahia de Tortugas . . . .

The story line may be a bit confusing . . . because it sounds like I am still sailing around the world. But, currently, I am not. I am anchored in 17 feet of crystal blue water about 250 yards off the resorts in Cabo San Lucas. The tiki-torch-lit beaches, live music and swaying palm trees of the resorts add a nice bit of ambiance to my view, and hopefully, the somewhat cliche vision of a sailboat bobbing at anchor in the bay is adding just a little bit of ambiance for the resorts guests.

Each morning, as I arise, I start my daily writing, which has largely consisted of re-living the immediate memories from the recent sail down to Cabo San Lucas. As much as I had hoped to post these stories in real-time, it was simply not possible, but for a very good reason.

Sailing a boat consumes a tremendous amount of time and energy. As you become more proficient in the sailing and managing parts of a sailboat, it takes less time to do. This is not a luxury that I have had on this trip–because I am new to so much of this.

Typically, as I race or cruise around the bay or even off-shore for a day or two, the space of sailing occupies roughly, a day or a weekend. It has never really had a tangible impact in my life. I mean, we can all turn our cell phones off for a day and it is fine, right?

But, this trip has been different for a couple of reasons. There was the harrowing delivery from San Francisco to San Diego, and then the mad-scramble final boat preparations prior to leaving for Mexico, and roughly two weeks of the Baja Ha-ha sailing, and then 5 days of Mexican paperwork, Baja Ha-ha activites, sight-seeing, decompression (and warm showers), getting the crew members to the airport, and finally, getting the boat on the anchor (by myself). And, then there was this other little thing . . . .

Over the course of the last month, it has been necessary for me to go from dipping my toes in the waters of sailing to swimming proficiently–an enormous, and consuming task. I am certainly NOT saying that I am an expert sailor, but rather that what I am doing right now, today, requires me to know a lot more about sailing than I did two months ago. It is the same immediate and tangible requirement I had when I was hired to manage an Engine Rebuilding shop my first summer home from college.

I applied for the job, idealistically, thinking that I could do it easily with the proper guidance. I could change an alternator, a starter, and spark plugs. I knew all the parts of the motor. What more did I need to know? I guess I believed that there would be some exiting manager who would be there to answer my questions for a few weeks, and show me how it has always been done. I would memorize the in-place systems, and be fine with it.

What I did not recognize at the tender age of 18 was that I suddenly needed to have answers for both the other employees and customers. I needed to be able to explain why blue smoke is coming out of the tailpipe, or black smoke, or white smoke. Or, why a 3-angle valve grind is better for racing and a single angle grind is appropriate for every-day driving. Or, why one crack in the engine block warranted a new engine block and why another crack could be repaired.

To give credit to my boss at the engine shop, he taught me everything that I needed to know and in short order–about a month. But, it consumed me. I arrived early to work, left late, and worked through my lunch hours–because it took me longer to accomplish tasks of an experienced manager.

After leaving our shop, I went next door and asked nosey questions to the shop owners who removed and re-installed the motors into our clients’ cars (we were only the machine shop/engine builders). How can you tell that water pump needs to be replaced? How do you keep track of where all those vacuum tubes belong? Why does it matter that the rubber on the motor mounts has worn away?

And, when I got home after the 400 questions game, the owner sent me with a stack of required reading of various trade publicatons, manuals and diagrams. Much to the credit of both the owner’s “fast-track plan” and the guys who owned the shop next door, in the space of about a month, I went from knowing what a piston is to having opinions about piston ring brands . . . .

This sailing adventure has largely taken the same course. In the last month, or so, I have weather-sealed windows, filled holes, installed dodgers, installed solar panels, re-wired electrical things, diagnosed engine problems (overheating and simply stopped running), cleaned, sorted, practiced heavy-weather sailing, chosen anchorages, set anchors, removed kelp from the keel (or attempted to–it had already worked itself free), navigated by chart for hundreds of miles, sailed off-shore for days at a time, called on-shore friends for assistance, diagnosed and reconfigured auto-pilots, planned and provisioned boats, avoided collisions of any kind, negotiated foreign harbors at night, managed battery charging schedules, repaired dinghys, landed and launched dinghys in surf, communicated through VHF and Single-sideband radios, cooked, cleaned dishes, refilled diesel at sea (in the dark, and off-shore), sailed under spinnaker at night, and a whole list of other things either by myself or with my Captain and fellow sailors–some that I cannot remember, but will return suddenly if I were to need that information.

This process has consumed ALL of my time during the sail–the time that I expected to be updating the story. And, to give credit to my Captain and fellow sailors . . . thank you.

Future posts will continue to be me re-living my sailing memories before they become too remote and slip away entirely. Meanwhile, the background noise consists of Cabo San Lucas tourists on rented jet-skis using anchored sailboats as obstacle courses, clinking anchors or cruiseships stopping for the 5-hour guest excursions, glass-bottom panga boats ferrying visitors to and from their various destinations, and floating disco lounges puttering around the bay filled with hollaring dancers as lyrics, such “play that funky music, white boy,” thump along to multi-colored lights. And, a nice sunset or two . . . .

And, now, back to our regularly-schedule programming. 😉

Around 1pm, the crew started to rumble and awake. We hadn’t slept a considerably long time – basically one watch-worth of time – but we were all hungry and eager to get ashore after 4 days on the boat.

Every morning, at 7:30am, the Grand Poobah (his choice of names, not ours) runs a check-in process over the Single-Sideband Radio (SSB). Each boat in the fleet reports their position and anything special (ie., we had a medical emergency on-board, or our motor stopped working and we are under sail only, or we caught a huge Dorado yesterday). After the check-in parts, we share information with the other cruisers. One of the important bits that we learned one morning was that in Bahia de Tortugas, call Enrique on channel 16 for a water taxi from your boat to town.

We have a dinghy that our captain went to great pain to patch and repair (apparently mice had decided to try the rubber in a few places) and an outboard motor, but we were all hungry. So, we called Enrique on VHF Channel 16 and he fetched us. Within moments we were speeding towards shore.

Bahia de Tortugas is a really small fishing town. One time each year (for the past 16 years), a group of sailing boats in a fleet known as the Baja Ha-ha comes to town–each year growing in size up to the 200 boats that were in our fleet this year. The town prepares for our arrival, stocks up on food and booze for the cruisers, and lays out the hospitality–and, we spend our money like crazy. And, it works. Our two or three day stop has become a huge cash infusion into an otherwise poor fishing town.

Enrique is really a fisherman–as are all of the other “water taxi” drivers. We know about him most likely because he has the most panga boats in his fleet. The locals fish for camarones (shrimp), langusta (lobster), dorado (mahi mahi) and tuna. When the Baja Ha-ha fleet arrives, they put their other profession aside and ferry American and Canadian cruisers from their sailboats to shore for $4/person per trip. They also take trash from your boat and dispose of it for $1/bag. They will also bring you jerry cans of diesel and water at reasonable prices–right to your boat. They will also sell you their fresh fish and shrimp–no market necessary.

Our water taxi delivered us to the large dock and we could see the restaurant where we were going to eat already. Salivating from hunger, there was a patio restaurant where we could see other cruisers already imbibing–and, we walked down the beach towards the cold beer and warm food (that someone else was preparing). Over the next four hours, we would eat and drink our fill of beef and cheese tacos, a gespacio-type shrimp cocktail and Nathan won the day by ordering the lobster plate–a HUGE lobster served ceremoniously on a plate with beans, rice and salad.