I Sail Away

I am a few posts behind . . . so, first of all, Happy New Years to all of you!!! 2009 seemed to be a big year for just about everyone I knew (myself included). I hope that when you look backwards, the good memories outweigh the bad ones, and if the converse is true, you learned a lot from the experiences.

I also hope that your 2010 is filled with hopes and goals, health, happiness and family. Form your idea, put it out into the universe, work like hell, and then be ready for it to happen. 2010 is going to be a good year for you–I can tell, already. 😉

Currently, I am still in Cabo San Lucas. When we arrived, the rest of the crew stayed for roughly a week, and then returned to their families, their jobs, and the United States–leaving me responsible for all aspects of the boat until we sail it back–at a date later to be determined.

After a week of being in the marina, tied to a dock, I was ready for a little quiet away from the 24-hour activity of the city. There is a dinghy aboard, and a dinghy dock at the marina, so I can go into town whenever I please, but a little privacy and separation would be great. Also, the prices at the IGY Cabo San Luis marina are exorbitant. The facilities are nice, but clearly MegaYachts pay the bills (and, yes, there was even one here with its own helicopter) and us little boats are an afterthought.

There was also a bit of excitement, on my part, for moving out into the harbor because I am excited to get a bigger taste of the cruising life. This is something I have tinkered with doing partially every year, and full-time when I retire . . . so, I might as well learn as much as I can while I am here.

The harbor itself is beautiful–especially at night. The lights of the resorts twinkle and reflect off the water. You can hear the music from the bars and resort clubs wafting through the night air. The first night at anchor, I made my dinner and marched up to the foredeck and took a seat. The air temperature was in the 80s, I was eating dinner and sipping a beer while watching the lights and listening to the free concerts. It was quite idyllic . . . .

The town of Cabo San Lucas is quite small, packed with American, Canadian and Australian ex-patriots, and very friendly. Although things are more expensive here than in some of the other, more rural Mexican towns (American prices for most things in tourist areas), the streets are clean, potable water can be found everywhere, comfort food, if desired, is easily obtained (although I never did find the slice of apple pie that I was craving around Christmas time), and every service imaginable is readily available.

From a boating perspective, two of the three chandleries that I have visited have been quite limited in their selection, and quite American in their prices. I am going to visit the third one this week . . . hopefully to be disproved with my generalizations.

Overall, Cabo San Lucas is an extremely safe, overly friendly, and quite fun town–with warm air temperatures, and warm water temperatures.

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.

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. 😉

Some not so good news for the adventure. Hurricane Rick is on a crash-course for Cabo San Lucas. It is currently a Category 5 Hurricane which originated around Acapulco and was headed out to sea. It made a turn north (and for the worse) towards Cabo San Lucas–who were just blasted 2 months ago by another Hurricane. More Hurricane info about Hurricane Rick is available at the National Hurricane Center.

The Grand Poo-bah of the Baja Ha-ha has said that the 190-boat fleet will hold in San Diego until the storm has passed if it poses a problem. At this time, we are proceeding with the delivery to get the yacht down to San Diego to join the rest of the fleet. But, we are watching the weather . . . .

I’ll keep you posted.