After arriving in Santa Rosalía, we got the boat tied up and had our celebratory beers, even though we had arrived at 9AM. It’s a tradition with us to have a beer to relax after the anxiety of anchoring the boat or carefully inserting it into a slip. We opened up the hatches and got the air flowing through and then took a long snooze to catch up on the sleep we both miss when we travel all night.
We had originally paid for a week at the marina in Santa Rosalía, although we had used only four nights on our previous stay. In this case we were given credit for three additional nights, and used them to work on some boat items that we wanted to finish before putting the boat up for two months.
One of the problems we had encountered earlier was a slipping belt on the engine that drives the alternator and water pump. In that case we tightened it up, but realized that we couldn’t change the belt unless we drained the cooling system and removed the two water hoses connecting the hot water heater to the engine through the plane of the belt. If we had broken a belt in rough weather we couldn’t replace it easily and we would be in real trouble without the use of the engine. I believe in prevention, but every time I try to improve something relating to the boat, I usually run into more problems than I had anticipated – and this was no exception.
We mentioned this to a fellow cruiser, Dave from ‘Juniata,’ who had been faced with this before, and he offered to help us. The idea was to replace the current belt and add a second one on the inside loop of the water hoses to be used as a quick replacement in the event of a problem with the primary belt. We pulled out all the manuals and learned how to drain the coolant from the engine using a combination of a piece of hose, a funnel, a small jar, and a larger bucket. Then we removed the hoses only to find that we needed to remove the belt from the refrigeration system. In doing this, we found that the mounting bracket for the refrigeration pump had cracked and the replacement belts we had were not quite large enough to fit over the pulleys.
Naturally we discovered these problems at 1PM on Friday in the middle of the siesta period (12-2). On Fridays some businesses don’t bother to return to work after the siesta; so we were concerned that we might have to wait until Monday to get things fixed. We got directions for a welding shop in town, and an auto parts supply store and hot-footed it into town. The guys at the welding shop were eating lunch and resting, but two of them got up to help us. In a matter of minutes we got the part welded back together for 50 pesos ($5), and found the belts we needed at the auto supply store and were back at the boat by 2PM.
Dave ended up doing a lot of the hands-on work for us because he was familiar with the activity, while Sheilagh and I handed him tools, asked questions, and learned a lot about our engine from him. That night we treated Dave and his wife, Marsha, to a chicken dinner at the cruiser-recommended chicken restaurant in Santa Rosalía. Dave and Marsha are from Colfax (near Lake of the Pines, north of Sacramento, where we were living most recently). They have been cruising for six years so far and have a lot of knowledge and experience to share.
On one of the evenings in Santa Rosalía all the cruisers (some 20 people) gathered together near the marina swimming pool and listened to a husband and wife (guitar and harp) perform while we had pizza delivered. Carrying a harp onboard has got to take up a lot of room, but they have a 50’ boat; so perhaps that’s where they get the extra room. We disbanded and all went to bed at about 10PM, just when the rock band began playing in the marina cantina. If the music doesn’t start before 10PM, we cruisers aren’t going to hear it – at least we older cruisers.
We didn’t need to provision during this visit, because we are trying to use up all the food we have before leaving the boat here in San Carlos. It will take us some time to take all the sails down, remove anything that could blow away in a hurricane from the top of the boat, empty the water tanks, and generally set up the boat to be left for two months. If Santa Rosalía were a recognized hurricane hole, we could leave the boat here and take a bus north to San Diego from here – a 14-hour trip. We noticed that a ferry comes over from San Carlos twice a week to Santa Rosalía; so suddenly we realized we could take the ferry back to Santa Rosalía and then take the bus north to San Diego. Our original plans had us taking the bus to Tucson and then a plane to San Diego, which would have cost more and taken longer.
We had planned to leave Santa Rosalía on Saturday evening for a night-time trip across the Sea of Cortez to arrive on Sunday morning. However, the weather report on Saturday morning recommended against making the crossing that day due to high winds. Rather than pay for another day at the marina, we motored over to a nearby island, San Marcos, where we anchored in the clearest water we have seen yet. We could see our anchor embedded in the sand 30’ below us. I went snorkeling along the shore and saw all sorts of fish including schools of Sergeant Majors with yellow and black stripes around their bodies, several King Angelfish with bright yellow fins and tail on dark bodies with orange tips flowing back from their dorsal fins, a school of dozens of needlefish with long snouts and a blue and silver body – just to name a few.
As I swam over a rock with lots of holes in it, a small moray eel poked its head out of one of the holes, which caused me to keep my distance from the rocks after that. The sandy part of the bottom was dotted everywhere with small stingrays settling down in the sand and periodically moving to new locations. I didn’t see any fish large enough to catch and eat, but I wasn’t hunting anyway, since we need to eat what we have in the next few days. When I got back I looked up the various fish I had seen in my Reef Fish Identification book. A Rainbow Wrasse really caught my eye because it had all the colors of the rainbow on its body. I also saw several tiny blue fish feeding on the bottom, thinking at first that they were small blue gems. The fish identification book didn’t indicate these at all.
We ran into Jim and Susan of ‘Windward Bound’ anchored near us at San Marcos and had them over for dinner before heading out to San Carlos that same night. We left the anchorage at 8PM and headed across the Sea of Cortez. As we started out the seas were a bit rough with a 15-knot wind just off the nose. We partially raised the mainsail (to the second reef points) to keep the boat stable in the waves and ended up motoring the entire distance of 70+ nautical miles. Throughout the night we had clear sky overhead and stars shining brightly. However, ahead of us were dark clouds that obscured the sky and lightning playing on the horizon all night. By 4AM we were within 25 miles of the mainland, and thankfully the clouds and lightning moved off to the east, and the waves and wind had settled down.
We arrived at 8AM Mountain Daylight Time, an hour before the marina opened; so we tied up to the fuel dock to await a slip assignment. At 9AM our time, the marina opened and we got a slip next to a motor vessel that dwarfed us in size. We slipped carefully into the slot between the overgrown power boat and the dock, and opened the morning beer just prior to sleeping for several hours. We found that San Carlos is actually on Pacific Daylight Time, even though it is further east than Santa Rosalía, so we are now on California time as we prepare the boat to leave it for two months.
The night of the 28th, the day we got in, turned out to be one of the hottest, most humid nights this marina had seen in awhile (we are told). Sheilagh and I stripped to almost nothing and slept with two fans blowing air on us all night in an attempt to keep the sweat from running off our bodies. Have you ever tried sleeping in a position that kept all members of your body from touching any other members? Believe me, it’s difficult, but necessary to insure that a layer of moisture doesn’t develop between touching body parts – and that applies to one’s own body. Heaven help me if I dared touch Sheilagh in any way; or her, me.
We had planned to take a week to get the boat ready, but after that night we are motivated to get the job done as soon as possible. We think four days should be enough, allowing us to take an air-conditioned bus north to San Diego by the 1st of August. We’ll see if we make it. We certainly don’t want any more nights like this one. More later . . .
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Thursday, July 24, 2008
July 23th – Santa Rosalía – Jim’s Blog #60
We’re back in Santa Rosalía after three days of travel back down the eastern side of the Baja peninsula. Some cruising friends had brought some mail down to Santa Rosalía for us from San Diego and we needed to pick it up before crossing the Sea of Cortez to San Carlos on the mainland side. We will cross the sea in the next few days and put our boat in a slip in San Carlos while we head up to the United States for two months.
On the way down the coast we saw the usual birds and dolphins, but had a unique experience seeing the incoming tide meet the outgoing one in the space of an hour. We were motor-sailing (using both the motor and the sails) south from Puerto Don Juan to Bahia San Francisquito on Monday. At the start of the trip we had a one-knot current caused by the outgoing tide carrying us down the coast for the first six hours of our trip on perfectly smooth water. Then all of a sudden we encountered swells and rough seas for about half an hour, followed by perfectly smooth seas again. But this time we had a one-knot current opposing our progress. Because the negative current only affected an hour and a half of our eight-hour trip, the loss of speed only cost us about an extra half hour over what we had anticipated. It’s a bit weird to experience a sudden transition like that between two masses of water, and see the smooth water on both sides at the same time.
On Monday evening I was the net controller for the Southbound Net, a job I had volunteered for on Monday evenings during the month of July, while the normal net controller was back in the States. It is not a job I particularly like, because it is difficult to hear folks on high-frequency radio, particularly with all the moisture in the air causing static in the signal. Working with the net reminds me of my junior-high school days, when I collected old radios and got them working in the basement of our house in Walla Walla. I strung a long antenna between a large elm tree in the back yard and the house, and used to spend hours twiddling the dials to pull in what stations I could. The longer-range signals were always full of static, and it was a real challenge to hear anything comprehensible.
Now that I am much older and have lost quite a bit of high-frequency hearing from my exposure to the high-pitched turbine engines on our P3 Orion Navy aircraft; so it is even more difficult to detect voices in the static. I had Sheilagh as my cheer leader during the net, copying stuff I couldn’t hear and periodically fanning me with a hand fan to help keep me from melting at the navigation table. When operating the high-frequency (HAM) radio, it is critical to turn off all appliances that could cause disruption of the signal. That includes all fans in the cabin, the inverter that powers 110 volt current, and all 110 volt appliances. Even the engine needs to be off to keep the noise down; so we made sure to be anchored before the net takes place at 5:45 PM Pacific Daylight Time.
Part of the job of the net controller is to record the location, local weather, and people-on-board from all the cruisers who desire to check in to the net. This helps us keep track of one another for safety’s sake, gives us an idea of the local weather in each of the anchorages, and offers us an opportunity to communicate with friends at a specific time each day, when we are quite far apart.
We also get a twice-daily weather report from Don Anderson, a cruiser of many years in his sailboat, ‘Summer Passage,’ who now lives in Oxnard, California. Don is a volunteer weather forecaster who keeps an eye on the weather on the Pacific side of Mexico and communicates the weather that we cruisers can expect in the next few days. It is the job of the net controller to copy down this weather report and be prepared to pass it on to cruisers on the net who are unable to hear Don’s report. This involves specific weather for the outside of the Baja peninsula (for cruisers coming down from, or going back to, California), the Sea of Cortez north and south, the north and south crossings from the Baja peninsula to mainland Mexico, and the mainland of Mexico from Mazatlan down to Acapulco and beyond. You can imagine what a job it is to copy all that information as I try to understand Don’s words through a screen of static.
The experience of trying to understand words buried in static has given me no desire to be a HAM radio operator in my free time, although Sheilagh and I both have licenses to allow us to use it. I much prefer being on the internet and being able to communicate clearly and distinctly in both words and pictures to anywhere in the world. I am surprised that HAM radio is still so popular with so many people, now that the internet provides a much better way of communicating between people around the world – at least in my opinion. Having said that, I have to admit that we use the HAM radio to connect to the internet when we are away from an internet location; so we have the best of both worlds when we need it.
On Tuesday we were roused from our beds by the buzzing of bees at our portholes with a few in the cabin. We have screens in each of the portholes (side-mounted windows) and screens on the hatches (mounted overhead), but we usually don’t screen the companionway entrance unless we have a bug problem. In this case we definitely had a problem. We closed up the companionway with net screening and were held hostage by the bees as they searched for fresh water on our boat. We had been advised in the past not to leave fresh water standing anywhere on the boat and we don’t, but we think they were attracted to the dew that had formed on the deck overnight.
Later we decided there were some things we needed to get done to prepare for our overnight trip that evening down to Santa Rosalía. When we got into the cockpit, we were swarmed by dozens (thankfully not hundreds) of bees. I sat down and bent over to put on my sandals (to avoid being stung by stepping on a bee barefooted) and suddenly felt a pain in my stomach. I had trapped a bee there and got a good sting that proceeded to swell up to unusual proportions over the next day. I am currently taking Benadryl to fight the swelling, but for a while I can blame the small roll above my belt on the bee sting. I had been stung only twice before in my life, and was surprised to find such a strong reaction with this sting. I had always expected that one would develop immunity from bee stings after the first few.
Talking to other cruisers, I’ve found that my body now knows when it has been stung by a bee and supposedly sends in the white blood cells en masse to take care of the problem. This is what causes the swelling, and it can be dangerous if the swelling happens in the throat. That’s why a number of cruisers take along an Epi-Pen (Epinephrine) kit to provide immediate treatment of the swelling symptom. We’ll be getting one in the future you can bet. I can stand the pain of the sting, but apparently my body can’t handle the swelling side effects. So much for getting old!
The bees kept demanding fresh water; so we sprayed the entire deck of the boat with salt water. Other cruisers found this effective, but our bees were convinced we had something they wanted down below; so they hung around. We then tried squirting them with some Windex window cleaner because the alcohol in the mixture is supposed to turn them off. I think we only improved their eyesight. We also tried Raid bug spray, but the bees just laughed at that. So we discontinued our tasks for the day, descended back into the cabin, covered up the companionway with screening material, and spent the afternoon watching two hour-long segments of the TV show “24,” the 6th season.
Yesterday we left Bahia San Francisquito at about 7:30 in the evening, expecting a 15-hour trip and an arrival at about 10:30 in the morning at Bahia Santa Rosalía. After we were on course and had the autopilot set up, we noticed the steering wheel spinning back and forth more aggressively than we had ever seen before. Looking out over the water we saw some six or more large whirlpools scattered about the surface of the water and spinning around counterclockwise about three boat lengths in diameter. As we entered a whirlpool the bow tended to turn to the right, which the autopilot corrected for. In the middle of the whirlpool the stern began tracking to the right while the bow was pushed left. This required the autopilot to correct back to the right, and so on. We assumed the whirlpools indicated where the incoming and outgoing tides were meeting, but we encountered the same whirlpools later on. I hasten to add that these were flat whirlpools, not the deep holes threatening to spin the boat to the bottom that one sees in pictures of Odysseus challenging the whirlpools of Charybdis.
We had a calm night until about midnight with just a shortened mainsail up to help the engine. The wind was just off our nose, so we couldn’t really sail the course without deviating significantly from our course and adding hours to our schedule. I was trying to catch a nap in the cabin while Sheilagh had the watch, when I was awakened by the boat plunging up and down in the waves. Within minutes we went from calm conditions to 4-6’ seas and wind speeds of 20-25 knots. We had to alter course a bit to keep the waves from broad-siding the boat. Our boat was handling the waves and wind in fine fashion, and I was enjoying the ride. Sheilagh, on the other hand, was becoming a basket case, curling up in the fetal position under the dodger in the cockpit and groaning whenever we received spray over the deck. I ordered her below and it was an order she was happy to obey. For the next two hours we rode like that, and then within a few minutes after 2 o’clock we were back to the calm conditions we had before.
From previous experience we had learned to batten down the hatches and dog down the covers on the side windows (called “port lights”) regardless of the current conditions we were in starting out in. In this case we also had the dinghy tied down well on deck and were ready for the storm. We understand that we may have been in an “elefante,” which is a blast of wind coming off the Baja side of the Sea of Cortez due to the cooling of the water and the heated nature of the land. These can be quite strong, as we found out, and they are unpredictable as well. The boat held up well, but the contents of some of our storage cabinets were in complete disarray. Most noticeable is the cabinet over the sink where we keep our plastic glasses. As soon as we open that cabinet after a blow we can expect glasses to fall out into the sink, which they did on this occasion. The rest of our trip was uneventful.
Now we are in Santa Rosalía once again and preparing the boat and ourselves for the 15-hour trip across the Sea of Cortez to San Carlos. More later . . .
On the way down the coast we saw the usual birds and dolphins, but had a unique experience seeing the incoming tide meet the outgoing one in the space of an hour. We were motor-sailing (using both the motor and the sails) south from Puerto Don Juan to Bahia San Francisquito on Monday. At the start of the trip we had a one-knot current caused by the outgoing tide carrying us down the coast for the first six hours of our trip on perfectly smooth water. Then all of a sudden we encountered swells and rough seas for about half an hour, followed by perfectly smooth seas again. But this time we had a one-knot current opposing our progress. Because the negative current only affected an hour and a half of our eight-hour trip, the loss of speed only cost us about an extra half hour over what we had anticipated. It’s a bit weird to experience a sudden transition like that between two masses of water, and see the smooth water on both sides at the same time.
On Monday evening I was the net controller for the Southbound Net, a job I had volunteered for on Monday evenings during the month of July, while the normal net controller was back in the States. It is not a job I particularly like, because it is difficult to hear folks on high-frequency radio, particularly with all the moisture in the air causing static in the signal. Working with the net reminds me of my junior-high school days, when I collected old radios and got them working in the basement of our house in Walla Walla. I strung a long antenna between a large elm tree in the back yard and the house, and used to spend hours twiddling the dials to pull in what stations I could. The longer-range signals were always full of static, and it was a real challenge to hear anything comprehensible.
Now that I am much older and have lost quite a bit of high-frequency hearing from my exposure to the high-pitched turbine engines on our P3 Orion Navy aircraft; so it is even more difficult to detect voices in the static. I had Sheilagh as my cheer leader during the net, copying stuff I couldn’t hear and periodically fanning me with a hand fan to help keep me from melting at the navigation table. When operating the high-frequency (HAM) radio, it is critical to turn off all appliances that could cause disruption of the signal. That includes all fans in the cabin, the inverter that powers 110 volt current, and all 110 volt appliances. Even the engine needs to be off to keep the noise down; so we made sure to be anchored before the net takes place at 5:45 PM Pacific Daylight Time.
Part of the job of the net controller is to record the location, local weather, and people-on-board from all the cruisers who desire to check in to the net. This helps us keep track of one another for safety’s sake, gives us an idea of the local weather in each of the anchorages, and offers us an opportunity to communicate with friends at a specific time each day, when we are quite far apart.
We also get a twice-daily weather report from Don Anderson, a cruiser of many years in his sailboat, ‘Summer Passage,’ who now lives in Oxnard, California. Don is a volunteer weather forecaster who keeps an eye on the weather on the Pacific side of Mexico and communicates the weather that we cruisers can expect in the next few days. It is the job of the net controller to copy down this weather report and be prepared to pass it on to cruisers on the net who are unable to hear Don’s report. This involves specific weather for the outside of the Baja peninsula (for cruisers coming down from, or going back to, California), the Sea of Cortez north and south, the north and south crossings from the Baja peninsula to mainland Mexico, and the mainland of Mexico from Mazatlan down to Acapulco and beyond. You can imagine what a job it is to copy all that information as I try to understand Don’s words through a screen of static.
The experience of trying to understand words buried in static has given me no desire to be a HAM radio operator in my free time, although Sheilagh and I both have licenses to allow us to use it. I much prefer being on the internet and being able to communicate clearly and distinctly in both words and pictures to anywhere in the world. I am surprised that HAM radio is still so popular with so many people, now that the internet provides a much better way of communicating between people around the world – at least in my opinion. Having said that, I have to admit that we use the HAM radio to connect to the internet when we are away from an internet location; so we have the best of both worlds when we need it.
On Tuesday we were roused from our beds by the buzzing of bees at our portholes with a few in the cabin. We have screens in each of the portholes (side-mounted windows) and screens on the hatches (mounted overhead), but we usually don’t screen the companionway entrance unless we have a bug problem. In this case we definitely had a problem. We closed up the companionway with net screening and were held hostage by the bees as they searched for fresh water on our boat. We had been advised in the past not to leave fresh water standing anywhere on the boat and we don’t, but we think they were attracted to the dew that had formed on the deck overnight.
Later we decided there were some things we needed to get done to prepare for our overnight trip that evening down to Santa Rosalía. When we got into the cockpit, we were swarmed by dozens (thankfully not hundreds) of bees. I sat down and bent over to put on my sandals (to avoid being stung by stepping on a bee barefooted) and suddenly felt a pain in my stomach. I had trapped a bee there and got a good sting that proceeded to swell up to unusual proportions over the next day. I am currently taking Benadryl to fight the swelling, but for a while I can blame the small roll above my belt on the bee sting. I had been stung only twice before in my life, and was surprised to find such a strong reaction with this sting. I had always expected that one would develop immunity from bee stings after the first few.
Talking to other cruisers, I’ve found that my body now knows when it has been stung by a bee and supposedly sends in the white blood cells en masse to take care of the problem. This is what causes the swelling, and it can be dangerous if the swelling happens in the throat. That’s why a number of cruisers take along an Epi-Pen (Epinephrine) kit to provide immediate treatment of the swelling symptom. We’ll be getting one in the future you can bet. I can stand the pain of the sting, but apparently my body can’t handle the swelling side effects. So much for getting old!
The bees kept demanding fresh water; so we sprayed the entire deck of the boat with salt water. Other cruisers found this effective, but our bees were convinced we had something they wanted down below; so they hung around. We then tried squirting them with some Windex window cleaner because the alcohol in the mixture is supposed to turn them off. I think we only improved their eyesight. We also tried Raid bug spray, but the bees just laughed at that. So we discontinued our tasks for the day, descended back into the cabin, covered up the companionway with screening material, and spent the afternoon watching two hour-long segments of the TV show “24,” the 6th season.
Yesterday we left Bahia San Francisquito at about 7:30 in the evening, expecting a 15-hour trip and an arrival at about 10:30 in the morning at Bahia Santa Rosalía. After we were on course and had the autopilot set up, we noticed the steering wheel spinning back and forth more aggressively than we had ever seen before. Looking out over the water we saw some six or more large whirlpools scattered about the surface of the water and spinning around counterclockwise about three boat lengths in diameter. As we entered a whirlpool the bow tended to turn to the right, which the autopilot corrected for. In the middle of the whirlpool the stern began tracking to the right while the bow was pushed left. This required the autopilot to correct back to the right, and so on. We assumed the whirlpools indicated where the incoming and outgoing tides were meeting, but we encountered the same whirlpools later on. I hasten to add that these were flat whirlpools, not the deep holes threatening to spin the boat to the bottom that one sees in pictures of Odysseus challenging the whirlpools of Charybdis.
We had a calm night until about midnight with just a shortened mainsail up to help the engine. The wind was just off our nose, so we couldn’t really sail the course without deviating significantly from our course and adding hours to our schedule. I was trying to catch a nap in the cabin while Sheilagh had the watch, when I was awakened by the boat plunging up and down in the waves. Within minutes we went from calm conditions to 4-6’ seas and wind speeds of 20-25 knots. We had to alter course a bit to keep the waves from broad-siding the boat. Our boat was handling the waves and wind in fine fashion, and I was enjoying the ride. Sheilagh, on the other hand, was becoming a basket case, curling up in the fetal position under the dodger in the cockpit and groaning whenever we received spray over the deck. I ordered her below and it was an order she was happy to obey. For the next two hours we rode like that, and then within a few minutes after 2 o’clock we were back to the calm conditions we had before.
From previous experience we had learned to batten down the hatches and dog down the covers on the side windows (called “port lights”) regardless of the current conditions we were in starting out in. In this case we also had the dinghy tied down well on deck and were ready for the storm. We understand that we may have been in an “elefante,” which is a blast of wind coming off the Baja side of the Sea of Cortez due to the cooling of the water and the heated nature of the land. These can be quite strong, as we found out, and they are unpredictable as well. The boat held up well, but the contents of some of our storage cabinets were in complete disarray. Most noticeable is the cabinet over the sink where we keep our plastic glasses. As soon as we open that cabinet after a blow we can expect glasses to fall out into the sink, which they did on this occasion. The rest of our trip was uneventful.
Now we are in Santa Rosalía once again and preparing the boat and ourselves for the 15-hour trip across the Sea of Cortez to San Carlos. More later . . .
July 18th – Isla la Ventana – Jim’s Blog #59
On Tuesday, July 14th, we left the anchorage in Bahia las Ánimas and went up around the corner to a well-known hurricane hole known as Puerto Don Juan. We weren’t planning to stay there, but we wanted to get an idea of the anchorage in case we needed to get there quickly. Puerto Don Juan looks exactly like a smallish volcano with steep sides nearly all the way around and a narrow entrance from the East. In previous hurricanes there have been up to 100 boats anchored there with little damage, although hurricanes are nearly always winding down significantly by the time they reach this far north. We couldn’t see how 100 boats could be shoe-horned into this smallish bay. We took a look around, measured the depths completely around the anchorage, and decided which of several locations we might prefer if we had the choice. Then we sailed on into Bahia de Los Angeles, anchoring in the roadstead opposite the town.
We had been advised that the tide ranges were quite high in this bay, up to 10’ from low tide to high tide, so we made sure to anchor in deeper water than the 20’ depth we usually look for. At a 20’ depth we need only about 100’ of chain to give us a safe 5:1 ratio of scope to depth. In this case we anchored at high tide in 30’ of water and let out 150’ of chain to give us the same ratio. By early the next morning we noted that our depth at low tide was about 20’; so we’re glad we gave ourselves some added depth.
We had no wind the entire day, just sweltering heat, which we kept at bay by the use of several fans in the boat. In the evening we went into the small town of Bahia de Los Angeles for dinner with Ed and Cornelia of ‘A Cappella’ (yes, I know we spend a lot of time with them) at Guillermo’s Restaurant and Bar on the beach. The prices were above average due to the fact that this is a tourist town, just 386 miles south of San Diego or approximately a 10-hour drive, with several air strips and a reputation for good fishing in the local waters. The food was fairly good, and then we found that tax had been added on top of the prices we thought we were paying – most of the restaurants where we have dined usually include the tax in the price of the meals. We had forgotten that the added tax is fairly common for tourist-oriented restaurants.
We did a little grocery shopping and returned to the boat for a completely windless night of sweltering heat. The next day we went back into town for internet work and some lunch and then decided to get away from the roadstead and find a cozier anchorage with a bit of a breeze. We motored about four miles to Isla la Ventana (the Window Isle) and found another volcano center to anchor in. That night we had a good warm breeze that helped dissipate the humidity. We were the only boat around, and it was extremely calm and peaceful. The almost-full moon came up just over the top of a peak, looking like the eyeball at the top of the pyramid on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill. The entire anchorage was illuminated by the moon, as we rocked lazily at anchor and slept out on the cockpit lazarettes.
We woke up to find that the tide was down at least 10’ and it appeared that we were a lot closer to shore than we had thought. The sides of this volcano are at about a 45° bank; so a 10’ loss in depth brings the edge of the volcano 10’ closer. We got in the dinghy and went to shore, where Sheilagh did some shell hunting along the edge, while I followed a trail up onto one of the hills that defined the volcano top. This anchorage is about as devoid of life as I have ever experienced, and I have done a lot of travel in the Nevada desert as part of flying gliders there. Here there was a lot of rock, several varieties of dried-up-looking cacti, and a few lizards. I kept my eye out for rattlesnakes, since several of these islands are supposed to have them, but saw none, nor did I see any small rodents, rabbits, or prairie dogs that might have fed a snake population.
The climb was a steep one on rough rocks that had a tendency to want to slide down the hill. This was not your classic volcano with a rim around the top. Instead it had a number of hills of various sizes that surrounded it, and the peak I had chosen to climb turned out to have higher peaks around it; so I did not have a view of much when I got to the top. The one moment of excitement I had was almost stepping on a foot-long lizard lying right on the path. As I jumped back the lizard didn’t move a muscle. Its skin was in the process of peeling off, its body was a dull black and brown, and it appeared to be dead to me. Then it blinked its eyes, and I decided to give it a wide berth in case it was hungry enough to take a bite out of a human leg.
‘A Cappella’ followed us into this anchorage that same day, and we got together for Mexican Train dominoes that evening on our boat. Once again Ed and Cornelia killed Sheilagh and me at the game, and Sheilagh was definitely responsible for my running up the largest score (large scores are bad) just to make sure she wasn’t the big loser. One would think after all these years that my own wife would help me out, but she seemed inclined to care only about her own score. She maintains she isn’t smart enough to cheat or to know what domino she should play to assist me, but I think that’s just an excuse. She is definitely getting back at me for some wrong she thinks I have inflicted on her in the past. In the future I’ll make sure she doesn’t sit to my right, where she can sabotage me with a move immediately prior to mine. And to think I have devoted myself to this woman for over 38 years! Where is the justice?
That night we had very strong winds and waves coming at us from the Baja peninsula nearly all night through the entrance to the cove. In these conditions we are always worried that our anchor may not hold. Therefore we leave the GPS and depth sounder on all night, and periodically get up to check on our position and our depth. I don’t think Sheilagh got much sleep, but I just woke up at the usual times to relieve myself and found that we hadn’t moved at all and that our depth was still good. So there IS a benefit in having to visit the head several times a night.
This morning we woke up to see what appeared to be a dead and bloated sea creature drifting into the anchorage with the tide, while a dolphin kept trying to push it back out of the anchorage. We finally decided that the dead creature was probably the mate or offspring of the active dolphin, which was unwilling to let it go. The carcass was in such bad shape that it must have been dead for several days, but the mate kept pushing it back against the incoming tide for several hours until the tide turned and the carcass floated out of the anchorage. It was sad to see this scenario play out, suspecting as we did that the active dolphin was doing its best to stay connected to its mate or child.
Russ and Debbie brought their boat, ‘Zephyra,’ into the anchorage today, and we got together with them, Ed, and Cornelia for a BYOBAA (Bring Your Own Booze and Appetizer) cocktail party that we might have had in a dinghy raft-up if it weren’t for the strong winds and swell that started up in the late afternoon. As it was, we had the party on Zephyra, and had to fight our way in our dinghy through some strong swells and spray to get there. The strong winds are continuing, as is usually the case here during the summer. As the land cools off in the evening the air on the hills rushes down to the warmer sea and can bring winds of up to 60 knots. So far we have only experienced 25-knot winds and are not eager to experience the higher speed winds.
In the middle of the night we had our first thunderstorm with a lot of lightning and thunder, but only a few drops of rain. It appears that it is so hot here that the moisture evaporates before it hits the ground. This marks at least 9 months without rain since we started cruising. When we first saw the lightning we quickly put our two portable GPS navigation units in our oven, along with a hand-held VHF radio and Sheilagh’s portable computer. We’ve been told that the stove oven (or a microwave oven) is the best place to protect the electronics on a boat in the case of a lightning strike. It may or may not be true, but the items we were trying to protect are essential to both navigation and safety. With GPS and the radio we could get by even if all the other electronics on the boat get fried.
We will be starting our trip over to the mainland side early next week to park our boat for a two-month visit back to the U.S. during August and September. Now, if we can just find enough relatives to visit during that time, we can forego the need for our condo in San Diego, which is still being rented to one of our nieces. The secret is to visit a lot of relatives and friends for only a few days each in order to maintain good family and friend relationships that could disintegrate if we stay longer than the three-day limit – the time it takes for visitors and fish to start smelling bad. More later . . .
We had been advised that the tide ranges were quite high in this bay, up to 10’ from low tide to high tide, so we made sure to anchor in deeper water than the 20’ depth we usually look for. At a 20’ depth we need only about 100’ of chain to give us a safe 5:1 ratio of scope to depth. In this case we anchored at high tide in 30’ of water and let out 150’ of chain to give us the same ratio. By early the next morning we noted that our depth at low tide was about 20’; so we’re glad we gave ourselves some added depth.
We had no wind the entire day, just sweltering heat, which we kept at bay by the use of several fans in the boat. In the evening we went into the small town of Bahia de Los Angeles for dinner with Ed and Cornelia of ‘A Cappella’ (yes, I know we spend a lot of time with them) at Guillermo’s Restaurant and Bar on the beach. The prices were above average due to the fact that this is a tourist town, just 386 miles south of San Diego or approximately a 10-hour drive, with several air strips and a reputation for good fishing in the local waters. The food was fairly good, and then we found that tax had been added on top of the prices we thought we were paying – most of the restaurants where we have dined usually include the tax in the price of the meals. We had forgotten that the added tax is fairly common for tourist-oriented restaurants.
We did a little grocery shopping and returned to the boat for a completely windless night of sweltering heat. The next day we went back into town for internet work and some lunch and then decided to get away from the roadstead and find a cozier anchorage with a bit of a breeze. We motored about four miles to Isla la Ventana (the Window Isle) and found another volcano center to anchor in. That night we had a good warm breeze that helped dissipate the humidity. We were the only boat around, and it was extremely calm and peaceful. The almost-full moon came up just over the top of a peak, looking like the eyeball at the top of the pyramid on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill. The entire anchorage was illuminated by the moon, as we rocked lazily at anchor and slept out on the cockpit lazarettes.
We woke up to find that the tide was down at least 10’ and it appeared that we were a lot closer to shore than we had thought. The sides of this volcano are at about a 45° bank; so a 10’ loss in depth brings the edge of the volcano 10’ closer. We got in the dinghy and went to shore, where Sheilagh did some shell hunting along the edge, while I followed a trail up onto one of the hills that defined the volcano top. This anchorage is about as devoid of life as I have ever experienced, and I have done a lot of travel in the Nevada desert as part of flying gliders there. Here there was a lot of rock, several varieties of dried-up-looking cacti, and a few lizards. I kept my eye out for rattlesnakes, since several of these islands are supposed to have them, but saw none, nor did I see any small rodents, rabbits, or prairie dogs that might have fed a snake population.
The climb was a steep one on rough rocks that had a tendency to want to slide down the hill. This was not your classic volcano with a rim around the top. Instead it had a number of hills of various sizes that surrounded it, and the peak I had chosen to climb turned out to have higher peaks around it; so I did not have a view of much when I got to the top. The one moment of excitement I had was almost stepping on a foot-long lizard lying right on the path. As I jumped back the lizard didn’t move a muscle. Its skin was in the process of peeling off, its body was a dull black and brown, and it appeared to be dead to me. Then it blinked its eyes, and I decided to give it a wide berth in case it was hungry enough to take a bite out of a human leg.
‘A Cappella’ followed us into this anchorage that same day, and we got together for Mexican Train dominoes that evening on our boat. Once again Ed and Cornelia killed Sheilagh and me at the game, and Sheilagh was definitely responsible for my running up the largest score (large scores are bad) just to make sure she wasn’t the big loser. One would think after all these years that my own wife would help me out, but she seemed inclined to care only about her own score. She maintains she isn’t smart enough to cheat or to know what domino she should play to assist me, but I think that’s just an excuse. She is definitely getting back at me for some wrong she thinks I have inflicted on her in the past. In the future I’ll make sure she doesn’t sit to my right, where she can sabotage me with a move immediately prior to mine. And to think I have devoted myself to this woman for over 38 years! Where is the justice?
That night we had very strong winds and waves coming at us from the Baja peninsula nearly all night through the entrance to the cove. In these conditions we are always worried that our anchor may not hold. Therefore we leave the GPS and depth sounder on all night, and periodically get up to check on our position and our depth. I don’t think Sheilagh got much sleep, but I just woke up at the usual times to relieve myself and found that we hadn’t moved at all and that our depth was still good. So there IS a benefit in having to visit the head several times a night.
This morning we woke up to see what appeared to be a dead and bloated sea creature drifting into the anchorage with the tide, while a dolphin kept trying to push it back out of the anchorage. We finally decided that the dead creature was probably the mate or offspring of the active dolphin, which was unwilling to let it go. The carcass was in such bad shape that it must have been dead for several days, but the mate kept pushing it back against the incoming tide for several hours until the tide turned and the carcass floated out of the anchorage. It was sad to see this scenario play out, suspecting as we did that the active dolphin was doing its best to stay connected to its mate or child.
Russ and Debbie brought their boat, ‘Zephyra,’ into the anchorage today, and we got together with them, Ed, and Cornelia for a BYOBAA (Bring Your Own Booze and Appetizer) cocktail party that we might have had in a dinghy raft-up if it weren’t for the strong winds and swell that started up in the late afternoon. As it was, we had the party on Zephyra, and had to fight our way in our dinghy through some strong swells and spray to get there. The strong winds are continuing, as is usually the case here during the summer. As the land cools off in the evening the air on the hills rushes down to the warmer sea and can bring winds of up to 60 knots. So far we have only experienced 25-knot winds and are not eager to experience the higher speed winds.
In the middle of the night we had our first thunderstorm with a lot of lightning and thunder, but only a few drops of rain. It appears that it is so hot here that the moisture evaporates before it hits the ground. This marks at least 9 months without rain since we started cruising. When we first saw the lightning we quickly put our two portable GPS navigation units in our oven, along with a hand-held VHF radio and Sheilagh’s portable computer. We’ve been told that the stove oven (or a microwave oven) is the best place to protect the electronics on a boat in the case of a lightning strike. It may or may not be true, but the items we were trying to protect are essential to both navigation and safety. With GPS and the radio we could get by even if all the other electronics on the boat get fried.
We will be starting our trip over to the mainland side early next week to park our boat for a two-month visit back to the U.S. during August and September. Now, if we can just find enough relatives to visit during that time, we can forego the need for our condo in San Diego, which is still being rented to one of our nieces. The secret is to visit a lot of relatives and friends for only a few days each in order to maintain good family and friend relationships that could disintegrate if we stay longer than the three-day limit – the time it takes for visitors and fish to start smelling bad. More later . . .
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
July 13th – Bahía las Ánimas – Jim’s Blog #58
We’re now about two-thirds of the way up the inside eastern edge of the Baja Peninsula. Our log says that we have now cruised for about 3,400 nautical miles (approximately 3,800 statute miles). At an average speed of 5-6 knots, that amounts to approximately 620 hours of sailing/motoring during the 8.5 months that we have been cruising since the beginning of November. If we assume that an average day of travel lasts about 9 hours to get from one anchorage to another, we have spent nearly 70 days (out of the 250 that we have been cruising) actually getting from place to place. So generally we’ve been relaxing in anchorages over 70% of the time that we’ve been out. And of the 70 days that we have been sailing/motoring, we have encountered only a handful of days that have been uncomfortable. Not bad for an eight-month vacation!
We left Santa Rosalía on Thursday, July 10th and motor-sailed to Ensenada la Trinidad, a small dent in the coastline about 10 hours north. The next real bay was about 80 nautical miles north, but would have required that we leave in the afternoon and sail all night to get there in daylight. We prefer anchoring at night and getting a good night’s sleep, rather than stand 3-hour watches all night where we never really get the rest we need. Ensenada la Trinidad, however, turned out to be a rockin’ and rollin’ anchorage with little protection from the easterly swells, so we had to wedge ourselves into our bunks and ignore the constant rolling motion of the boat. We left early the next morning to get out of the constant rolling of the boat and to make sure we would get into Bahía San Francisquito early in the afternoon.
On the way up to Trinidad we were able to sail a bit, and were enjoying the quiet, when we heard the sound of a very large snort. Looking around, we saw a very large whale about 3 boat lengths away from us on the port (left) side (probably 120’ away), expelling breath through his blowhole, and paralleling our course. The distance from the back of his dorsal fin to the front of the body that could be seen above the water was at least 30’ long. It was not a Gray Whale, since Grays don’t have a dorsal fin. So we went to our sea life identification book, and decided the beast was a Fin Whale. Checking out the diagram of the whale in the book to determine the size, we found that we had been viewing about one-third the length of the entire whale. That means we had about a 90’ whale taking a look at us.
We did the whale look-up later to determine the full size, but at the time we were more than aware that we had a monster following us, and our thoughts immediately turned to what a whale that size could do to our boat if we were mistaken for a whale of the opposite sex. We held our breath, grabbed a handhold, and attempted to get a picture of the whale. We were too flustered to get a good photo and just at that time the whale went down, the wind died, the sails started flapping, and we became absorbed in getting the sails furled. After we started the engine and handled the sails, we noted the whale now on our starboard side about twice as far away and it soon disappeared. Apparently he/she passed under our stern while we were otherwise engaged.
Reading further about Fin Whales, we found that there are several sedentary populations of these whales in the Gulf of California (our name for the Sea of Cortez) and that they occasionally make close approaches to divers as they pass – almost as if they are curious. We assume this whale was simply observing us and had no other plans for us or our boat. It was certainly an eye-opening experience, and I couldn’t help but think that we were awfully close to harpoon distance, if we had been whalers.
Later that same day we were approached by three dolphins that played around our bow for at least 10 minutes. We got some movie footage of the dolphins, but they didn´t show up very well. Here´s a still of two of them that we got.
On Friday, due to a lack of wind, we motored up to Bahía San Francisquito where we ran into ‘A Cappella’ and ‘Zephyra’ waiting for us in the anchorage there. ‘A Cappella’ had left two days previously in the afternoon and went straight to this bay. ‘Zephyra’ left a day ahead of us and also stopped off at Ensenada de Trinidad. Also in Bahia San Francisquito were several large, rusty fishing boats that were anchored during the day to let their crews sleep; so they could catch and process squid all night. When we first showed up we were invited to cocktails with Ed and Cornelia on ‘A Cappella’ along with Russ and Debbie from ‘Zephyra.’ It was wonderful to sleep on a boat that was steady in the water.
We stayed an extra day, and invited the other two crews to cocktails on our boat that afternoon. After two days of sailing/motoring, it was enjoyable to sit and do nothing all day. I got hot at one point in the afternoon and stepped off the side of the boat into what I expected would be the 80° water I had experienced in Conception Bay. Not so! The water was about 70° and a shock to my body that I didn’t expect. It reminded me of my pre-teen summer ritual at the local swimming pool, where I used to dawdle around the edge of the pool dreading the moment of contact with the water, even though I knew my body would get used to it almost immediately. I must have wasted hours getting up the nerve to get wet, and I still have that initial reluctance to get wet unless the temperature of the water is at least 80°.
That night the fishing boats did their nightly processing so close to our boats that we could smell the squid, hear the Mexican music on the boats, and even observe the assembly line on a couple of the boats. It was definitely time to leave. As we departed at about 8AM the next day, we couldn’t help but notice the tin cans, food wrappers, plastic bottles, and other trash floating in the bay from the fishing boats. It occurred to us that these decrepit boats probably didn’t have holding tanks; so swimming in their vicinity was not an option.
All three sailboats brought up our anchors within a few minutes of each other today, and headed north to Bahía las Animas. The water was absolutely flat most of the day, not a breath of wind until about 2PM. Sheilagh and I kept cool by watering each other down with the fresh-water hose in the cockpit. In the course of the day all three boats encountered large groups of dolphins playing together and possibly feeding in a couple of locations. Several of the dolphins split off and rode our bow wave, while we saw several baby dolphins playing in the group. We saw no whales in the last two days, but we did see a seal lying on its back in the water with its flippers extended up out of the water and lacking only a good novel and an umbrella drink to be totally content (at least from our perspective).
This is one of my favorite seats - on the bow pulpit facing back toward the boat - from which I can see the wildlife, particularly dolphins swimming below
Tonight the cocktails were on ‘Zephyra,’ a very roomy ketch with a center cockpit, whose original home was Lake Tahoe. Russ and Debbie bought the boat there, did some chartering with visitors to the lake, and eventually transported it down to the San Francisco Bay Area to prepare it for cruising. Russ entertained us with a description of the geology of the area that he had learned about thirty years ago, and had retained an amazing amount of information from the course. We can see a perfectly shaped volcano a bit north of us with an absolutely flat top. We are anchored near some lava cones that show evidence of having expelled gas some years ago, forming caves in the rock. We may do some exploring tomorrow. More later . .
We left Santa Rosalía on Thursday, July 10th and motor-sailed to Ensenada la Trinidad, a small dent in the coastline about 10 hours north. The next real bay was about 80 nautical miles north, but would have required that we leave in the afternoon and sail all night to get there in daylight. We prefer anchoring at night and getting a good night’s sleep, rather than stand 3-hour watches all night where we never really get the rest we need. Ensenada la Trinidad, however, turned out to be a rockin’ and rollin’ anchorage with little protection from the easterly swells, so we had to wedge ourselves into our bunks and ignore the constant rolling motion of the boat. We left early the next morning to get out of the constant rolling of the boat and to make sure we would get into Bahía San Francisquito early in the afternoon.
On the way up to Trinidad we were able to sail a bit, and were enjoying the quiet, when we heard the sound of a very large snort. Looking around, we saw a very large whale about 3 boat lengths away from us on the port (left) side (probably 120’ away), expelling breath through his blowhole, and paralleling our course. The distance from the back of his dorsal fin to the front of the body that could be seen above the water was at least 30’ long. It was not a Gray Whale, since Grays don’t have a dorsal fin. So we went to our sea life identification book, and decided the beast was a Fin Whale. Checking out the diagram of the whale in the book to determine the size, we found that we had been viewing about one-third the length of the entire whale. That means we had about a 90’ whale taking a look at us.
We did the whale look-up later to determine the full size, but at the time we were more than aware that we had a monster following us, and our thoughts immediately turned to what a whale that size could do to our boat if we were mistaken for a whale of the opposite sex. We held our breath, grabbed a handhold, and attempted to get a picture of the whale. We were too flustered to get a good photo and just at that time the whale went down, the wind died, the sails started flapping, and we became absorbed in getting the sails furled. After we started the engine and handled the sails, we noted the whale now on our starboard side about twice as far away and it soon disappeared. Apparently he/she passed under our stern while we were otherwise engaged.
Reading further about Fin Whales, we found that there are several sedentary populations of these whales in the Gulf of California (our name for the Sea of Cortez) and that they occasionally make close approaches to divers as they pass – almost as if they are curious. We assume this whale was simply observing us and had no other plans for us or our boat. It was certainly an eye-opening experience, and I couldn’t help but think that we were awfully close to harpoon distance, if we had been whalers.
Later that same day we were approached by three dolphins that played around our bow for at least 10 minutes. We got some movie footage of the dolphins, but they didn´t show up very well. Here´s a still of two of them that we got.
On Friday, due to a lack of wind, we motored up to Bahía San Francisquito where we ran into ‘A Cappella’ and ‘Zephyra’ waiting for us in the anchorage there. ‘A Cappella’ had left two days previously in the afternoon and went straight to this bay. ‘Zephyra’ left a day ahead of us and also stopped off at Ensenada de Trinidad. Also in Bahia San Francisquito were several large, rusty fishing boats that were anchored during the day to let their crews sleep; so they could catch and process squid all night. When we first showed up we were invited to cocktails with Ed and Cornelia on ‘A Cappella’ along with Russ and Debbie from ‘Zephyra.’ It was wonderful to sleep on a boat that was steady in the water.
We stayed an extra day, and invited the other two crews to cocktails on our boat that afternoon. After two days of sailing/motoring, it was enjoyable to sit and do nothing all day. I got hot at one point in the afternoon and stepped off the side of the boat into what I expected would be the 80° water I had experienced in Conception Bay. Not so! The water was about 70° and a shock to my body that I didn’t expect. It reminded me of my pre-teen summer ritual at the local swimming pool, where I used to dawdle around the edge of the pool dreading the moment of contact with the water, even though I knew my body would get used to it almost immediately. I must have wasted hours getting up the nerve to get wet, and I still have that initial reluctance to get wet unless the temperature of the water is at least 80°.
That night the fishing boats did their nightly processing so close to our boats that we could smell the squid, hear the Mexican music on the boats, and even observe the assembly line on a couple of the boats. It was definitely time to leave. As we departed at about 8AM the next day, we couldn’t help but notice the tin cans, food wrappers, plastic bottles, and other trash floating in the bay from the fishing boats. It occurred to us that these decrepit boats probably didn’t have holding tanks; so swimming in their vicinity was not an option.
All three sailboats brought up our anchors within a few minutes of each other today, and headed north to Bahía las Animas. The water was absolutely flat most of the day, not a breath of wind until about 2PM. Sheilagh and I kept cool by watering each other down with the fresh-water hose in the cockpit. In the course of the day all three boats encountered large groups of dolphins playing together and possibly feeding in a couple of locations. Several of the dolphins split off and rode our bow wave, while we saw several baby dolphins playing in the group. We saw no whales in the last two days, but we did see a seal lying on its back in the water with its flippers extended up out of the water and lacking only a good novel and an umbrella drink to be totally content (at least from our perspective).
This is one of my favorite seats - on the bow pulpit facing back toward the boat - from which I can see the wildlife, particularly dolphins swimming belowTonight the cocktails were on ‘Zephyra,’ a very roomy ketch with a center cockpit, whose original home was Lake Tahoe. Russ and Debbie bought the boat there, did some chartering with visitors to the lake, and eventually transported it down to the San Francisco Bay Area to prepare it for cruising. Russ entertained us with a description of the geology of the area that he had learned about thirty years ago, and had retained an amazing amount of information from the course. We can see a perfectly shaped volcano a bit north of us with an absolutely flat top. We are anchored near some lava cones that show evidence of having expelled gas some years ago, forming caves in the rock. We may do some exploring tomorrow. More later . .
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
July 9th – Santa Rosalía – Jim’s Blog #57
We have come to the last major town on the Baja side of the Sea of Cortez, which is called Santa Rosalía – the last one of any size from which we can provision our boat as we head further north into the Sea of Cortez. Santa Rosalía is an old copper mining town, originally financed by the Rothschilds in France in the latter part of the 1800’s. It had French management and engineers involved in creating one of the major copper-producing mines in the world in the early 1900’s. Currently the main industry here is squid fishing, with some manganese mining still going on. On the day we arrived, Santa Rosalía was celebrating the birthday of the town some 123 years ago (1885), and the backdrop on the stage that was set up for the dancers showed a cauldron of ore being poured on one side and a giant squid on the other.
A picture of me along with Debbie and Russ of 'Zephyra' and Cornelia and Ed of 'A Cappella' in front of one of the engines used to tow the ore cars out of the mines - as we head out on the town
What kind of dancing do you suppose we saw that evening? Not Mexican, not Flamenco, but belly dancing by some young girls who didn’t appear to have any bones in their bodies – they were so flexible. We’re still trying to understand how belly dancing fits into the Mexican culture. And these girls were tall and flexible in comparison with the short, rather stocky Mexican women one sees in these towns. These dancers had been brought in on a “cultural exchange” program of some sort, probably performing in fiestas around Mexico during the summer for a stipend for their organization. They certainly didn’t look like the typical Mexican girls that we have seen.
The French influence is quite strong here and the town is unlike any of the other Mexican towns we’ve seen. No adobe buildings that look as if they emerged from the soil, as we have seen everywhere else! Most of the buildings are made of wood that was imported from the Pacific Northwest, since the place has no natural resources other than the ore that was discovered in 1868. The French built company homes for the workers, whom they imported from neighboring towns. They also had had to import all building materials, mining materials, water, and food for the workers. A smelter was built near the port, which was responsible for covering the town in dirty soot while it was operating. Nowadays, it seems to be a fairly clean little town.
One interesting fact about the town is that it was built by engineers rather than architects; so there was little thought given to quality of life versus the expediency of getting the ore out with the minimum effort necessary. Identical houses were built for the workers with the minimum rooms necessary to house them when they weren’t in the mines. We noticed a graveyard at the top of the nearest hill overlooking the town and sitting on the mine itself. Apparently putting the dead on top of the hill was a way to avoid having bodies in the way down below in case the management needed to run a railroad track through a ravine or around a hill.
A shorter Eiffel Tower on the church in Santa Rosalía
The church is famous because of the engineer who designed it, Alexander Gustave Eiffel. Yes, he’s the same person who designed the Eiffel tower in Paris. In this case he had designed a galvanized iron church for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. The French consortium running the mine bought the church in the 1990’s, broke it down into sections, and shipped it around Cape Horn to Santa Rosalía, where it was reassembled and still stands. Apparently the early French managers had not planned for a church, but the rumbles of dissent from the townspeople caused later managers to reconsider and purchase the church. It is painted white on the outside to reflect the sun, but it still seems quite hot inside.
We took some time while in the marina here to defrost the refrigerator, which was beginning to smell a little too much like dead fish and was not making ice very well. In doing that we discovered that one of our gallon plastic oil bottles in the bilge had sprung a slow leak and had covered the bottom of the bilge with an inch or so of water and oil combined. We discovered that our plastic bilge pump was nearly useless in getting the oil out of the bilge, so we had to soak up the oil in oil pads and rags to get the bilge clean. This is one of those examples of what can happen to increase the scope of a small one-hour project to one that takes half a day or more.
We also discovered that a large bird decided to take up residence on top of our mast, announcing its presence with large white splotches on the deck. We dislodged the bird by pounding on the forestay, but it took several repetitions of this process to get him to move to another boat. I am now considering ways to send a jolt of electricity up the mast in the future, but I’m afraid of what it might do to our radar and the wind instruments at the top. The best approach we’ve heard of is to put up sharp-pointed, stiff wires at the top of the mast to make it a highly uncomfortable place to land.
We climbed to the top of the French Mesa this morning to view the museum, where we saw mining equipment, pictures of miners from long ago, and even office equipment from that time. We saw a Royal typewriter that was at least 100 years old, along with a calculating machine, an old ammeter, a primitive telephone and switchboard, and many other objects. There was a gas tester with several tubes indicating the types of gas each tube was supposed to test – this had been manufactured in Glendale, California, and looked remarkably well-made for an instrument that was 100 years old.
Sheilagh in front of the Hotel Francés along with another locomotive from the old mine
We also visited the Hotel Francés, which had been rebuilt in 1920 after a fire. It is a two-story structure that duplicates the original building, and is an operating hotel today at $65 a night. It has rooms around an internal courtyard with a square “swimming pool” in the middle. There is no room to do any real swimming in the pool; so
I imagine it is used as a way to cool off periodically when reading on one of the lounge chairs.
The inner courtyard of the Hotel Francés
Everywhere in Santa Rosalía are large pieces of mining equipment on display from the turn of the last century. I could swear the townspeople have put a sign on every piece of broken down equipment in town rather than cart it away to be disposed of.
But now the industries are tourism and squid fishing. The squid fishermen go out in their pangas at twilight with bright lights on their boats to attract the squid to the surface. We can see dozens of lights flickering over the surface of the water offshore each evening. We can tell when they return because the processing of the squid causes a stench that seems to linger over the marina until a wind comes up. The water in the marina is not anything I would swim in, and we are a bit tired of trying to ignore the smell. Tomorrow we will be heading north to get into clean air and water once again. We will be cruising up in the Bay of Los Angeles (“Angeles” is pronounced with a hard “g”) for the next few weeks before we sail back to the mainland side of Mexico to put up our boat for a couple of months and return to the U.S. We’ll have a few more blogs before that happens. More later . .
A picture of me along with Debbie and Russ of 'Zephyra' and Cornelia and Ed of 'A Cappella' in front of one of the engines used to tow the ore cars out of the mines - as we head out on the townWhat kind of dancing do you suppose we saw that evening? Not Mexican, not Flamenco, but belly dancing by some young girls who didn’t appear to have any bones in their bodies – they were so flexible. We’re still trying to understand how belly dancing fits into the Mexican culture. And these girls were tall and flexible in comparison with the short, rather stocky Mexican women one sees in these towns. These dancers had been brought in on a “cultural exchange” program of some sort, probably performing in fiestas around Mexico during the summer for a stipend for their organization. They certainly didn’t look like the typical Mexican girls that we have seen.
The French influence is quite strong here and the town is unlike any of the other Mexican towns we’ve seen. No adobe buildings that look as if they emerged from the soil, as we have seen everywhere else! Most of the buildings are made of wood that was imported from the Pacific Northwest, since the place has no natural resources other than the ore that was discovered in 1868. The French built company homes for the workers, whom they imported from neighboring towns. They also had had to import all building materials, mining materials, water, and food for the workers. A smelter was built near the port, which was responsible for covering the town in dirty soot while it was operating. Nowadays, it seems to be a fairly clean little town.
One interesting fact about the town is that it was built by engineers rather than architects; so there was little thought given to quality of life versus the expediency of getting the ore out with the minimum effort necessary. Identical houses were built for the workers with the minimum rooms necessary to house them when they weren’t in the mines. We noticed a graveyard at the top of the nearest hill overlooking the town and sitting on the mine itself. Apparently putting the dead on top of the hill was a way to avoid having bodies in the way down below in case the management needed to run a railroad track through a ravine or around a hill.
A shorter Eiffel Tower on the church in Santa RosalíaThe church is famous because of the engineer who designed it, Alexander Gustave Eiffel. Yes, he’s the same person who designed the Eiffel tower in Paris. In this case he had designed a galvanized iron church for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. The French consortium running the mine bought the church in the 1990’s, broke it down into sections, and shipped it around Cape Horn to Santa Rosalía, where it was reassembled and still stands. Apparently the early French managers had not planned for a church, but the rumbles of dissent from the townspeople caused later managers to reconsider and purchase the church. It is painted white on the outside to reflect the sun, but it still seems quite hot inside.
We took some time while in the marina here to defrost the refrigerator, which was beginning to smell a little too much like dead fish and was not making ice very well. In doing that we discovered that one of our gallon plastic oil bottles in the bilge had sprung a slow leak and had covered the bottom of the bilge with an inch or so of water and oil combined. We discovered that our plastic bilge pump was nearly useless in getting the oil out of the bilge, so we had to soak up the oil in oil pads and rags to get the bilge clean. This is one of those examples of what can happen to increase the scope of a small one-hour project to one that takes half a day or more.
We also discovered that a large bird decided to take up residence on top of our mast, announcing its presence with large white splotches on the deck. We dislodged the bird by pounding on the forestay, but it took several repetitions of this process to get him to move to another boat. I am now considering ways to send a jolt of electricity up the mast in the future, but I’m afraid of what it might do to our radar and the wind instruments at the top. The best approach we’ve heard of is to put up sharp-pointed, stiff wires at the top of the mast to make it a highly uncomfortable place to land.
We climbed to the top of the French Mesa this morning to view the museum, where we saw mining equipment, pictures of miners from long ago, and even office equipment from that time. We saw a Royal typewriter that was at least 100 years old, along with a calculating machine, an old ammeter, a primitive telephone and switchboard, and many other objects. There was a gas tester with several tubes indicating the types of gas each tube was supposed to test – this had been manufactured in Glendale, California, and looked remarkably well-made for an instrument that was 100 years old.
Sheilagh in front of the Hotel Francés along with another locomotive from the old mine We also visited the Hotel Francés, which had been rebuilt in 1920 after a fire. It is a two-story structure that duplicates the original building, and is an operating hotel today at $65 a night. It has rooms around an internal courtyard with a square “swimming pool” in the middle. There is no room to do any real swimming in the pool; so
I imagine it is used as a way to cool off periodically when reading on one of the lounge chairs.The inner courtyard of the Hotel Francés
Everywhere in Santa Rosalía are large pieces of mining equipment on display from the turn of the last century. I could swear the townspeople have put a sign on every piece of broken down equipment in town rather than cart it away to be disposed of.
But now the industries are tourism and squid fishing. The squid fishermen go out in their pangas at twilight with bright lights on their boats to attract the squid to the surface. We can see dozens of lights flickering over the surface of the water offshore each evening. We can tell when they return because the processing of the squid causes a stench that seems to linger over the marina until a wind comes up. The water in the marina is not anything I would swim in, and we are a bit tired of trying to ignore the smell. Tomorrow we will be heading north to get into clean air and water once again. We will be cruising up in the Bay of Los Angeles (“Angeles” is pronounced with a hard “g”) for the next few weeks before we sail back to the mainland side of Mexico to put up our boat for a couple of months and return to the U.S. We’ll have a few more blogs before that happens. More later . .
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
July 5th – El Burro in Conception Bay – Jim’s Blog #56
We just completed a very enjoyable 4th of July celebration here in El Burro Cove yesterday in one of the palapa-like halls that line the edge of the beach. A former cruiser, named Gary, gave up the cruising life and established himself in a beach house here about 15 years ago, and he sponsors a hotdog barbecue on the 4th of July each year. By Thursday night there were some 20 sailboats and a couple of power boats anchored in El Burro Cove and the neighboring Coyote Cove. At noon on Friday we all convened in the palapa on the beach with potluck dishes from each cruising boat and several hundred hotdogs furnished by Gary. The local Bertha’s Restaurant and Bar were on site to sell cold beer.
There were some 40-50 cruisers there, along with some of Gary’s Mexican neighbors. It was a chance to meet face-to-face with cruisers whose voices we have been hearing on the radio networks for the past several months, but whom we had never met. We had already met about half of the cruisers in get-togethers in various anchorages and marinas along the Mexican mainland coast and along the Baja coast. This was a chance to meet some "old hands" who had been cruising in the Sea of Cortez for several seasons and who could advise us of what we needed to consider in our first summer. We learned that the VHF radio frequency for cruisers further north is channel 68 instead of 16; so we probably avoided complete communication isolation by learning that fact.
One of the highlights was a rubber duck race, where some 50 numbered ducks of various sizes and colors were entered in the race. We first had a chance to check them out in the duck paddock with fact sheets about the success of each of the ducks in previous races, and then we had to put money on them to get them selected for the race. Having observed the winner of a previous race in Tenacatita, I put my money on that duck and waited to collect my winnings. The ducks were dumped out of a bucket about 10 yards out in the gentle surf that lapped the beach, while all the attendees watched from shore. The first thing I noticed was that my duck was dumped on its side and never had a chance to get upright and start using its webbed feet. My duck ended up way back in the pack in a very ho-hum race. I can only believe that my duck would have won if the surf had been as large as it was in Tenacatita and if my duck had been able to get up on its feet and do some serious surfing. One spectator comment was “I can’t believe so many adult cruisers even care about this rubber duck race – don’t we have anything more important to do than this?” The fairly universal response was “If you mean in addition to visiting and drinking beer, then no!”
The day ended with a less than imposing fireworks display, but actually quite a big deal for this little cove, which has one bar and one small store - and the 4th is not a Mexican holiday at all. Various local families drove in and parked, putting their children on blankets on the ground or having them sit in the back of pickups. Plastic chairs were everywhere; so everyone had a place to sit during the fireworks. The weather had moderated early in the morning and a good breeze kept us fairly comfortable all day, as long as we stayed out of the sun. Gary had erected a large umbrella in the fairly shallow water in front of his house, along with a flat floating table. Sheilagh and I spent some of the day up to our chests in warm water under the umbrella with our drinks on the floating table that was tied to the umbrella – a poor man’s hot tub and sauna.
During the earlier part of the week we cruisers got together for shopping at the one “tienda”, playing Mexican Train dominoes, eating at the one “palapa,” and generally visiting from boat to boat. We also found time to do some solo kayaking, swimming, reading, and napping. I resolved to swim around the fleet every day, which I did in the later part of the afternoon to keep from sunburning my back. As the fleet grew in size from day to day, the swim got longer and longer, but it was a great way to exercise without overheating. I hope to keep it up in the future as a way to limit beer belly development.
Swimming continuously for 30-60 minutes gives one a lot of time to think and remember the thousands of other times I've had my head in the water under similar circumstances. I remember first learning to swim in one of those round shallow fountains in the local park (3’ deep at the center and 1’ at the edges) where the water was kept warm by the uncontrolled output of children with no bathroom nearby. I progressed through Minnow, Flying Fish, and Shark levels in the local YMCA program, spending more time on the diving board than actually swimming laps. I was on a local swim team and hated long distance swimming, preferring short sprints and diving competitions. All I could think about with my face in the water was the grueling punishment my body was being put through by a coach who had nothing better to do than blow a whistle and think of additional tortures for us – naturally he was fat and needed the exercise more than we did.
In a small high school and college I attended we didn’t have a coach; so we swimmers became our own coaches, and I continued to specialize in short sprints and diving to avoid the long swims. Then along came the navy, and we got to show our ability to jump from 18’ up (simulating the side of a ship), to swim underwater for 25 yards (simulating the avoidance of burning fuel above us), and then to swim a mile with our clothing on (simulating swimming to shore or to a rescue vessel). Since most of our missions were over cold water that wouldn’t support a human body for more than a few minutes, I’m not sure why we needed to swim the long distance, but I learned to like the long swims. Later in life we lived near a lake, and I swam a mile at a time and enjoyed the experience. I used to rope a kayak to my body to warn water skiers that I was there and to serve as my method for getting back when I had finished the swimming I wanted to do.
In all these swimming situations I have had an opportunity to revisit my previous swimming experiences and the thoughts I had at those times. It’s not as if one can swim with an IPod and headphones to listen to music or books, or to distract one from doing any thinking. Swimming long distances forces one to meditate more than any other activity I know of. Only long walks without music offer a similar opportunity, but the view is usually too distracting to do any serious meditation. When I am swimming in the ocean or a lake, there is usually very little to see in the water when the bottom is more than 10’ deep, and that allows for a singular opportunity to be alone with one’s thoughts. Having said all this I have not yet come up with any earth-shattering revelations, solutions to the world’s problems, or a grand unified theory for the origins of the universe. However, I may have produced one of the above and forgotten it by the time I finished my swim and was ready to record my thoughts.
This is going to be short, because there just hasn’t been much excitement to write about. We spend our time trying to keep cool in the heat. Tomorrow we are heading north to Santa Rosalia, which should offer more to write about. More later . . .
There were some 40-50 cruisers there, along with some of Gary’s Mexican neighbors. It was a chance to meet face-to-face with cruisers whose voices we have been hearing on the radio networks for the past several months, but whom we had never met. We had already met about half of the cruisers in get-togethers in various anchorages and marinas along the Mexican mainland coast and along the Baja coast. This was a chance to meet some "old hands" who had been cruising in the Sea of Cortez for several seasons and who could advise us of what we needed to consider in our first summer. We learned that the VHF radio frequency for cruisers further north is channel 68 instead of 16; so we probably avoided complete communication isolation by learning that fact.
One of the highlights was a rubber duck race, where some 50 numbered ducks of various sizes and colors were entered in the race. We first had a chance to check them out in the duck paddock with fact sheets about the success of each of the ducks in previous races, and then we had to put money on them to get them selected for the race. Having observed the winner of a previous race in Tenacatita, I put my money on that duck and waited to collect my winnings. The ducks were dumped out of a bucket about 10 yards out in the gentle surf that lapped the beach, while all the attendees watched from shore. The first thing I noticed was that my duck was dumped on its side and never had a chance to get upright and start using its webbed feet. My duck ended up way back in the pack in a very ho-hum race. I can only believe that my duck would have won if the surf had been as large as it was in Tenacatita and if my duck had been able to get up on its feet and do some serious surfing. One spectator comment was “I can’t believe so many adult cruisers even care about this rubber duck race – don’t we have anything more important to do than this?” The fairly universal response was “If you mean in addition to visiting and drinking beer, then no!”
The day ended with a less than imposing fireworks display, but actually quite a big deal for this little cove, which has one bar and one small store - and the 4th is not a Mexican holiday at all. Various local families drove in and parked, putting their children on blankets on the ground or having them sit in the back of pickups. Plastic chairs were everywhere; so everyone had a place to sit during the fireworks. The weather had moderated early in the morning and a good breeze kept us fairly comfortable all day, as long as we stayed out of the sun. Gary had erected a large umbrella in the fairly shallow water in front of his house, along with a flat floating table. Sheilagh and I spent some of the day up to our chests in warm water under the umbrella with our drinks on the floating table that was tied to the umbrella – a poor man’s hot tub and sauna.
During the earlier part of the week we cruisers got together for shopping at the one “tienda”, playing Mexican Train dominoes, eating at the one “palapa,” and generally visiting from boat to boat. We also found time to do some solo kayaking, swimming, reading, and napping. I resolved to swim around the fleet every day, which I did in the later part of the afternoon to keep from sunburning my back. As the fleet grew in size from day to day, the swim got longer and longer, but it was a great way to exercise without overheating. I hope to keep it up in the future as a way to limit beer belly development.
Swimming continuously for 30-60 minutes gives one a lot of time to think and remember the thousands of other times I've had my head in the water under similar circumstances. I remember first learning to swim in one of those round shallow fountains in the local park (3’ deep at the center and 1’ at the edges) where the water was kept warm by the uncontrolled output of children with no bathroom nearby. I progressed through Minnow, Flying Fish, and Shark levels in the local YMCA program, spending more time on the diving board than actually swimming laps. I was on a local swim team and hated long distance swimming, preferring short sprints and diving competitions. All I could think about with my face in the water was the grueling punishment my body was being put through by a coach who had nothing better to do than blow a whistle and think of additional tortures for us – naturally he was fat and needed the exercise more than we did.
In a small high school and college I attended we didn’t have a coach; so we swimmers became our own coaches, and I continued to specialize in short sprints and diving to avoid the long swims. Then along came the navy, and we got to show our ability to jump from 18’ up (simulating the side of a ship), to swim underwater for 25 yards (simulating the avoidance of burning fuel above us), and then to swim a mile with our clothing on (simulating swimming to shore or to a rescue vessel). Since most of our missions were over cold water that wouldn’t support a human body for more than a few minutes, I’m not sure why we needed to swim the long distance, but I learned to like the long swims. Later in life we lived near a lake, and I swam a mile at a time and enjoyed the experience. I used to rope a kayak to my body to warn water skiers that I was there and to serve as my method for getting back when I had finished the swimming I wanted to do.
In all these swimming situations I have had an opportunity to revisit my previous swimming experiences and the thoughts I had at those times. It’s not as if one can swim with an IPod and headphones to listen to music or books, or to distract one from doing any thinking. Swimming long distances forces one to meditate more than any other activity I know of. Only long walks without music offer a similar opportunity, but the view is usually too distracting to do any serious meditation. When I am swimming in the ocean or a lake, there is usually very little to see in the water when the bottom is more than 10’ deep, and that allows for a singular opportunity to be alone with one’s thoughts. Having said all this I have not yet come up with any earth-shattering revelations, solutions to the world’s problems, or a grand unified theory for the origins of the universe. However, I may have produced one of the above and forgotten it by the time I finished my swim and was ready to record my thoughts.
This is going to be short, because there just hasn’t been much excitement to write about. We spend our time trying to keep cool in the heat. Tomorrow we are heading north to Santa Rosalia, which should offer more to write about. More later . . .
Sunday, July 6, 2008
June 30th – Conception Bay – Jim’s Blog #55
We had a very enjoyable sail to Conception Bay, starting at 6AM from Ramada Cove, about 60 miles south of here. We were able to use the warm winds coming off the land for the first hour, but then the wind died and we motored for the next 7 hours. The sea was very flat, no swells and no chop, and it was so calm during one hour of the trip that fog covered the sea. We had less than a half-mile visibility during that time, which caused all of us to turn on our radars to avoid running into one another or into pangas or fishing boats that might be in the vicinity.
A picture of 'A Capella' against the rising sun
Getting into Mulegé is difficult because it is 13 miles from the beach with no phone connections to call a cab. We have to hitchhike into town, buy supplies, and then take a cab back out to the beach - $17 one way. On our way in on Friday we were approached by a van when we landed our dinghy on the beach. It was loaded with blankets (blankets in this weather?), jewelry, T-shirts, hats and a variety of other items to sell to tourists. The beach was entirely empty except for us, and we were not interested in buying anything. We told the vendor that we were more interested in a ride into town. He thought about it for a minute, looked up and down the empty beach, and promptly shifted the merchandise in his van to make room for us. He didn’t ask for any payment when we arrived; so we gave him 100 pesos ($10) for the trip and he went back out to the beach to sell to the non-existent tourists there. When we returned by cab, he had put up a hammock in the shade of a palapa-like structure on the beach and was taking a nap. We ended up buying a couple of T-shirts and a bracelet for a friend’s birthday party the next day as a way to show our appreciation for his earlier help. I think I got the last two extra large T-shirts in his van that didn’t have a suggestive picture or slogan.
On Saturday our friends Ed and Cornelia had invited us to share in her latest birthday remembrance (I have learned not to state ages for women), along with three other couples, to a pig roast at a local hotel called the Serenidad – very famous for hosting movie stars over the years who came down to fish, and also famous for the Saturday night pig roast that had been going on for some 40+ years. We had cabs previously arranged to pick us up on the beach, and they whisked us into the hotel in short order. There we had margaritas and a roast pig dinner to the sound of Mariachi music – originally the hotel had used Mariachi performers, but in this case there was a single musician playing a synthesizer that sounded like a Mariachi band – so much for authenticity, but an “attaboy” for keeping costs down. It was a great evening for all of us, and ended as usual with wet feet pushing our dinghies off the beach to get back to our boats.
Sheilagh had worn a nice dress and a pair of shoes; so I had offered to carry her off the dinghy at the start of the trip to keep everything dry. As I prepared to take her in my arms (as a romantic gesture) she threw herself over my shoulder in a modified fireman’s carry, and after stumbling backwards a moment, I carried her to the beach over my shoulder (see picture nearby). She’s darn lucky I didn’t slip and fall backwards into the water with both of us, but she was pleased with her crowd-stopping performance in front of the others. There’s no understanding this woman.
We’ve all been sweltering in the heat and humidity here, which means there is little motivation to exercise. It occurred to me that a good way to exercise and keep cool is to swim, something I used to do in the lake at Lake of the Pines. I tied our lightweight kayak to a line around my waist and, with the aid of a mask and snorkel (to help my breathing in the waves), I swam around the fleet of sailboats in the harbor in about half an hour of swimming. The water was actually too warm to be very comfortable, but the temperature was a lot better in the water than out of it. The next day a couple of extra sailboats had come into the cove; so the swimming distance was increased a bit. We are currently in a location where a lot of cruisers are sailing in for a 4th-of-July celebration on Friday. That means the fleet should grow quite a bit in the next few days; so I get to increase my exercise load each day until my body is a work of art – okay, maybe a work of modern art, which could look like anything.
We were talking with some other cruisers the other day, and found that everyone was feeling hot and sticky nearly all the time. Naturally this limits the amount of hugging we do with our spouses, as well as any other incidental contact. One cruiser said “Why do you think the other name for the Sea of Cortez is the Sea of Celibacy?” TMI, I know! More later . . .
A picture of 'A Capella' against the rising sun We saw all sorts of wildlife, the most interesting of which was a seal reclining on the surface, as if he were in a lazy-boy chair. At one point we crossed over a sea mount, where the normally 300’ deep bottom had risen to 40’ from the surface. This “shallow” water allows kelp to grow and provides a feeding place for small and large fish. As we approached the sea mount (indicated on our GPS) we saw a swarm of birds and a pod of dolphins all feeding feverishly on some unlucky school of fish that was too near the surface for their own good. It appears that the pelicans didn’t try to grab any dolphins and the dolphins were uninterested in eating feathers. We also saw several manta rays jumping out of the water to at least a 4’ height, where they seemed to hang for a while and then do a belly flop to impress the others.
You’ve heard of flying fish, and we’ve seen several in the past, but now we’ve seen a “skipping fish.” This is a fairly long narrow fish that seems to skim over the surface, touching its tail every so often to provide additional impetus. We have seen these fish skim the surface for a good 50 yards at a time. They don’t appear to have wings – they just look like a small arrow skimming along on its tail with its head at a 45° angle up. We haven’t noticed any fish pursuing them, at least none that break the surface of the water themselves. We’re not sure how many other unknown fish we will eventually see.
We are now in a hot spot in the Sea of Cortez: the inside air temperature is about 98°, the water temperature is about 80°, and the humidity must be at least 90%. This is the weather that others warned us about when we decided to go up into the Sea of Cortez for the summer, which is the “OFF” season here. We have all the fans on in the cabin all day and all night in order to at least circulate the warm air. It actually gets a bit cooler at about 4AM in the morning, but soon warms up by 7AM when the sun comes up.
Soon after anchoring here, I was coated in my own sweat; so I stepped to the rail and jumped into the water to cool off. Surprise! The water was so warm that I didn’t feel the normal jolt one gets when entering the water, which is usually colder than the outside air. In fact the water felt like a bathtub. The best part was getting out and letting the warm wind start the evaporation and cooling process. However, in a matter of minutes I was dry again and then the sweat came penetrating back through my pores as bad as before. I have described this in the first person because Sheilagh doesn’t “sweat,” she “glows”; so this situation doesn’t affect her in the same way.
Sheilagh’s been sleeping on the top of the boat with a towel to lie on and I’ve been sleeping on cushions in the cockpit. Apparently she is a hardier person than I am, but she usually goes below by 2AM. We erected the domed shades that we had built for the boat; so the deck is protected from the sun during the hot part of the day. We do get some sun under the edges in the morning and evenings, but that’s when we go overboard and cool off. We bought a couple of those psychedelic neoprene noodles that you may have seen people using to sit in the water at neck height. They do a great job of letting us sit in the water next to the boat without any effort while we cool off.
The major highway going south in Baja passes around our cove, so we hear the roar of semis gearing down with loud brakes as they come down the hill and then gearing back up with a roar of the engine to climb back out of here. At first we thought we were being dive-bombed by fighter planes, but soon learned the reason for the noise. In the first bay we anchored in we found that the restaurant and tienda had been closed for the off season. So on Sunday we moved the boat over to El Burro cove which still has a palapa and a tienda (a restaurant and store for those who haven’t been following our blog long enough to have picked up those Mexican terms). As of this writing, most of the sailboats that were in our old cove have now moved over here as well. Now if we could just find a “lavanderia” (laundry), we could stop hand washing our clothing and actually see the colors again.
On Friday we went into the nearby town of Mulegé (pronounced Moo-la-hay’) to replenish our supplies and have a restaurant meal for the first time in about ten days. Naturally we ordered hamburguesas con queso con papas (cheeseburgers with fries) and some cold beer. Then we did grocery shopping, stopped by a package store for a case of beer, and were stymied that the main store in town didn’t have sufficient diet cokes to sell us a case. I went wandering through town and spied a Coca Cola delivery truck and asked where they had customers who sold cases of coke. The driver’s reply was to open up the side of the truck and sell me a case directly – not something most distributors would do in the U.S. so as not to offend their store customers.
Lunching with Sheilagh, Susan and Jim from 'Windward Bound,' and Ed and Cornelia from 'A Cappella' (Cornelia was taking a picture at the same time) in Mulegé
You’ve heard of flying fish, and we’ve seen several in the past, but now we’ve seen a “skipping fish.” This is a fairly long narrow fish that seems to skim over the surface, touching its tail every so often to provide additional impetus. We have seen these fish skim the surface for a good 50 yards at a time. They don’t appear to have wings – they just look like a small arrow skimming along on its tail with its head at a 45° angle up. We haven’t noticed any fish pursuing them, at least none that break the surface of the water themselves. We’re not sure how many other unknown fish we will eventually see.
We are now in a hot spot in the Sea of Cortez: the inside air temperature is about 98°, the water temperature is about 80°, and the humidity must be at least 90%. This is the weather that others warned us about when we decided to go up into the Sea of Cortez for the summer, which is the “OFF” season here. We have all the fans on in the cabin all day and all night in order to at least circulate the warm air. It actually gets a bit cooler at about 4AM in the morning, but soon warms up by 7AM when the sun comes up.
Soon after anchoring here, I was coated in my own sweat; so I stepped to the rail and jumped into the water to cool off. Surprise! The water was so warm that I didn’t feel the normal jolt one gets when entering the water, which is usually colder than the outside air. In fact the water felt like a bathtub. The best part was getting out and letting the warm wind start the evaporation and cooling process. However, in a matter of minutes I was dry again and then the sweat came penetrating back through my pores as bad as before. I have described this in the first person because Sheilagh doesn’t “sweat,” she “glows”; so this situation doesn’t affect her in the same way.
Sheilagh’s been sleeping on the top of the boat with a towel to lie on and I’ve been sleeping on cushions in the cockpit. Apparently she is a hardier person than I am, but she usually goes below by 2AM. We erected the domed shades that we had built for the boat; so the deck is protected from the sun during the hot part of the day. We do get some sun under the edges in the morning and evenings, but that’s when we go overboard and cool off. We bought a couple of those psychedelic neoprene noodles that you may have seen people using to sit in the water at neck height. They do a great job of letting us sit in the water next to the boat without any effort while we cool off.
The major highway going south in Baja passes around our cove, so we hear the roar of semis gearing down with loud brakes as they come down the hill and then gearing back up with a roar of the engine to climb back out of here. At first we thought we were being dive-bombed by fighter planes, but soon learned the reason for the noise. In the first bay we anchored in we found that the restaurant and tienda had been closed for the off season. So on Sunday we moved the boat over to El Burro cove which still has a palapa and a tienda (a restaurant and store for those who haven’t been following our blog long enough to have picked up those Mexican terms). As of this writing, most of the sailboats that were in our old cove have now moved over here as well. Now if we could just find a “lavanderia” (laundry), we could stop hand washing our clothing and actually see the colors again.
On Friday we went into the nearby town of Mulegé (pronounced Moo-la-hay’) to replenish our supplies and have a restaurant meal for the first time in about ten days. Naturally we ordered hamburguesas con queso con papas (cheeseburgers with fries) and some cold beer. Then we did grocery shopping, stopped by a package store for a case of beer, and were stymied that the main store in town didn’t have sufficient diet cokes to sell us a case. I went wandering through town and spied a Coca Cola delivery truck and asked where they had customers who sold cases of coke. The driver’s reply was to open up the side of the truck and sell me a case directly – not something most distributors would do in the U.S. so as not to offend their store customers.
Lunching with Sheilagh, Susan and Jim from 'Windward Bound,' and Ed and Cornelia from 'A Cappella' (Cornelia was taking a picture at the same time) in MulegéGetting into Mulegé is difficult because it is 13 miles from the beach with no phone connections to call a cab. We have to hitchhike into town, buy supplies, and then take a cab back out to the beach - $17 one way. On our way in on Friday we were approached by a van when we landed our dinghy on the beach. It was loaded with blankets (blankets in this weather?), jewelry, T-shirts, hats and a variety of other items to sell to tourists. The beach was entirely empty except for us, and we were not interested in buying anything. We told the vendor that we were more interested in a ride into town. He thought about it for a minute, looked up and down the empty beach, and promptly shifted the merchandise in his van to make room for us. He didn’t ask for any payment when we arrived; so we gave him 100 pesos ($10) for the trip and he went back out to the beach to sell to the non-existent tourists there. When we returned by cab, he had put up a hammock in the shade of a palapa-like structure on the beach and was taking a nap. We ended up buying a couple of T-shirts and a bracelet for a friend’s birthday party the next day as a way to show our appreciation for his earlier help. I think I got the last two extra large T-shirts in his van that didn’t have a suggestive picture or slogan.
On Saturday our friends Ed and Cornelia had invited us to share in her latest birthday remembrance (I have learned not to state ages for women), along with three other couples, to a pig roast at a local hotel called the Serenidad – very famous for hosting movie stars over the years who came down to fish, and also famous for the Saturday night pig roast that had been going on for some 40+ years. We had cabs previously arranged to pick us up on the beach, and they whisked us into the hotel in short order. There we had margaritas and a roast pig dinner to the sound of Mariachi music – originally the hotel had used Mariachi performers, but in this case there was a single musician playing a synthesizer that sounded like a Mariachi band – so much for authenticity, but an “attaboy” for keeping costs down. It was a great evening for all of us, and ended as usual with wet feet pushing our dinghies off the beach to get back to our boats.
Sheilagh had worn a nice dress and a pair of shoes; so I had offered to carry her off the dinghy at the start of the trip to keep everything dry. As I prepared to take her in my arms (as a romantic gesture) she threw herself over my shoulder in a modified fireman’s carry, and after stumbling backwards a moment, I carried her to the beach over my shoulder (see picture nearby). She’s darn lucky I didn’t slip and fall backwards into the water with both of us, but she was pleased with her crowd-stopping performance in front of the others. There’s no understanding this woman.We’ve all been sweltering in the heat and humidity here, which means there is little motivation to exercise. It occurred to me that a good way to exercise and keep cool is to swim, something I used to do in the lake at Lake of the Pines. I tied our lightweight kayak to a line around my waist and, with the aid of a mask and snorkel (to help my breathing in the waves), I swam around the fleet of sailboats in the harbor in about half an hour of swimming. The water was actually too warm to be very comfortable, but the temperature was a lot better in the water than out of it. The next day a couple of extra sailboats had come into the cove; so the swimming distance was increased a bit. We are currently in a location where a lot of cruisers are sailing in for a 4th-of-July celebration on Friday. That means the fleet should grow quite a bit in the next few days; so I get to increase my exercise load each day until my body is a work of art – okay, maybe a work of modern art, which could look like anything.
We were talking with some other cruisers the other day, and found that everyone was feeling hot and sticky nearly all the time. Naturally this limits the amount of hugging we do with our spouses, as well as any other incidental contact. One cruiser said “Why do you think the other name for the Sea of Cortez is the Sea of Celibacy?” TMI, I know! More later . . .
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