The adventure continues! We just returned to San Carlos, Mexico to put our boat back together after three months of living a nomadic life in the states. From August through October we camped in some national parks, visited all the relatives in Washington and California (we have no relatives in Oregon), and even sponged off my brother, Ken (and Mavis), in the Seattle area and my sister, Lisa (and Bob), in the Los Angeles area – for at least two weeks in each place. We also stopped in on our daughters, Melissa (with Tim, Delaney, Riley, and Paige) in Newport Beach, and Stephanie (with Hayden and Evan) in San Jose. We were also given the run of our previous neighbors’ house, Sue and Larry, in Sunnyvale for a week as they went on a cruise. Everyone was very gracious in allowing us to experience the benefits of the settled life – certainly a better life than camping in cold weather in a tent.
We took the opportunity on this trip to do a volcano tour of Lassen, Crater Lake, and Mount Rainier during some of the best weather ever in California, Oregon, and Washington. The only real problem was a cold snap at Crater Lake that resulted in frozen water pipes in the campgrounds and two very cold campers in sleeping bags that were rated to 50°F. Since we couldn’t sleep, we got up early, started a big fire to get warm, piled everything back in the car, and left the park a day early. We hustled off to Bend, Oregon where we got a motel room and got warm. After our earlier experience in San Carlos with the intense heat in late July, we thought we could never be cold enough again – so much for thinking.
One of the benefits of camping in national parks is that, at 62, I am allowed into all national parks free of charge for a one-time $10 payment, and the cost to camp there is one-half the going rate. After Labor Day there was no difficulty in finding space in any campsite, even without reservations. So there is a benefit to being retired and not having any family members tied to school or work.
On Monday, October 27th, we set out from San Diego in a Greyhound bus at about 2PM, switched to a Mexican bus line in Tijuana and arrived in Guaymas at 9:30AM the next morning. We had four big bags of clothing and boat equipment, but were fortunate enough to get the green light at customs to avoid a complete inspection. We were feeling good about that, but were later rousted out at 2AM in the morning by another checkpoint, where we had to unload all our bags, drag them into an inspection building, got a red light (along with everyone else), and had an inspector go through two of our bags without comment. We assume they were looking for drugs, arms, or something else we didn’t have.
Our boat was covered in dust, but everything else seemed to be in good shape. We immediately sprayed it off, but had no food and no room in the boat to sleep on it Tuesday night. Our friends Ed and Cornelia of “A Cappella” suggested we stay at a motel in town where they were located, and offered to drive us in their rental car. It was a wonderful feeling to hit the bed and sleep for about 12 hours straight. This was right after we had a great dinner with Ed and Cornelia, Ron and Karen of “Aegean Odyssey,” and Ted and Joan of “Pangaea.” These are all cruisers we met during the past year; so it was like “old home week.”
On Wednesday we replaced all our halyards with new ones that we had purchased in California, and we put up all our sails – a tough job since the sails are so large. We have also had the bottom cleaned, the stainless steel shined up, and are getting the hull waxed tomorrow for the season. We have now set up the bimini to provide some needed shade, reattached the life raft to the top of the deck (as a last resort someday), and reattached the life preservers and man-overboard pole to the aft rail to allow one of us to save the other if someone goes overboard. We also reinstalled the barbecue grill on the aft rail.
After all this we noticed that our batteries were not charging fully; so we investigated. It turns out that these batteries were at the end their lives, and there are no comparable batteries sold in Mexico. We have now located a distributor in Arizona who can sell us the batteries we need. All we have to do is load up our 7 batteries in a rental car (each weighs about 70 lbs. for a total of nearly 500 lbs.), drive up to Arizona, offload the old batteries, load up the new batteries, and make the 300 mile trek back to Mexico. Why take the old batteries to the U.S.? To avoid customs payments for the new batteries!
Even though Mexico can’t supply the batteries we need, they want to charge us 17% for the privilege of bringing them into the country to put on our boat. So we will simply take the batteries to the U.S. “to be repaired” and return with the “repaired” batteries. We have yet to see how the NAFTA agreement has been helpful to those of us trying to operate between the U.S. and Mexico. This whole process will delay our departure about a week – something every cruiser has experienced or will experience. Friends of ours discovered the same problem while anchored in an out-of-the-way cove and had barely enough power to start the engine. In this case they kept the engine going for two days until they reached San Carlos to do what we’re doing.
Our current plans are to cross over to the Baja Peninsula, work our way down the eastern edge to the tip, and then hop back across the Sea of Cortez to Mazatlan. We plan on this because there are no safe anchorages to speak of between San Carlos and Mazatlan; so it would require a two- or three-night trip down. We prefer daily trips or single over-night trips; so it’s worth it to do the over-and-back routine. In addition to the lack of decent protected coves between here and Mazatlan on the mainland coast, other cruisers have reported a prevalence of crime in those locations. Friends of ours lost a dinghy and an outboard motor in one of those anchorages and warned the entire fleet before anyone else got ripped off.
We got plenty of exposure to the presidential election process during our trip to the States, and are happy to have voted by absentee ballot while we were there. Now we are no longer bombarded with television ads and news programs. However, we do have Sirius radio, which keeps us up with what’s going on when we want to know. It appears that most of the news organizations have finally been exposed for their lack of objectivity in reporting on the candidates. Hopefully this will lead to some improvement in the way news is reported in the future.
I’ll be back to you in a few days. This year Sheilagh has promised to contribute to this blog much more than she has in the past. This means you should be getting a different slant on things from her. The primary complaint of readers over the past year has to do with the length of my blogs; so I will be attempting to shorten them significantly. Please note that I have compressed three months into two pages for this kickoff message for the new cruising year. More later . . .
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