Before starting this blog I want to mention that our blog site will take your comments, if you have some. We usually review them to see if they are personal or for general knowledge and then publish those that others might want to read. Our daughter, Stephanie, who is a professional artist and sculptor (http://www.stephaniemetz.com/), had a thoughtful response to my tongue-in-cheek swipe at primitive artists, which you can read as a comment to my blog #23 on February 10th. Stephanie’s husband, Hayden, has also had some questions about cruising that he has sent as comments, and which serve as a basis for my describing aspects of the cruising life. If you have questions or comments that might be of interest to those who have never cruised on a sailboat (which is our primary audience, we believe), feel free to submit the comment to the blog.
One of Hayden’s questions was what do we do with the boat when we leave it to come back to the states, as we are planning to do in April. It is not a good idea to leave a boat at anchor, or even on a mooring (a buoy attached to the bottom in a permanent way), because unattended boats are subject to break-ins and theft. So we are planning to leave the boat in the Paradise Village Marina in Puerto Vallarta for the month of April, which offers docks that are protected by locked gates and security guards. We will also let our neighbors know how to get in touch with us, if necessary. The real problem with leaving a boat and going back to the states has to do with hurricane season between the months of June and October. In those months the boat needs to be far enough north or south to avoid hurricanes – the northern Sea of Cortez in the north and someplace in South America to the south.
We plan to put our boat in the port of San Carlos in the northern Sea of Cortez during the months of July and August, when we plan to visit family in the states again. Cruisers who only cruise six months of the year will often take their boat out of the water in a place like San Carlos and prepare it for a possible hurricane while they are away. In addition to positioning struts and lines to keep it locked in an upright position, that preparation involves about 4-5 days of effort to remove all the sails and all the structures that could blow off (like the dodger over the companionway), collect all the lines that would be damaged in the sun, and cover all the exposed woodwork that would fry in the sun during the summer in the Sea of Cortez. Since we plan to be gone only a couple of months, we will probably leave the boat in the water and only remove the sails and dodger. Luckily we bought a boat that has very little exposed wood on the outside; so we have been saved the effort of sanding and varnishing and would not need to cover it for a two-month period.
Part of the cruising lifestyle is to talk to other cruisers to see what they have done in the past, such as in the case of leaving their boat in a given marina, but that sort of discussion always leads to the hard-luck stories suffered by a few cruisers in the past that have made their way into cruising legend. One cruiser in La Paz suffered a break-in and lost all the things that a cruiser would want, and none of the things the local fishermen might take. His accusation of the cruiser community was not well received. One couple, apparently thinking that cruisers were the problem, decided to hide their boat in a small inlet, away from the eyes of other cruisers. They came back to find the boat stripped of nearly everything. In the case of leaving one’s boat for a time, it is far better to pay the price of keeping it in a marina than to have to pay for new laptops, radios, GPS’s, TV’s, DVD’s, clock & barometer, life raft, dinghy, dinghy motor, anchors, and solar panels, not to mention less expensive items (but still costly) such as fins, goggles, snorkels, spearguns, pots, pans, maps & charts, etc.
We took our boat out of the lagoon and out into the bay on Monday to test the repaired autopilot and to dump the holding tank – I know the latter information may be termed TMI (too much information), but it becomes a strong motivator for pulling up an anchor that is imbedded in the muddy bottom, rinsing off the entire length as it comes up, and leaving a spot in the anchorage that has been proven safe from the swinging of the boats nearby and higher than the lowest tide. Since we liked our spot, we put an anchor on the dinghy and dropped the dinghy anchor exactly where our anchor came up, leaving the dinghy to hold our place. We notified a couple of our neighbors that we were going out to test the autopilot and would be in later that morning, and it’s a good thing we did.
As we were going out the channel we passed three sailboats coming into the lagoon; so we could only hope that our dinghy and our neighbors would preserve our spot for our return. The channel out to the bay from the lagoon is quite narrow and no less than three pangas were anchored at various spots in the middle of the channel diving for oysters on the bottom, cleaning them onboard, and throwing the shells back for repeated usage by the oysters.
My original comment regarding the reuse of oyster shells was "No, I cannot explain how shells can be reused by oysters when they are dropped back to the bottom. Maybe someone can look this up and report back to us. I visualize a bunch of small, shell-less oysters waiting on the bottom to fight over their parents’ old shells, but how do they exist without shells in the first place?" My brother, Ken, did some research and came up with the following (which I have also posted as a comment on the next blog): "Adult oysters release millions of fertilized eggs in the summer months. During their 2 to 3 weeks of development, larvae (young, free-swimming oysters) may be carried great distances from where they were released. When development is complete, young oysters must attach to a hard substrate, ideally another oyster shell. If no suitable substrate exists, the oyster dies. Juvenile oysters (known as "spat") require several years to reach harvest size, but they begin to reproduce within a year, completing the life cycle." Thank you, Ken, for your research. Did you ever consider how much you are learning from this blog, everyone?
Back on track, we had to maneuver very carefully to miss the pangas while passing the other sailboats and trying to stay in the channel to keep from scraping our keel on the bottom. The fishermen didn’t seem to realize they were impeding traffic, and, as frustrated as we were, we had to remember that this is their country, their bay, their lagoon, and their fishing grounds.
Our test of the autopilot was a good one; so we now have a way to keep the boat on its heading when we need to motor from place to place. In previous blogs I have explained that we have been working with the factory for most of the past 6 months to make this happen; so we are extremely happy with this final test. Without the autopilot, the person on watch had to set the wheel, crank in some friction to hold it in that position, and then hustle like mad to go below to use the head, or record a fix, or get a drink. If we tried to combine a couple of those tasks in one trip below, we usually got back with the boat headed 30° off course. You can imagine what it would be like to hold your car’s steering wheel in one position for more than a few seconds, although our 5 knots is well below the speed of a car.
We got offshore a ways to dump the holding tank and then turned around to get back to our anchoring location before it was seized by one of the incoming boats. We made it in just in time to see one of our neighbors in his dinghy warning off one of the sailboats. He saw us coming and handed up the line from our dinghy to help us get back into our original position. The other sailboat, Far Fetched, anchored nearby and its owners, Bruce and Steve, turned out to be two brothers whom we had met in Puerto Vallarta. We invited them over to give them the information about the lagoon; so there were no hard feelings about being warned away from our spot.
As it was we missed our original anchoring spot by a few feet, which positioned us very near another boat as we swung away from the westerly winds that afternoon. We were forced to reduce our anchor rode length to 70’ versus the 100’ we had been using before. The afternoon wind came up at 15 – 25 knots and kept most of the cruisers on their boats making sure that their anchors would not drag them into another boat, or that another boat wouldn’t drag into them. The wind kicked up such waves in this small lagoon that it was impossible to use the dinghy and not get drenched. So naturally my peripheral vision caught a blur of something going over the side, which turned out to be our carpet on deck (for cleaning feet or shoes when getting onto the boat) as it was flipped over the side by the wind. I was too late with the boat hook; so I had to get out in the dinghy to bring it back. I grabbed the sodden carpet in time – for some reason it floated – and then fought my way back to the boat against fairly large waves that drenched me in a matter of the minute or so that I was out on the water.
This evening we got together with some other cruisers and took a bus to a restaurant that was known for its shrimp dishes and was reportedly “on the way” to the neighboring town of Melaque. Halfway to Melaque we spied the restaurant and tried to get the bus driver to stop. Either he was bound by the strictest rules not to stop at other than official bus stops, or he couldn’t understand what we wanted to do. As it was he kept driving and we decided to go on to Melaque and get a cab back. The bus to Melaque winds its way through a number of dirt streets on the outskirts before it reaches the town square where we could catch a cab. We finally got to the town square, grabbed two cabs back to the restaurant only to find that it was closed on Tuesday nights. So it was back to Barra de Navidad where we found a good restaurant on the water that served very good shrimp dishes. Since attitude is everything in the cruising life, we chalked this up to adventure and figured the 30 pesos apiece (5 pesos for the bus and 25 for the cab) was part of the cost of the meal.
More later . . .
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