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 . . .