The
most common type of phosphorescence is an invisible little beast that is
only luminescent after it has been disturbed. As the boat sails through
one of these microscopic countries the water changes from inky black in
front and beside, to a shining green searchlight in our wake. Frightened
fish leave a jagged lightning bolt gleaming in their path and dolphins
and seals leave blazing light trails behind.
We
soon discovered that hopping overboard for a swim just before bedtime
made it much easier to sleep in the heat. The first time we tried this
it caused quite a stir. We found ourselves swimming in a world of
sparkling light instead of darkness. The phosphorescence left a trail of
green, twinkling lights whenever we moved. With some experimentation we
were able to make perfect ‘water angels’ which are closely related
to ‘snow angels’.
On
our way up the Sea we stopped to visit Mulege. It is located on a
freshwater spring one mile from the sea and has got to be one of the
prettiest towns in Baja California. Spanish monks founded the town as a
mission 400 years ago. These monks planted date palms all around the
spring and the river that it produces. The monks are gone but the palms
have prospered and they almost completely overhang the river now.
Although the river is too shallow for “Daydream”,
we made our way up it in the dinghy. This seemed to us the most exotic
way possible to visit a desert city.
Our
favorite place this summer was a series of anchorages called Refugio
(Refuge) on Isla Angel de la Guarda (Guardian Angel Island). Refugio has
soaring, red cliffs, thirty-foot tall organ-pipe cactus and crystal
clear water overflowing with fish and sea lions. The island is inhabited
only by lizards and birds, but fisherman who visit occasionally, have
built a tiny 6 foot by 4 foot church. The only other sign of man is a
deep cave where someone has stored an old anchor and a gunnysack of
salt. We had the whole place completely to ourselves for weeks on end.
We enjoyed the isolation and spent our time charting the bays and
exploring the area.
The
Boobie birds at Refugio are really odd. Normally Boobies fish by getting
about 50 feet up then folding their wings and plummeting into the water
to a depth of ten feet or more - very exciting if you’re swimming
nearby. After the dive they pop to the surface and flap wildly while
running on the water until they achieve escape velocity. In Refugio
however, they skim along the surface looking for a fish. When they see
one, they do a very flat dive to a depth of perhaps one foot, grab the
fish, pop back through the surface into the air, then spread their wings
and continue their flight. We’ve never seen this behavior elsewhere,
but here the Pelicans, also known as ‘flying trucks’, try to imitate
the Boobies, providing us with endless entertainment and themselves with
headaches.
Until
a few weeks ago spear fishing was how we got most of our fish. One day I
poked an Opal Eye, but before I could get it off the spear, an octopus
reached out from underneath a rock and stole it. This was the first
‘pus I had seen so it was quite a shock. Since then we’ve seen quite
a number and we’ve taken up petting them. They feel sort of like your
tongue, unless you touch a sucker which will actually vacuum onto your
finger. Just like a chameleon, octopi can change colors as they glide
over the bottom. Once in a while they shoot out black ink, but usually
they just squeeze under the nearest rock and sit there changing from
purple to yellow to brown to red while you pet them.
Due
to a broken spearhead, spear fishing has fallen out of favour on “Daydream”.
We could always take up fishing from the dinghy, however, with
temperatures running over 100° and very little breeze the smart place
to be is underwater. So we’ve taken up underwater fishing. This
involves taking a line and a hook and going snorkeling. Once below the
surface, we dangle the hook in front of a tasty looking fish and voilà,
supper! It sounds silly, looks a little silly too, but it works! With a
little practice we’re even getting good at hooking the fish that we
want and avoiding the rest. We’ve also done a lot of diving for
scallops. They are one of our favorite foods and coincidentally a
favorite of Triggerfish which conveniently are also one of our favorite
foods. Harvesting a scallop sets up a miniature perpetual food machine.
It goes like this. First we find the scallop, knife it open and clean it
underwater. The good part goes in the foodbag and the rest goes onto the
underwater fishing line. Sergeant Majors, Hogfish, Sargos, Parrotfish
and Triggers gather in clouds. If we can keep all the others off the
hook for a few seconds, the Triggers will bull their way in and grab the
bait. With the IQ of a carrot they manage to steal the bait and avoid
the hook two times out of three, but eventually we can usually outwit
one. Our biggest food problem lately is that we haven’t been able to
hook any Ice Cream Fish or Potato Chips clams.
While
we’re on the subject of diving, we should tell you about the
delicacies that we’ve been enjoying. There are three kinds of scallops
that we’ve become very friendly with, so friendly that we often invite
them to dinner. They are rock scallops, pen scallops and swimming
scallops. All are fabulous, especially wrapped in bacon then fried or
barbecued. Then there are butter clams and an old favorite chocolate
clams. Both kinds are delicious steamed, battered, barbecued or made
into chowder. And, of course, there are always fish of which there are
at least a dozen kinds that we like. About the only thing that we
haven’t found in the Northern Sea is lobster but don’t feel badly
for us; it’s shrimp season now. Sometimes we don’t know what we’re
having for dinner until an hour before but it’s a rare day that we
can’t have seafood if we want it.
During
all of this diving we are sometimes visited by sea lions. They are
amazingly fast and graceful underwater. They’re always curious and
sometimes five or ten of them will swim right up to us then pirouette
away, circling and barking while making rude remarks about our swimming
abilities. They are up to eight feet long and outweigh us by quite a bit
but they never seem to mean any harm.
While
snorkeling one day I came across a live seahorse! I couldn’t believe
it! Its a fairly rare event especially while snorkeling. Seahorses are
normally found in deeper water and they are so well camouflaged that
they’re tough to spot. This one was about seven inches long and so
incredible to hold. Until this day I was pretty much convinced that a
seahorse was only a fairy tale creature.
There’s
a group of islands called the Enchanted Islands way up in the North end
of the Sea. Since nobody ever goes up there the charts are a joke, but
we had some overhead photographs and lots of time. We couldn’t resist
going. The effort was worth it because the Enchanted Islands are really
impressive. They are volcanic and quite recent in origin. The striking
rock formations make up for the complete lack of vegetation. There are
enormous vertical cliffs that tower straight up out of the ocean for
hundreds of feet and mountains of jumbled razor-sharp rocks the size of
houses. Much of this rock is pumice - the rock that floats. Perhaps the
name ‘Enchanted’ is explained by the difficulty that early
navigators would have had charting an area full of floating rocks.
The
Colorado River empties into the head of the Sea of Cortez. We thought
that it would be cool to go up the river a ways. Maybe visit the Grand
Canyon! Unfortunately our chart of the area was drawn in 1873 and I
guess that it’s a little out of date ‘cause the river is dammed now
and all of the water is used long before it reaches the Sea. We did get
to Puerto Peñasco though which is the most Northern port. It wasn’t
anything special as towns go, but after six weeks without ice cream or
restaurants it looked like the Big Apple to us.
The
summer of ‘97 produced eight hurricanes on the West Coast of Mexico.
Two of them gave us quite a scare. The first, Linda, was the most
powerful storm ever recorded in the Eastern Pacific. It had steady winds
of 160 knots (about 200 miles per hour) with gusts to 190 knots. When it
turned toward us at a distance that it could cover in just twenty-four
hours we started making serious preparations. Of course, no boat - or
building for that matter- is likely to survive 200 mph winds, but if a
hurricane misses you by as little as 100 miles the winds could be half
of the peak force. By doing everything that we could to protect the boat
and wearing our rose-colored spectacles we thought that there was a good
chance that “Daydream”
would come through. Linda seemed to know about our superhuman efforts,
because as soon as we were ready she turned away, then petered out.
A week later hurricane Nora
decided to take a run at us. Nora was more normal-sized with only 100
mph winds. She did have a few unpleasant habits though, like holding up
in one place, then speeding up, then slowing down, but always heading
more or less toward us. Eventually she got down to business and came
straight for us at top speed. Gale-force winds started at sunset and
built until two in the morning when we had sixty mph. We were in a great
anchorage so the waves weren’t large, but with that much wind howling
through the rigging it felt like we were at sea. Every other boat in the
area was also in this anchorage so at the height of the storm we had
rocks just 100 feet behind and a fishing boat 75 feet directly upwind.
That fishboat caused us a lot of worries. They had begun the storm three
or four hundred feet away but as the wind increased they kept getting
closer. Usually this would mean that their anchor wasn’t holding.
Being upwind of us they would eventually hit us or their anchor would
pick up our anchor and we would be dragged onto the rocks. The crew was
wide awake and out on deck most of the time so we were pretty sure that
they were aware of what was going on. When they got within 75 feet we
couldn’t stand it anymore. We called them on the radio and asked, in
our fractured Spanish, if they were having a problem.
“Oh, everything is OK we are just bleep-bleep-bleeping our
anchor”, they said.
“Sorry, our Spanish is not too good. What are you doing to your
anchor?”
“We are bleep-bleep-bleeping it, Señor.”
“Uh... OK, are you guys all right?”
“Oh yes, everything is good.”
We
never did figure it out. Maybe they were letting out more rope, or maybe
they were praying over the anchor. In any case they didn’t get any
closer.
We
were never in any danger but we spent the whole night watching to be
sure that our anchor didn’t give way. Nora passed seventy-five miles
West of us rotating at 100 mph and moving North at 20 mph. Shortly
afterward she went aground on the Baja Peninsula and continued up into
Arizona causing flooding and storm damage before dissipating. In the Sea
of Cortez only one yacht was lost. “Slo’
Dancing” went up on the rocks and was seriously damaged at Isla
Tiburon. The crew and cat made it safely ashore and were picked up by
the Mexican Navy the following night.
It’s
not unusual to see groups of porpoises here. They seem to like boats and
often surf in our bow wave. Usually they appear in groups of three to
ten, but recently we’ve been seeing pods of hundreds. Porpoises seem
to have three modes, which are; fishing, when they jump, bang their
tails and dive over and over in a small area; commuting, in which they
appear on one horizon, leaping through the water at high speed in an
absolutely straight line and then disappear over the other horizon; and
playing, unquestionably their real occupation. Near Bahía de Los
Angeles there is a huge pod of resident porpoises. On several occasions
we saw them in the same area, leaping, diving, slapping their tails and
racing around at top speed. We did our best to estimate their numbers
and thought that there were 500 in sight at one time. There would likely
be double that number below the surface at any given moment.
Once
while we were anchored in a small landlocked bay, a large pod of
dolphins came in fishing. They jumped and dived in a precise formation,
right up to the end of the bay, turned around in unison and retraced the
exact same path back out. I gathered up my courage and went swimming
with them. Visibility was only fifteen or twenty feet and all I could
see were ghostly glimpses as they shot past, but Susan said that they
were all around, clearly interested in what was going on.
Mid-October
is when summer ends in the Sea of Cortez, which means that the
temperature comes down 20°F and the prevailing wind switches from
South-East to North-West. This change of direction is helpful to us, but
since it switches back and forth a few times before settling down it can
also cause some big problems. The worst is that most anchorages are open
to one direction or the other and if you choose the wrong one your
comfortable refuge can quickly turn into a rough and dangerous lee
shore.
For
three days we’d had North winds, but on the way out to the Midriff
Islands it switched so we anchored on the North side of Isla Partida.
During the night the wind returned to the North and although there was
no problem, the boat was pitching wildly in the wind-waves and we spent
a very unhappy night. When morning finally came we gratefully moved
around to the other side of the island. That afternoon a big swell
appeared and started rolling the boat through 40 degrees. There was no
wind, but boats further South were reporting strong winds heading our
way. Up came the anchor and back we went to our first anchorage, which
had become flat and comfortable in our absence. Shortly before we went
to bed we felt the first breath of wind from the North. Within a few
minutes it was tearing through the rigging and big, dangerous seas were
slamming into the boat before crashing onto the rocks behind us. It was
almost too late to leave but we knew that if we stayed much longer the
choice would be taken out of our hands. Seas were bursting over the bow
as the anchor came up and with the engine at full speed we were just
able to make 3/4 of a knot against the storm. Our dinghy, hanging on the
davits, was getting slammed by every second wave and our inflatable
which was suspended beside the boat was being tossed around like a toy.
The moon had already set and the night was pitch black but it didn’t
matter because “Daydream”
knew the way to the other side of the island. We were anchored again by
midnight and spent an uncomfortable and sleepless, but safe night.
We’ve
started to prepare for our return to the ‘real world’ next year. The
thought of the upcoming voyage to Hawaii is both thrilling and a little
scary. It will be our first passage of more than 5 or 6 days. It may
take us well over a month to sail the 2900 nautical miles. Certainly the
thought of being out of sight of land for so long and traveling at night
doesn’t bother us but you have to wonder what it will be like on Day
20. Will we be bored, tired, thrilled, or possibly stark raving loony?
The only way to find out is to try it. I’m sure our arrival in Hawaii
will bring with it a tremendous feeling of satisfaction, having traveled
so far under our own steam, so to speak. Somehow it sounds far more
romantic to have sailed there using your own skills rather than just
buying a ticket and hopping a plane. The final leg home from Hawaii to
Victoria will be a considerably shorter journey of only 2100 miles.
Even
more scary than the long voyage home is going home itself. We’ll have
been gone for four years. If you say it really fast it doesn’t sound
like much. Not only will the ‘real world’ have moved on, but we have
changed as well. We worry that life at home has sped up while we’ve
learned to slow way down. One thing that we’re looking forward to is
finally getting a chance to sit down and do some serious catching up
with many of you.