Orem, USA - La Paz, Mexico

Wayne

Finally, we return to Mexico! We left Utah September 22nd and drove all night long arriving in Newport just at sunup. Even though the car was filled past capacity, there were a few things that we had to buy for the boat. From Newport we took the coast road down to San Diego for a final shopping binge. We spent the night in San Diego and after a quick trip to Costco in the morning we headed for Mexico. At this point we had two gallons of bottom paint on the front seat between us, two more gallons underneath the passengers feet, and the back seat was packed to the roof except for a little Twiggy hole. As a result of all this, the car’s undercarriage dragged on the ground at every opportunity.

We were searched at the Mexican border, but since it was clearly going to be a giant hassle to see everything, they just poked around a little and then let us go. Once in Mexico we started to worry about Mexican car insurance. In Mexico if you are in an accident you’re detained until you either show that you can pay for damages or until the trial. My guess is that Mexican jails are not too nice. Anyway we drove very carefully and discovered that the drivers down here are really polite but they do some things differently. For example, they don’t stop at stop signs; instead they cruise through them at up to 20 miles per hour, looking carefully in both directions. Red lights seem to mean yield and people pass you on the wrong side of city streets if you are going too slow. Also stop signs are sometimes so faded that you don’t see them and sometimes they appear halfway down the block, not at the corner where you might expect them. The drivers though, are polite and careful and nobody goes very fast so the problems are not too severe. We were subsequently told that almost no locals or long term gringos have insurance and that if there is an accident you wouldn’t normally even stop. This probably explains all of the dented cars that you see. All of this is behind us now as we are once again dependent on our feet for transportation since we sold the Nova shortly after arriving in La Paz.

Back to the trip. The first 100 miles down the coast is on a good highway and was uneventful. After Ensenada, the road gets bumpy and narrow but worst of all are the speed bumps. For some reason just for a few miles south of Ensenada they seem to really like speed bumps. Every little town has a couple and they are huge. The last set is the biggest measuring about four feet across the top and maybe six inches tall. We went over them at about 1/2 mile per hour and even so we dragged the entire length of the car.

We managed about 200 miles that day and probably got over the worst of the road in terms of bumps, pot-holes etc. The next day we crossed the peninsula. The temperature out in the desert was around 100 degrees and we were baking. The Nova, of course, has no air conditioning. Susan was so worried about Twiggy that she was using a plastic syringe to force water down Twiggy’s throat and finally she ordered me to stop and buy some ice. The ice was put into ziplocks and packed around the cat. The cat seemed to be enjoying it so much that we tried it too. Susan wore one on her head and I had one in my lap. Things were much cooler after that.

We spent that night in Loreto on the east coast of the Baja peninsula and the following day was spent lounging around with Dennis and Judith on “JAD”. They were anchored in Puerto Escondido, which is about 20 miles from Loreto. They were very happy to see us as we had a lot of boat things and mail to deliver to them. We also got a chance to talk to Jamie from “White Squall”. A week before we got there he had been anchored at an island nearby. During the night a storm had come up and blown his boat up on the beach. This must have been a terrifying experience but at least the beach was sand so he had a fighting chance to save the boat. All night long he sat there with each big wave picking the boat up and slamming it back down a little further up the beach. There was nothing that he could do except keep bailing out the water and sand that was coming in with each breaking wave. Sometime during the night the boat was dropped onto one of the few rocks on that part of the beach. The rock broke through the hull and the water started coming in the bottom as well. Along with this the pounding had broken the aft three feet and ground off the bottom five or six inches of the keel. Also at some point a giant piece of the rudder was broken away. It looked like Jaws had taken a bite out of it. The hull is of wood and the keel was concrete. There was no question that the wood took that beating much better than the concrete. By daybreak the wind was gone and the waves were way down but “White Squall” was high and dry, maybe ten feet from the edge of the water. Jamie and Dennis repaired the hole with a big wooden patch and large quantities of underwater epoxy but there was no way to pull the boat off the beach until the next high tide. Even then it was going to require an extremely powerful boat to do it. To add to the difficulties, hurricane Ismael decided to head straight for them at this point. Ismael had  100 mile per hour winds and they knew that if they didn’t get the boat off before Ismael arrived, the boat would be destroyed by the waves. Jamie spent the next night alone on the beach with the boat. The following day a dive boat called “Ambar III” was located nearby and they agreed to try to pull “White Squall” off. This is a big twin engine boat, probably one of the most powerful on this coast with the exception of the Navy ships. Every boat in the area had pitched in with lines by this time and when “Ambar III” arrived they hooked up and proceeded to break them one by one. These were mostly ¾” nylon lines which have a breaking strain of eleven thousand pounds so there was some serious pulling happening. Finally they told Jamie that they couldn’t get the boat off and suggested that he strip the boat as Ismael would be there within a few hours. As Jamie started to think about what to take off, they called back to say that they wanted to give it one more try. The only line left was a ¾” polypropylene line which is usually considered junk compared to nylon, but they hooked it up anyway and started to pull. By this time the waves from the hurricane were starting to build and actually helped to lift the boat. After a couple of minutes “White Squall” started to move, then bumped out over the rocks and floated off. We had an opportunity to see this dramatic rescue as “Ambar III” had it on video. It was heart-stopping footage for other sailors. “White Squall” was towed back to Puerto Escondido. After a week of repair work Jamie sailed across the Sea of Cortez to San Carlos to put the boat up on the hard. The latest we’ve heard about “White Squall” is that she was being trucked back to Seattle for more complete repairs. The hurricane never amounted to much at Puerto Escondido, but 150 miles away on the mainland coast many fishing boats were lost and approximately ninety fisherman were killed.

We continued driving down to La Paz and once there worked long and hard getting “Day Dream” back in sailing shape. We had to pack away all of the stuff that we’d carted down, clean the bottom of six months worth of barnacles, put on sails, etc., etc., etc. We never thought we’d get all of the “new” books packed away. We now have at least two years worth of reading on board. One other thing that we were doing was getting a cellular phone set up. The cell phone was needed since we are still doing some work. This, at least, is the theory. As we told our partners, we would be doing ‘virtual’ work in our ‘virtual’ office and it would go along nicely with our ‘virtual’ paycheque! We couldn’t believe what a problem it was to get this phone set up. It took about ten days, with two to three calls or visits to the cellular office every single day. Voice Mail took a whole hour to set up. I guess that’s the downside of mañana land.

We finally got everything done and sailed north up the coast to Puerto Escondido. This is one of the best hurricane holes on the entire coast so we wanted to stay near it until the end of hurricane season. We met Dennis and Judith about ten miles south of Puerto Escondido at an anchorage called Candeleros where Dennis helped us put together our new fishing gear. We hadn’t caught one edible fish last year in 4600 miles of sailing and had complained vociferously about that to Dennis. He never fails to catch all he can eat, so we thought he should have to listen to our whining. He had described to us what gear to get but after buying it we hadn’t had the time/energy/knowledge to put it all together. The next day as we were leaving for Puerto Escondido, we put the line over the back and not ten minutes later caught a 26 inch Dorado. These are the most beautiful fish on Earth. Bright yellow, emerald green and flashes of blue and they really fight. When you pull them in they turn into Mahi-Mahi (at least on a restaurant menu) and are absolutely delicious. Two days later we went out to the island where Jamie went up on the beach and on the way there we caught a Marlin! This is a huge fish! Ours was between five and six feet long and had a sword of about eighteen inches. I fought him for an hour and when I finally got him up to the boat, we cut him loose. Somehow we couldn’t see killing him and then eating only a tiny percentage before it went bad. On the way back from the island Susan hauled in a thirty-three inch Dorado! It’s all we can do to eat everything that we catch. Of course we have also caught a fair number of inedible fish but we just yell at them for wasting our time and chuck them back. To date the biggest fish we have brought aboard is a fifty inch Dorado.

While we were at the island, which is called Monserrat, we went diving for lobster. We got 15 in two dives. That was enough for one giant feast and one regular meal for everyone. They were really exciting to spear. They live underneath rocks at depths of 10 to 15 feet. You have to dive on fifty rocks or so before you find a lobster rock, but then it’s usually a colony and you can spear two or three.

Once they realize that you are after them, they scamper off sideways or if they are really scared, they have a little jet propulsion system that scoots them backwards. They are incredibly fast and they look like the aliens in the movie Aliens when they are jetting away. On our second dive we found a great little colony living underneath a  hollow rock. They could get far enough inside the hollow that all we could see was their antenna sticking down, but, we could see that there were lots of them. The rock was about fifteen feet down, so we took turns going down and sticking our spears underneath the rock to try to scare them out. Finally one left and Dennis managed to shoot it with his spear gun. As he was retrieving his spear a big green Moray eel shot out from under a rock and tried to steal the lobster off it! This was exciting as the eel was about five feet long. They have canine teeth and a mouth about the size of a German shepherd and are one of the few things that can actually be dangerous for a diver. A minute later he came out of his hole again and went after Judith who was holding our bag full of lobster. He could really swim, easily going several times as fast as we could. He eventually went back to his hole (right beside the lobsters) and if we had had any sense at all we would have left then, but not only are we great white hunters, we were also hungry! I stood watch over his hole with my spear while Dennis went down for more lobster. Every 10 seconds the eel would stick his head out of his hole and look around. After a while he started to get braver and he’d come halfway out. When he did that, I’d whack him in the head and he’d go back in. This went on for about 20 minutes with the eel getting madder by the minute and us becoming more scared. Finally, we decided that we weren’t that hungry! We looked this eel up later in our fish book and found out that they eat lobster and can sense a wounded one so I guess that explains his aggressive behavior. He must have thought we were there to provide his dinner.

I have a couple more types of wildlife to tell you about. The first is clams. We are now pretty adept at getting two kinds. The first are called chocolate clams because they are brown. You dive between six and ten feet and dig these out of a sand bottom. They are difficult to spot and when they sense you coming they pull in their feeding tubes and hide so it’s a little bit of a sport. After you catch a few, you hang them in seawater in a bag and allow them to spit out sand for a day or so then you steam them and have a feast. Chocolates are about half the size of your fist and on a good beach you can get enough for a meal in about ten minutes. The second kind of clams have no name as far as I know so I’m going to call them thumb-nail clams. This actually is a pretty optimistic name as most of them are between the size of your pinkie fingernail and your ring finger fingernail. Fortunately they live right on the beach at about the half-tide level. You take an old, empty shell and dig about 3 inches down and pick up 2 or 3 at a time. Of course you need quite a few to make a meal but you can probably get all you need in 2 or 3 hours. However, this has been the fun part (a bit like picking blackberries). After letting them spit for a while, you steam them until they open and then you have to dig each one out of its shell individually! This takes forever but it’s worth it ‘cause they make great chowder or clam pizza. We’ve also learned how to get scallops and oysters. Since we have arrived in Mexico we have only actually bought meat twice so we’re doing all right in that department. One last word on wildlife. We have visits from moths almost every night. These are not what you’re thinking. These moths have a wing-span of five inches across, their bodies are the size of small mice and they have vampy red eyes and black wings. They seem utterly harmless but they always freak me out. Susan seems to like them since Twiggy gets a bit of exercise chasing them. In the morning we often find tattered moths that can no longer fly, lying about and yellow moth blood here and there.

Puerto Escondido is a really great harbour as it is completely landlocked other than a very narrow channel. We spent part of each week there since I had to take the bus down to La Paz in order to get cellular service so that I can pretend to work. The harbour is natural but the Mexican government started to develop it in the mid-eighties. It now has a breakwater, dinghy docks, garbage pick-up and tap water. Almost more service than we can stand although the nearest town is twenty miles away. Most of the harbour is deep, but right at the water tap it is only about six feet. One day another boat was filling up with water and just as they were leaving they went aground. Normally going aground is a calamity for a boat, equivalent to a fire in a house. However, here the tide only goes down a couple of feet, the bottom is soft mud and because of the breakwater there are no waves. The worst that would happen would be for the boat to lean over at an embarrassing angle for 8 or 10 hours. The people on the boat gunned the engine and with four dinghies pushing at full throttle we managed to get it free. A couple of days later the local people in Loreto asked if any of the yachts wanted to participate in their annual fiesta. This is a local festival in which a statue of the Virgin of Loreto is carried by boat from Puerto Escondido to Loreto. This Virgin saved the local fishing fleet several hundred years ago and somehow lost her arms in the process. We thought that this would be fun and the fiesta to follow the delivery sounded great. There were four sailboats involved, one had the statue and 10 or so local kids on board, the rest of us were just required to look good. As you will appreciate, “Day Dream” did very well at that job! We had a really nice sail up to Loreto but when we arrived we were really uncomfortable and not sure that we would stay as the anchorage was exposed and the wind was blowing pretty good. Normally we don’t like to anchor in less than about thirty feet of water in case the wind comes up and the waves start to break. At Loreto we discovered that you passed the thirty foot level about a quarter mile from the shore. As a result we were driving around in circles discussing the situation and trying to decide what to do. The boat with the statue and the kids on board kept right on going in until it finally went aground on the beach. This was a really ugly situation. With the wind blowing straight onto the beach and the waves building there was a real chance that these folks could lose their boat. I think if they had been almost anywhere else they would have been in huge trouble. However, within five minutes two Mexican pongas roared out, hooked up and started to pull. We got our dinghy behind to push and the sailboat had its engine at full bore. After a couple of minutes it popped free. Meanwhile Susan was sailing back and forth out in front of the town. By the time I got back to the boat in the dinghy, all the other boats had decided that this was a bad anchorage and we all turned around and headed for Escondido with our tails between our legs.

After two months spent in and around Puerto Escondido, we finally said good-bye and headed for La Paz for Christmas. We decided to do the grand tour of offshore islands on the way down. First stop was Isla Monserrat. As we were heading into an anchorage, we ran out of fuel. I guess when you only fill up every few months, it kind of slips your mind. Fortunately we had a little bit in another tank because the nearest fuel dock is over a hundred miles away. Susan sailed us around in circles while I bled the engine and we finally got to anchor. We didn’t find a single lobster that day so we left the next morning for Isla Santa Catalina. Catalina is well out in the sea so we thought there should be lots of lobster. There were none, but the trip was worth it for the thousands of bright tropical fish. Luckily we didn’t go hungry that night because a small cruise ship (70 paying guests) anchored nearby and the captain sent over an invitation to dinner. What a pleasure to eat great food that someone else prepared and is going to clean up. We stayed after dinner to watch a video of some spectacular film taken from an old square rigged ship rounding Cape Horn in a storm in 1939.

We had planned to spend a day or two at a little island called Las Animas. This island is way off the beaten track and in fact as far as we know there is no chart for it. Due to the lack of commercial traffic in this area charts range from indifferent to downright laughable. Most of the surveys were done in the mid-1800s and there are many places that have never been surveyed or whose positions are off by as much as a couple of miles. Anyway, there is no official chart of Animas or even a sketch in any of the guide books so it sounded like a cool place to us. When we arrived we found that it is about a half mile from where it’s supposed to be. Unfortunately, we could see that it would not be safe to spend the night, so we just cruised slowly by while drawing a sketch chart. Now if you need to go to Las Animas, you’ll know where to get a chart.

Susan

Just a short note from me about the weather in these parts. We are enjoying the cooler weather now especially after arriving back to such intense heat at the end of September. Daytime temperatures were always in the 90’s and the water didn’t even provide much relief. It’s been gradually cooling down to daytime highs of 75 or so with the nights in the sixties sometimes. The water temperature started to change dramatically in mid-October and we are now wearing our full (but thin) wet suits in order to stay in the water for a while.