Destinations – Page 4 – s/v Mysticeti

Thanksgiving in La Paz

Posted by John

We first heard the term on our second or third day here in La Paz, on the morning VHF channel 22 radio net, which we discovered by accident, during a portion referred to as “Arrivals and Departures.” A boat was welcomed back to La Paz after a two-year absence with the words: the “bungee effect” has struck again. What was meant was that even though boats leave La Paz, they are often drawn back, like the pull of a bungee cord.

We just got here, and we already see the attraction. It’s comfortable, and as we mentioned in the last post, there is a welcoming and supportive cruising community. We joined Club Cruceros, the cruiser club, paying for a one-year membership. Maybe we just want to keep our options open. Or maybe we want to draw a line in the sand for ourselves at a new latitude, to kind of establish a forward base as it were, a familiar fallback position as we ultimately press onward.

The city of La Paz, population around a quarter-million, is located on the Sea of Cortez side of the Baja California peninsula, maybe thirty miles or so north of the Tropic of Cancer. We crossed the Tropic of Cancer twice getting here. The first time was at approximately 3:45 AM on November 10th, entering the tropics on the way south to Cabo San Lucas, and the second time after rounding the southern end of the Baja peninsula and coming back up on the inside, leaving the tropics.

La Paz is located on the Bay of La Paz, which is separated from the Sea of Cortez by a peninsula. The distant view from La Paz is therefore of mountains (or at least big hills) on three sides. Just off the northern tip of the peninsula, at the open end of the bay, is the UNESCO designated biosphere reserve of Isla Espíritu Santo. I dove in these waters before, almost thirty years ago, and have waited a long time to be able to anchor in one of the picturesque bays of the island on my own boat. Because of its protected status, to visit the area now requires each person to purchase a permit, but that is not a big deal.

Up to this point, our trip schedule has been driven by two main events. The first being getting out of Puget Sound during the weather window, and the second being in San Diego by the last week of October to join the Baja Ha-Ha. The next event that would drive a schedule is crossing the Pacific to French Polynesia, but that is at least several months away. In the meantime, we can relax, work on projects, explore and enjoy.

Thanksgiving Day, 2016. We don’t know for sure which of our families these never-lit candles came from, but these, or ones just like them, were part of both Julie’s and my childhood Thanksgivings.

For us as a family the Thanksgiving Holiday has evolved over the years, but this year it took a drastic turn to the different. It’s hard to think of it as Thanksgiving when the sun is bright, hot and high in the sky. At home in the Seattle area we would be entering the “Slimy Season” now, when the sun, if it manages to come out for a few minutes, is too weak and low in the sky to dry anything out, a green slime seems to form on everything and the ground remains perpetually wet. Here in the desert climate of La Paz, if something gets wet it dries in a matter of minutes.

We can’t help but to think back on what we’ve had to do, and give up, to get this far. The years of planning and preparation; the familiar routines of caring for our goats, chickens, dog and cat we used to have, even the bee hives Julie tried to maintain, are all just memories now. The gambles we’ve taken, financial and otherwise, are not trivial. There is a sense of excitement for where we go from here, but also the knowledge that every time we set out is another opportunity for failure. Even if we changed our minds and quit today, just getting the boat back home would not be easy and could take months.

A few days before Thanksgiving, the cruising community threw a party at La Costa restaurant for all the new boats that had just arrived. There was music and dancing, from performances of a Mariachi band and traditional Mexican dancers, to the live band and party participants themselves. In the fading light of the sunset, I looked at the fronds of the trees blowing in the wind and the boats in the boatyard next-door and it hit me as to just how we had gotten here. I suddenly thought of my dad. As a kid I spent many Saturday afternoons with him sailing in his 14-foot C-Lark on Lake Washington and telling him how someday I was going to sail to Tahiti. I don’t think he ever took it seriously. It’s still too early to tell if we’ll make it to Tahiti, or even get close, but if my dad could see what we’ve done to get this far, I’d like to think he’d be impressed and happy.

There were plenty of opportunities offered to have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner here. We chose The Dock Café, just up at the end of the dock, overlooking the marina, which made an American Thanksgiving dinner the special of the day. We shared the table with Joe and Cathy from “Slainte,” and shared the experience with others of the local cruising family.

That was our Thanksgiving for 2016.

San Diego

Posted by John

When we sailed into San Diego Bay we needed a specific destination. That pre-decided destination was Glorietta Bay, which is a designated anchoring area for boats participating in the Baja Ha Ha, the annual cruising rally to Cabo San Lucas. The anchorage area, designated by the San Diego anchorage designation authorities (there must be such a group) as A-5, would allow Ha Ha boats to stay for the entire month of October, rather than the normal 72 hours. We had prearranged to meet another rally boat there that also had an 18-year old onboard, so we raised our Baja Ha Ha flag and headed for Glorietta Bay.

Just as when we noticed the birds in Half Moon Bay and the sea lions in Monterey, we immediately noticed the military helicopters in San Diego. Unlike the birds and sea lions, they did not have a strong odor, but they were loud, low and there were lots of them. So loud at times it was difficult to talk. We suspect they are from the Marine Corps Air Station at Camp Pendleton, doing routine training, but we could be wrong.

Glorietta Bay is a little appendage off the main part of San Diego Bay at Coronado. We found the other boat we were looking for, but being a Friday evening, we also found the anchoring area crowded with weekend boats all a little too close together for comfort. On Saturday the wind came up, and we watched one unattended boat drag anchor and drift through the middle of the pack, narrowly missing several others until the harbor police, and eventually the boat’s owner, showed up.

Other than a place to hang out for a while, Glorietta Bay offered practically nothing on shore for us, not even a place to leave the dinghy for the day or anywhere to replenish our fresh water supply. We didn’t really mind the playing of Reveille and Taps over loudspeakers at the nearby Naval Amphibious Base, but it was clear that staying there for two weeks anchored out wasn’t going to work for us.

It didn’t take long to find a marina with available guest slips, and on Monday morning we moved the boat farther south to a marina in Chula Vista. There we found everything we could possibly need, from friendly people and clean, bright docks and sidewalks with night-time floodlight-lit palm trees (always makes me feel like I’m on vacation), to a West Marine store a few blocks away, and a shopping mall a few more blocks beyond that. We even found a Mexican money exchange inside the Costco store.

Although Glorietta Bay was free, and a couple weeks in the marina is a bigger hit to the credit card than we planned, the marina was far more practical for everything we had left to do. We immediately had our mail sent there, and ordered everything we knew we’d need soon, rather than trying to find it all in Mexico.

Glorietta Bay. The yellow buoy marks a corner of the special anchorage area.

On Tuesday, Slainte arrived from a stop in Catalina after figuring out their engine problem in Santa Barbara. Joe and Cathy rented a car for the rest of the month, which we shared with them and split the cost. It was nice being able to make Costco runs and get everything loaded onto the boat directly from the dock rather than having to ferry it all in the dinghy like we did in Half Moon Bay.

We haven’t had any time for sightseeing because we have so much to do still. We’ve received our temporary import permit for the boat, got Mexican fishing licenses (a requirement for each person onboard), bought a Mexican liability insurance policy (also a requirement), bought a SIM card for our boat/house phone so it will work in Mexico, and then promptly dropped and broke the phone (that’s what, maybe item number 26 of the lost and broken?). We did manage to see a couple movies at a theater in the mall. We don’t get to do that as a family very often.

Our big purchase, and another big project to complete (a never-ending list), is a reverse osmosis water maker. It took us a long time to choose which one we wanted, and to figure out how to power it. It’s also going to take a while to get it installed, but it will be a certain necessity once we’re into the Sea of Cortez—and later if we do any long ocean crossings.

We bought the 30 GPH model from Cruise RO Water in Escondido. We had almost bought the one they had for demo at the Seattle Boat Show two years ago, so we’ve been looking at this model for some time. The water maker will (think positive) force filtered seawater at high pressure through membranes which block the salt in order to obtain pure water. Sounds simple, but the actual system has a lot of parts, pumps, valves, gauges and somewhat complex operating and maintenance procedures. That sustained “high pressure” is the hard part, and the membranes are delicate and expensive. It took the first day and a half of reading the manual and looking at the parts just to decide that we were missing the breather cap for the high pressure pump. We won’t have the system installed before we leave here, but we are scrambling to figure out how best to make it all fit and tie in with the existing electrical and plumbing systems. We think it might be easier to buy hardware here than try to shop for it in Mexico.

As for being here in San Diego, we’ve had some of the most summer-like weather we’ve seen all year. We’ve also seen the most rain since we left Puget Sound, but that isn’t saying much. I don’t think it’s rained enough to make the ground completely wet yet. It cools off at night, but otherwise it is shorts and T-shirts weather.

The strangest thing has been a weird crackling noise in the boat, especially at night. It sounded like it was coming from up in the bow, where the holding tank is and we store so many things, but we also heard it equally as loud in the stern. It sounded like electrical sparks, or maybe dripping water—but random, with no pattern. It was enough to nearly drive me nuts. I finally asked people who live on other boats in the marina if they heard it too. They laughed. One person said it was shrimp, and another said crabs; the sounds they make travel through the water and are easily heard through the boat hull. They told stories of people nearly ripping boats apart trying to find the source of the noise. I don’t care what kind of creature is making the sound, or why. I’m just good with being able to sleep at night.

And of course, one more thing failed this week. In the process of fixing the light inside the compass so we can see our heading at night, suddenly the transparent dome popped off and all the fluid gushed out. I have had that compass—the main binnacle compass on the steering pedestal—out of there many times in the past without a problem. It even spent last winter sitting on a shelf. I knew that one of the two very dim LED’s inside the rim was not working, which makes it difficult for our aging eyes to maintain the desired heading at night. I spent a big chunk of the day making up a replacement light from a strip of three red LED’s, including a whole new cable and connector assembly to replace the 22-year old corroded original, and was just reinstalling the compass when the dome fell off. Once my shock and frustration subsided, I decided that I probably had taken out too many screws. In the meantime, Julie located some “Ritchie Compass Oil” in stock at the downtown San Diego West Marine store. I found the fill plug you take out of the compass to pour the oil back in. You learn new stuff everyday.

Fixing the compass light removes one old item from the project list, but losing the compass fluid adds a new one (#27) to the lost and broken list.

California Yacht Marina at Chula Vista—a bright and sunny place.

There is no moss growing on these docks, nor, we trust, will any grow on our boat this winter.

The rally leaves on Monday, the 31st. The next post will be from somewhere in Mexico.

Under a Half Moon in Half Moon Bay

Posted by John

It looks like we’ve been hanging out in Half Moon Bay for more than four weeks so it’s probably time to say something about it. We used up all of our paid internet access, and we’re too far from the free marina Wi-Fi to get a reliable connection, otherwise this post might’ve been made sooner.

As a destination, Half Moon Bay is not much for us to write home about. It was just an easy place to get off the ocean without a lot of screwing around. Simply steering around the rocks near Maverick’s Beach, famous for its annual surfing competition, and then entering Pillar Point Harbor through an opening in the breakwater, and we were suddenly inside a completely protected and uniformly shallow bay within the bay. Behind another breakwater within the harbor is the Pillar Point Marina. In the time we’ve been here, we’ve met people on several other boats heading south from Puget Sound and B.C. At one time, there were at least six boats from the Seattle area all anchored around us in the harbor. We met some in a bar watching the Seahawks on TV, which has kind of become what we do on Sunday afternoons.

We will remember Half Moon Bay as the place where, for the first time in years, we found ourselves without anything we really needed to get up for and do. We’d wake in the morning and lie in bed trying to think what the agenda of the day was, but we wouldn’t be able to come up with much. There was no commute to get up for, no job to go to, no plans to be worked out, no financial details to discuss (how, again, are we going to do this?), no rooms to clean out, flooring to install, tile to lay, animals to feed, possessions to sort, cars to get fixed or items to donate or try to sell. Everything on which we had worked so hard for so long had led up to us getting on our boat and sailing away. And now, some 700 miles later, we realized all those things were behind us. We had, perhaps, achieved the escape that we had previously only wondered if was even possible. When the big event of the day was eating half moon cookies under a half moon in Half Moon Bay (“Hey, look at this!”), we knew life was different.

We are here because we needed to be south of Cape Mendocino before the Seattle summer ended, when the jet stream moves south and starts steering storm systems directly at the Washington and Oregon coasts. We missed it last year, so we made sure to leave early this year. But we can’t go too far south until the hurricane season in Mexico ends in November. So we end up with this dwell time in between to just sort of hang out and try to not get in anybody’s way.

We couldn’t get a temporary slip in the marina, but we were able to rent a mooring buoy in the harbor for a couple of weeks. That got us a key to the marina laundry room and showers, two things we still find easier with actual plumbing. But when we tried to rent the mooring for a month we were told we’d have to apply to the harbor patrol for live-aboard status, and then pay several hundred dollars in live-aboard fees. So we paid for the mooring on a day-to-day basis for a couple of weeks and then moved back to where we’d been anchored by Slainte and dropped the anchor again. We’ll give the key back when we leave.

Half Moon Bay is easy to find. The Air Force radar domes on Pillar Point are visible from miles away.

Pillar Point Harbor, protected by a long breakwater, occupies the north end of the bay. A humpback whale ventured inside the breakwater a few times, and more than once we were surrounded by large porpoises. An intimidating sea lion likes to hang out on the marina fuel dock.

When we arrived, the place was crazy with birds. Elegant terns (?), frantic little squeaky white things, take high speed plunges straight down into the water, then immediately pop back up into the air with a tiny fish. Meanwhile, whole squadrons of pelicans return to the bay in the evenings, coming in low and looking cool and confident skimming the surface. They glide more and flap less than the terns, only losing their coolness when they spot a fish and get all gangly with their feet sticking out and wings at an awkward angle; rolling, diving and crashing into the water with a noisy splash. There are still a lot of birds here, but the numbers seem to be less the last few weeks.

The marina is behind a second breakwater, but is it made of rocks or resting birds? Hint: zoom in, look close, start counting.

Pillar Point Marina is used by both recreational and commercial boats, but the daily activity is dominated by the fishing fleet which comes and goes constantly. Some marinas have a high-end feel, some seem more suited to the average boater, but this one, with the fish trucks and fork lifts, definitely feels industrial.

Many boats sell directly to the public. The weekends also bring lots of people out to sail, kayak, wind surf, paddle board, fish and generally mill about in the marina and the seafood restaurants and the few local shops.

Downtown Half Moon Bay is about a ten minute drive south on the highway. It has a Safeway, a hardware store, banks and other businesses. It would be more convenient if they were within walking distance of the marina, but a regular transit bus runs all day. We rented a car so we could drive to Alameda for a seminar put on by the Baja Ha Ha about cruising in Mexico. The next day we drove around and did some serious shopping, including picking up some parts for our wind generator project from a Silicon Valley electronics store that I used to mail order electronic parts from decades ago. The thought was nostalgic, but the experience really wasn’t.

We can feel homeless and broke one day and back to normal the next. But either way, realizing that we have to get our grocery cart full of food onto a public transit bus (why did we buy so much?), or a rental car trunk-load from Costco into a tiny dinghy (why did we buy so much?), we are constantly being reminded that the logistics of life are different now.

All is not lying around and watching the birds and taking occasional shore excursions, however. Nature abhors a void and will fill it with things for you to do. Since we left home and had to replace an engine impeller while underway on the first day, followed by repairing a broken latch on the bow hatch the next, so many things have broken or otherwise been in need of repair or replacement that I started keeping a list. As of today, we are up to nineteen individual items that needed unplanned attention. That’s about one new problem every other day. It’s been everything from broken sail slides on the mizzen, to a clogged carburetor jet on the outboard. The one thing we haven’t fixed yet is a wind-up ship’s clock that was part of the boat when we bought it. We had it cleaned about ten years ago, but didn’t think to have it cleaned again before we left. It suddenly stopped working a few days ago. I won’t be taking it apart myself to see what I can do, but we can’t imagine going the rest of the trip without it, either. Maybe we’ll meet a friendly watchmaker along the way.

Little to do except handle the daily breakdowns. That’s how Half Moon Bay will be remembered.