Living Aboard

I thought I’d jot down a few notes about life aboard for those who are wondering about the day-to-day routine of cruising in Mexico.  While we have been doing a fair amount of traveling, most cruisers spend more time in port than actually underway…and so here are a few comments on the life that is not under sail.

 

We returned to La Paz a week ago, and chose to anchor out – being in a marina is convenient, but there is little privacy since you are right next to other boats and people feel free to stop by as they walk down the dock.  In addition, the wind can’t blow through the boat when it is tied to a dock, and the air can get pretty stuffy when the outside air temp reaches as high as 90F (as it has been lately). However, at anchor the boat generally turns with the bow toward the wind, allowing fresh air to be scooped into the hatches.

 

(At least, NORMALLY we swing with the wind and the tide, but in La Paz those are not always from the same direction, since the incoming tide sweeps along the length of Bahia La Paz from the south as the wind comes from the north.  The photo below shows how wind, current and hull shape interact to keep one boat oriented to the wind and the other to the current….a sight that you don’t see often in an anchorage as breezy as La Paz.)

 

Some people don’t like to anchor because the boat moves more and you have to pay attention, checking to be sure your anchor is not dragging, or (more likely) that other people are not dragging down on YOU.  But if you have good anchoring gear and deploy it well, you should be able to sleep well at night…and I like the rocking motion of a boat at anchor.

Anchoring out also means that trips ashore involve a dinghy ride.  Most cruisers here have inflatable dinghies with oars and outboards.  Outboards are a highly coveted item in Mexico, and it’s imperative to lock the outboard onto the dinghy and lift the dinghy from the water if you have an outboard on it.  Otherwise, you’re likely to wake up in the morning to find the dinghy stolen, and, if you are lucky, to find it drifting somewhere minus the outboard. 

Fortunately, Kim and I both prefer rowing to the noise and smell of an outboard, and so we have only once put the outboard onto the dinghy in the last two months.  Pumping up the dinghy is a regular ritual once we reach harbor, and provides more exercise for those quads, so we take turns on the foot pump.  Rowing is great aerobic exercise as well, so we keep very careful tabs of who GETS to row each time.

Each dinghy trip provides an opportunity to bring water back to the boat from the marina dock, and we generally refill the 5-gallon jug at least once or twice a day – that’s more than enough to keep the water tanks topped up, even with showers and dishwashing.  Unless we are in a bay with lots of other boats, we wash the dishes in salt water and save the fresh water for rinsing.  Since we have no laundry facilities on board, it’s easiest just to bring it to a lavanderia every 5-6 days, where they will wash, dry and fold a load of clothes for $50 MX (about $4 US).  With this weather, we’re typically in shorts and T-shirts, so the laundry bag never gets too heavy – I haven’t worn jeans at all in Mexico.

Kim has a couple of bicycles and La Paz is a wonderful city for biking, with wide streets and few hills.  With a plastic milk basket strapped to the back, we don’t need a taxi to provision the boat or visit a bunch of hardware stores looking for the odd nut or bolt.  Another great way to get some exercise and see the side of the city that is not experienced by cruisers who stay at the dock

Of course, the best place to provision is right out of the sea and the Sea of Cortes is fabulous for fishing.  On the way into La Paz, for instance, we put a hand line over board and it took us 15 minutes to hook a fish – although that one got away as I began hauling in the line, the next one was not so lucky and the 18” Sierra was turned into sushi in less time that it took us to catch him.

 

Needless to say, living on a boat involves the occasional repair job, validating the saying that “cruising is just working on your boat in exotic locations.”  There is always a list of “boat projects,{ and while we were in La Paz we took the opportunity to trouble-shoot the Single Sideband Radio as well as install some new speakers for the stereo. 

 

Single side bands are a valuable addition to the VHF radio, allowing cruisers in foreign countries to get weather faxes and weather forecasts, and to communicate with people back home through ham networks.  Accessing grounds and wires often involves climbing into tight spaces, and moving the ‘stuff’ into a different tight space for examination or repair.  We still haven’t diagnosed the problem, but we have reason to believe we may have too little ‘ground plane.’

Hope you enjoy the pictures!

Miscellaneous Musings Making Weigh from Mazatlán

I’m on another night watch, Kim having headed below at 8, knowing I will be waking him up at 2 am.  The wind is steady from the W and we are on a starboard tack on a moonless night, the boat riding easily up and down the light swell.  We left Mazatlán at about 9 a.m. after checking our email accounts one last time with the air card as we sat at anchor across from the city.

We had a whirlwind turn in Mazatlán.  We had made our way steadily up the coast from La Cruz (near Puerto Vallarta) with stops in Chacala, Isla Isabel and Mantenchen (outside San Blas).

Chacala was as charming as I remembered from my visit in January and we enjoyed a couple of good meals at a restaurant on the beach that had wifi and a fabulous book exchange.  As an avid reader, I can’t keep enough books on the boat, and I count on the book exchanges in marinas and other cruiser haunts to replenish my reading material. If I were an aficionado of Danielle Steele, Dean Koontz or John Grisham, I would have no lack of options, since the offerings in the usual book exchange consist of 75% romance novels, 24% mystery/thriller/legal fiction, and .5% cruising and travel guides.  This book exchange offered an amazing selection of good fiction and non-fiction and we traded gladly.

From Chacala, we did a day sail to Mantenchen, where we anchored long enough to get a good night’s sleep before our overnight sail to Isla Isabel.  We managed to barely arrive at the island anchorage before darkness fell, after an exhilarating sail that found us reefing for the first time in our 4 weeks of sailing together.  Kim’s system is a bit different than mine, but the procedure went well and we could check off one more system we had successfully checked out on this shakedown cruise.

This was Kim’s first time to visit the rookery and we both enjoyed the boobies and the frigate birds.  When I had visited with Mark and Frank on Dec 31, the boobies were still sitting on eggs or fluffy white chicks.  Now 4 months later, the eggs were all hatched and the downy chicks had grown into ungainly adolescent boobies, as large as their parents but lacking their sleek coats and brilliant coloring.  We both took scores of photos and this time I had the presence of mind to shoot some video as well.

From Isabel we headed to Mazatlán. We needed a marina stop in order to take on fuel and water, replenish our groceries, do laundry and - most importantly – celebrate my birthday.   It was another overnight sail, this time requiring a number of sail changes as the wind was up and down, requiring me to shake out a reef, take down the staysail and pull out the genoa at midnight and then roll the genoa back in and put the staysail back up by 1 am.  The video I posted gives you some sense of what the foredeck crew (me) looks like on such a day!  The stabilizing muscles get a good workout – no need for Pilates here!

It says something about this lifestyle that we somehow lost track of the dates and were both under the impression that it was my birthday when it was really only the 16^th.  (No, we were not smoking anything, either!)  I had managed to score a birthday breakfast and a birthday lunch before we clued to the reality, at which time I decided that big birthdays (like my turning 30 at last) warrant a celebration on the Birthday Eve as well as the actual Birthday. 

We arrived in Mazatlán on the evening of the 16^th and anchored outside the city, planning to go into the marina the next day.  However, because they were dredging the channel that led to all marinas, we had to wait for the dredge to take siesta at 2pm to enter.  So we moved the boat to a closer anchorage at 1 and called into the marina to learn that because we drew 5.5 feet and the tides would be quite low at 2 pm, we would have to wait until 5 to enter.  So instead of getting our errands done over the course of two days, we would only have the 18^th to take care of them all. 

Arriving in the marina at 5:30, we fueled up and pulled into our assigned slip.  And, first things first - we celebrated the real birthday with coconut shrimp and a bottle of red wine at a restaurant in town.

The next day found us doing the marina hustle – bringing two weeks worth of laundry to the lavanderia, washing down the boat, cleaning out the frig, taking the bus into town, filling up our cell phones and air card with more minutes and grocery shopping.  We had just enough time to unload the provisions into the frig and top up the water tanks before the marina staff came down to help us out of our slip…a tricky maneuver since we were at the very end of the fairway with little space to turn and a rock breakwater hard on one side.   It was nice to anchor up and enjoy the city lights from the water and get one last good night’s sleep before the crossing.

It’s been six months since I ‘retired’ and came down to Mexico, so it seems appropriate at this birthday juncture to take stock of what I’ve learned in the experience.  My goals when I came down were basically to learn Spanish and to experience cruising in a foreign country (although I have cruised a lot in BC, I don’t consider Canada ‘foreign’ even if they spell color, honor and license incorrectly – sorry, Heather and Gavin!)  I also wanted to learn more about new (to me) aspects of cruising - such as single sideband radios, water makers and dealing with port captains and other authorities.

I’m very pleased with my progress in Spanish, and although I want to continue my studies, I’m no longer apprehensive about interacting en español.  Sorting out the single sideband was frustrating for a few weeks, but I am finally able to get weather faxes with some reliability. Only two of the 4 boats I have been on had water makers, but after seeing the space and work involved to install and maintain one, I think I’d focus on getting more tankage before I’d go with a water maker.  I’m a firm believer in the KISS principle and I’d rather spend my time sailing than troubleshooting one more piece of equipment.

So my original goals have been more than met in this adventure.  Even better have been all of the serendipitous discoveries that came along with the sailing and the Spanish studies – I’ve learned so much about Mexican history and culture, which has been sometimes endearing and sometimes frustrating.  I’ve met many interesting people, with a variety of stories and motives for being in Mexico…. retirees seeking to stretch their buying power…refugees from the hectic pace of life in the big city…young families sailing with children…and many people like me, taking advantage of the window of opportunity to sail in new places.

I’m especially pleased about the improvements in my understanding of sail trim.  Unlike Puget Sound and the Inside Passage, the Sea of Cortez offers long hours of winds that are constant in direction and strength, so there is plenty of time to experiment with a little less halyard here, a little more outhaul there, moving the cars a bit more forward or a bit farther back, sheeting the sail in a bit more and letting it out, as I watch the knot meter to see what effect that has on our speed and course. 

And, finally, the many amazing and magical moments that I could never have predicted: dinghying up against a mother humpback and her calf, watching the moon rise blood red over the Mexican Riviera, sailing down the moon river under spinnaker, picking my way through booby nests and swimming with the sea lions.  I can’t imagine a better way to close another decade.