Hidden Phantoms and Triangulated
at Sea: Banderas Bay to the Sea of Cortez
November 31, 2019-December 12, 2019
“Slowly,
I learned to trust [the boat’s] strength. Every time she rose to the top of
a crest, I would hunch up in the cockpit under the scant protection of the
sprayhood and hold on. She would pause, almost suspended in midair, before
dropping down in the deep trough. My stomach was in my throat as we nosedived
and slammed into the sea, only to begin the ascent again.”
--Tania Aebi, Maiden Voyage
Maiden
Voyage is one of the
first sailing adventures I read about after Kevin began teaching me how to
sail. One of the youngest solo circumnavigators, Aebi happened to be an 18 year
old young woman. Her story is raw and harrowing, and I remember wondering as I
read her story how I would react when we encountered a similar situation as the
one described above.
Notice I
didn’t write “if” we encountered such weather….
I knew it
was only a matter of time. And on our passage from Mazatlan to La Paz, crossing
the Sea of Cortez, Abei’s words became our reality.
Before this
crossing, however, Kevin and I spent our first time alone together on the boat
after Quinn flew home and before all 7 of our kids arrived
in La Paz.
Our first
trip happened to be where we could not anchor, in Sayulita. This surfers’
paradise is a short 45 minute drive from La Cruz, where we were anchored for a
couple of nights. We decided to Uber after we checked the incredibly cheap
price: exactly $9 each way. (As a side note: Uber was cheap everywhere in
Mexico. As an example, we would regularly head to a grocery store 20 minutes
from our marina in La Paz, and invariably, we would only have to pay about $3
one way. Yes, 3 bucks! But Uber drivers work surreptitiously…meaning, you will
not see an Uber sticker anywhere on their car; the local taxi cab drivers have
been known to pull Uber drivers out of their own car and beat them up. The
competition, in other words, is fierce).
Sayulita was
equal parts jungle, crowded coastal beach, and hippie-meets-California vibe.
Which explains the crowding. It was quaint, and we loved browsing vendors’
homemade sandals and jewelry—but I can see why so many locals and cruisers
mentioned Californians taking over the town. It was probably the most crowded
small town we experienced in Mexico. But the highlights included a vibrant
cemetery, a beautiful hot pink church in the main plaza, and swaying
multi-colored banners adorning the streets, drawing visitors’ eyes upwards.
After a
couple of days, we left Banderas Bay for good and headed North toward Mazatlan.
Before we got there, however, we decided to stop at a small village/anchorage
called Chacala. Perhaps the beauty of this town was that we had no expectations
of it. We read briefly about it in our cruising guidebook—but otherwise had
little information.
There was
only one other sailboat when we arrived, and the couple aboard gave us various tips
about the area. The first piece of advice: there is no need to beach the dinghy
when a small, nondescript beach on the northwest end of the jetty, near the
local panga boats, offers a great parking spot. Also, this couple gave us local
knowledge about several hiking spots, which we took advantage of (see the pics
from the top of the ridge line). Our main hike to the top involved broken
communication with a sleepy gate guard (he eventually tired of our lousy
Spanish and gesticulating handwaving), and it’s the first time I have ever
stopped dead in my tracks on a hike and refused to go any farther. The
long/short story is this: I will try anything, and I’m not one to give up on something
that challenges me, but I hate snakes more than Any. Other. Thing. We had
gotten off our makeshift dirt path and were wandering through someone’s orchard
(see the pic of the bread fruit) when the ground was no longer visible; covered
with dense grassy muck at least a few feet deep, the orchard floor only made me
think: “I’m going to step on a snake…and then we’ll be too far from anyone or
anything [for help]….and then I’ll hyperventilate because I’ll worry that the
snake is poisonous…and”—well, you get the picture. We had also been told that
alligators lived in the adjacent “pond,” so my slippery slope thinking sealed
my fate. We headed back down from where we came, creating our own trail until we
reached the bottom, where there is a coastal yoga retreat, complete with guided
paths back to the beach. Whew.
The rest of
our time in Chacala was leisurely. We enjoyed stand-up paddle boarding, getting
to know the local workers at the various palapa restaurants (Hector, an 18 year
old waiter, shared his story of fleeing the violence and mayhem of Venezuela
and finally finding refuge in this sleepy town), and we joined an entire fleet
of cruisers and ex-pats at a local brewery called Onda. Onda offers about 10
different craft beers, some of the best we’ve ever had; an American couple, who
divides their time between Chacala and Alaska, owns this place, and it is open
only a couple of nights a week. We actually stayed an extra night in Chacala
because we heard such great things about this place. We mingled with fun, insightful
cruisers in an atmosphere reminiscent of an old friend’s candle-lit living room,
but the distinctly non-Mexican beer (aka more than 5.0% alcohol) made us glad
for our decision.
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| A few more boats showed up! |
Triangulated
in the Open Ocean: Our Overnight Passage to Mazatlan
We enjoyed
perfectly calm, warm days and evenings on our way to Mazatlan. Most of the time
we simply motorsailed, hugging the coastline in about 18 to 30 feet of water.
We kept noting the shallow depths, wondering whether we should give wider berth
from land, but the truth was, land looked pretty far away. Our radar and naked
eye discerned one finger of land pointing due west; this point looked like a
reef—even though we clearly saw a light of some kind on the stretch of sand. An
occasional panga boat would speed past us going the opposite direction…then,
one became three or four. We could see the bright orange waders filling the
lower half of the boats, clear indicators of fishermen cruising their territory in search of their livelihood.
However, a
curious thing happened: we noticed 3 pangas on our starboard (right) side,
maybe a mile from our vessel. Then, within about 10 or 15 minutes, one panga
was behind us, one was in front of us, and one had ended up on our port (left)
side. Meanwhile, the panga boat on our left had slowed down and was furiously
flashing us with a light; within a couple of minutes, we could see the flashlight
beam nodding up and down, like an overzealous toddler flickering a light switch on and off. I had come up from the galley below when I saw the two men, now
about less than a quarter of a mile off our beam.
“Oh crap,” I
said to Kevin. “Why the hell are they flashing us?” What I meant, of course: “What
are we supposed to do? Is this a trick?” Pirates came to mind as I noticed that
Kevin, at the helm, had not slowed down at all. Being the perfectly calm personality that he is, Kevin simply said, “I’m not sure
what they want. . . .”
While one
fisherman flashed his beam, the other guy was quickly hauling up what looked
like buckets-full of fishing line. Within a minute, with both fishermen
standing in the panga and yelling at the top of their lungs, they charged
toward us, cutting us off at the bow. Or, at least they tried to cut us off.
The reality was that our vessel was four times bigger than theirs—but their
actions were loud and clear even if their words were not. We pulled back our
power but did not kill the engine entirely. I noticed the setting sun while I
did a quick inventory in my head of everything I should grab down below (knife?
definitely the wasp spray, handheld radio…you get the idea: I wasn’t thinking twinkies
or cheap t-shirts, items sailors might bargain in an exchange with locals).
As the panga
crossed from our port to starboard side, Kevin left the cockpit to look over
the railing to see whether we had crossed their fishing line. Meanwhile, the
fisherman was making a circle in the air, an indication of our prop, we
presumed. Kevin noticed a black-looking buoy behind us…and we both pointed toward
our stern and shook our heads as if to say, “no, we didn’t cross your fishing
line.”
“Esta bien,”
I kept saying. “It’s okay.”
These two
guys finally relaxed and nodded in friendliness to us.
That night,
on the radar, we noticed about 18 dots, all lined up together and running
parallel to the mainland. I asked Kevin about these because I didn’t know if I
was looking at land—I thought maybe something was wrong with our charts. It
turns out, the row of dots was a fleet of shrimping boats. Of course. The
intrepid fishermen, combined with the shallow depths, finally made more sense
(as did the rumors of a shrimping shortage). We have since learned that these
fishing lines, running from close to land due west, are almost four or five
miles in length; avoiding the lines and shrimpers means giving the land wide
berth and, therefore, lengthening the passage to Mazatlan. Once we finally
arrived, we enjoyed our time immensely! We would not recommend Isla Mazatlan,
but the absolute best restaurant of our entire 3 month trip in Mexico was there
at the Marina/hotel: it’s called Tostaderia.
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| On high alert for more panga boats. |
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| We arrive in Mazatlan |
Crossing
the Sea of Cortez
After
listening to various cruisers’ nets throughout mainland Mexico, one thing we
realized was that cruisers on the radio typically attempted to dissuade fellow sailors
from hitting the open ocean if the wind was forecasted above 18 knots. Our boat
happens to love 20+ knots of wind, which we knew from our almost two years of
sailing on the Central Coast of California. Some of our best sailing days
consisted of at least 25 knots (especially when the rollers steaming toward us
from the far Pacific horizon were less than 6 feet; and very rarely did these
bumps occur in succession, say in anything less than 4 or 5 second intervals).
So when we listened to the net the morning we left the harbor, we were not
concerned—we actually relished the 18 to 25 knot forecast. The waves were not
forecasted above about 4 feet, so we thought we had a perfect window to cross
from mainland Mexico to La Paz, about a 275 mile, two-night journey.
Our first 24
hours proved idyllic, except for one important problem: we had heard a strange
snap in the cockpit that morning before we left the marina. Neither of us could
identify the problem, so we decided after looking around that it [the sound]
should not hold us up. Unfortunately, as Kevin was unfurling the genoa (forward
sail, the “big” one), he noticed the luff was slipping from the foil (the sail
was sliding past the railing toward the water). So Kevin quickly furled the
sail, hoping the jib sheet would secure it “enough” to keep it from going
anywhere. The sail we use most was effectively paralyzed. Our first evening,
December 11th, remained calm and uneventful.
The wind and
swell picked up in the morning, with sustained 18 knots but gusting up to 28 knots. However, the swell—specifically, the type of swell—is what we noticed. With
short periods (3 to 4 seconds between waves), the waves reminded me of a witch’s
hat: broader at the bottom, narrow at the top, and certain waves would curl at the
tip, folding over to push more white water toward our bow (or slightly right of
the bow as we tried to stay at a 45 degree angle); we were bucking current and
short-period swell and usually riding one wave to another, which elevated us
above the baseline of water— like a crowd surfer being passed from one person
to the next at densely packed concert. But then the inevitable would happen:
the waves would spread out, say at 6 or 7 or 8 second intervals, and our wave
riding would end with a seriously jolting crash, making our bow hit a deep
trough, sending a reverberating thud through the hull. Aebi had captured the
feeling in this scenario well.
I remember thinking
of the witch’s hat, of seeing white tendrils against a blackboard of pure dark
peaks rising above the railing and heading toward our bow, on December 12. I looked
at the clock: 12:12 a.m. exactly. The full moon had sprouted above our stern in
the early evening, but the glow from its light only permeated the water behind
us (the opposite direction). I was learning faith in our boat at the same time
I was doubting my ability to steer us into the black abyss if our autopilot
failed. Like Aebi, I was simply holding on.
But I had
Kevin. With two hour watches, we would pass each other in silence, exhausted from the constant jarring and seesawing….both of us leaned on the other in a way we had not done before
(with sailing). After 30 hours of the same intensity, we crossed the Lorenzo channel
between La Paz and Isla Espiritu. As soon as we rounded right toward Espiritu,
the wind and waves shut off, and we glided toward one of the most beautiful
places I had ever seen: the turquoise green water of Ensenada de Raza.
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| The best reward after 30 hours! (and note the awkwardly furled genoa!) |
