Syzygy Sailing

We left La Cruz on March 31st to sail south to Tenacatita, a little over a hundred miles down the coast, for a brief respite from the bustle of La Cruz. Jon had flown out for his spring break vacation from teaching, and was looking for a legitimate cruising experience, and Karen had read about a “jungle river adventure” to be found at Tenacatita, so that sealed the deal.

The wind was very light during the entire passage; the sail south was slow. I recollect sailing half the time, motoring half the time. We try to sail whenever there is sufficient wind to fill the sails, which puts us at a boat speed of about 2 knots. 2 knots is a fairly leisurely walking pace, so you can imagine how long it can take. We were in no rush, though–so 2 knots it was.

The anchorage at Tenacatita was tranquil and relaxing. There was a dolphin that lived in the anchorage, affectionately named “nacho” for a notch missing in his dorsal fin. Nacho was most interested in the boat 300 feet away from us, I think because it had a little dog that would run around the deck following the dolphin. Karen wanted to swim with Nacho–she has a lifelong dream to swim with dolphins–so she jumped in the water and started making various sounds intended to attract the attention (and affections) of Nacho over to our boat. The sounds succeeded . . . in making us laugh! I think Nacho sensed her need, because he stayed just far enough away–sometimes coming within 15 feet but no closer–during our entire stay in the anchorage.

At night, the phosphorescence was spectacular. One night we swam in it. Swimming through liquid light, making light by moving, little dots of light dripping off your hands and arms. Your whole body illuminated like some sort of superhero, like your body itself is radiating the light. It struck me as extra-terrestrial–not something that I knew existed on this earth.

The day after we arrived we serviced the outboard for the dinghy (finally), then packed up the dinghy for a day of travelling up some river through the jungle. It was a cool scene. Not, I must admit, a very impressive jungle–I think that experience is still to come–but it was fun travelling through this dark, narrow corridor of a river, barely wide enough for the dinghy in places, with a ceiling of vines and leaves overhead. At the end of the river we found a lake, which happened to be next to a town on the beach, which happened to be overrun by mexican tourists for the Easter holiday. We sat at a little food place next to the lake and spent the day like that, sitting there.

I have a good story about our first beach landing. There’s a hotel just up the beach from where we were anchored; Jon needed to arrange for some sequence of transportation back to Guadalajara to catch his flight. We took the dinghy in. There were small waves breaking on the beach, and it was fun to run in there surfing on a little wave until it got shallow then quick turn off the engine and raise it up and then jump out and drag the dinghy up on the beach. The waves seemed small and the trip into the beach was easy, so we were goaded into a sense of complacency. Trying to get back out, we were not so lucky. It’s all in the timing, I’m sure, but we did not spend much time trying to wait for a good window. Essentially, we dragged the dinghy into the water and went for it. As a result, we provided wild entertainment for a boat in the anchorage that happened to be watching this scene unfold. We got repeatedly thrashed by waves breaking on us, swamping the dinghy with seawater, and nearly flipping the dinghy end for end. I think we went weathered about 4 waves that had our number. Jon was up in the bow trying to hold it down as these waves lifted us to the vertical–on the last wave he was propelled vertically out of the bow straight into the air and crash landed back into the bottom of the dinghy. Unfortunately, the amusing part of the story would be the video and pictures that we didn’t take. On our way back to the anchorage we were hailed by the boat that watched it all unfold. They said they were sure we weren’t going to make it through the last wave, that we completely disappeared and then came launching vertically out of the white surf like a rocket. It was a hell of a fun time, that’s for sure.

We have been anchored a half mile outside of La Cruz for just over a week now, and it has felt like approximately 3 days. The time passes effortlessly unnoticed. For the first week we spent a lot of energy getting accustomed to the scene and taking care of business. Finding groceries, doing laundry, picking up parts for broken items, etc. Most days we dinghy into the marina, sometimes before lunch (more often after).   We’re anchored towards the back of the pack (there are about 30 boats out there with us), so it takes about 20 minutes of fighting with the outboard to get us into the marina.  We tie up next to the boat of newly acquired friends and then walk a half mile around the marina and into la cruz.  Three times now we have caught the bus towards puerto vallarta–a slow local bus that immediately turns the trip into a full-day affair.  We have eaten most of our dinners in town–the food is usually cheap and often it doesn’t make sense to return to the boat to make a meal.  We now plan only one task for each day–getting groceries is definitely a full-day affair; doing laundry ended up being a two-day affair.  I have experienced “mexican time” in the past, but each time I return it takes time to adjust.

We’ve made many new friends. There was a potluck on the roof of the yacht club, a couple dinners at friend’s boats, dinners on our boat. There was a swap meet this past weekend.  Many of the friends we met through their blogs before we even arrived to the area.  It was very cool to meet Diane, Evan, and Maia aboard Ceilyadh; we’ve been following their progress down the coast for months.  I spent nearly a full-day slacklining with Maia and a few of her friends.  We had Mike and Hyo from Io aboard for dinner last night, and I laughed to the point of tears over some of their stories.  Our friends Louis and Laura from Cirque are in the area–they’ve been cruising this part of Mexico for years now and were our inspiration for heading to La Cruz.  I learned how to sail while racing on board Cirque up in the bay, and they just won their division of the banderas bay regatta for a second year in a row.  Last night we had dinner with Mark on Wendaway (previously SolMate), who we met in San Carlos years ago when we first bought our boat; both the food and conversation was excellent and I will remember it as a special evening.  Raptordance (Bill and Mary) are also in the area; Raptordance is a Valiant 50 and Bill was one of the founders of the yahoo Valiant owner’s forum that has been such a helpful resource for me.  Wally Bryant from Stella Blue is anchored near us in the bay; he was up in the bay area with us while we were fixing up our boat.  His detailed blog is incredible and his advice in fixing up Syzygy was, and continues to be, top-notch.  It has been great to finally spend time with him over a few beers instead of email.  This place is full of cruisers who are doing the same thing we are, and it’s good to be able to bond over similar experiences.

The warm weather is wonderful.  It feels fantastic to be able to wear only shorts, all day long and into the evening.  I’m getting a tan for the first time in years.

Most boats that are doing the puddle jump–crossing the pacific to the marquesas–are leaving within the next week or so, or have left already.  We’ll definitely be one of the last boats to head out; we’re ok with that.  We need the time to relax and recover, and finish getting the boat ready.

Honestly, I’m still finding it hard to relax–I have been so long out of practice.  I have had difficulty sleeping–I’m thinking that it’s mostly the hotter temperatures, to which I haven’t yet acclimatized (but I love that it is hot, don’t get me wrong).  Then I wake up and feel as if I should be getting stuff done, working on the boat, running errands, etc, and unfortunately there is still a lot of that to be done.  We want to depart for the south pacific in about three weeks and there are items to fix and improve from our trip down the coast, so half of the days we’ve been here I’ve been working on something.  Each day I feel a little less pressure, but there hasn’t been a dramatic release of stress and responsibility as I had expected.  I feel that it will take a while to adapt to the changes, to become accustomed to having free time.  We have no hard deadlines anymore, we can do what we want when we want, and surprisingly the absence of such deliberate planning has been difficult to get used to.  Time, we’ll give it time and see how it feels.

The truth is that the mere absence of boat work does not in itself cause happiness–it has taken me a few weeks to recognize this.  I have the time now to again participate in other activities: reading, thinking, socializing, exercising, etc, and these other activities in life bring me my joy and fulfillment–just as soon as I again remember how to let them happen.

some images and video between Ensenada and La Cruz

(post dated–this post refers to events on 3/7)

Before leaving Ensenada I pulled in a weatherfax over the SSB (our shortwave, long distance radio) and noticed that we would be heading out into a developing low pressure system with a cold front moving over our position–i.e. a small storm.  The wind speeds were predicted at 25-35 knots and seas 12-18 feet–these sort of conditions are fairly substantial when you’re offshore in the dark, but not the sort of thing that need be dangerous if you’re prepared for it.  So Karen and I discussed the forecast and decided that we were game for it.  Personally, I was interested in testing our mettle.  Also, I thought it would be good to get our first storm experience under our belt, as a confidence-building exercise.  And really as far as storms go it was a small one, not too crazy.

As it approached, the wind shifted around from behind us–where it is convenient for the wind to come from—to directly ahead of us–not so convenient (though expected).  Still keen on making forward progress, however, we started beating into the wind.  For the first five hours or so of windward sailing we were ecstatic to discover that it was our most comfortable point of sail so far: the wind waves had not yet built, so were were sailing smoothly into the wind with a following sea.

As the winds increased, we progressively decreased sail area.  We had been sailing for hours with a full main and full jib.  First we took one reef in the main, then took two reefs in the main, then switched down from the jib to the staysail.  With the staysail and double-reefed main we beat upwind in increasingly shitty conditions for a number of hours. Here’s a really crappy little picture I just drew and took a picture of to illustrate:

This is the position we found ourselves in–beating upwind in the darkest night with double-reefed main and staysail–when the worst of the storm came upon us.  The “worst of the storm” involved 30 knots of wind, an immense quantity of driving blinding rain, occasional ambiguously located flashes of lightning, and reasonably sized obnoxiously pounding wind waves.

Beating upwind is not an advisable thing to do in a storm, unless you are trying to deliberately subject yourself and your boat to the strongest forces possible.  You can sit there and say that we should have changed things sooner, before we found ourselves in the situation of being over-canvassed beating upwind in a storm that is.  Three weeks ago I probably would have said the same thing–but I have learned some things since then.  One of those things is that if something is working well enough, then leave it well enough alone.  Too often I fall victim to experimenting with sail changes and modifications, only to find myself needing to change everything back–and exhausting myself in the process.  When there are only two of you, and sleep becomes a high priority, you must eschew the textbook sailing setup for one that is working well-enough to leave well-enough-alone.  So even though beating upwind in the storm was not ideal, we were still “fine”–fine in the sense that I judged neither us nor the boat to be in any immediate danger.  So, despite the increasing ridiculousness of beating upwind in those conditions, I still found myself wondering whether we should bother taking any measures to alter our situation.

Well eventually of course conditions deteriorated to the point where we needed to modify our situation.  Ahhh now the tricky part is what to change and how to do it, in the middle of the storm, isn’t it?  Trying to get something accomplished in those conditions–i.e. two steps shy of “worst conditions imaginable”–is touch and go.  If you mess something up with the sail, it will promptly flog itself to pieces before you have a chance to save it.  If you make an honest mistake with steering, you’re liable to find yourself on your ass, which in a boat means “knocked down”, which means getting your mast to touch the water–not cool.  Basically, you don’t have many chances to get it right.  Whatever you do, you want to pull it off right the first time.

We decided that we should heave to, and we also decided that we should get it right this time.  The last time we tried to heave to while experimenting in the dark prior to entering san diego, I was dissatisfied with our setup.  Specifically, I was annoyed that we were unable to completely stall the boat.

This time it worked out perfectly fine for us.  We hove to under double-reefed main and staysail, the motion of the boat became relatively calm, and we slept the night away (in turns).  The boat still fore-reached at about a knot, so I still want to work on that a bit, but as it turns out the hove-to position was still stable and calm, so perhaps I was being a bit perfectionist about it before.  If we ever experience a real storm we’ll see.

Perhaps that was an anticlimactic conclusion to our storm story, sorry about that, but we were safe and fine so that’s a good ending right?

We arrived mid-day yesterday after a 9 day 1200 miles passage from Ensenada.  There are many stories to tell, which I will need a few days to write up and post–there are a lot of things occupying our time now that we are back among people again (like showers and food and laundry, etc).  Some brief notes: it was extremely challenging, and is now extremely satisfying to have accomplished.  We certainly hadn’t planned on staying out for so long or going so far before stopping, but we were both of the mindset to keep going as long as we were feeling ok, and were continued to feel ok all the way down here to banderas bay . . .

The second day out from Ensenada we experienced our first storm–a small one, perfect for practicing.  You’ll hear that story in another post.

We had a lot of wind and big seas almost the entire time.  Like 20-30 knots of wind and 10-15 foot seas, for all but the last few days.  This was good, in the sense that we reeled off 150 mile days and got south fast.  But wind and seas like that make the experience tiring and challenging.

And I should emphasize that it was really challenging.  It was hard not because of any technical difficulties, but simply because of discomfort and frustration and lack of sleep.  At times the discomfort of the boat motion and frustration of seemingly easy tasks was overwhelming.  I now well understand the expression “mouth of a sailor”, because at times I swore harder and louder than ever before.  At one point I had a teapot jump off the stove and spill water all over my head WHILE I was finishing mopping up two bowls of cereal from the floor.  That’s just one of dozens of comically ridiculous things that happened, all of which elicit an emotionally explosive need to simultaneously cry, scream, and laugh.  “Too ridiculous to have just happened” went through my head often.  I started thinking of our boat as a funhouse; it was laughable to be down below when everything was going every which way, things flying all over the place, etc, which was most of the time.  It got better.  We became more efficient with the watches and the sail changes, and more accustomed to the funhouse nature of being down below.  It got sunny and warm shortly after passing Cabo, and that was a big turning point.  By the end we were sleeping 6 hours at a stretch and drinking beers, and it was feeling good.   Now that we’re at anchor having successfully made that monster passage, it feels really good indeed!

So, I will post some more entries with specific stories from the trip.  Our priorities are sleep, relaxation, food, drink–the basic essentials of comfort really.  Eventually we’ll get around to such motivated tasks as laundry and writing emails etc, but there’s no reason to rush these things!

fyi we’re planning on sitting right here where we are for about a month.

[writing this at the nav table, in a slip at Baja Naval, Ensenada, BC, MX; these are some disconnected notes and observations regarding the 1.5 day passage from San Diego to Ensenada]

We departed San Diego mid-day yesterday, in an attempt to time our arrival at Ensenada during the following day. At first, the wind was excellent (10 knots off the beam) and we made great time–yet again we found ourselves in a position to enter the harbor sooner than expected, in the dark, so we doused the jib and sailed obliquely away from Ensenada and then back, killing time until the sun rose (of course, on the tack back towards Ensenada the wind disappeared entirely, so instead of bobbing around in the 5 foot swell we motored slowly for a few hours).

Both of us felt a bit queasy on this passage.  The quartering sea didn’t help (in which the waves get you from the right butt cheek of the boat, if the boat had a right butt cheek that is).  I anticipate that the first day or two on passage will probably take some getting used to, each time.  However, once again the hardest thing about the passage was getting adequate sleep.  As soon as we were secured to the dock this morning we got back in bed and napped for another few hours.  I think that we will become increasingly comfortable with the abnormal schedule as we make more passages (one can hope).

We are in a slip at a marina called Baja Naval for tonight; we head south again tomorrow morning.  The check-in procedure was straightforward, except that the port captain here requires liability insurance, and there’s only one insurance place in town that does it, and they charged $210 for a year’s worth of insurance that probably isn’t worth jack because I doubt if they would ever pay any claim (the woman would not provide me with any paperwork outlining the terms of the policy).  The insurance thing is clearly a scam to take some more money from the yatistas down here.  It makes sense to me for a marina to require insurance, but not the government.  Hell, even in the USA your aren’t required to have insurance on your boat (though most marinas do require it).  We should have taken care of it while up in the states, but I had mistakenly thought that insurance was not absolutely required.

This baja naval marina is a trip.  Apparently the swell readily finds its way into the harbor, because all the boats and docks are in constant motion, as if all of us and all the docks were all lightly lashed together and set free, without any pylons or connection to land.  Like we’re tied into one big floating raft, with all the pieces going every which way and bouncing off each other ad infinitum.

The AIS tracking feature has been a big hit as we’ve travelled down the coast of california, especially with concerned family.  However, once we leave the country we will be out of range of the shore-based AIS stations, and we won’t show up on the map except maybe in very popular international ports.

At the request of family and friends, we purchased a SPOT tracking device.  It cost $50 (after mail-in rebate), plus a $100/year subscription fee.  For our purposes, each time we press the “check in/ok” button on this little jobby, it communicates our position to one of their satellites, and then it shows up as a pin on our SPOT map, which I added to the sidebar and also to our “Current Location” page (a bigger version).  We plan on pressing the button about once a day; that will be our daily position report.  Supposedly it will have coverage in MOST places, including the coast of Mexico.  However! Important note that THE SPOT WILL NOT SHOW OUR POSITION WHILE WE CROSS THE PACIFIC, SO DON’T WORRY!

I have mixed feelings about this SPOT jobby.  The box it came in was hugely wasteful, with extra stupid pieces of cardboard, the website interface to get it working is terrible, their widget that I put up on our site messed everything up until I did some extra html coding, and even using the damn thing is extremely counter-intuitive.  It’s hard to tell when you’ve successfully turned it on, turned it off, or sent a signal, which is not so cool when you’re out in the middle of the ocean trying to figure out whether it worked to upload a checkpoint or not.  I anticipate it to be buggy, so mom please don’t worry if it malfunctions on us and you stop getting position reports.

So, to be clear: the lack of a daily check/in is not a cause for concern.  It probably means that we’re either having too much fun and forgot to press the button, or else that the piece-of-crap thing busted on us and is no longer working.

(fyi, the pins that you see on land in San Diego are a result of my initial testing right after we bought the SPOT, on foot and by bus; we left the boat in the marina)

Pete and Ray hopped a ferry on Catalina to catch a plane out of L.A. this past Saturday.  Karen and I are extremely grateful to them for joining us during the first leg of our journey.  Their mere presence on board to assist with watches would have been more than enough, but their assistance extended far beyond that.  Pete fixed (finally, for real) our engine overheating problem, fixed the ssb, spliced the radar wiring together, repaired the windlass after I broke it, and got our outboard running, and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.  Pete is better at working on boats than anyone I have either met or even heard of.  I consider myself pretty capable at this point, but I felt like a novice apprentice in the presence of Pete.  Together, Pete and Ray gave us great advice at every turn, and while we are understandably very excited to be off on our own, we will sorely miss Pete and Ray.  Thanks Pete and Ray!

Karen and I departed Catalina on Sunday morning, bound for San Diego.  It was a joyous departure, being alone for the first time.  We experienced a consistent 20 knot winds out of the West and Northwest for the whole passage; this wind speed and direction allowed us to haul-ass the entire time.  It was a fast, enjoyable, comfortable ride.  It was wonderful to be out there alone, wonderful to be feeling good and sailing well.

There were two notable incidents: just before sunset we were hailed by an aircraft carrier, which identified itself as being at 20,000 yards, and would we please not come closer than 5,000 yards as they were doing “night exercises”.  I thought to myself–isn’t a “yard” an inappropriate unit of distance in this case?  Later in the evening I spotted a vessel off our port bow, and after a few minutes I determined that we were converging, and not wanting to collide with them I hailed them on the radio.  During my radio call, I identified their exact position, and it took two attempts before they identified themselves as “warship 88” and thanked me as they had “only just noticed us” . . . and I thought to myself–what kind of warship doesn’t notice a sailing yacht first?  I told them not to bother altering course, as I would pass behind them.  We passed about 500 yards astern of them–close enough to see that yes, indeed, they certainly looked like a warship–and then they turned off all their lights.  WTF?  Pretty freaking unsafe to sit around with no lights on.  What kind of boat sits around out in the ocean with all its lights off, especially when it can fail to notice an approaching vessel less than 4 miles away?  Karen and I have no valid explanations.  If it was hanging out there all stealth-like to look for smugglers or illegal immigrants, then maybe they should take lessons on reading their radar effectively–we had lights on, AIS on, and were headed right for them, after all, so what kind of small unlighted illegal boats are they ever going to find?  Anyway, strange things happen out in the ocean I guess, like encountering incompetent stealth warships.

As it turned out, we made such good time that we ended up arriving at the entrance to San Diego around midnight.  It being greatly preferred to enter during the daylight (a lesson learned during anchoring outside Santa Barbara in the dark), we decided to sail around killing time until the morning.

We proceeded to spend the next three hours messing around with sail combinations and positions, unsuccessfully attempting to stop the boat from sailing.

If one simply douses all the sails, attempting the sailing equivalent of “hanging out”, what happens is that the boat bobs around in the waves in a surprisingly violent way, while everything in the boat is rudely thrown from left to right and back in endless repetition until it all breaks, and furthermore sometime during that endless repetition all semblance of sanity departs from the minds of all crew on the boat.  So we don’t do that.

Heaving to is the preferred method of “stopping” the boat.  It is a balanced state in which the force of the jib and the main sail balance each other, working against each other, holding the boat slightly into the wind, such that the boat moves neither forward nor backward, but drifts directly downwind at about 1 knot.  The basic position of the sails required to heave to is straight forward: jib sheeted to windward, main eased to leeward, rudder to leeward.  Every boat is slightly different, however, and modern boats in particular can be hard to successfully heave to (so I have been told).  I was under the impression that our boat, it being heavier, with a medium-length keel and skeg-hung rudder, would have no trouble heaving-to.  I have discovered otherwise.  None of the various methods Karen and I tried throughout the night were successful.  With greater skill no doubt I will get it right, but no matter what I did that night our boat would sail forward.  The slowest I got her to was 1.5 knots–if that was 1.5 knots drifting directly downwind I would have been satisfied, but alas it was 1.5 knots forward, and I would be satisfied with nothing less than a perfect textbook heave-to.  Perhaps that was ambitious for 3 in the morning; perhaps I was being a little insane offshore in the pitch black in a healthy 20 knots of wind, but we were trying to kill time anyway and what else better did I have to do?  Our boat would not be stopped.  Don’t get me wrong, I am glad that our boat loves to sail, but clearly it will require further practice to get her to stop.

After four hours of putting sails up and down in the dark, within sight of all the lights of San Diego, Karen and I convinced ourselves that it would be just fine to enter the bay in the dark after all.  We motored up the channel without incident, and were directed by the harbor police to tie up to a quarantine buoy for the rest of the night.  This accomplished, we passed out for three hours, roused ourselves to motor over to the “cop dock” as they call it around here, and procured a transient slip for a few days at $10.50 a night in which to park the boat.

In retrospect, I am not happy with our late-night change of plans decision to enter the harbor.  If we thought it was a poor choice at the start of the evening, it was certainly a worse decision after we were considerably more tired out.  It all turned out to be perfectly fine and there were no close calls or dangerous aspects of entering the harbor, but it was still the wrong choice.  With or without achieving a  perfect heave-to, we could simply have sailed back and forth for a few more hours.  Tiredness can be an unbelievably powerful force–somehow it convinced me at 4 in the morning that it would be light by the time we got into the harbor proper, which was a silly thing to believe considering it only took us 40 minutes from that point to reach the quarantine buoy.   I suspect there will be many tired situations in the future, and so we would do well to remember it and to steel ourselves against it.

All in all, though, it was a safe and enjoyable first passage for Karen and I, and it greatly eased our minds about our ability to sail alone in a comfortable and happy fashion.

And, to the present: I am glad to be stationary in San Diego for a few days.  We have a number of errands on our list: we need to tie up loose ends from our former life (bills, taxes, etc), purchase spares, and do a few maintenance tasks on the boat.  It will be our last convenient chance to take care of things before heading into mexico–which we hope to do in about a week.