If It's Going to Happen, It's Going to Happen Out There

After returning from the hospital with great news of not having to have surgery, we were anxious to get on the road back to Mexico to get the boat in the water and begin our long-awaited sailing season. We also needed to get off our mountain or face a possibility of further delays from being stuck in the snow. Here’s what it looked like at our cabin right before leaving.

No problems getting into Mexico. It was a quick and easy trip through customs, and we made it to the boatyard without issue. It is a hard life “on the hard” as they say when you want to be floating but your boat is being held up on stands in the boatyard. Everything is dirty from the ground all around you being blown onto the boat by the wind and tracked in on your feet—not to mention all the sanding and grinding going on by yourself and others all around you. Our particular boatyard sits right next to a commercial fishing boat yard where they are always sanding, grinding, welding, and painting the big old rusty tubs that come in and turning them into bright and fresh fishing boats. That gives an added dose of particles in the air end up on your boat. All of us living on our boats in the yard face the same struggles and hardships that just become part of everyday life. Climbing up and down the ladder to board your boat what seems like hundreds of times a day, getting to the top only to realize that you left some crucial item for the task at hand down on the ground, (sigh). Just as you get back up the ladder, nature calls, and it’s back down the ladder for the 100-yard walk across the yard to the old toilet/shower rooms (twice that distance for the newer ones with hot water showers). Once you are there, you remember you have forgotten your toilet paper back up the ladder on the boat, (if you are lucky you remember this before you sit down!). The bathrooms become one of the main social outlets for sailors living on the hard. Each morning everyone makes their trek across the yard to do their morning “business” which includes emptying a bucket or makeshift urine container for those of us not keen on making the trip down the ladder and across the yard in the middle of the night. Out front, we discuss the triumphs and setbacks from the previous day and the plans for today’s work (intentionally ignoring whatever the other sailor is carrying along). Even the walk to the bathrooms is an opportunity for socializing as you walk the yard and stop to chat with others you see out working on their boats. Our boat is right at the entrance to one of the yards, so everyone in our yard has to pass by to leave or enter the yard. Some days it’s amazing we get any work done at all with all the stopping to chat with each person who walks by.

There are some sailors who have been living permanently on the hard at Guaymas Marina for years, and others who have been coming down seasonally for many years. The season usually starts somewhere in October through December when people start arriving. There are always projects and repairs to complete before getting in the water. This means that everyone spends at least some time living on the hard. After doing this for so many years with the same people, many more official social events began to develop. We missed this year’s big Thanksgiving and Christmas potlucks, but we were able to attend a pig roast potluck. For the big social events everyone hits the shower rooms puts on some clean civilized clothes ready to eat, drink and be merry. After everyone has said their hellos to reacquaint themselves with their fellow sailor friends, and everyone has eaten their fill (the drinking continues throughout as most of us drink like…er…well, we drink like sailors), someone starts playing and someone starts singing and an evening of merriment begins. The next morning, after helping to clean up the garbage that is inevitably and unintentionally left out and consequently strewn about by the multitude of wild yard dogs, life gets back to normal with the exception of those who may have over imbibed and thereby need to take the day off from boat projects to recuperate.

We were dragging our heels a bit getting into the water in spite of our late arrival. As much as we wanted to get going, things just weren’t lining up for us. After we got here, Granny took a fall. Besides the big goose egg on her head and a black eye, she seemed to be fine and didn’t want to go to the hospital. However, after a few days had passed she was having a hard time moving and was in excruciating pain while trying to breath. She spent the entire day in a chair in the hallway outside the emergency department in the hospital which was lined with chairs filled with other patients. (perhaps an overcapacity issue due to Covid??). After a full day without food or water sitting in the hospital all she wanted to do was go home and go to bed. They were not able to find anything wrong with her, so they prescribed her some medication for her pain and let her go. She rarely takes pain medication because she doesn’t like the way it makes her feel, so for a couple of weeks it was hard to know what her status was. My uncle was afraid she was going to die soon. I called her every day and the only thing that was clear was that she was doped up and knew that she was not clear-headed because of the medication which she took because it made her pain manageable. So, we wanted to stay on land as to not make flying to Granny at a moment’s notice any more complicated. But, I’m happy to report that after she stopped taking the pain medication, she started to feel better and get back to her cranky self, (that’s how we knew she was feeling better, when the crankiness returned).

So, time to get into the water, right? Not so fast. If it is not one thing, it’s another. Upon inspecting the rig, Jim found some “suspect pitting” in several of the stainless connections at the top of the mast. Since these were original to the boat as far as we know (over 40 years old), and since they are crucial to keeping the mast upright as well holding the sails on under lots of pressure from the wind, we decided it would be best to replace them. We were able to find a machine shop that, after some communication difficulties about exactly what we wanted and what it was to be used for, could fabricate them as specified. However, it did set us back several more days.

In the meantime, we enjoyed many beautiful sunsets over the boatyard.

A beautiful sea bird who has decided that boatyard living, with all of the high masts for perching, is the life for him

Painting the bottom

Saying goodbye to some of our amigos that work for the marina

The “splash” (why they call it that as opposed to the gentle lowering of a boat into the water is a mystery to me), went smoothly with one exception. The boat must have slipped a bit in the slings of the travel lift. About half way across the yard we noticed that the strap was pressing against one of the solar panels mounted to our railing. We kept waiting for the glass to shatter or snap in half, or for one of the mounting pieces to break, however, once the boat was in the water, relieving the pressure on the strap, everything seemed fine. Kudos to the flexibility of a solar panel that is not intended to flex. (The picture doesn’t show how the frame was twisted under all that pressure).

Anyone who has ever lived life on the hard can understand the complete sense of relief and joy to be floating again! Our first stop was to anchor right off the city of Guaymas. It is very protected water and consequently flat and calm for good anchoring. It also has the benefit of a cell signal for getting weather and sea state information for planning our voyage south to warmer waters. Things were looking favorable. The second night afloat we motored over to Catalina Cove. There the waters were also calm making for a comfortable anchorage, however, there was no cell signal for updating our weather information. After setting the hook, Lily spotted some dolphins jumping around just outside the cove—at the time we took that as a good omen. Our original plan was to head straight for Mazatlan, which would be just over a four day journey in our boat. Without a signal to update our weather information, we used our satellite GPS unit to order a marine weather forecast for a point on the sea about half way there. Things were not looking as nice as our previous information had indicated. We had not used this forecast before and had no way to compare it to anything else, so we had to take it at face value. It was looking like only a one day window for good sailing, after which the winds were picking up to about 20 knots with 6 foot seas, (not ideal conditions for us). So, we decided to take that one day window to sail to Bahia de Santa Barbara (about a 24-hour trip), where we would wait in a protected bay for our next opportunity to sail south.

As we left Catalina Cove, it was hard to believe that there would be any sailing at all. There was no wind and the water was flat—until we motored out beyond the headlands. After motoring out about an hour, there was still no wind but the seas were very sloppy with about a 2 foot chop from all directions. Without any wind to put up a press of sails to smooth out the ride, even small seas can be too uncomfortable to bear for long. We were just about to make the decision to turn around and head back to anchor in Catalina Cove when poof, out of nowhere comes a moderate breeze. We raise the mainsail and hoist the yankee sail. We were sailing comfortably at about 4 to 6 knots for about 7 hours with our windvane steering.

Sidebar for those without sailing knowledge: Our boat has tiller steering which is the stick you see to steer some boats as apposed to a wheel for steering. No matter how your boat steers, no one steers their boat while cruising long distances. Steering by hand is exhausting not to mention impossible for small boats without a crew. So there are devices specifically for holding a boat on course. One type is electronic that uses battery power make course adjustments to hold a compass heading called an auto pilot. Another type sets a course and makes adjustments based on the wind angle called a wind vane. We own both types, using the auto pilot while under motor and the wind vane while under sail.

What happened next is a good reminder to us how quickly conditions can change, how powerful the wind and seas can be, how many systems can fail when you need them, and how insignificant we are in the big scheme of things. So much happening all at once makes it difficult to tell in a coherent manner, but I’ll try my best and hope it makes sense.

So, there we were sailing at 4 to 6 knots which is good for our boat. The wind picks up and we were seeing 6 to 8 knots (great for our boat), with gusts pushing us up to 9 knots, but the boat seemed to be handling it fairly well. As the seas started to build, she was rounding up pretty hard and regular, (think of fishtailing in your car where the car is generally moving forward in the direction you want but with a lot of side to side sliding out of control). We decide to try to slow things down a bit to get it under better control by putting a reef the mainsail (lowering some of it to make it a smaller sail). That didn’t seem to help as seas and winds continued to grow, so we decided to lower the mainsail completely. In the short time it took to get the mainsail down, the seas grew to at least 9 feet and were coming from 3 different directions (the biggest ones from the starboard stern quarter), and we were being tossed about quite a bit. Then we hear a ping. One of the pulleys that is part of our wind vane steering system burst apart under the pressure of the seas and wind working to send us in differing directions, (luckily none of the pulley pieces hit either of us). First failure: windvane.

Jim goes to start the engine so we can motor while we try to make a repair to the windvane, but the engine won’t start! Failure number two. Fortunately, the engine failure was some kind of fluke (we hope), because even though our starter battery showed a full charge, it didn’t start until we combined it with the house battery bank.

With the engine started, I take the helm so that Jim can lower the headsail. In order to lower it I need to turn up into the wind to take pressure off the sail and control the sheets (ropes that control the sail) so that the sails and sheet aren’t just flapping in the wind out of control. I always hate coming about when things get rough. Getting sideways to the waves while making a turn is always a dangerous and wet event. The seas were so overpowering that I was pulling the tiller with all of my strength with my feet pushing against the opposite side of the cockpit, but she wouldn’t turn up into the wind. Jim is struggling out on the bowsprit trying to pull the headsail down, yelling at me, “come into the wind, come into the wind!”. I am struggling with the tiller yelling back, “it’s hard over, it’s hard over!”. Meanwhile we take a wave over the side getting me soaking wet, but the high adrenaline of the situation kept me from feeling the cold. Jim finally got the headsail down and tied off and came back to take over at the helm.

We hook up the autopilot to keep us on course while Jim finds a spare pulley to replace the broken one. This entails unscrewing the old one from the gunwale and screwing in another. Keep in mind the difficulty of this task while the boat is being tossed around, rocking back and forth like a hobby horse along with the more violent jolts from side to side when the waves caught us from the sides. The pulley Jim used to replace the broken one wasn’t an exact match, so after screwing it down in a couple different places at differing angles, it was clear that it wasn’t going to work. Our thought was to put up a storm sail (a very small sail for bad weather conditions) on the staysail track (a place between the headsail and mainsail for putting up a smaller sail)—failure number three, we somehow forgot to put the halyard for the staysail up the mast (the halyard is the rope set in a pulley on the mast for hoisting up a sail) This was a dumb mistake on our part, but sailing is all about moving beyond the failures and figuring out how to make something work when things don’t work. This was an easy one. We would just hoist the storm sail up on the headstay. But, since we couldn’t get the windvane fixed, it was clear that we would not be doing any more sailing.

Meanwhile, a few other things going on: Everything down below in the boat that wasn’t stowed (or stowed properly), flew to the floor and was rolling about. We ignore that for now. Additionally, Lily was going crazy. Since things were rough, we had put on her life vest and attached to a jackline (webbing attached to the boat that you stay clipped onto to keep you in the boat). At first we thought she was just picking up on our frantic energy, so we tried to put out more of an “it’s okay, everything is fine” vibe. Eventually it became clear that she was so worked up because dolphins were coming. I don’t know what sense she uses, but she always seems to sense them well before we can see them. All of a sudden we were right in the middle of the biggest pod of dolphins we have ever seen. Perhaps they were fishing because there were also hundreds of birds coming along with them. It was an awesome sight to behold. As the waves came up towards the boat, they were nine or more feet higher than where we were in the cockpit. So we could see the dolphins swimming under the water along side and above us. (Don’t worry, as long as the waves don’t break over the boat, the boat will float to the top of each wave as they approach as long as they don’t get too steep or tall enough to tip you over.) Unfortunately, we were unable to enjoy this encounter with nature as we needed to focus on the task at hand.

Another (and arguably the most important) thing going on while Jim is trying to repair the windvane, is that I keep hearing the autopilot beeping (it isn’t supposed to be doing this). It doesn’t seem to be keeping its compass heading, and we keep having to adjust it. At the time, it didn’t seem problematic since we have had trouble with it holding course in rough seas before. But when regrouping after giving up on the windvane, I mentioned the beeping to Jim. Failure number four—the autopilot. Turns out that it was not keeping a compass heading even though we had used it when we first left our anchorage that morning and it was working perfectly. This was the final straw for me. A wave of hopelessness washed over me and I just wanted to cry. We had no way to steer the boat except by hand. We had at least 18 hours left until we reached safe anchorage. It was cold and miserable. Did I mention how seasick I was? Oh yes, I get seasick for a time until my body adjusts to being on the water. I am able to manage it mostly with meclizine, but as the seas grew rougher it was clear that the meclizine wasn’t working. By this time I was barely able to communicate or remain upright. Even if I wasn’t seasick, I was not physically able to control the tiller to take a turn at the tiller. I couldn’t even imagine Jim being able to keep us on course for 18 hours throughout the night. But he is my rock. If he had any doubts about his capability to get us to safe harbor alone, he didn’t let them show. He assured me that it would be okay and that he would get us through this.

And get us through it he did. While steering the boat he was troubleshooting the autopilot. Thankfully, he was able to get it working (somewhat) so that he didn’t have to muscle the tiller constantly. He did have to stay out in the cockpit to monitor and make frequent adjustments as it wasn’t holding course like it should, but at least it was doing some of the work for him. It was a hard night for both of us. The seas and wind calmed down somewhat that night, but it wasn’t until sunrise as we approached land that we weren’t being tossed about. There was some anxiety coming into Bahia Santa Barbara, but that is a story for a different time. Once we set the anchor, both of us feeling exhausted, sore and achy like we had been beat up, we ate a little food and we went straight to bed…

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