April 2018 – A Year and a Day

Specifically the Pacific

Our next port is 3,000 nautical miles away, which seems like too long (to me at least). It should take about 25-30 days to reach French Polynesia, and I expect that eventually we will get into a routine. We hope to leave next week, once our friend Oliver has arrived and we finish all the projects on our lists. Getting ready to cross an ocean takes a lot of preparation.

My dad’s project of replacing leaky bungs.

We have a list of projects to prepare the boat. A few of these are inspecting and tensioning the rig, setting up and testing the sea anchor, and making new fair leads for the jib sheets. We will also hire a diver to clean the bottom of the boat before we leave.

A drawing that I made of the spoons to the left, the salt and pepper to the right, and seeing over to some shelves in the galley.

In the beginning, we may get pretty sea sick, so my mom will prepare a few meals just before we leave. This way she, she doesn’t need to go down below and cook if she is feeling sea sick.

Another aspect of the preparation, is planning. We have been watching the weather every day to see when we can leave. There is a calm spot with little to no wind in the Pacific. This calm spot is called the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (I.T.C.Z.). We are watching the I.T.C.Z. to see when it will be the smallest. The other thing that we are planning is the paper work. We need papers to leave Mexico and to arrive in French Polynesia.

We have ordered about 100 green bananas to be delivered to a market near by for the passage.

The aspect of preparation that I am most exited for is provisioning and supplying. We will stock up on food (from mangoes to garbanzo beans) and water. We will also get diesel for our engine, and propane for our stove. We have started (and will continue) buying a few miscellaneous things that won’t be available in the Marquesas and Tuamotus, like clothes, clothes pins, and Nerf balls to stuff in our hawse pipes around our anchor chain to keep water out.

The last aspect of preparing (that I am going to talk about) is preparing the crew. I’m kind of scared about being at sea for about a month. The thing that helped me the most, was looking at the digital charts, and seeing how short 3,000 miles looked on the computer screen. Before that, I had been trying to ignore the fact that we are about to cross. Preparing the crew also means taking our last real showers for a long time.

Although I know what the preparations are like, I don’t know what the actual passage will be like. Maybe 3,000 miles won’t seem too long after all.

Hear are a few more recent photos:

Always wishing that we had a dishwasher.

Arlo in the partially finished ratlines.

Our friends, the Ruports visited us for a super fun week in Mexico.

Arlo’s drawing of a ship behind a break water in Manzanillo.

Arlo’s sketch of umbrellas on the beach.

My sketch of a dish towel and the running backs on the life line.

Pacific Mexico Food Roundup

–by Arlo

When we left home, we left our favorite taqueria, Ramiro and Sons. I have always loved Mexican food in California. AInd though Mexican food in Mexico is very different from California’s Mexican food, it is at least as tasty as California’s Mexican food, and it has much more variety than what you will find in a taqueria in the Bay Area. Here is a roundup of all the Mexican food that we ate from Ensenada to Bahia Tenacatita.

As we walked up the streets of La Cruz, I was going crazy with all of the yummy looking taco shops on the street. What you come accross most of in Pacific Mexico is tacos and quesadillas. We have eaten fish tacos (pesca), octopus tacos (pulpo), shrimp tacos (camaron), and countless more. My personal favorite was from a resturant in La Cruz, called “La Silla Roja”. Not surprisingly, it had red chairs. Their street-side tables seemed like the best place to be in the world when you sat down at 8 p.m. as the heat of the day was turning into the cooler evening. Their best dish (in my opinion), was the “quesadilla mamalona”. This tasty morsel was 8 or 10 inches long and stuffed to the brim with your choice of asada, adobada, or chorizo. I tried all three, and they were all equally delicious.

The other thing which they have quite a lot of in Mexico is seafood. In San Quintin, we had fresh clams, and in San Jose del Cabo, I tried octopus in the form of the above mentioned tacos, and decided that it was a new favorite. Shrimp are plentiful, appearing everywhere from quesadillas to el “rollo del mar,” a bacon-wrapped fish fillet stuffed with shrimp and doused in rich, creamy, almond sauce. The Mexicans use spear, net, and longline to catch fish from their pangas, or fiberglass boats. It is a common sight in pacific Mexico to see the pangueros, or fishermen, walking up from their boats to a palapa resturant on the beach, and then cleaning the fish that you ordered right there in front of the resturant.

The food just got better and better as we went south, and when we got to La Cruz, we found a paleteria, or ice cream shop that we discovered to have very good ice cream cones as well as paletas, which this shop sold as a tasty combination of chocolate and ice cream on a popsicle stick.

With this much variety in food, I invariably ended up trying some new things. Some of them I came to love, like tomatillas, which taste like a sweeter green tomato, chayote squash, and octopus. trying some of these new things led to some of the best eating experiences so far on the trip. Some of the new things that I tried, I didn’t love quite as much, like de-spined, cooked, cactus, and some odd little seedpods that roadside venders were selling, called guamachiles. We came upon these little seedpods on a road trip to the mountain town of San Sebastian in a rented car. On the way up, our curiosity got the better of us, and we bought a big bag, full to the brim. We first disliked them, then we came to think of them as half-decent, and then they fell out of favor once more. But some of the new foods I straight up disliked, for some inexplicable reason, such as mole, an unsweetened chocolate sauce often served with chicken. Looking back at my whole food experience in Mexico so far, I am more than satisfied, but I would not go as far as to say that I am satiated, and I could probably handle a couple more paletas just fine.

Update from Barra de Navidad

–from Caitlin + Jason

We’re writing and posting this one from a cell phone, and we can’t figure out how to move the pictures to place them where they make the most sense. So they’re mostly clustered at the end. Please forgive/enjoy the randomness.

The 150 miles of coastline south from La Cruz in the Puerto Vallarta area to Bahia Manzanillo, where we will anchor in a few days, has more harbors than the entire 850 mile coast of Baja, and we’ve slowed down to enjoy them. Another reason we’re moving slowly is that there hasn’t been much wind. The forecast, predictable for this time of year here, is so often for light and variable winds.

All these days at anchor have been busy.

Caitlin & Alma repair a sail cover at anchor. Alma is doing most of the work, turning the handle on the hand-cranked sewing machine.

In addition to working on the boat—this is endless and there’s a long list of jobs to check off before we jump across the Pacific—we’ve been in the water, both intentionally (snorkeling) and unintentionally (flipping the dinghy in a botched surf landing), doing school work, kayaking, exploring a mangrove estuary (we rowed by a small crocodile!), eating at beachside palapa restaurants, fishing, cooking, visiting with other cruising boats, and swimming some more.

Tonight we are anchored in the shallow lagoon at Barra de Navidad. This is a domestic tourist destination, and the beaches and streets are packed with families from all over Mexico enjoying the santa semana. We joined the crowd ashore today. Tomorrow we’ll stay on the boat to celebrate Easter by painting the mizzen mast and sailing the dinghy.

We had a bit of a change of plans earlier this month, shortly after we last wrote. The three or four days we meant to spend reprovisioning and working on the boat dockside in La Cruz turned into ten days when Jason landed in a hospital for surgery

to repair a hernia. Tuesday night he became aware of the issue, Wednesday morning he popped into a little farmacia to speak with a doctor, and by Wednesday afternoon, we had taken the bus to a hospital in Puerto Vallarta, where Jason was admitted

for surgery the following morning. There was no emergency, and we could only imagine how long the series of appointments and office visits would have taken to get the same surgery in the United States.

Jason’s surgeon seemed to run the hospital, and with his jeans, and shirt open under his blazer, he looked more like a Hollywood producer than a gastroenterologist. But Jason fared well under his care and is, just over two weeks later, all but back to full strength. It turns out Mexican hospitals do not, unfortunately, serve carne asada tacos.

To pass the time while Jason recovered, we rented a car and spent a couple of days in the mountains above Bahia Banderas. It was good to leave the heat of the coast and we loved the beautiful town of San Sebastian, where we stayed in a 300-year old adobe home and walked along ancient sunken stone paths through the pine forest. Getting to the top of the mountain above San Sebastian was more than our little sedan could take—the steep cobbled roads wound up and down improbably—and we gave up, likely just before the top.

Though we enjoyed the mountain excursion, the town of La Cruz, and new friends on other boats at the marina, we were relieved, finally, to take in our dock lines and to be on our way again. The sailing has been gentle, though sometimes through water stained a shocking deep red by plankton. We had read about a red tide but none of us had seen one. The ocean truly looks like its bleeding, and it leaves us feeling uneasy. But then the water is suddenly blue again. Or the light turquoise of water over sand

We’ll try not to post too many pictures of dolphins, but look at this guy.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll see friends and—mostly—work to prepare the boat for the 3,000 mile passage to the Marquesas. During the passage and during the six months we are in French Polynesia, we’ll be less frequently connected to the internet. Our friend Mark has kindly agreed to post messages to the blog as we are able to send them to him, though there will have to be fewer pictures. Whenever we do get internet we’ll look forward to hearing from you—in messages on the blog or by email.

Tomorrow we’ll find out if the Easter Bunny can find us on Debonair.