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January, 2012:

Baja Slow Life

Jan 27th, 2012
by Sara.
1 comment

They say that it takes six months to really slow down and enjoy cruising. Or maybe it’s a year. Whatever it is I think we are finally there.

I realized this while making lattes this morning. It’s our second day of hunkering down in Ensenada Grande while the fierce northerly winds buffet the other side of the island. We haven’t been ashore in two days and talk about the idea of putting the outboard on the dinghy today and venturing to the beach.

It’s 11 am and I am tidying up our oatmeal breakfast dishes, which consists of piling them into the sink to wash sometime later in the day. “A latte sounds really nice today,” Michael mentions from where he sits on the settee, watching the girls color and draw at the table. It’s sunny and warm, not a cloud in the sky, and I’m still feeling awake from our first cup of joe hours ago. “Yeah, that does sound good,” I reply and start getting out our coffee paraphernalia: our Aeropress and filters, the coffee beans, the grinder, the soy milk, the chocolate soy milk, my vanilla syrup, the frother, our latte cups. I set a kettle of water on the stove to heat.

Meanwhile both girls take note of the action in the galley and pop their heads up above the sink. “Chocolate milk! Chocolate milk!” they chant in unison. “How about some Mexican hot chocolate?” I ask. “Yeah!” they declare with glee.

I get out another pan and measure two cups of milk into it, light the burner, then drop the Mexican hot chocolate tablets in to melt. Meanwhile, I pour some chocolate milk into the frother for Michael’s mocha, set it to heat, then grind the beans.

An hour later, I am sitting in the cockpit with my hot vanilla latte and a book. People are now clamoring below for a snack. “Twenty minutes!” I tell them. “I’m going to enjoy my coffee now!” For the next 45 minutes I sit with my feet up in the sun letting Michael handle the deluge of requests down below from the girls while I read a chapter in my book and sip my frothy hot drink.

When I am done I get up and stretch and go back inside to get started on lunch which we’ll need to power us for an afternoon of digging holes on the beach, writing practice in the sand, searching for shells, climbing on rocks, and watching fish dart through the shallows. We have a full day ahead.

Another Countdown Begins

Jan 26th, 2012
by Sara.
4 comments

We are currently anchored at the north end of Isla Partida, in Ensenada Grande waiting for the northerly winds to finishing blowing themselves out so we can continue northward. The night before last we’d been anchored in San Gabriel. Just after settling in for a movie, the wind starting blowing from the southwest, right into our formerly peaceful anchorage. We spent the night bouncing up and down in the wind waves with only a fitful, half-awake sleep to get us through the night.

The next morning the southerly winds were still blowing so we were up early to take advantage of them, hoping to reach Isla San Francisco 25 miles north. As we expected, the breeze gradually petered out as we sailed up Espiritu Santo/Partida. We took down our spinnaker and motored for about 10 minutes. Suddenly the northerly we’d hoped would wait until later in the day to arrive, arrived. It didn’t just gradually build as winds typically do. Nope. One minute our Windex was spinning around with no wind whatsoever to guide it, and the next a steady 15 knots was blowing down on us from the north.

Five minutes later we had 25 knots, with gusts to 30. Michael and I looked at each other after watching the building windwaves for a minute or two. “Turn?” “Yep.” We steered the boat to port and high-tailed it back to Ensenada Grande to wait for the winds to die down over the next several days. With only our staysail up, we were making six knots directly for our coveted anchorage. Not an hour after the northerly started we already had 4-6 foot wind waves pushing us around. The Sea of Cortez is intense indeed.

Ensenada Grande is hardly a terrible place to be stuck in. We are surrounded by turquoise water and huge pink cliffs of volcanic rock sculpted by wind and waves backed against a sky that seems impossibly blue. There is a white sand beach which we had to ourselves to play on today and criss-cross trails that meandered inland a bit through desert scrub and cactus.

Back on the boat, the girls busied themselves with their workbooks and Magic Tree House audiobooks and Michael and I busied ourselves with our Lists. Our mission right now is to just relax and simply enjoy the next few weeks of slow exploration in the Sea, as once again a deadline is looming. By March 15th we’ll start our nearly month-long sail across the Pacific Ocean to the Marquesas Islands, our first stop on our South Pacific Adventure.

But rather than the dread that many a deadline evokes, when we get out our lists of things to do in the next seven weeks we feel butterflies. We are nothing but excited at the journey ahead. We look ahead in our South Pacific guidebooks daily, and realize that we are not dreaming anymore, but planning. All we really need to do is relish the beauty of Baja Mexico, pack some food and supplies onboard, and go.

When the wind picked up yesterday and we were barreling along with just our tiny staysail up, the sea a froth of whitecaps and spray I looked around at the beauty of it all and realized I wasn’t nervous a bit. I watched Michael as he calmly adjusted our course so our leeway wouldn’t send us south of our destination. I peeked down the forward hatch and checked on the girls who were in our bunk looking at books, oblivious to the howling wind outside. The anxiety I’d felt each time the wind built six months ago was gone. In it’s place is a calm confidence that Wondertime can handle this and much more with grace. And now after sailing several thousand miles together, I see that so can we.

Hello, Good-bye La Paz

Jan 20th, 2012
by Sara.
1 comment

I’ve been meaning to write to you about the week we spent on Islas Espiritu Santo and Partida after we crossed over from Mazatlan. These are the two stunning desert islands dressed in layers of pink that lie just north of La Paz. I was going to write about how we were the only boat anchored at Bahia San Gabriel, how “winter in the Sea” stills feels like the hottest NW summer day, how we played in the clear turquoise water that was — admittedly — a little too crisp for venturing out of the shallows. How we buried each other in the soft powdery sand, hiked through giant cactus, and generally just lazed around in the sun admiring the view. I wanted to remember the feeling of our souls recharging, and feeling immensely grateful for being able to visit this very special corner of the earth together as a family.

Until now, we’ve been busy in La Paz this past week getting our chores done so we can head back out again which is exactly what we’re doing in the morning. So we can get back to this:

December 2011 Cruising Expenses

Jan 17th, 2012
by Sara.
Comments are off for this post

To be honest, we were a little nervous adding up this past month’s expenses. What with Christmas presents, eating out nearly everyday at the many amazing restaurants and taco stands around Banderas Bay, recertifying and refilling dive tanks given to us by friends in San Francisco along with hookah gear, a trip to Costco, and filling the diesel tank again we thought that our budget would be a disaster. While it’s still a boat buck above our target, considering all the fun we had — and a few projects checked off — in Banderas Bay in December we still consider living down here a serious bargain.

S/V Wondertime’s December 2011 Cruising Expenses

boat bits – $135
books/magazines – $16
bus/taxi – $49
cat care – $76
cell phone – $29
clothing – $135
diesel – $222
dinghy gas – $34
dive/snorkle gear – $329
eating out – $387
galley – $9
gifts – $239
groceries – $605
internet – $36
carousel ride – $2
laundry – $35
moorage – $146
movie tickets – $21
mp3 album – $9
personal care – $36
supplies – $85
toys – $4

total: $2,639

Ghosts, Doubt, and a Green Corduroy Couch

Jan 8th, 2012
by Sara.
8 comments

Last night, during my almost-midnight watch they appeared again. We are nearly halfway across the Sea of Cortez. The water is smooth as glass and we are motoring along. Clouds are scattered around the almost-full moon and diffuse the light so it feels like it is a silvery version of twilight. The sea is soft ripples of various shades of silver and the air is so still the hazy shapes of the clouds are reflected in the glassy surface.

I sit in the cockpit underneath the dodger so as to avoid the quickly settling dew, and the noise of the engine, Deb Talen singing in my ears. Suddenly, I am surrounded by them, the ghosts I mistakenly thought I could leave behind when we left to go sailing last year. Here, completely alone a hundred miles from land they loom larger than ever: relationships that are unmendable, phone calls I can’t seem to make, people I’m losing touch with, the eternal absence of my mother.

Part of heading off to sea was to leave these things behind for a while, thinking the farther away from the location they first appeared the dimmer they will become. But that’s the funny thing about the sea: things you want to leave behind don’t fade in the distance, they get magnified and on a night when you are alone with nothing but the moon and a mirrored ocean, they are smothering.

I close my eyes and try to wish them away again, but that’s when the largest ghost of all creeps into the cockpit and sits down right next to me. Doubt. I was tucking Leah into bed last night and she told me, “Mom, I hate dawn watches,” referring to a book we’ve been reading her since she was a toddler about a girl helping her dad on his watch during an overnight passage. “I don’t like rolling around in my bed and the loud noises.” I tried to console her, saying we only had one more night until we reach La Paz, and then no more dawn watches for a couple more months.

But my daughter’s unhappiness haunts me. I know she still misses her friends back in Olympia, her grandpa and his new wife, her uncles. She misses snow and even rain. She is confused by the seemingly random way we say hello and goodbye to the new friends we are making in this nomadic life. I can relate, I miss all this too.

Michael and I have talked about whether this life is right for our children, to be constantly on the move without a real sense of home except for our small boat. Cruising is so full of highs and lows, amazing places and experiences. But these come at a cost that is sometimes very dear.

Then again, this will all be over before we know it. We’ll be at work and school again wistfully reviewing our memories and photos of the amazing years we spent on the sea. And be dreaming of leaving again. But still, some nights the doubt looms largest and it sounds so delicious to just stop, to settle in another cottage in the woods and spend the winter in front of a warm wood stove, safe and content. People that say, myself included, that the most difficult part of cruising is tossing off the dock lines forget that the hardest part is really keeping on.

When we lived ashore, we bought this used green overstuffed corduroy couch from Craigslist. We loved that couch; it was already well worn in when it came to live with us, so soft. A huge L shape, so it could hold everyone with their legs stretched out even. Sometimes, Michael and I will reminisce about sitting there again: warm, dry, still. But it was on that couch that this whole plan was hatched; we rented Michael Palin’s old BBC travel shows one winter, when Holly was just a newborn. We watched them sitting on that couch and a fire was lit. We realized our tucked-away dream of sailing again was what we really wanted, not the security of our small quiet home. We wanted adventure, to leave it all behind and sail the world with our small children. I’m sure you can see the irony too, of craving that couch while on the deck of our sailing boat.

So here I am, at sea, having adventures. So very far from any sense of home, so much more riding along in this boat with us than I ever thought there was room for.

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