The Taco Traveler

When I returned here to San Diego this past January, I came back for the proximity to an airport, the chance at better job opportunities, and the 100% Internet connectivity via my Verizon v-card. And although I've enjoyed my time and have been pretty comfortable here at the Sun Harbor Marina on San Diego Bay - Shelter Island, the job situation hasn't worked out so well, as the Internet search has been nearly worthless and the in-person and local-contact search has netted two interviews in total (in my field), and of course, rather than restaurants hiring (I seriously considered it and even went to my old college employer to check it out), they're actually shutting their doors.

What went wrong with the interviews? I felt I was definitely qualified for both positions - quite a bit overqualified for one of them - but I think given my history these last few years I'm not coming off as much of a long-term committed employee. And with my blabbermouth, even the mention in passing of my boys half a continent away would sorta make me feel emotional about missing them, and I'm sure I didn't hide that too well.... Bottom line: I think they saw my thin level of commitment to San Diego and that I'd have a hard time sticking around for more than a year or much longer than it took to get back on my feet. There are too many other qualified candidates out there for them to go with, I suppose.

So... in the interest of not paying crazy marina + liveaboard fees anymore, and getting the boat somewhere more financially reasonable where I can keep her while I see the boys and then seek work wherever it may be after that, I'm going to sail Chemistry back to San Carlos / Guaymas, lock her down tight, and then go be with my boys.

A good friend, a very reasonable and conservative friend (G), said to me before I bought Chemistry: "Maybe you should rent a boat. Can you just test it out to see if you really like that life and everything?" And he was spot-on with the conservatism (fiscally - we all know he's wrong about his social conservatism), but what happened is that I absolutely loved the "cruising life" and the people I've met so far in it... what didn't pan out so well, and has made his concern almost Nostradamus-esque, was the economic downturn that caused my startup's funding angel to walk away and leave the company to shrivel as we just tried to keep the thing breathing with no salaries, no more passion, and very little hope.

So yeah, it would have been better if I'd never signed on that line to buy this boat, but I probably would have continued to sink my entire 401k into my vacant house anyway, just because of a need to do the right thing - to pay the debt I owed the heartless mortgage company. But more importantly, I wouldn't have experienced the amazing time I've had in Mexico (or the amazing time sailing down from Seattle, for that matter). And as I watch the trash compactor walls close in around me and my boat (I'm Han Solo and Chemistry is my faithful Chewbacca), I keep reaching for the pole that will slow the walls just a bit longer, and right now that helpful pole is getting the boat back where $100 is a month's worth of a mooring ball in a safe harbor. I've had my R2D2 friends and family, tapping into the Death Star's systems to help with life-sustaining loans, but those loans have been helpful for much more than the boat and my "keeping the dream alive" - they've enabled me to stay almost but not quite current on my responsibilities as a dad - the school and child care stability that keeps my boys from feeling the pain of this economy and this situation.

So what next? After getting the boat back to cheaper digs, I'll get almost a whole month with the boys while R goes on travel. I'll get amazing little kid hugs from a two-month absence, and I won't want to let them go. They'll have grown so big since I last saw them in February, but I know also they'll be happy and content, as R & I do our exceptional job of navigating through this process of divorce, relocation, life change.... And at the end of June I'll travel somewhere, anywhere in the world that could use me. Or, maybe lightning will strike, and one of my projects will hit just the right chord with an investor, or my writing will find its way to Oprah's desk.

TT

 

Waiting now for the lowboy to get us to drop us back in the water. Slide is a better verb, as the lowboy with hydraulic “jackstands” will just back gently into the water until Chemistry begins to float. I was scheduled for 8am, but the swapped me with another boat because a couple spots of my bottom are still drying (after they moved the jackstands they painted the spots where the jackstands were). I like the people here at Marina Seca, but the overriding impression is that it’s a business first and foremost. The work yard is relatively inexpensive as work yards go (about $15/day if you do it yourself) but the labor rates are unreasonable. We’re a captive client – if we store our boats here what else are we going to do? You have to put at least one coat of paint on before you go into the water.

Yesterday at 8, I woke to the sound of rotary sanders taking off Chemistry’s top layer of ablative bottom paint. The two guys were done when I got back at 10 after coffee and breakfast, so at most it was 4 labor-hours of work. That cost me $215. Yes, I’d seen the quote, but the quote is called an “estimate” so I presumed it was somehow based on hours, when in fact it’s a flat rate for all labor based on the length of your boat. Rather than $5/hr for as many hours of sanding as was necessary, I was paying $5/foot * 43 feet no matter how long the sanding took or how gnarly my bottom was. My fault for not asking more questions before I pulled her out here, I guess.

 

For a three-leg trip, that was a pretty easy flight down. It took about 90 minutes to drive to Fort Walton Beach / Valparaiso (VPS) for a 6:40 flight, so I was up at 2:45am. VPS to Charlotte was about a 90 minute flight, then a 40 minute layover before a big plane to Phoenix. Charlotte and Phoenix are both hubs for US Airways, so it was a crowded flight.

I waited in Phoenix for a couple hours, and then hopped on a twin turboprop puddle jumper for the last leg to Guaymas. No problem, and I even slept on that leg, the loud hum of the props knocking me out almost as soon as we gained altitude. As the small group of passengers were walking to the plane, I asked a lady if she happened to be heading to San Carlos, and if so if she’d like to share a cab. It’s thirty bucks from the Guaymas airport to San Carlos, so I’ll save fifteen bucks when I can. Turns out she was planning on renting a car, and offered me a ride (bonus!).

All my luggage made it fine (I was worried about my checked backpack on a three-leg trip) and after no trouble with Immigration I put all my bags through the scanner for Customs, I stepped up and pushed the button for the red/green indicator that randomizes to decide whether or not they search your bags. For the first time, I finally got red. Red is bad. Luckily, however, on a flight with only about fifteen people, and no other flights around, it was a pretty casual search. Mainly, they’re looking out for gringos coming down here to take their jobs. “Tiene equipo para trabajar?” “No.”

The big disappointment came when I asked at the office of Marina Seca about the whereabouts of my boat. There was a lot of confusion, as I haven’t spoken much Spanish in four months and was obviously rusty, but even with the front desk girl who speaks good English, there was confusion. The problem was that when I emailed to cancel the work I’d scheduled to be done by the yard (because I decided to paint the bottom myself and save a few hundred bucks), they also canceled my move to the work yard. So the problem is that in the storage yard there’s no water, no electricity, and they don’t allow you to sleep there. So I had nowhere to sleep. I laid out the problem, and since it was their confusion that created the problem, they decided to allow me to sleep on my boat this time even though it was in the storage yard.

It will turn out fine; though I’d like to be able to clean Chemistry up with a nice rinse / soap, there are still tons of things I need to do both inside and out that don’t really require the work yard: light sanding of the bottom to prepare for bottom paint; interior cleaning and dusting; miscellaneous repairs including (so far) the accumulator pump which was leaking and blowing off water pressure and (most importantly) a bad seacock on a seawater intake through-hull.
_________

After a quick breakfast this morning, I made my way to the chandlery, where I discovered that the paint I could afford was crap (only 33% cuprous oxide – copper is poison to stuff that wants to grow on your boat). So I went back to Marina Seca and talked to Jesus again about his quote, whereby I could have his team do all the work of a light sanding and a coat of paint for around $850 with better paint. It’s painful to think about, as I know it’s pretty easy to do, but still, I have plenty of things to do and at $5/hr I can certainly contract out the dirtiest work while I get the other stuff done. I removed the seacock and through-hull and am on my way (after posting this, drinking some coffee) back to the chandlery where I expect I’ll find ridiculous prices for replacing it. I may end up taking the bus into Guaymas to see if I can find a better price, and if I can find paint for cheaper, I may still end up doing that myself, too.

So at this point I’ve got the boat scheduled to move into the work yard tomorrow at 10am, and then into the water on Friday at 10am.

More soon.

TT

 

Monday, May 12, 2008

Well, I've begun the last leg of my sailboat trip until November, when I'll retrieve Chemistry from the Guaymas Marina Seca, get all sorts of great work done on her, and plop her back in the water for our trip to Florida (and/or beyond?). I left Agua Verde this morning about 9, motor-sailed up to Puerto Escondido, fueled up and were out of there in a flash. It's now 5:30, I've just finished some work-work, and for most of the day I've been doing that web development stuff and some boat housekeeping, preparing Chemistry for the Sea of Cortez crossing even though it's forecast to be quiet, flat motoring all the way across.

It's a 20-hour trip (at 6 knots) from Puerto Escondido straight to Guaymas at a bearing of 10-12 degrees True. This means I'll be crossing the Sea at a diagonal, almost due north, but frankly, I could use some regular wind so I don't mind the middle of the Sea. I don't think I'll find it even in the middle this trip, though. I'm making 6.1 knots motor-sailing with a negligible wind on my starboard bow. I left Isla Carmen and Isla Coronados behind an hour ago, so there's open sea ahead with still a couple hours of light.

What great work will I have done on Chemistry next Fall? Well, we'll start with some good Mexican bottom paint that will kill any creature dumb enough to even *think* about growing there. The US EPA won't let us buy the really toxic stuff, so as a consequence I've carried around hundreds of extra pounds of weeds and barnacles at various times - and who knows, maybe infection from my barnacle-cut hand will be the end of me? Thanks, EPA. I'd like to get a new radar; this one is pretty old and barely adequate. There have been several times this trip where a boat hasn't show up on radar until just a few miles out - especially in rolly seas. I'd like a radar to have a bit better performance than that. I need to get the mainsail track re-welded to the boom - that broke somewhere around Barra de Navidad. I need to get this cockpit enclosure canvas re-done; the mildew has to be dead by now, in this heat, but it's still there. And after so many years on the hard, the canvas is pretty brittle, and coming apart at some key points of pressure. New cockpit cushions, new salon settee fabric, new rugs, a more matress-like matress, new running rigging, new (fresh scent!) sanitation hoses, a truly networked electronic system, two new tilt-able 2'X2' solar panels, an upgraded (and/or completely refreshed) battery bank, a 110-volt electrical system with a new inverter, new fridge plates and a new water heater.... And most importantly of all, a new linear drive arm for OV, since my rebuild only lasted about 500 miles.

How much of that will I actually get done next fall? Probably just the paint, boom-welding, the enclosure and the auto pilot. Truthfully, I can live with everything else. But if lightning strikes, business-wise, would I sell Chemistry and commission a brand new Oyster or Hinckley, or would I make Chemistry the prettiest 1989 Taswell 43 in the oceans of the earth? Well, assuming I'm still single-handing and don't want to go any bigger, there's no question; Chemistry is my girl.

TT

I've been here in La Cruz (once again) for 5 days now, but this time my only visit to the marina is in my dinghy to pay the 100-peso dinghy dockage fee and walk into town or use the restarant/lounge. Instead, my main purpose here is to keep cool at anchor with the breeze blowing through the hatches, and to get work done utilizing the Internet from the marina a few hundred yards away. The days here are pretty predictable, and I'm looking forward to leaving soon for a little more excitement once I get done what I need to get done. In the meantime, however, in checking my anchor this morning I remembered how worried I've been in the past about the unknown, boat-wise. And now those worries seem so silly. Standing on my bow watching my anchor hold me securely in 20 knots of wind, I thought back and had to wonder where I'd be if I'd let those old worries keep me from doing what I needed to do.

My first sailboat, Chemistry (I), was a beautiful, flag-blue Sweden Yachts 36. A fast and graceful sailboat - a sister of the better-known Nautor Swans from Finland. Better laid out and brighter below than the Swans, I think. When I got that boat, I remember sitting in the club with my friends Bob Byrd and Craig ("Doc") Jackson and asking them everything they could tell me about anchoring. I'd never done it before and somehow with everything I'd read up to that point anchoring was the thing about boating that most concerned me. "What depth do you anchor in? How crowded are the anchorages, usually? How far are you from the other boats? Have you ever dragged into anyone else? How hard do you back her down to set the anchor?" Etc. The reality is you just have to do it. Anchoring now is nothing. There are very few ways to screw up anchoring as long as there's decent ground to hold you and you land your anchor on that decent ground instead of on rocks or coral or a bottomless pit. I won't go into a tutorial - there are plenty of those around. Now docking... that's another matter. Chemistry (I) handled like a sports car. I'd single-hand her all the time and get to the dock and back her in, just like the power boats do with their twin-Cat diesels and their bow thrusters. This Chemistry doesn't handle so well and really likes to "walk" to port, but I've yet to have a mishap and don't expect one as long as I'm smart about the weather and the dock hands aren't too overzealous.

More recently, my main worry was paperwork. I'm justified in that, because I'm the worst record-keeper / paper-organizer in the world. Taxes kill me. So before I set out to Mexico I was very worried about the paperwork part of it. Getting the proper clearances, checking into ports.... That again is another fear that has been washed aside by just doing it and figuring it out along the way. Of course, Mexico is a little more advanced with that stuff than a few other Central American countries I'll deal with next year when I make another go of the Panama Canal to Florida route. But Mexico is a good learning area because they deal with so many cruisers.

For friends, family, the curious dropping by to see some pictures of sunshine, I thought I'd give you a better idea of what it looks like around here in the anchorage. And if you're curious about anchoring....

This is a view looking west towards the Pacific Ocean. The wind is blowing about 20 knots and you see the line running into the water which attached to the anchor chain a few feet below the surface. The snubber serves a few purposes. Mainly, it's to take the load off of the windlass. It also reduces the angle of the chain in relation to the ground, which lets you hold better with less chain. Instead of coming off the very tip of the boat, the load is against the snubber which has a slightly lower angle. Generally, boats using something like this have it set up more like a bridle, with one end of the line going to the port cleat and one to starboard, so the whole apparatus stays off the center of the bow. My snubber isn't spliced correctly (the lengths at the cleat ends are too short to reach both cleats at the same time), which is okay because when I have it snubbed off one side it keeps me turned just a bit so I can control the direction of the bow into the waves, which makes for a more comfortable time sitting at anchor.

Here's a photo of the "yacht club" - the new La Cruz marina building with restaurant, lounge, showers, etc.... They have a "Sky Bar" on the roof, which I'm sure will be a hit when they're all done with construction in and around the marina in a couple years. Granted, it's not a great photo of the building; I'm mainly interested in showing the view from my boat towards the building. :)

Here's my latest mounting technique for my wifi adapter / antenna. I've picked up a much better signal since mounting it higher, and I think it also benefits from the mast acting like a backboard. The wifi signal I'm using is coming from the marina building above.

When it really starts blowing and I want to double-check that my anchor is holding securely, I'll go right to the bow and look towards shore. Because the strong afternoon winds always come from the same direction, I can line up the green buoy in the center of the picture with the farthest-most part of the jetty, and I know I'm stretched out and not dragging.

And finally, just a view aft towards some other boats in the anchorage. The streaks on the water indicate the strength of the wind. The buildings in the background are Bucerias, I believe, which is about half-way between La Cruz and Puerto Vallarta.

So at the moment it's 4:26 Nayarit time (Mountain Time in the US), and I've been eating come chips & guac, listening to Radio Lab podcasts, and answering emails and doing other work since I woke up around 10:30 (hey, I was up till 4am, again). Time for a check on all the scripts and processes I'm waiting on.... When you're dealing with database tables of 50+ million rows, sometimes it takes a while (some photos and a blog entry's worth of time, for example) to get things done.

TT

 

In the small anchorage that sits between the Coast Guard Air Station and the huge docks where the cruise ships load and offload their passengers, sits a massive field of mooring buoys rented by the month by the San Diego Mooring Company. I haven’t gotten a great look at the boats farther out, but as best I can tell it’s no more than a floating trailer park within walking distance of downtown. I don’t mean that pejoratively; more than anything else, it just makes me sad.

By far the saddest of these floating trailers are the ones lining the quay – the walkway along the waterfront once you get past the touristy restaurants and into the area of the city that is nothing but a four-lane road running to the airport. There you see the boats on the low-rent mooring buoys. The ones tied stern-to the quay where all the walkers, runners, bike riders and vagrants can see the bottom-growth getting heavier day-by-day from stasis and owner-neglect. Like meals on wheels for overweight couch-potatoes too large to leave their homes, these boats have their adventure delivered to them by the wakes of passing container and cruise ships that remind them twice – once coming from the bay, and again going back out after rebounding off the quay – of larger swells they used to surf.

Though there are clearly people living on many of these boats, you rarely see them. The bar-b-queues are well-worn, sometimes the dinghy seems operable to ferry them to land for a bit of work, but there’s nothing about these boats that rings of adventure... anymore. Often, the sails have been replaced with rolled up tarp, or what lies underneath a sail cover is just a boom.

Nanaimo

You can't see it in this little photo, but Nanaimo's hailing port is Ipswich. Really? Ipswich, Suffolk, UK? Ipswich, Queensland, Australia? Ipswich, Massachusetts? It doesn't matter; they're all pretty far away. Did this little Nanaimo really come all the way from some Ipswich or another? Did she motor down the River Orwell and out into the English Channel, past London and out into the Atlantic? Did she thread her way through the islands of the South Pacific, maybe hop up the coast of Mexico and land here? Or did she come down the east coast, through the Canal? Anyhow, now she sits, after all that adventure, sail-less but still barely alive. Possibly kept alive by her wind generator, waiting out her remaining days in the San Diego Yacht Convalescent Home, a $20 summertime drugstore inflatable raft serving as her dinghy.

Euphoria

By far the most ironic of these boats, Euphoria seems pretty sad. From the overgrown assortment of boat bumpers, of which the owner is obviously an avid collector, to the rusty aluminum dinghy that seems to be about 2/3 her own size, she doesn't really seem to scream, euphorically. She hails from Coronado, which is just across the bridge. A lot of bumpers get lost due to poor knots, so I guess this area, like the backstop of a baseball field, is a good place to pick up the stray bumpers floating away from the rest of the mooring field residents.

Mutt “N” Jeff

Deflated and engineless, sometimes, even their dinghies have given up. Mutt "N" Jeff has, at least, some hope of a visitor, with her bumpers deployed ready to receive a guest alongside.

Dinghy Dock

The most hopeful of these pictures, the dinghy dock shows that there is some sign of life out there. The dinghy dock is the parking lot for the working crowd. And really, it's not too bad a commute. A five-minute dinghy ride, ten-minute walk to many downtown buildings.... I'll have to make an effort to stroll on my dinghy through the mooring field before I leave San Diego, and see what sorts of folks are out there a bit farther, beyond the quay.

Vacancy (Thanks. Chemistry and I will pass.)

I haven't yet updated my float plan to correct all the things no longer accurate or relevant; I've just sort of changed dates. The most important factor is I'm no longer looking for a boat; I've got one. She's a 1989 Taswell 43, formerly Bonheur, which I had to rename to Chemistry because I couldn't not think of some perverted French guy saying "Oui, j'ai un bonheur." Which probably means "I have a good life" or something but sounds like something quite different in English slang.

My first sailboat was Chemistry - a beautiful, flag-blue Sweden 36 yacht built in 1985. She came to me with the rather (I thought) pompous name Bon Vivant. It was a fitting name for such a beautiful boat, but not one that I thought I'd feel very comfortable with when hailing other ships or port captains. It's what I always presumed we boat buyers do to every one of our possible names; say it aloud as if you're hailing someone, and listen to how cool or normal or stupid or arrogant you sound when doing so. "Port of Sidney - Port of Sidney. This is Bon Vivant. Do you copy?" While Bon Vivant isn't all that offensive when said aloud, I nonetheless had Chemistry in mind for other reasons - mainly that my new love was a scientist; a chemist, and well, we mixed and reacted nicely with each other.

In the three months since R and I decided that a divorce was the only option that made sense to allow us unbridled pursuit of our separate passions, I've spent a lot of time on yachtworld.com looking for just the right boat with which to spend my time sipping champagne at sunset from the quiet anchorages of tropical shores, and I've found it amazing how few names I'd actually keep. The good names always seem to have involved some bit of research into literary texts or are beautiful sounding translations of nice ideas. There's Innis Fail, a very nice Sabre 452 whose name is Gaelic for "Island of Destiny". A beautiful Hylas 49 named Empathy was unfortunately sold before I had a chance to wrap things up and re-invest my home equity. But then you have the thousands of sadly named otherwise beautiful yachts hindered by moronic owners who did nothing more than corrupt a standard saying or type sea-faring words into a thesaurus and like the entendre they saw there: Knot Working, Seas the Day, Wet Dream, The Wet Spot, Bow Movement.... And a big sister of my Chemistry, a Sweden 39 that I'm actually considering, sails now in Mexico marred by the name Sea Bee (CB? Maybe?).
 
I really started thinking about this on my way to work today, as I passed a new housing development outside of my city where it seems every conceivable neighborhood name has already been taken, as the developer chose to go with Conifer View. Maybe it's not as bad as I think, but there's something so simplistic and thoughtless about it that it really bugs me. I mean, "conifer" is just a family of trees. Trees with cones. Is that what we've come to? All the Aspens and Hollys and Pine Ridges have been taken, so now we're down to some dim-witted cardboard box-style home developer typing "pine" into the thesaurus and deciding that "conifer" has a nice ring to it? Maybe I'm jaded by the fact that I know Conifer View is being developed on dozens of acres of absolutely treeless land that was once an automobile graveyard. But like every single home in the state of Washington, it does have a view of some pine trees.

There's always regret; the guy who got drunk and thought his boat name would be funny and never sobered up enough until the vinyl was already ordered, or the paint already dry. Or the housing developer who costs himself tens of thousands of dollars because people will just feel stupid giving directions - telling their friends to take a right into something like Conifer View. In the end, though, we name things very simply because of the difficulty in describing them over and over again, so in its most basic function a name is just a pointer to a greater thing. But in many ways, I think a name should not just describe or point, but also evoke. Then again, not a day goes by that I'm not accused of over-analysis.

Note: Moved from MySpace. Originally published 3/26/2007.