The Taco Traveler

(back-dated to 5/4/2009)

My extreme frustration and stress over this trip has turned into elation, as I’ve managed to repair / jury rig the backup autopilot (O.V. Jr.). I’d attempted to fix it sort of casually before, thinking I didn’t want to break it and make it non-reparable by someone who knows what they’re doing, but the last few days have really worn on me, physically and emotionally, spending so much time at the wheel and basically steering a zig-zag course down the coast as I miss a few seconds of concentration and have to correct. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t play chess on my iPhone. I couldn’t really fish because of the trouble caused trying to haul in a fish and steer the boat to ensure there are no dangerous crash gybes…. In short, it was a marathon that was grueling in every aspect – even for shorter hops like yesterday between Isla Cedros and Turtle Bay – and it wasn’t very much fun at all.

But finally about forty minutes ago I decided, “well, it’s not gonna get any more useless, so I might as well be more aggressive in trying to fix it.” So I pulled it apart, and found that the belt inside was still usable but was finding no purchase on the shell that connects to the wheel. Predictable enough, but even simpler was the fix – I just put two wraps of electrical tape around the surface the belt grabs, snapped it back together, mounted it to the wheel again, and … joy.

So we are now motorsailing down the coast, in the lee of the large swells since the land turns to the southeast after Turtle Bay, and will go through the night to get to Mag Bay tomorrow late morning. I’ll still need to steer when we get large following seas, but the in-between times, and the times when I need to make food or coffee, or just take a break and relax in the sun… O.V. Jr. should be able to hold down the fort now.

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Well, O.V. Jr. couldn’t handle as much as I’d hoped, but it’s nice knowing that when I get to flat water or non-following seas, I’ll be able to rest and do things (write, read, think) without the boat running off course dramatically. I stopped last night at Abreojos (“open your eyes”), and an approach / anchoring like that is all you need to feel sailorly: darkness, shoals and other hazards all around, 20 knots of wind blowing through the anchorage…. But I got 10:1 scope out in 20’ of water, so the 30 knot gusts were manageable, and I left the Nobeltec on all night and kept a boundary circle on that anchor, so that if the boat slips out of that boundary, an ugly noise would have awoken me and I would have had to run up, start the engine and try to re-set the anchor and 200’ of chain before the shoals about .8 of a mile behind me.

So I had a great night’s sleep, and decided to sleep in (it’s 8:30) and get going again closer to 4 or 5 this evening. The next stop, Mag Bay, is about 140 miles (18-20 hours at 7 – 7.5 knots) away, so an overnight has to happen, so I’ll stage the overnight so I’m fresh. I’ve improved my angle a bit, and should have a very fast sail, though still lots of hand steering because although the seas won’t be following, whenever the wind is behind the beam, this autopilot doesn’t do well.

I’m having some breakfast now, and will be showering and then getting busy taking O.V. (the primary autopilot) apart to try once again to repair that. At this point I believe the problem is the clutch, which isn’t properly pushing the gears into place when it needs to. I doubt there’s anything I can do, but it’s worth a shot. After that, I’ll write and/or work on some other projects until it’s time to hit the road again. I’d hoped to go into town and look for an Internet Café (there are no open Wifi connections here in the anchorage) but there are breakers all around, and I’d need to take the dinghy off the deck in 20 knots of wind, which is a major pain.

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Well, I couldn’t wait, so decided if I was arriving at Bahia Santa Maria too early (before sunrise) that I’d just slow down, but I’ve been moseying along and am currently on track to arrive at BSM around 8am. It’s almost 7pm, and it’s been a very nice sail so far, and I’ve only recently had to fire up the engine because the wind started getting shifty / inconsistent. So now we’re cruising along at 6.8 knots and the autopilot is doing a good job in these relatively light seas.

The one thing that concerns me at this point is that the barometer is down to about 1002.5 MB, which could mean a low pressure system is coming down from California, or worse yet, that it’s coming up from the south. That would very seriously suck, but I’m about 1/3 across a huge bight in Baja, the nearest land 26 miles away so there’s nowhere to go but onward. Way back when I left Eureka without adequately checking the weather, I ended up having 45 knots blowing from dead astern, and O.V. handled those winds and seas just great. With only a bit of mainsail up, we were doing 9 knots running towards San Francisco when my friends were rolled, dismasted and helio-rescued well offshore.

So it could be that selling my Pactor modem for the SSB wasn’t the smartest move, as I’d be able to download GRIB weather files to overlay onto my Nobeltec (chart plotter software on my computer), but I figured I wouldn’t be offshore that much this trip, and would generally have connectivity as soon as I get to Cabo (Pacific Coast Baja is pretty desolate and unpopulated). I had decent possibilities last night at Abreojos, but all the connections were secured. No local residents opened up their Internet access to those poor suckers out in the anchorage. But if I get really worried, then I can just radio one of the many ships farther offshore and ask them for a forecast. I’m inside the bight, so I’m protected from some of the swell and am definitely safe from shipping traffic, and I have only seen three or four northbound yachts since Ensenada. And the money from that Pactor modem has been pretty instrumental, as it’s paid for fuel and food the entire trip, and will pay for the first month on a buoy once I get to San Carlos.

No fish yet since the bonito just after Ensenada, but yesterday I screwed up by tightening the drag too much and not checking it, and the first indication that something was interested in my lure was the line – the 60lb Spectra – snapping at the rod tip, so whatever it was, it was damn big and I probably didn’t want it anyway, but now the poor thing is swimming around the ocean with a yellow plastic squid and two big painful hooks hanging out the side of its mouth… not to mention the 100 feet of Spectra fishing line trailing behind him. So this morning I re-spooled the fishing reel and am ready to go again, but no luck today.

One thing I think is worth mentioning as sort of a neat thing, is the failure of my speed gauge – the transducer for the gauge anyway, with a little paddle wheel that spins according to how fast the boat is moving. Well, it’s never worked very well, and it’s always frustrated me because it stops spinning with the slightest bit of gunk or tangle, but I’ve given up on it and have started just using it for its secondary function, which is water temperature. The speed through the water isn’t that important anyway (speed over ground – SOG – is more important and is available through the GPS), and it’s just a lot more fun, romantic and poetic to watch the water get warmer and warmer as I move on south. And yes, it is getting warmer, though it’s still pretty chilly after sunset.

So the sun is down, and it will probably be a long night, but thankfully I’ve got O.V. Jr. back in good condition, so I’ll be able to take little naps here and there as long as the following seas aren’t too bad. It’s a beautiful night, with a great sunset and a very bright, clear ¾ moon directly above me, and we’re moving along now at 8.2 knots, so I need to slow down or I’ll get to Bahia Santa Maria (and the dangerous Cabo San Lazaro) before sunrise.

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I’m in an odd sort of racing mood, I guess, and just finished tweaking the sails to get all the speed possible out of the little wind I have. Yeah, sure, I’m motorsailing, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also be under full sail (main, yankee, staysail) and tweak here and there as the wind shifts. I just unfurled the staysail because the wind shifted to the beam – basically out of the southwest, which is odd but hopefully not indicative of a more significant or lasting shift (until I get to Cabo, anyway). It’s always nice to see adjustments gain that extra couple tenths of a knot. There’s not enough wind to kill the engine, but I’m only running at 1500 RPM, so it’s only really serving to help the autopilot stay on track and to bring us from 5.5 knots up to 7.

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I can’t possibly do this justice, but it’s 3:17 am and the moon has gone down so that all the stars are as visible as they can possibly be – not a light disturbance within 100 miles (outside of my bright laptop screen). In tha past couple of hours (even with the moon out) I’ve seen several shooting stars (meteorites) and at this moment the mass of stars is so great that I can’t even find the second most recognizable constellation out there. I found the Big Dipper, but I had to look at my Cybersky program to figure out where Orion is, and even given the direction and the altitude, I can’t make out Orion amongst all that brightness. Imagine that – and I’ve seriously been an Orion fan for years.

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A girlfriend once called me Flappy McFlapperson, and I thought that was hilarious. I don’t remember what I was doing to earn that (it’s reasonable to assume I was talking too much) but I’ve obviously never forgotten the goofiness of the nickname or the cuteness of her as she said it. Well, that’s what my mainsail is doing right now – just flappin’ back and forth as the swells rock the boat all over the place, with not enough wind from behind to keep it full. So we flap and rock. I keep it up because its flapping – while annoying – also helps stabilize the boat as we motor along; without the flapping we’d be rocking even more.

That girlfriend, by the way, is one of my biggest guilt trips ever, as I ended that relationship by being such a dick that I forced her to break up with me. I know – I suck(ed). She hasn’t spoken to me since (10 years ago), and ignored my friend request on Facebook. Sorry, K.

 

(back-dated to 5/1/2009)

It’s been a very difficult sail so far since I left Ensenada. Well, I guess there has been some good, too, but basically when you’re single-handing and both of your autopilots give out, it’s hard to see the good amongst all the hand-steering for hour upon hour. I’m just now leaving Isla Cedros, about 50 more miles (7 hours) to Turtle Bay where I may be able to get Internet and post this tonight.

The biggest issue so far has been the lack of a reliable autopilot. Theoretically I should be able to balance the boat (adjust the sails so she stays on course), but with the wind coming from dead astern and some fairly large following seas that want to push us off course every ten seconds or so, it’s just not possible. In fact, it’s even difficult hand-steering while *not* standing up, so I spend a lot of time and concentration steering downwind and trying to maintain the right levels of speed and direction, while my arms, shoulders, neck, back, eyes, legs… everything is killing me. I’ve got cuts on both hands, two of them fairly deep and painful but I have no idea where they came from. But I’ve made it across Bahia Viscaino, and that’s one of my larger successes, so far.

Just outside Ensenada on Tuesday morning I caught a nice bonito, but haven’t had time to cook it until last night while finally at anchor off Isla Cedros. This was my first bonito – about 15 pounds, and was a very nice fish. I hauled him in under full sail, so it made the battle extra hard with the boat going 7.5 to 8 knots and having to try to keep the boat going one direction with nobody at the helm. I believe at that point that I was on a beam reach, so the wheel autopilot was able to keep up long enough to allow me to haul the fish in and clean it. Autopilots like a beam reach a lot more than they like going downwind, though my main autopilot (O.V.) could handle anything… it’s just the $1,000 it would take to replace the linear drive that has created the problem.

Crossing Bahia Viscaino was pretty much a nightmare, with the following seas, wind directly at my back, and the last anchorage I’d planned to stop at (Bahia San Quintin) was completely blown out on Thursday night, so I just kept going. The problem with having wind directly at your back, non-sailors, is that it requires a lot of concentration to run dead downwind with just a main, because if a wave turns you too much, or you don’t pay attention, you could have an accidental gybe. I had a preventer rigged the first time it happened, but it wasn’t rigged very well because the boom came crashing over with such force that it just stripped the preventer out of the winch. That accidental crash gybe would have knocked me out (and probably off the boat altogether, 15 miles offshore… at dusk) if I hadn’t been ready, as I was freeing one of the yankee sheets from a turnbuckle and was moving quickly towards the cockpit when I felt it happening, but I was ducking, of course. The preventer line bent one of the stantions and further ripped my house canvas as it smacked it when the boom came over. This, amongst a few other mishaps and bad decisions has frustrated me a lot, but I’m getting better and getting the hang of sailing Chemistry with no help - no help even from an autopilot. I’ve since moved the preventer farther forward, and the preventer has made a couple of saves.
The good news is that with 20-30 knots at my back I’ve been able to get this far using 95% wind power. I only motor to get into & out of anchorages at this point, but we’ll see how that continues.

When I left San Diego I figured I’d be in Cabo by Saturday or Sunday, but that’s looking crazy, and it will probably be more like Wednesday or Thursday because I’m unable to make any progress while I’m resting. And with no autopilot, I need a lot of rest. That’s been another learning curve this trip – I’d never had to “heave-to” before, which is basically a means of standing still at sea. You arrange the sails so that the boat stays pointed to the wind and you just bob there comfortably. I’ve discovered that Chemistry heaves-to fairly well under mainsail only (held out to the side a bit by the track, and with the current and the larger winds I actually make 1 or 1.5 knots backward (south, down the coast as I’m pointed to the north) as I’m hove-to, which is a pretty good deal.

So I’m still just motoring in the lee of Isla Cedros (this is a heck of a big island) and will be stopping at most every rest stop between here and Mag Bay, unless I can find better wind direction (wind at 120 degrees off the bow, pushing me from the aft quarter), in which case I may go offshore farther and just heave-to to sleep again. Can’t wait for Cabo and warmth, a free and nighttime-calm anchorage with parties on the beach, coffee shops with Internet, and jet-ski / parasail craziness out there on the water all day long.

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Turtle Bay – 1 May 2009

I’ve made it to Turtle Bay, basically about half way to Cabo. I’ll leave early in the morning for Punta Asuncion or possibly Abreojos (“abre ojos” = “open your eyes”). It will be 14 hours to Abreojos, and then a longer leg down to Mag Bay / Bahia Santa Maria. Then it’s a 24-hour trip from there to Cabo San Lucas.
It’s 7:30 here, and I want to get into town to see if I can get Internet and a couple of fish tacos somewhere. There aren’t many services here, but it’s worth a shot.

Cancel that… I guess the only reason I’d be going into town would be to send this off and catch up on a few emails, but at this point I think it’s more important that I just get going very early in the morning. It’s a pretty big pain to take the dinghy off the deck and an even bigger pain to lower the outboard and attach it to the dinghy, and all of that for one 30-minute trip to town doesn’t make a lot of sense. Hopefully nobody is too worried (Dad) and everyone knows I know what I’m doing despite the occasional bad sailing decisions, and that outside of the occasional crash gybe, I’m doing well and moving forward.

So instead of getting the dingy prepared, I’m going to make some bonito spaghetti, watch a movie on my laptop, and get to bed. I’ll be up and out of here about 4am to ensure I arrive at Abreojos before sunset tomorrow. Is there anyone in the world who likes anchoring in an unfamiliar spot in the dark?

 

Lists are easy writing. There's no need to connect the bullets, though it's better if they do connect, somehow, bullet-to-bullet. But mainly I just have these things bouncing around - these odd or occasionally interesting thoughts - that probably don't deserve an entire entry of their own.

- Ex Officio are the greatest warm-weather clothes in the history of human kind. A couple nights ago after returning from town I changed out of my wet, heavy, suffocating cotton t-shirt to put on one of my Ex Officio t-shirts. Expensive but worth every penny. The difference is incredible. And the boxer briefs? Even better than nothing. I should say: I am not, nor have I ever been, a paid representative of Ex Officio, Inc (though they are a Seattle-area company). Actually, check that... I just saw that they have an affiliate program, so I signed up. After they send me some links, if you buy a shirt I'll get a few bucks.

- Podcasts are essential when you're far from home and missing culture. Lately I've been catching up on Radio Lab and some NPR podcasts. Radio Lab rules. I used to be a huge fan of This American Life, and I'm still a fan, but so much good stuff is free; why pay my public radio dues and pay for TAL? To be fair, they're free the week after they're broadcast; it's just the archive you have to pay for.

- Though I only feel 30, my face, after 3 days of not shaving, is starting to betray my 40. Yes, those are gray whiskers. And here I sit on my 10th day at anchor off a little Mexican village, sometimes feeling like I'm turning into the epitome of the salty old sailor who gets to a little place and then never leaves, never sails again. I'm not so salty, though, and I'm still wearing clothes, generally.

- I cleaned the bottomside of my hull early last week - soon after I arrived from Nuevo Vallarta. It was so gnarly, with barnacles, large clumps of everything, and things living in the everything. It took me about 2 hours and a full tank of air that I'd rather use for seeing cool stuff, but it needed to be done; I really was carrying around about 100 pounds of crap, which felt like 1000 as Chemistry dragged it through the water. I scraped my knuckles bloody several times on the barnacles to the point I was concerned about sharks. I'm still healing. The scary thing, though, is the hundreds of tiny shrimp on my wetsuit after I got out of the water. After 3 or 4 good showers, I wonder how many (dead?) shrimp are still hiding out in my hair.

- Yesterday was laundry day. When it's beautiful out but very windy on a rolling boat, that's when you get the true measure of the importance of certain articles of clothing. As further proof of the importance of my Ex Officio t-shirts and underwear, I hung them so that if the clothes pins failed in the 20 knot breeze, they'd still just fall onto the deck rather than blow over the edge. All other clothes (and Anachini sheets, even!) were on the standard clothes line.

- My clothes line was crazy expensive. In San Diego I paid about $50 for 50 feet of high-tech line to use as a control line for my boom-furling main, but when I got it back to the boat it was too small. Well... I knew I'd find some use for it.

- Though probably deserving of an entry of its own, I wanted to mention the music here. It surprises me that everyone so loves mariachi. You don't often hear Shakira or other popular musicians who sometimes speak/sing in Spanish. What you hear everywhere are slightly different genres played by mariachi. Lots of tubas that reverberate for miles. And lots of loud singing and loud horns. Banda, Ranchera... from the elders to the kids, everyone loves it. Imagine teens in the U.S. listening to polka. I don't know... maybe it's more the equivalent of something more popular but still acoustic, like Jack Johnson.

TT

We got to the harbor marker at Humboldt Bay last night around 9:30. It then took about 40 minutes to make our way across the bar and up the channel into the marina. The bar crossing was easy, as there was a slight flood tide and very small swells, but I'm glad Capt Rich was running the show. I feel confident that I can manage a bar crossing like that - in fact, I played along in my head as if I were doing it myself ("okay, I see the next set of range markers lining up; I'd turn 20-degrees right... now") - but it was good to have an expert do it the first time. Here's a view of the Humboldt Bay bar. The City Marina is in the upper left, just above and left of the smoke stack. This bar's got a nasty reputation when the swells are up, but of course I'll wait for good conditions to leave. Here's a nice model of the bar conditions that I'll use to plot my escape. You can see that at the end of the model (currently Thursday 10/18) the waves will be hitting the north jetty at about 18' and the swells even in the middle of the channel are 14'. There's no way that bar is passable then. For a longer range look, check out stormsurfing.com's prediciton model of Cape Mendocino for the next 180 hours. Note especially the predicted swells at 06Z Saturday (that's 6:00 AM Saturday GMT/Zulu, which is 11PM Friday PDT). Yes, those are 28 foot swells they're predicting. Now you know why I'm in port, and why I may be here for more than 10 days.
 
Anyway, last night after we got in we tied up on an outer pier for the night, and I made some more spaghetti. Woke this morning after a 9-hour sleep and Capt Rich was all packed & ready to go, so I got up and we moved the boat into my assigned spot which will be my home for the next week or so. Then we settled up finances, I thanked Capt Rich for his excellent help on my first ocean voyage, and then he got into a taxi and I started walking to town for some breakfast.

Eureka is a decent little town. The "Old Town" area has some nice little restaurants I'm looking forward to checking out this week. There was also an adult "toy store" I walked by that had some interesting costumes in the window for something like an 18th century duke and cortesan. Like Dangerous Liasons. Cool, but I'll pass for this Halloween. And of course on the way back I fell into the "browsing the chandelry" trap, and ended up buying all sorts of stuff for the boat. I needed most of it (oil, grease, antenna mount, 2 Lewmar Synchro blocks to better rig the yankee and staysail roller furling, a couple tubes of 3M 5200 marine sealant) but I'm not sure I needed to spend $75 on tuna fishing gear (3 jigs @ $13 each, $35 for 10 stainless hooks!). Oh well, if I get even one nice tuna out of it it will pay for the gear.

In the chandelry (Englund Marine) I saw some photos on the wall of breakers around some large fishing boats as they crossed the bar. The guy says that was winter of 2000, and when those photos were taken was actually the best conditions they'd had for a while. Ugh.

TT

 

Clearly, some of my loyal readers are very very very bored and have a keen interest in what sort of junk (and occasionally useful stuff) I'm loading onto this boat. Maybe it has something to do with today's cultural climate - people sure love lists (and who has time for my paragraphs, or long, overdrawn and occasionally completely unrelated parenthetical statements?). So in the interest of satisfying my readers, here's another list from today's Seattle excursion:
 
- 6 oil filters
- 6 (more) primary fuel filters (Racor, 10 micron)
- 1 dozen secondary fuel filters (2 micron)
- 6 bottles of wine (hey, there were too few before, so they rattled. Now they're packed in there tight and very secure).
- 1 8" fish filleting knife and sheath... heh... For AHI!
- Another couple of those amazing and magical magnet lights
- 5 gallon jerry jug for diesel fuel

Uhhhh... sure seemed like I paid for more than that. Maybe I was overcharged, but it was marine-grade stuff (except the wine).

Listening to Bright Eyes, drinking a glass of wine [Editor's note: the bottles are loose and rattly again. Must buy more tomorrow], and taking a break from all the stowing and packing and lashing. My delivery skipper (Captain Richard Bard, "Rich") has targetted a break in the weather starting sometime Wednesday night / Thursday morning. This (finally) well-prepared boat and the weather window is, of course, something I've been waiting a long time for, but is bittersweet as I've only recently been introduced to some features - restaurants I haven't been to, people I hadn't met - that make me feel like Seattle may have a bit more to offer, after all.

TT

 

... read this post. There is absolutely no reason why you should care about this post, but in the tradition of bloggers everywhere, I'm going to put it out there for everyone to see, for no particular reason.
 
I woke this morning to 30-knot winds whistling in the rigging, with gusts up to 43. There were whitecaps in the marina in the 300-ton TravelLift area. For the first time in a while, happy to be in the marina, still.

I drove around and found the only bar in town that had a big TV and had the Seahawks game on. Well, not the only bar, but the only one that tolerates non-residents, so says the boyfriend of the barista-girl, sitting at his perch guarding his girl, unseen, near the back of the roadside coffee stand. "Well, there's also the Hilltop Tavern, but they don't have mixed drinks there. They also don't allow non-locals." Ugh. Okay, dude.

After watching the Seahawks poor performance, I roamed around Henery Hardware (no, that's not a typo, it's Henery) for about an hour and put anything in my basket that I thought might be good or interesting on the boat. To wit:

- A can opener (duh)
- Electrical tape (can always use more)
- Duct tape (ditto)
- Misc screw kit
- Smoke / CO alarm (have needed this for a while)
- Wooden spoon set
- Oil filter wrench
- Magnet lite
- 150 yds of 65# test fishing line (to go with the offshore pole/reel combo I got yesterday)
- Chef's cooking tongs (love 'em)
- A copper-bottomed, whistling tea kettle
- Hacksaw and add'l blades
- Several misc-sized S.S. hose clamps (spares)

There. Nothing more to say other than, yes, I'm still hoping to get out of here soon. Possibly Thursday or Friday, after this Tuesday/Wednesday storm blows through.

TT