Green Ghost, Blue Ocean

by Jennifer M. Smith

  Looking back now, I realize how large our next steps loomed in our minds. Bit by bit we were letting go of everything our lives had been, but we had not yet fully released our grip. We were still in the United States, still speaking English, still in a culture we largely understood. Venturing into Mexico meant we were one step closer to heading offshore, westbound across the Pacific. It would be a full year before we reached Australia. We’d severed the umbilical cord to our Vancouver life but we had not severed our ties to the continent. We were still coastal cruising. In San Diego, we both felt the need to touch our home bases one more time. Tuzo was flown to Vancouver. Nik visited his parents vacationing in Florida and I flew to Toronto. This time it was a bigger goodbye. We had no idea when we’d be home again.

  CHAPTER 6

  Mexico

  (December 2000 – January 2001)

  In mid-December 2000, we checked out of the U.S.A. and departed for Bahía de Tortugas (Turtle Bay), Mexico. We’d dawdled in San Diego and were feeling left behind as many of the other cruisers we’d met were well ahead of us farther south.

  Our route took us 35 NM offshore and 320 NM due south over three days and two nights. For this leg, we both used a proper dosage of seasickness medication and donned a scopolamine patch. While this anti-seasickness drug works well for many people it can produce undesirable side effects. Using the patch, we both experienced a dry pasty palate, morning-mouth twenty-four hours a day. We also experienced disturbing auditory hallucinations. Nik was certain he heard bagpipes in the distance while I heard a far-off radio playing at low volume all the time. Unfortunately, I also developed another side effect, blurred vision, which was a problem because it kept me from reading – a favourite pastime when underway.

  Nik also loved to read through his night shifts but by day he was all about fishing. It all started with a book, The Cruiser’s Handbook of Fishing by Scott Bannerot and Wendy Bannerot. He’d read it cover to cover before our departure and so revered the text that it came to be known as The Sacred Scrolls aboard Green Ghost. After reading The Scrolls, Nik gave up on using the simple term “lures” and began using the term “presentations.” He named his fishing rod The Red Devil and began to speak in dramatic ways.

  The fishing fixation spread from his reading habits to his shopping habits and to his navigational habits as well. All courses he plotted arced offshore over any bank he could find on the charts.

  Southbound we continued 230 NM from Turtle Bay to Bahía Santa Maria and on to Bahía de Magdalena via the Uncle Sam Bank. It was okay with me since fishing was one of the few things that got Nik excited about the longer passages. Besides, I was very interested in landing more fish. A lot of money had been spent on fishing gear. According to my cost-per-pound analysis, we had a C$700 albacore caught off the Oregon coast and two US$35 mackerels caught in California. After the San Diego shopping spree and the Mexican fishing license, we were another US$400 in. As far as I was concerned, we needed to catch more fish to lower our cost per pound.

  On our first day out of San Diego, we were boldly flying our spinnaker when The Red Devil shrieked. How does one slow a boat down to land a fish when a lofty spinnaker filled with a steady twelve-knot breeze is billowing out before the bow? We had to douse the spinnaker of course. Nik pulled the tubular sock down to snuff the wind out of the sail. In his haste to rush astern to deal with the catch he didn’t secure it. I went to the helm to start the engine to give us some control in the swell. When I looked forward, I saw the spinnaker sock creeping up, up, up, and the spinnaker beginning to fill with wind once again. The unsecured snuffer line was blown high out of reach in the breeze, so the only way to get the spinnaker down was the old-fashioned way, lowering the halyard while rapidly pulling the sail in at the bow. We made a complete mess of it, dropping the sail into the water, driving over it, filling it with water and losing the sheets overboard where they dragged astern, nearly getting caught in our spinning propeller in the process. Meanwhile, the fish was bleeding all over the starboard side deck. In the end, after plenty of yelling, the sail was recovered, the fish was cleaned, and another lesson was learned. Spinnaker flying and fishing don’t mix.

  On the second day of our trip south we passed over hallowed ground, the Uncle Sam Bank. Nik pulled two salted ten-inch mackerel carcasses from the fridge.

  “This is the ultimate bait presentation!” he announced excitedly.

  “Okay,” I said, disinterested.

  “Prepare for the second coming of the Tuna God! These presentations are known to disappear in an explosion of white water stirred by the behemoths of the deep!”

  He was into it.

  Six yellowfin tuna and several smaller bonito later he stopped fishing because he was tired of reeling them in. We had fish in the freezer for a Christmas feast and plenty to give away to friends.

  We pulled into Bahía Santa Maria on our tenth wedding anniversary. We had not been off the boat in eight days and I was antsy to go for a walk on Frisbee Beach, so named for the thousands of large sand dollars lying in the sand. The beachcombing was fantastic but the beach landing was another story. It was our first attempt at taking our dinghy in through the surf. How hard could it be? I thought. The dinghy was inflatable, like a rubber duck, so it would float no matter what, right? Besides, we had fold-down wheels on the transom. As soon as we were in shallow water, we could jump out, flip the wheels down, then lift the bow and drag the dinghy up the beach on its two-wheel assembly.

  The trouble was that we hadn’t stopped to think about the moment the dinghy touches bottom and comes to a stop. We hadn’t thought about the waves – they keep coming. They broke over the transom and filled the boat with water. A 130-pound dinghy filled with seawater was pretty hard to drag up on a beach, wheels or no wheels.

  The landing was a miserable failure, but the launch was worse. The waves broke over the bow and beat us back against the beach as we took on more and more water. We failed and bailed and tried again. On our second launch attempt a set of waves took the dinghy sideways and beat it hard against the sand bottom, bending a strut on the deployed wheel apparatus. Being a surfer, Nik was disgraced by our discombobulating in the surf and frustrated that we’d broken his home-built dinghy wheels on our first-ever landing. We made it out on our third attempt.

  We joined a number of other Canadian cruising boats in Magdalena Bay for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, we rafted up with friends aboard the trimaran, Paudeen, and together dinghied over to a party held on one of the larger boats in the bay. Christmas carols and colourful lights made the evening festive and there was no shortage of potluck goodies and cruiser camaraderie among the two dozen sailors on board.

  On Christmas morning, we zipped into the town of San Carlos to find a phone to make calls to family celebrating in the traditional way back home. For us, this was no ordinary Christmas. After our long-distance well-wishing, we flew back to the Ghost at high speed in the dinghy, passing a gray whale in the channel on our way. The rest of our day was spent in the water and on the beach where another potluck was held. A boisterous beach soccer game followed Christmas lunch. I wasn’t sorry to miss a wintery turkey dinner back home. I loved where we were and what we were doing – playing with fellow cruisers in Magdalena Bay was everything I thought a cruising Christmas would be.

  As we turned our bow south once again, heading to Cabo San Lucas for New Year’s Eve, friends in Mag Bay hailed us on the VHF radio to wish us a boring trip as all good sailing friends do. And that’s exactly what we had; with light winds under sail we had a perfectly boring run down to the tip of the Baja.

  The ever-changing sea enthralled us. On this low-speed leg to Cabo we had small squid land on the deck in the night. Their limp little bodies left inky stains on the white fibreglass of the coach house. Perhaps they were attracted to the boat’s navigation lights and had flung themselves moth-to-a-flame toward the light or perhaps our passing had startled them from the water.

  Another day, we found ourselves sail
ing through sapphire blue water with thousands of tiny scarlet crustaceans floating by. I scooped one up in a bucket for a better look. They were bright red, like miniature Atlantic lobster, only an inch long. We later learned that the locals called them tuna crabs.

  With turtles drifting by and whales breaching in the distance, the sightings of wildlife kept us entertained by day and other natural phenomena amused us by night. There were shooting stars so bright I ducked in reflex as they streaked across the sky. There were other more mysterious lights as well.

  In the wee hours of a night watch I identified two white lights on the horizon directly off the bow. A ship! I thought. But two white lights? It didn’t make sense. Through the binoculars I thought I could see a pinkish glow. Perhaps it was a very poorly lit port light. Whatever it was seemed to be coming closer very quickly. It was directly in front of us – a collision course? I stared into the binoculars trying to understand what it was. It was getting larger and brighter. It was barrelling down upon us, and yet white navigation lights signified the stern of a vessel, not the bow. Confused, I contemplated waking Nik. Then the two lights merged into a line of light along the horizon and I realized what it was. The two lights were the tips of a crescent rising on the distant horizon. We were on a collision course with the moon. I was embarrassed at my momentary panic but glad I’d not woken the captain for the “emergency.” I never would’ve lived it down.

  Unharmed by the shooting stars and without a scratch from our close call with the moon, we arrived in Cabo ready to take on officialdom. Although we’d been on the Mexican coast for over two weeks, we had not cleared in with Mexican customs. In Cabo, we paid our anchorage fee at the port authority, then went to the bank to pay our tourist visa fee. After that, it was over to the port captain’s office to check in to the port, then to the immigration office to check in to the country. There was yet the tonnage fee to pay, so we went back to the bank and then finally back to the port captain’s office to complete our check-in by showing all our receipts from the various offices. Some cruisers grumbled loud and long about the paperwork in Mexico. There was no doubt it was a red tape jungle, but we found if we made an outing of it and did the rounds with friends we could figure it out together, share costs if taxis were necessary, and have some fun along the way. We tried to see it as more of a cultural experience and less of an administrative nightmare.

  La Paz, La Paz, everybody said so much about La Paz.

  “Forget Cabo,” they said, “that horrible tourist town. La Paz is where it’s at. La Paz is the real Mexico.”

  When we voiced concern that La Paz might be too smalltown for our boat maintenance needs they insisted, “Don’t worry! You can get anything you want in La Paz!” From all this raving about La Paz by seasoned American cruisers we built up our expectations for a cultural experience. What we found was that although Cabo was clogged with sunburned one-week North American tourists, La Paz was equally encumbered. The difference was the La Paz tourist was the well-tanned North American RV camper who stayed for several months or the leathery cruising sailor who stayed for several years. From the numbers of gringos crowded into the local bars, La Paz appeared to us as less of an adventurous frontier and more of an affordable place to drink yourself to death. In expat circles we found it somewhat depressing.

  Of course, it’s possible that it wasn’t the town that was bringing us down. We were dealing with some difficulties on board that probably influenced our judgement. Nik had become concerned about the water pump on the engine. On a routine inspection, he noticed that the pulley was wobbly and he suspected that the bearing was deteriorating.

  We might have splurged on a slip at a marina while these repairs were being made but there were none available. The repair, if it could be done, would have to be done at anchor. It is risky to take your engine apart while at anchor for the simple reason that if anything goes wrong in the anchorage – if the wind comes up, if your anchor drags, or if your neighbour’s anchor drags – you cannot easily get out of trouble. One might think a sailboat could always sail its way to safety, but that was not the case in La Paz.

  Sailboats naturally sit bow to the wind even in a light breeze, but the La Paz anchorage is subject to strong currents and strong winds, often in opposing directions. This wreaks havoc among the anchored boats as different hull designs respond to the wind direction in various ways and different keel designs react individually to the underwater forces. Instead of being neatly aligned in the prevailing wind direction, in La Paz the boats lie helter-skelter, oriented every which way in the close-packed anchorage. They call it the “La Paz Waltz.” At times, Green Ghost sat stern to a twenty-knot wind, held in that position by the several-knot current.

  There were many windy days and the Waltz caused a few boats to collide, resulting in minor hull damage. Often we didn’t feel comfortable leaving our boat unattended. When the boats swung erratically we wanted to be on board to fend off collisions with neighbours. I volunteered to stay while Nik went ashore to find a mechanic. This may have seemed brave of me, but the truth is that I’d fallen victim to Montezuma’s revenge (the result of a meal out the evening before). Being at home in an engineless boat in an unpredictable anchorage was okay by me – at least I was near my own toilet.

  Besides, Nik was better suited to dealing with the water pump. He took it around town on his bicycle and managed with broken Spanish, wild hand gestures, and much laughter to find a shop that could fix it. He was so pleased he was able to remove the pump, have it repaired and reinstalled in less than twenty-four hours. One thing they said about La Paz was true: you could get anything repaired there, quickly and inexpensively.

  With the water pump fixed we were ready for our next destination, mainland Mexico’s west coast. We had Zihuatanejo in our sights.

  CHAPTER 7

  Crew

  (March 2001)

  We were getting pretty good at it and we were getting it right. Down the Mexican coast our confidence was building, so much so that we invited family and friends to join us at various ports along the way. We’d cruised the west coast of North America for seven months, facing each challenge presented to us. We saw ourselves as increasingly intrepid even though our insurance company still considered us newbies.

  We sailed as far as Zihuatanejo, or “Zee-town” as so many cruisers called it. It was our jumping-off point. From the golden shores of Mexico, we were Australia-bound. Setting out across the Pacific was a huge step for us. It’s a great step for every sailor, travelling nearly 2,800 NM from Mexico to the Marquesas (the easternmost island group in French Polynesia); it’s the longest offshore leg of many circumnavigations. From this point on, there was no easy way to get home. In my mind, the Pacific crossing was nothing short of an expedition and the first leg was a daunting one.

  Our insurance company was firm – if we set out alone, we were uninsurable. They insisted we have a minimum of four people on board and that at least two of the crew be experienced open-ocean sailors. At the time, Green Ghost represented a significant portion of our personal wealth. If we suffered a total loss and survived it, we wanted coverage. We wanted to insure the boat, but our desire to mitigate our financial risk was at odds with the way we wanted to live. Having experienced a crowd of five aboard for the one-week trip to San Francisco, the thought of having a four-man crew for many weeks did not appeal to us; twice the provisions, twice the water consumption, twice the personalities, twice the sweaty bodies taking up space, and half the privacy. It was not how we wanted to travel.

  Besides, who did we know who had both the time and the money to fly one way to Mexico, sail for a month, and then buy a one-way ticket home from a tiny island in French Polynesia? We weren’t in a position to pay crew to join us. Anyone who accompanied us on the journey would have to be willing to pay their own way.

  We put the word out to would-be offshore sailors while simultaneously looking for a new underwriter, one that would trust our sailing skills. Our Vancouver mentor and frie
nd put his hand up. Retired, he had both the time and the budget to join us. He wrote to say that if we needed another crewman for insurance purposes, he was up for the passage. Meanwhile our broker found us coverage for a two-man crew. We didn’t need another body after all, but having incited our friend to join us, we did not want to revoke the invitation. If he had a passionate desire to join us for a unique opportunity, our offer remained open. But we didn’t want to take on crew who thought they were doing us a favour. We didn’t want one whit of obligation to influence his decision. We made a long-distance phone call from Mexico to explain the situation and to give him an easy out. His commitment was firm. He was in. Green Ghost was getting a crewman.

  To make it easy for our friend to find us, we made a booking at a local marina. In a slip for three days we got some chores done. I went to work with the garden hose on deck, desalting Green Ghost with the first endless supply of fresh water that we’d had in two months. We erected the sun awning to combat the heat but it made little difference to our crewman. Just arrived from Canada, pale-skinned and streaming with sweat, he took a pair of scissors to his jeans and the electric shears to his full head of thick hair within hours of his arrival.

  Despite all the long-term preparations made before our departure from Vancouver, there was plenty to do in Zihuatanejo. On foot, by bicycle, or by bus we made daily forays into town to search for parts and provisions, to run errands, and, on occasion, to have a little fun. We used our best sleuthing skills to find plumbing hose, a dinghy anchor, funnels, spark plugs, engine oil, padlocks, and fabric for flags. I was sure it would be nearly impossible to find electrical contact cleaner at the hardware store and truly impossible to ask for it. But when it came to language challenges Nik was always up for it, summoning the few words he remembered from our Vancouver Spanish courses, improvising with French, or tossing out a fictitious word instead.