Category: Blog Post

Every morning on the Sonrisa HF radio net a very extensive weather forecast is given “in color” for the outside of Baja, the Sea of Cortez, and Pacific Mainland Mexico by a US ex-pat who now lives in a palapa in El Burro Cove in Bahia Concepcion.  He gets up at 5am every morning to pull together the forecasts that cruisers have come to depend on to keep them informed of what weather is coming and what’s going on in the “tropical kitchen,” and as far as I know, he doesn’t seem to ever take a day off.   Every year Gary the weather guy hosts a 4th of July party in El Burro Cove where he provides the hot dogs, and everyone else brings something for the potluck, and, of course, the locals set up beer for sale.  As soon as we first heard it announced on one of the nets, we decided we wanted to try to make it in order to meet Gary and all the other cruisers.

As usual, we pulled in loaded down with garbage and someone told us that Gary lets the cruisers drop their trash with him for 10 pesos a bag or so and he gives the money to a local to haul the trash away.  We were around the corner in the adjacent anchorage, so we asked Alex, Brenden, Kyle, and Joel (Lady Carolina), to take all the trash from both boats to Gary.  A little while after they get back I see Steve (Lady Carolina) jump in the dinghy and head around the corner.  It turns out he asked Kyle if they met Gary and ended up finding out that they had just left all our bags of trash on his doorstep.  Can you imagine?  We show up and haven’t even met him yet and we dump our garbage on his front porch!  Luckily Steve got there before any bad feelings could materialize.

The next day before the party we sent the boys again, this time to go ask if there’s anything they could do to help set up.  This time they met Gary, and he didn’t give them any jobs to do, but he did give Brenden a hat, which he wears all the time now.  I really have no idea why Brenden got the hat, and he doesn’t seem to know either.  The party was a lot of fun with a lot of good food, and Alex especially liked the hot dogs, so much that he ate six of them.  It’s such a trip to meet people that you’ve only talked to on the radio and see if they look like the mental image you’ve already created for them in your head.  We met one other kid boat there, Heavy Metal, with two more boys on board, and the younger of the two got along great with Brenden and Joel.  We all spent a lot of the day in the water trying to keep cool in the heat.  After dark there was a “fireworks” show, you know the kind where when it’s over you thank the lucky stars that no one caught on fire or lost a limb or anything.  We definitely weren’t in El Segundo any longer!   The evening ended with a fire show.  One of the single-handed cruisers juggles fire and puts on shows to raise money for his cruising kitty.  The kids seemed to really like it.  Overall, it was a great day and a great kickoff to our summer in the Northern Sea of Cortez.

So far, I’ve gotten a lot of experience driving Exodus around anchorages.  Tim and I usually swap roles between driving and working the anchor so that we both stay sharp at both tasks, but if we err one way or the other, it would be for me to do the driving so that I can continue to build confidence.  Being a catamaran we have a lot more maneuverability than most boats, what with two engines and all, but it’s still a large vessel that is greatly affected by wind and currents.  What I learned at Bahia San Nicolas is that anchoring in 20 kts of wind is A LOT harder than 10.  As I worked the engine controls to keep us pointed into the wind I overcorrected and between the force from the engine thrust and a wind gust that came up we got into an unstable oscillation and just kept going around.  Not good when you’ve got an anchor halfway deployed and anchor chain rubbing one of the hulls.

So, I don’t do that anymore.  I make smaller adjustments, even when it seems like initially, it’s not taking effect.

When we were at Bahia San Nicolas Tim and Steve (Lady Carolina) took all four boys out spearfishing a little ways away around the point.  They left about 10am, and the boys had had breakfast earlier, but they didn’t take lunch or anything, so I inferred they’d be back in a couple hours.  Apparently, so did Carolina, because around 3pm I got a radio call from her sharing her concern.  We both tried hailing them on VHF, but 1) there was a big landmass in between us, and 2) there’s no guarantee they even had the radio on.  I wasn’t too concerned, but in the back of my mind, I just wished they would call.  I thought about trying to hike to the top of the ridge with the VHF, but I didn’t really know how long that would take and I didn’t know if even then I would have a line of sight to where I thought they were.  I also thought that from where they were they probably had a line of sight to La Ramada, and I knew from the morning net that sailing vessel Interabang was at La Ramada, so in the remote chance they were calling for help I thought maybe Interabang would hear them.  Carolina and I talked again at 4pm and decided that if they weren’t back by 5:00 that I would raise anchor and go look for them.  It was pretty calm conditions, and I was confident I could manage (as long as the wind didn’t pick up to 20 kts, that is).  We decided it would be better if Carolina and Joel did not come with me because 1) The boys had taken the Exodus dinghy, and Carolina and Joel don’t know how to drive their dinghy, and 2) When you aren’t 100% confident, sometimes it’s easier to just do something yourself rather than try to explain how to do it to someone else.  Luckily, it didn’t come to that.  They pulled in around 4:45, and they had lobsters, so all was forgiven (not immediately, but eventually, when the lobsters were cooked and the drawn butter prepared.)

Note: Catching lobsters is illegal for tourists in Mexico.  So, the official story is they ran into a panga and the guy sold them the lobsters.  It’s good they remembered to take pesos with them when they were going spearfishing.  Right.

Back at Isla Coronados, I finally worked up the nerve to check in to one of the radio nets. It was the Amigo net in the morning, and all the people who check in all sound like they know each other, so it was slightly intimidating. The radio nets are daily congregations of cruisers on the radio at a specific time and frequency. Someone will be the net controller and everyone will check in and give their location and their current weather conditions. It’s partly for safety and partly for just socializing. We met Mark on sailing vessel Wendaway briefly in San Juanico, and after introductions, I’m pretty sure his next question was do you have an SSB radio and then do you want to be a net controller. Whoa, wait a second, I barely even check in and I hated the idea of the commitment. We are cruising after all, signing up to be a net controller puts us on a schedule. I politely declined. Then one evening while I was lurking on the evening southbound net I heard Lady Carolina checking to see if we were on frequency. I responded and we were able to coordinate meeting up at San Juanico. At that point, I was invested and knew I appreciated the nets being there and I wanted to grow to be more a part of the community.

I checked in to the Amigo net a few more times and then I met Jake, of Sailing Vessel Jake, in Puerto Escondido, and then I had a face for the voice of the Amigo Net manager, so shortly after that I bit the bullet and volunteered to be a net controller.

I was actually pretty nervous on my first day. We were anchored at San Nicolas, and I got up early, reviewed the preamble Jake had sent me, downloaded weather, and felt ready to go. When I finished giving the weather I checked if anyone needed weather fills and heard nothing. Then I checked for announcements, and I heard nothing. Then I glanced at the radio and was absolutely horrified. I was on the wrong frequency! My mind raced. How long had I been off frequency? When you are talking into a mike without any sort of verbal or visual feedback it’s a little unnerving, but it also means I have no idea how long I was gone. Seriously, if you know me and know how important doing a good job is to me, you know that I am not exaggerating when I say I was horrified. I switched back to the correct frequency and heard Jake finishing up the weather and then mentioning that hopefully, Deanne would be back with us soon. I broke in, asked how long I’d been missing, thanked Jake for stepping in, then tried to brush it off and continue the net without missing a beat. I think I made a joke at the end about it or something, and I’ve taken some good ribbing about it from Steve on Lady Carolina. The hardest part, really, about doing the net is holding the button on the mike down so long while reading the weather. That day I learned that the up-down arrows on the mike change the frequency channel. So while I was struggling with both hands to keep the button pushed down I must have inadvertently pushed one of those buttons. But what I really learned that day is that it didn’t matter that I screwed up. That was just a very small example of how out here everyone has everyone else’s back. Now I actually look forward to doing the net each week.

Previously, I wrote about tracking down SSB noise sources and mentioned that we still had a loud hum at the 4 MHz range. I’m happy and a little embarrassed to report we have tracked that down. It turns out that when I thought I was turning off the inverter, I was really only flipping the switch at the output of the inverter. While staring aimlessly at the electrical panel one day I actually noticed an on/off button. Not sure how I didn’t notice that before, but when I turned the inverter itself off, the hum disappeared, and listening to Gary’s weather on the Sonrisa net in the morning isn’t quite so ear-splitting.

We have a bad habit of not always remembering to reel in the fishing poles as we get to an anchorage and start the anchoring process. We are actually lucky we’ve only wrapped the fishing line around the prop once, way back at Los Frailes (I think). As we were approaching San Nicolas, we actually remembered the fishing lines, and as Alex was reeling in one of the lines he said, “Hey, there’s something on the hook… hey, it’s a piece of clothes… hey, it’s dad’s swim shirt!” We hang our wet laundry on the aft lifelines. Although we use plastic clothespins, I’m guessing this shirt escaped, only to be reeled back in. It was Tim’s XS Scuba short sleeve swim shirt that he wears under his wet suit, and he would have really missed it, so it was quite a lucky snag.

We have heard so much from other cruisers about summer in the sea, mostly from people who don’t usually stay. And the most common response we get is, “oh, you must have an air conditioner, then?” Well, no, we don’t. We think we can tolerate the heat, but we’re not so sure about the humidity. We will count on the water to cool us off and will just have to live with less productive days when the heat and humidity sap all of your ambition and all you want to do is lie around or float in the water. We also keep hearing about the Chubascos, which are weather phenomena caused by convection over land, that produce lightning, rain, and strong winds, that can drift out in the sea, usually at night. We know we will have to develop better habits with respect to tidying up the cockpit and securing everything down at night, but we’ve heard stories of Chubascos having up to 60 kt winds, and we have no idea if our efforts will be good enough for that or if we will learn some lessons the hard way. We will spend the summer up in Bahia de Los Angeles, and we also hear amazing stories of swimming with whale sharks and of some of the more remote anchorages up that way. Most cruisers here go home for the summer, so the ones that stay form an even tighter-knit community. It should be a lot of fun, and as usual, a new adventure.

When we were with the kid boat flotilla we kept hearing about Lady Carolina, another kid boat with two boys who will also be staying in the sea for the summer. We finally met Steve, Carolina, Kyle, and Joel in Agua Verde around the time we were saying good-bye to Star Passage. We had a nice day snorkeling and hanging out on Exodus, and we learned they are from Calgary and that they started their journey South from San Diego shortly before we did and that they like to fly radio-controlled airplanes. We were ecstatic after our first visit that they seemed pretty normal, after all, if there’s only going to be one other kid boat around in the summer, it would be nice to hang out quite a bit. I have no idea what they thought of us that day. I should ask them sometime.

That first evening, things got really interesting. From our perspective, we heard a call on VHF from another boater saying two people from Lady Carolina were up on the hill, they have crashed their plane, and they need help. Of course, knowing they fly model airplanes, we knew exactly what “crashed their plane” referred to, but even so, they needed help, so Tim, Gary, and Alex jumped in the dinghy and headed over to pick up Carolina and go to the beach. The radio traffic absolutely blew up after that. Imagine hearing on the radio that there was a plane crash. Paramedics and nurses came out of the woodwork. We were in Agua Verde, and boats as far away Puerto Escondido were getting in on it. Everyone wanted to help and most boats nearby sent dinghies to the beach. Happily, it turned out that everything was fine. They didn’t even need help. They were just on the hill at dusk without a radio, and someone on another boat had seen their plane go down, and had seen them go up the hill looking for it, and got a little skittish when they were up there for a while. He was trying to yell to them asking if they needed help and he either couldn’t hear them or heard them incorrectly and then put out the call on VHF. To hear Steve’s version after the fact is pretty funny. As soon as he heard the guy yelling to them, he said to Kyle, “here we go, Kyle, here we go.” Lady Carolina became famous (infamous?) after that. Steve had to make the rounds on all the radio nets explaining what happened, and when they would introduce themselves to new people they’d get, “ohhhh, Lady Carolina” with that hint of recognition. They joke that they were just trying to meet new people. And I wonder if even still there’s anyone out there who never heard the real story and recalls when they heard about the plane crash at Agua Verde on the VHF radio.

There have been no plane crashes since, and I think we are all better about being sure to carry a handheld radio when we leave the boat. The excitement went back down to a normal level as the primary focus became finishing up school. Their homeschool program is through a regular school back home, so the requirements for completing coursework by a certain time and taking exams are much, much more stringent than for us. (Brenden probably won’t finish 4th grade until about Oct, and Alex probably won’t finish 6th until Jan or so). Kyle is in the 7th grade, and he had final exams he had to take that required internet access to get the tests from the school, and also required a non-family member to administer the exams for him. So, I became the exam proctor for a few days. Poor Kyle had to take his exams on Exodus in the rolly anchorage of Nopolo in the sweltering heat at a very uncomfortable desk. He studied hard, got through his tests, and we were able to finish Loreto provisioning and make it up to Concepcion Bay for the 4th of July party. Steve and Carolina were very grateful to us for helping with Kyle’s test, and I kept saying it was Kyle doing all the work. I still think they felt a little indebted to us, so of course, I milked that for all it was worth.

We are really so glad to have met up with and gotten to know the Lady Carolina family. The boys all get along well, of course, lately, all four of them are acting more and more like brothers, with all the bickering and squabbling that entails, than just friends, but maybe that just shows how close they are getting. Steve and Carolina are both engineers too, so they are just the right amount of geek for us. Much more of our adventures will come in essays to follow.

Since Tim bought a spear gun from Jim on Endeavor way back at Agua Verde (our first time there) and Gary and Marsha brought Tim a couple of pole spears of his own, it didn’t take long before the boys wanted to try it. Alex was first, and he was in the water with Tim, Gary, and Marsha almost as soon as we anchored at San Juanico. It was cold and there were swells, but he was persistent. Very persistent. He wanted to spear a fish so bad he just did not want to get out of the water. They were out there a long time, so eventually, I kayaked over to say hi and check on him, and he was shivering like crazy, so I suggested it was time to get out, and Marsha said she was trying to get him to get out too, but he just didn’t want to. Marsha and I went back to the boat and Grandpa stayed with Alex, and eventually, they made their way back too. He came back empty-handed that evening, but it didn’t discourage him. The next day they were all in the water, this time Brenden too, and Alex came back with his first kill, a tiny little fish barely six inches long. He was so happy. Looking back now and comparing it to what they routinely catch it is quite comical. Then the next day, Brenden got his first kill, a tiny little fish like Alex’s first one, and Alex came back with a fish worth filleting. This time happy could not even describe it.

While the surface water temperature isn’t too cold, it can get quite cold down deeper, especially if you stay in for a while. The boys didn’t have their own full-length wet suits, so when they would dive, Alex would wear my full wet suit. It was big, but it did seem to help. Brenden would then wear both his and Alex’s shorty suits and then over that wear my long sleeve wet suit top. Brenden was always the first one to get cold and get out of the water.

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that Brenden is a bit of a wild man underwater. He’s like a dart going this way and that and he loves being in the water with me swimming circles around me. They’ve learned all the safety precautions on how to handle their spears, but we’ve had to remind Brenden several times that he has to pay attention to where everyone is and not to wander off on his own. He just follows a fish without and awareness of where he is and where he is going. Kind of like a small child following a butterfly. It didn’t take long to institute the buddy rule and Alex and Brenden have to stay together and each has to know where the other is. Tim usually goes much deeper so he does not babysit the boys when they are in the water. They do a pretty good job taking care of each other, though.

I have a couple of most memorable moments of the boys spearfishing so far. The first is when we were in Agua Verde (the second time). Brenden was suiting up and announced to me that he was coming back with a Cabrilla, because at that point, I kept saying they were my favorite. They are very tasty, soft, white fish, and they are not easy to spear because they seem to have a knack for judging your range and staying just outside of it. Tim had mastered catching Cabrilla, but the boys had not gotten any yet, so Brenden was putting himself out there and guaranteeing one for me. And he delivered. He could not get back to the boat fast enough to show me, and he talked about it for days, how he “told mom I was going to get a Cabrilla and I got one!”

Then there was the time we were around the corner from Candeleros (outside the Loredo National Park). This time I was snorkeling with them and following Brenden around because I just get a kick out of watching him hunt. This time the prize was a Parrot Fish, and I watched Brenden pretty easily spear one. Again, he was so pleased with himself. Of course, since Brenden got one and Alex hadn’t, it was game on. I watched Alex hunt a Parrot Fish for a good 15 minutes, but eventually, I got cold, and Brenden and I kayaked back around the corner and back to Exodus. Brenden and I chatted along the way back about how there is absolutely no way Alex would be coming home without a Parrot Fish. Just think if Rylee were here too! Of course, when Tim and Alex came back in the Dinghy, Alex proudly displayed his Parrot Fish. And then Brenden told us he thinks the one he shot was sick or something because it was laying on the ocean floor when he first saw it and it swam away slowly and he was able to easily spear it. Under further investigation, it appears the fish Brenden speared had already been shot. Alex was certain that the first shot was his. The funny thing was that Brenden shared all this without any sort of concern, it wasn’t as if he was admitting anything. He got a Parrot Fish, and that’s all that mattered to him. I do think it helped Alex’s ego a bit to understand how Brenden got one so easily and he had to work so hard.

I should probably mention some of Tim’s spearfishing adventures too. As with most things, he is exceptional at it and almost always comes back with at least one huge fish. A couple of times he wore the GoPro camera, and there is a great sequence of him shooting a Parrot Fish and struggling with it and then having to drop the gun and go to the top for a breath and then return to retrieve the gun and the fish. I’ve tried to upload it to Facebook a couple times, but the wifi connection is never good enough. By far Tim’s spearfishing prize at this point is when we were at Candeleros Chico and he speared a very nice sized Yellowtail. Yes, that is correct, he speared a Yellowtail. These are not reef fish and are usually caught by line, not spear. But we had sushi rolls that night, which was an absolutely wonderful treat.

Fish are not the only thing the boys have come home with. When we were at La Ramada we had a few boats over for cocktails and talked about clamming. So, when we were at Bahia Candeleros, all the boys from Exodus and Lady Carolina went on a clamming expedition. No one really knew what they were doing, and the story I hear is that Tim came up with a clam or two, and Steve asked how’d you find them, and Tim said I just started digging. So, for a while, they were all down randomly digging looking for clams. Tim called it terraforming. It didn’t take long for them to figure out that there are two holes in the sand that can be used to identify where a clam is. While they were all gone I had the cookbooks out to figure out how to cook clams since I had never done it before. In one of the cookbooks, there was a discussion of how to find them, including a picture of the two holes. When the boys came back and I heard about the terraforming, I showed them the picture. Apparently, that would have been good to know ahead of time. Steve and Carolina volunteered to be the clam chefs the next evening (you have to let them soak overnight to get all the sand out), and that night on the Southbound radio net they asked the simple question of does anyone have any suggestions on how to cook clams. So, clams totally took over the net. They got several recipes and tried them all. The two recipes we have used repeatedly are the baked clams from Trisha on Interabang and the steamed clams from Peggy on Interlude. It was a wonderful dinner, and I think that was our first time over to Lady Carolina (now we eat dinner together almost every night and trade-off which boat we eat on).

I kept myself busy getting to know the boat systems, and I even went so far as to create an Exodus Systems Manual and took pictures to go along with it.    Here are some of the Communication System components.

Since Loreto was our new La Paz, I thought I’d share some of my observations of the differences between the two towns. First off, there is no anchorage at Loreto. The closest one is Isla Coronados about 6 nmi away. We would anchor off Loreto just for the day, which was basically just open roadstead anchoring exposed in all directions but due West. In calm weather, it’s possible to anchor there overnight, but we just didn’t do it. A couple of our afternoon visits ended with very rocky conditions while trying to unload all the provisions out of the dinghy onto Exodus. La Paz is overall a much bigger town with much bigger stores (including Walmart). So, the selection was much better in La Paz. However, overall, provisioning was much easier in Loreto, because the main grocery store wasn’t too far from the dinghy dock. It was also a pretty pleasant walk down a “walk-street” past the mission. Also, in Loreto, across the street from the grocery store was a pet food and seed/grain store, where there were things like quinoa, couscous, and sushi rice all sold in bulk. They also had the nicest garlic bulbs I’ve seen anywhere in Mexico so far. Often the garlic is tiny little bulbs with tiny little cloves that make you work really hard for just a tiny bit of garlic.

Overall, I enjoyed walking around Loreto much more than La Paz, with one exception: the Malecon. I just loved that part of La Paz. I also loved in La Paz how the locals always seemed to be out and about. And of course, the $1 draft Negro Modelos at The Shack in La Paz was really hard to beat. Overall, dining out was less than spectacular in either place. Although we really like Mexican food, we haven’t found any really good fine dining, but to be fair, we haven’t looked really hard either. A family of four on a cruising budget can’t splurge on nice dinners out like we could at home. Both La Paz and Loreto have islands nearby with beautiful bays and lots of snorkeling. My preference was for the islands near La Paz, the bays were shallower and beaches were prettier. However, that was earlier in our trip so by the time we were up near Loreto I might have already started getting a little numb… ho-hum, another beautiful anchorage with another beautiful sunset. Overall, we spent much more time in La Paz, simply because we could anchor there. I would have loved to have hung out in Loreto more, but usually our trips there were frenzied reprovisioning afternoons with not a lot of time for leisurely strolls. I look forward to visiting both places again on our way back down South in the fall.