Gresham Family Exodus

When we shoved off from the dock after clearing out in Nuevo Vallarta, it was exhilarating.  We were leaving Mexico for new adventures starting off with an ocean passage unlike anything we had ever done before. 

Not so fast. 

The VHF radio chatter started amongst our buddy boats, and we soon learned that the Paradise Village clan had come up with their own secret language, but no one bothered to tell us about it.  Apparently, everyone was going to “waypoint 1,” except for Chara who was going to “Waypoint 0.”  I mentioned that we had no idea what they were talking about, so Steve said he would send us an e-mail, because apparently there would be a huge breech in national security should they let it slip what these waypoints were over the radio.  We checked email about an hour later, and well, there was no email.  Thanks to Chara who was both kind and sane enough to tell us over the radio that Waypoint 0 was La Cruz and waypoint 1 was Punta de Mita.  You see, after clearing out you are supposed to leave Mexico immediately, so I guess they thought the Port Captain had nothing better to do than track us on VHF.  Anyway, all that aside, “what the hell, I thought we were leaving!?!” 

Turns out that they were all going to wait until the next day to leave.  I was a little irked because first of all I was ready to leave, and second of all, no one told us what was going on.  Well, Tim talked me down from the ledge, and we ended up staying the night in Punta de Mita.  I wanted to leave, but Tim wanted to stay with everyone else.  It seemed silly to me because 1) We wouldn’t be having any party that night (like Tim was anticipating) because all the dinghies were tucked in their beds for the passage, 2) There’s no way we would all stay together over the long passage anyway, and 3) OK, at this point I can’t remember what #3 was but there was definitely a #3 and I’m sure it was a very good reason.  In the end, of course, it didn’t really matter when we left, and on the very positive side Brenden and Kyle got in some last-minute surfing at Punta de Mita, so that helped my soul be at peace with all of it.

Spoiler alert: Of course, we didn’t have a party that night, because like I said, no one was going to launch their dinghy.  We DID stay together on passage much longer than I thought we would.  And I’m sure #3 was still a very, very good reason.

Just like when you travel by other means, when you travel on your own yacht, you have to officially clear in and out of each country.  This usually means some sort of interaction with Customs and Immigration.  Unlike other means of travel, you also have to interact with the local Port Captain in the port you are clearing in/out of.  For some reason these formalities are always a mystery, and Mexico was no different.  I don’t know why it’s so mysterious, maybe laws and processes change, maybe individuals in the official offices implement processes in different ways, maybe urban legends among cruisers get perpetuated to the point that no one knows what’s going on. 

Anyway, as time got close, I kept hearing from various people, OK mostly from Lady Carolina, that you had to go to Paradise Village to clear out.  That made no sense to me, how could a single marina have a monopoly on all traffic exiting Mexico from Banderas Bay?  So, when we got back to La Cruz after our trip south, it was time for me to try to sort it out.  My first stop was Katrina, the PR rep from the La Cruz marina, and she actually had a printout with written instructions on how to clear out.  Wow, could it really be that easy?  It indicated that Nuevo Vallarta was the port in Banderas Bay where you had to clear out from, not La Cruz or Puerto Vallarta.  So, that made more sense, Paradise Village is IN Nuevo Vallarta so it’s not that you have to clear out from the Paradise Village marina but rather from the Port of Nuevo Vallarta.

The instructions said that before your departure date you should phone the Nuevo Vallarta Port captain and make him aware of your intentions to leave.  Then you should email copies of your passports, ship’s papers, etc., to him so he can arrange your departure with immigration and customs.  Then on your departure date you take your boat to Marina Nuevo Vallarta and get a temporary slip to complete all of the formalities.  So, since 10 March was a Monday, I phoned the Port Captain the week before.  He took our boat information, insisted that we not email him anything, and that we should just come to Nuevo Vallarta to clear out.  I felt good at first, but then I started to doubt.  Perhaps he still needs the paperwork in advance, he just doesn’t want us to email it.  I consternated over it, and then just decided to go there by bus on the Friday before.  The trip coincided nicely with the Latitude 38 PPJ sendoff party at the yacht club at Paradise Village, so it wasn’t really even a special trip.  It was a good thing we did, because my worries were correct, and he did need the paperwork.  We got all of that taken care of, and after we paid our fee, we had an appointment to check out on Monday at 10:30 am.

So, we pulled into Nuevo Vallarta about an hour early, hailed Marina Nuevo Vallarta on VHF to arrange a temporary place to park Exodus and headed over to the Port Captains office.  He told us we could wait on Exodus for everyone to come see us.  From our end tie we could see the various officials visiting Lady Carolina, who were over on A dock at Paradise Village (you obviously don’t have to move to Marina Nuevo Vallarta if you are staying at Paradise Village, the officials will come there too.)  Eventually we were visited by all three government organizations (immigration, customs, and port captain) including an inspection by a German Shepherd. The poor puppy had trouble boarding Exodus and fell partly in the water, only to be rescued by his leash and collar.  Then we were free to go.  That was it, easy peasy.

We started tracking a weather window about 4-5 days before our planned ready date of March 1.  We had previously learned that you could request a “moving spot” forecast from saildocs.  In your request you give a point GPS location, a heading, a speed, and your desired time increment and you get a text file that gives you the forecast along that path.  We wanted to compare different departure days, but there was nowhere in the request to give it a day/time to start the forecast.  It always started it at the time the request was received.  We emailed saildocs, and their response was no, that feature isn’t available, but that’s a good idea.  So, basically what we did was move the start location back 24 hours in order to get a forecast for what it would look like if we left a day later.  A little clunky, but it worked.  Then Tim wrote an excel program that took into account the polars for Exodus, and we were able to compare 3 different departure days by comparing how many miles we would cover in the first 5 days.  Once I put the final touches on the program, it was a breeze to use every morning as we got new forecasts and tried to determine the best day to leave. 

There was what seemed to be a good window to leave right around 1 March, but since we had only just started tracking it, we weren’t sure if it was really good in a relative sense or not.  Plus, we weren’t really thinking we’d leave on 1 March even though that was our ready date.  We were thinking March 2 or 3 was more realistic.  It was not to be, though, because the weather window closed and there was basically no wind for about a week and change.  Lady Carolina wasn’t able to leave yet anyway, since they were waiting for new glasses that they ordered for Kyle at Costco.  We kept tracking the weather and it started looking like the next window would open up around March 9-11, which was great because that’s about when Kyle’s glasses were supposed to be ready.  We never really confronted the decision that we might have to make of whether to wait for Lady Carolina or leave as soon as the weather looked good.  The weather gods took that ominous decision out of our hands and made it so both things coincided, and we could all leave together at the first weather window.

So, as it got close, we started discussing our plans with other cruisers.  Winds looked decent for a 10 March departure.  We wouldn’t break any speed records, but we were ready to go, and we would at least move along, so we were going to go for it.  As it turns out, Mike from PV Sailing/North sails on Channel 6-8, who is also the weather guy for the VHF net hadn’t yet declared a weather window for the puddle jump and he was saying it wouldn’t open for another 2 weeks.  Screw that.  We were ready, and our own observations led us to believe we would be just fine.  However, it seems there were very few other people willing to go out on their own limb like that, and pretty much everyone we talked to said something like, “well, there’s no wind so we are going to wait.”  I get that people might not be ready yet, but if you are really and truly ready, there was plenty of wind.  At least that’s how I saw it.  I can’t tell you how sick I got of hearing how there was no wind.  One of our friends even told me how they were on another boat and some blowhard was going on and on about how the boats who were getting ready to leave are nuts to leave when there’s no wind.  No wind?  I just didn’t get it.  You can really only look out with any sort of certainty for 5 days, and the forecast we were looking at told us we could make 500-600 miles in those first 5 days.  Good enough for us.

Anyway, wind or not, our little clan of Exodus, Lady Carolina, True Blue V, and Chara were ready to go, and we left.

Spoiler alert: Our winds were fine.  We made 583 miles in the first 5 days, and the entire trip in just over 22 days.  Better than many who left when the weather was “good” and much, much better than some. 

Final provisioning was a bit of whirlwind, so much so that I barely remember it and it’s kind of a blur.  Recall that we had done a fair amount of provisioning when we stayed in Paradise Village in January, so theoretically this last haul should be easy.  We rented a car for just 24 hours, again from Paradise Village, and we were off to the races.  We went to Costco, Mega, and Walmart, as well as a couple hardware stores.  My approach was to provision for 3 months, long enough to get us to Papeete.  Obviously, you can’t provision fresh items for 3 months, but we did load the fridge up with as much cheese and veggies as it would hold.  A lot of the veggies don’t get stored in the fridge.  Heartier ones like cucumbers, carrots, onions, garlic, potatoes, apples, oranges, and others get stored in bins in our cabin and as the fridge slowly empties things get rotated in.  The freezer was about as packed as it ever gets with all kinds of meat and about 12 packs of tortillas (we knew we were going to miss our tortillas after we left Mexico). 

You might be surprised that the rest of the world does not store eggs in the fridge.  Nope.  I store 4 dozen eggs in open containers in our cabin, rotate them every other day or so, and they stay surprisingly fresh.  I used to keep the lids on the lock ‘n’ lock storage containers and keep them in the cupboard, and I had a horrible time with mold growing on the outside of the eggshells, so I would have to wipe them clean everyday so the mold wouldn’t penetrate the shell.  Then I realized that a little light and ventilation go a long way, and I never have any egg mold problems anymore. 

We kept hearing and reading and hearing and reading that things are outrageously expensive in French Polynesia, especially soda and alcohol.  So, we went a little crazy.  We bought 8 cases of Pacifico, 2 cases of Pacifico Light, 10 bottles of Bacardi Anejo, 6 bottles of Captain Morgain, 4 cases of cokes and 4 cases of sparkling water.  Supplementing all the alcohol we also have the odd bottle of Seagrams, Kahlua, Tequila, etc.  We were very pleased with how prepared we were, but then came the challenge of where to stow it all.  We came to a quick conclusion that we would have to turn one of the heads into a storage closet.  Who needs 3 heads on their boat anyway, I mean really.  We decided it would be Brenden’s simply because the back of the boat in Alex’s room already has a lot of weight in it (this is where our battery bank is).  When we broke the news to Brenden, he quickly turned to Kyle and said, “you warned me this would happen!”  Although, in all fairness I’m pretty sure Lady Carolina assumed we would give up one of our 3 heads much sooner than we did, I guess we just like fixing macerator problems.

Stowing everything is quite a chore and can take hours.  Partly because there’s so little space and it’s like a puzzle getting everything to fit, and partly because I’m super anal (no, really?) and I keep an inventory log of how much we have of stuff and where it is stored.  So, as I’m putting things away, I update the log as I go.  This helps me when I need to reprovision (I don’t have to pull everything out and take inventory) but it is also very useful when I forget where I put something.  I never have to go through the stress of not knowing where my Anejo is or how many bottles I have, oh the horror.

Once we turned the car back in and I slept for 12 hours straight I went into triage mode until we left.  I kept track of what we used and every few days I’d hit a store (either in La Cruz or I would bus to Mega) and I would replenish what we used.  This got really old, and by the time we left 11 days later, I was glad not to see another grocery store for a while.

Spoiler alert: Overall, our approach to provisioning was successful.  We made it to Papeete easily without any major provisioning along the way.  The only non-fresh item we ran out of was boxed milk, so I underestimated our milk usage, but I was able to restock that myself by backpack in Nuku Hiva.  And contrary to popular belief, eggs are available EVERYWHERE in French Polynesia.  We left La Cruz with 4 dozen eggs, and I never ran out.  They are more expensive than in Mexico, but overall, they seem to be fresher too, so I don’t mind.  There are really only 2 things I wish we had left Mexico with more of:  1) Apples.  We ran out about a week into the passage, and since apples are a daily snack staple in our family, we really missed them.  They store well and keep awhile, so we easily could have brought 2 or 3 times more than what we brought (we brought about 24).  2) Gasoline.  We used our generator quite a bit on passage since the autopilot sucks a lot of juice and the sun doesn’t shine all the time.  

One of the major activities of Brenden and his buddies in La Cruz was Lego trading.  Brenden even labeled one of his containers “Valuable Legos” that he would use for trading.  Each kid was interested in different things and had different priorities, and they would spend hours on the dock or in one of the boats working out their deals.  Some parents were protective of what their kids were trading away, but I really wasn’t interested in it.  Brenden has so many Legos even if he gave any away, let alone trade them, I wouldn’t mind.  But I did cousel him about being fair.  Since he was one of the oldest of the Lego trading crowd I wanted him to be sensitive to not taking advantage of the younger kids. 

We had been away from La Cruz for a few weeks, and there had been some new kid boat arrivals while we were gone.  When we left there were mostly younger kids, younger than Brenden, not that he cares, he has such a playful spirit.  But now there was a whole new crowd of young teens, and so now Alex and Kyle had a group to fit in better with.  In fact, during this last stay in La Cruz it seemed like Alex and Kyle started connecting a little bit more as peers while prior it was always Kyle and Brenden, since Brenden is, after all, Kyle’s mini-me. 

The La Cruz marina even hosted some beach camp outs for the kids.  It was put on by Katrina, the marina PR lady, and Mike from PV sailing/North sails (on channel 6-8).  They had one while we were gone and they tried to make it 12 and up, which I personally have no problem with, but of course wherever you draw the cutoff line some kid will be left out, and I heard there was some tears and some complaining, so they ended up letting all the younger kids go too.  Well, they were going to do another one, so rather than stay at Paradise Village we bashed across the bay into a headwind to get back to La Cruz in time for the campout.  Like I said, I had no problem with an age cutoff, because I understand first that it’s unfair to expect Katrina and Mike to be babysitters, and second, I think it’s fun for the older kids to have a getaway without all the younger kids around.  And more specifically, I thought it would be fun for Kyle and Alex to go hang out without their little brothers along.  I certainly wouldn’t want to force age segregation all the time, but no harm in just this once.  So, I formed a plan to keep Brenden and Joel happy too.  We decided to have a sleepover on Exodus, and once we had Fluenta and Kenta Anae on board with the plan they didn’t care one bit about the campout they’d be missing. 

Tim dropped Kyle and Alex off at the dock and then picked up the Fluenta and Kenta Anae kids and as they were pulling up to Exodus in the dinghy, I saw the folly in the plan I had formed.  Tim and I were going to spend the evening on a boat with 6 kids, 11 and younger.  And let me just say that Brenden fits in quite nicely with this group, so saying they are an active bunch pretty much sums it up.  They played with building toys that Shandro and Matero brought (they built swords, what else?!), fished off the bow of Exodus, ate hot dogs, and generally had a great time, especially if fun can be gaged by the volume of the activity.  Tim and I survived, and while I don’t know all the details, Alex and Kyle had a great time at their campout too.

Our last couple nights in La Cruz the entire kid gang had sleepovers at the end of dock 11.  The first night I didn’t let Alex and Brenden go (boo, Mom, boo!) because we were out in the anchorage, and if they got kicked off the dock by marina security we wouldn’t be there.  However, since we stayed in the marina our last night, I pretty much let them loose the entire day and night.

The time we spent in La Cruz with all the kids was the closest the boys have ever come to answering the question, “Would you rather go home or stay cruising?” with, “stay cruising.”

It’s almost time for us to leave Mexico, and I can’t believe how fast the year has flown by.  Since we made the decision to slow down and stay in the Sea of Cortez for the summer, travel has been at such a nice pace.  We’ve taken the time to enjoy the towns and anchorages we’ve been in, sometimes two or three times.  I am starting to get a little sad that we will be leaving soon, so I’m also starting to chalk up a list of regrets.  It’s a short list, but it’s a list all the same.  When we decided we would give up on Central America and jump the Pacific from Mexico, I could deal with that because I thought, well, at least we will really get to see mainland Mexico.  Turns out time still got away from us, and we even cut our touring of the mainland short.  I thought perhaps once we got out of Banderas Bay, we would just keep heading South to Zihuantanejo and jump the Pacific from there.  But when I was doing the math in my head, I realized that by the time we got there we would only have about a week, and most of that would be consumed with provisioning and final preps to leave.  Not a lot of time left for exploring a new place.  So, we regretfully made the decision we should head back to Banderas Bay, because if we are going to be doing frantic provisioning, I’d rather be doing it somewhere that I’ve already got the lay of the land.  We ended up going no further south than Tenacatita, so we didn’t even make it to Barra de Navidad, which is another cruiser favorite.  However, we thoroughly enjoyed our time at Chamela and Tenacatita and the anchorages in between, and our last cruising stint in Mexico was as it always had been, relaxed and never rushed. 

So, this is my short list of regrets: 1) No Barra 2) No Zihuat.

Although these are regrets, they do not cut very deep.  The nature of our journey will change a lot going forward, both in the type of sailing we will be doing (much more offshore than coastal) and in destinations we will visit.  It’s hard to dwell too long on regrets when you have all of that ahead of you.