Gresham Family Exodus

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.