Gresham Family Exodus

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.

June 30 – July 29, 2013

We left San Juanico on Sunday, June 30, finally into new territory again.  Our first stop was Bahia San Nicolas, and calling it a “Bahia” was a bit generous.  It was basically a long stretch of beach on the Northside of a pretty predominant point called Punta Pulpito.  It wasn’t a very glamorous anchorage, but it provided protection from the mostly southern wind, so that’s where all the cruising boats were congregating on the way up north.  A very redeeming quality of this anchorage was the lobsters, and we had our first of many “lobster fests” on Exodus with Lady Carolina.  After a couple nights we continued north and sailed around Point Concepcion into Bahia Concepcion, which is a very, very deep north-facing bay with many smaller bays along the edge of it to anchor.  We made our way down to El Burro Cove, which is where the 4th of July Cruisers party was to take place.  We maneuvered around the very crowded anchorage to the shore side, set anchor, and then consternated over whether we should stay or not, because we were pretty shallow, and we didn’t know what the tide swing was going to be.  In the end, we moved over to the next anchorage, called Playa Coyote, with a lot more room, and to our pleasant surprise, Lady Carolina followed us over.  The water there was insanely warm, and so was the air temperature, so we spent the entire day before the party hanging out in the water in the shade of Exodus between the two hulls.   There’s a small community there at both El Burro Cove and Playa Coyote, with “houses” lining the shore and a couple small tiendas.  The nearest town is Mulege to the North, but there’s not a good anchorage there, so most cruisers get there by hitchhiking.  We never got around to trying that.

After a couple days at Playa Coyote and a great 4th of July party, we sailed further south into Bahia Concepcion down to Playa Ventura near Isla Requeson.  There is a small hotel and restaurant there, so we had a late lunch/early dinner there with several other cruisers along with many Clamato drinks.  Before we left Concepcion we spent of few nights at the Northern anchorage of Santo Domingo, but on the way, we made a quick day stop at Playa Santa Barbara to dive on a sunken sailboat.  It ended up being a pretty disappointing dive due to low visibility, but it was pretty nice diving without needing any wetsuit whatsoever.  At Santo Domingo it wasn’t quite as hot, but we were infiltrated by a colony of bees, so we moved to a “secret anchorage” just a little way south to get relief from the bees.  Secret anchorages are those that aren’t mentioned in the guidebook, and usually cruisers don’t readily share their knowledge of them because they want to keep them low traffic areas, but in this case, Bill and Lisa on Beyond Reason took pity on us and shared this one.

When we left the Santo Domingo area we were headed for Isla San Marcos, but the wind totally died on us, so we ended up staying the night on the Northside of Punta Chivato.  It really was just a rest stop, so as soon as the wind picked up the next day we got moving again.  Our first stop on Isla San Marcos was a day stop at the Gypsum mining town at the Southwest end of the island.  One of the first things we noticed about the town, after the cloud of gypsum hanging in the air, of course, was how clean the town was.  We walked around for a while, but the tiendas were unfortunately closed.  We scattered a bit, and as I was checking out the graveyard, Alex and Brenden come back to me and tell me that Dad got on a motorcycle with some guy and drove off that way.  Then I notice the Lady Carolina family getting into a large pick-up truck with someone.  I tell the boys to stay with me, and all I can think is, “what the heck is going on here?”   Not too much later Tim pulls up on the back of a four-wheel ATV with two kids who didn’t speak any English, but they gave Tim a riding tour of part of the town, including the airstrip.  Then they showed us where an open tienda was, but it was the type where there is a counter and not much of a selection.  Don’t even think about fresh veggies.  While Tim was playing around with the kids on the ATV, it turns out Lady Carolina was in a truck with the Director of the Mine and had arranged for us all to get a tour the following day.  Score!  We anchored for the evening up at Sweet Pea Cove, and then took Exodus back to the town the next day for the tour, and it was an amazing experience.  We ended up staying at Sweet Pea cove for a few days where there was excellent snorkeling, and I finally saw a golden grouper.  There were several boats in the anchorage, so Tim and I made the rounds in the dinghy and ended up having a big cocktail party on Exodus.  One of the highlights of the anchorage, though, was the incredibly loud whales in the moonlight.

From Sweet Pea Cove we headed into Santa Rosalia for our first stay in a marina since leaving San Diego.  We arrived on July 16 and left on July 30, and this included a several day road trip up to San Diego.  Santa Rosalia is a nice little town with decent provisioning and air-conditioned restaurants.  There was wifi at the marina office, so most days after getting all their boat work done the boys hung out up at the office, which was also air-conditioned.

When we left Santa Rosalia we were bound of Bahia de Los Angeles, where we would be spending the remainder of the summer months with the rest of the small group of cruisers, who like us, were planning to bear the heat, tropical storms, and Chubascos and stay in the sea for the summer.