|
Sometimes it all goes by and you just want to grab it. |
|
The colors of the sea as the afternoon ages into night. The rich
musk-like smell of the earth coming out across the salt water
as you near port after five days on the ocean. |
|
Pelicans skim over the waterline at suppertime. Just grab it.
You know it's a sad thing to think that way. That you need to
keep it, stop it, not let it go. Sadder that it's just damned
impossible to do it. |
|
We sailed and motored eleven long days trying to reach the moonscaped
islands and craggy mountains surrounding La Paz, Mexico. |
|
One long stretch, really, 900 miles down and around the tip of
Baja California Sur. |
|
Sleeping in shifts, through the cold of night, dodging freighters,
trying to make port by Christmas. It was beautiful. It was hell,
too. |
|
Sailing southward a few nights out from San Diego an iridescent
yellow blip showed up on the radar, coming in slowly toward us
like a missile seeking ground zero. An ocean going freighter
slicing northward at thirty-five knots forty miles off the Mexican
coast. Jon radioed the captain. Sylvia woke up and watched as
the big ship closed the distance. The captain acknowledged us
in a Russian accent, said he saw us on his own radar. He kept
coming, though, closer and closer, plowing the dark seas. We
could see his running lights, red and green. You see that, the
red and green, and you know you've got close to a dead hit ahead.
Sylvia turned on the masthead light to illuminate our sails against
the dark ocean swells. We called out again. The captain came
over the vhf radio sounding panicked. He'd seen another boat
on radar, five miles distant. He mistook us for that ship. Now
he could see the Aviana visually dead-on in his path. The giant
steel vessel, lit brightly, maneuvered, cranked over,best it
could. It was just enough. The ship and its freaked-out captain
slid past a freaked-out us and into the night. |
|
We wouldn't have had that radar if Dan Roy in San Diego hadn't
given up his family and his free time to install all the specialized
equipment needed for an extended ocean voyage. San Diego is a
cruiser's trap. The sirens' lure. You get in there and you're
lucky to get out. We arrived feeling good. A pleasant port of
call. We left just about broke and broken spirited.
Cruisers in Mexico laugh when you tell them you stopped in San
Diego to outfit your boat. "The Trap," it's called.
Once in you can't get out. Boatyards quote you a price for work
and a week later what you pay bears not even a slight resemblance
to the estimate you hold in your trembling palm. Marine businesses
suck you in, start the installation, then disappear as they shill
for more business while you sit and wait for someone to show
up to finish the job. And sit. And wait.
Dan Roy. If you're in San Diego on a boat, pray that Dan Roy
rides in out of the dust, just when you thought you couldn't
stand the sorry situation another second, straps on his head
flashlight, and saves your day. He did ours, fixing other technicians'
mistakes, getting us on the road to Mexico finally, pointing
the way with a wrench and an index finger to our high seas adventure
south.
|
|
The first islands north of La Paz, in the Sea of Cortez, rise
out of the sea like the dead volcanoes they are. Rocky. The moon
with an atmosphere. |
|
Beaches too. White sand and clear water. |
|
Christmas we headed to Isla Espiritu Santo, Island of the Holy
Spirit, with Jon's mom and brother, the irrepressible Vi, and
Jay, the wry observer. |
|
Mom Dunc half dove, half snorkeled, butt-up, in the cold clear
water.
What she saw, we'll never quite know. We wouldn't believe her
even if we understood her garbled speech trying to describe through
a snorkel the enormity of the underwater world.
A fine thing that Jay came too. Mom and Sylvia couldn't have
pulled the weight of that raft through the shark infested shallows,
their soft dainty ankles gnawed away to bony nubs.
|
|
This is what you want to hold, to grab. Put your arms around
the sky and pull it in. Each time you see it you wish you could
just keep it. Every night it slides into the black.
You breathe deep. You pray. Tomorrow, please, God, tomorrow.
Give me more.
|
|
You go to sleep here anchored alone in a cove. You wake to find
another boat, fishermen, taking the cover of land to block the
rocking swell of the sea. |
|
We spent a month and a half in and around La Paz. A favorite
inlet wraps around Aviana like a warm volcanic sheet.
The land and the sea. Like southern Utah with an ocean lapping
the flanks of its red rocks. The weather in January warms you
but rarely overheats. The wind sometimes blows like Zeuss on
a rampage, like witches on the attack, like you better find cover
or the gods and the goblins will sweep you clean off the deck.
Fifty knot winds swept up one day off Isla San Francisco, churning
twelve to fifteen foot breaking seas, sending our twenty thousand
pound boat careening like a surfboard down the swells. We lost
a dinghy that day and an outboard motor. Both torn away with
the violence you can only know after having seen. We tethered
ourselves to the boat and thanked the fates once we reached a
protective cove that we hadn't lost each other.
|
|
January, Steve Jerve, television meteorologist, came to visit.
Came to visit the hammock, anyway. Man, he loved that thing.
Wouldn't let us lay down for a second. |
|
He finally got out at one point to use the head. We locked him
in. |
|
That hammock felt good without Big Steve taking up space. |
|
Isla Isabella stands as a few guano covered rocks about eighty
miles south of Mazatlan, thirty to forty miles off the Mexican
coast.
Not much there except birds and the evidence they leave of
their presence.The Mexican government has declared the island
a sanctuary for the winged fishermen. |
|
If you've got a boat and you're nearby, you'll find sooner or
later a hitchhiker stopping to take a ride. |
|
Pelicans. Herons. Gulls. They all live off of pescado, or fish.
This was the point in our trip, nearly two thousand miles since
we started, where we began to live off fish, too. Tuna practically
jumping onto the lines we dragged in the cresting seas behind
the Aviana. |
|
Clean a tuna and it'll bleed like you severed an artery in your
arm. Sink a blade into its flanks and you might as well be slaughtering
a lamb or a calf. The first few bites of your meal carry the
memory of murder. It's not fun, frankly, but that didn't stop
us from mixing up wasabi and slapping on the pickled ginger and
letting that fresh raw fish flesh slide on down our throats.
Tuna for breakfast. Sashimi for lunch. Tuna on the grill for
dinner. The steak of the sea, tuna is firm, flaky. Excellent
in every way. Don't ever try to tell us, though, you can't have
too much tuna
|
|
Captain's log
Feb. 18, 1999
N 21.32 W 105.17
Coming into San Blas I felt as though we'd sailed into Africa.
Banana plantations and coconut trees running up jagged green
mountains made dimensional by wisps of fog and the smoke from
cooking fires. This is where the rain forest begins in Mexico,
about 22 degrees north latitude. The air clutches you. The sound
of strange birds. Roosters, too.
It's 6:30 a.m. and those roosters are the reason I'm sitting
here. Starting at 4 they don't stop until everybody's up. At
six the church bells start to ring. We're anchored up a river
just across from the rusting tuna boats of San Blas. There's
a reason we're here, too
We'd been at Isla Isabella, a stopover island most of the way
down from Mazatlan, about 40 miles out in the Pacific. About
six miles out from San Blas, 30 miles north of Puerto Vallarta,
a measured voice, somewhere in the octaves between tenor and
baritone, sounded from the radio. "We are Jama. We are here
to help cruisers..." It could have been Jim Jones. It was
entrancing. I couldn't not jump on the radio to reply. I seriously
considered that it was a recording played in a constant loop
and that we'd just gotten into range. "We are Jama..."
Africa. Jama. This was getting interesting.
Jama was a man, an American, a "we" who claimed to
want to help cruisers. I still assume he's just a cruiser who
got stuck in the mud of the estuary here 33 years ago, and the
ghost of his living self still needs to feel the "cruising"
connection.
"Evian," he mispronounced Aviana, "we invite you
to take the estuary into San Blas...", instead of anchoring
out in the awe-inspiring Mantachen Bay, the very bay I described
at the beginning of this letter. Jama was persistent. Jama was
a San Blas salesman. He wanted us up the river like he wanted
me to be his Captain Willard. Oh, the horror.
We anchored out in the bay that night, the tide being too low
to go up-river to San Blas. By morning, after a couple of cafe
con leches and a healthy dose of what is now a never ending feed
wagon of fresh tuna, we motored in.
Not too many sailboats had come up this way. What with the looks
we were getting from panga skippers that was obvious. Entering
the narrow breakwater, trying to time the surf, breaking swells
very nearly threw us onto piled stones on the lee shore. Inside
the estuary the depth sounder told us our 7-foot keel was 6 inches
from dragging bottom.
Mangroves lined the shore. Thick. You could practically smell
the bugs over the wafting stench of raw sewage. 3 inches. I radioed
Jama for reassurance.
Hailing him twice the steady voice announcing Jama's presence
came on, "we are here to help you. We want you to proceed
past the concrete dock..." Who was we? Jama never said,
"my wife and I", or "me and the boys want you
to..." Just "we".
For me to try to approximate Jama would be to perform a severe
injustice to him and to our recollection. Sylvia and I were amazed
at the incredible long-windedness of his radio replies as he
guided us up this swampy, jungle river. Each natural marking.
A pier. A boat. Jama described it all with impassioned indifference.
By now I knew I had to avoid his spell at all costs. We were
in his grasp. He knew it and he knew we now needed him. "Evian,
we want you to anchor across from the cement pier. In line with
the channel marker, between the channel marker and the far shore."
I could hear the hum of the bugs, as the humidity of the day,
coupled with Jama's dulcet tones droned on. "We would like..."
I went forward to drop anchor. Sylvia stood at the wheel with
the boat in neutral. We were drifting slightly with the current.
Then we hit.
It's never a jolt. It's just that everything stops. Which is
strange, because on a boat nothing ever stops. You float here,
you bob there. This time, nothing. I got on the radio and called
Jama.
"Jama, Jama, this is Aviana. We seem to have run aground
at the moment."
At that he lost it. In anger Jama struck out, "Evian, I
told you to stay in line with the..."
He didn't tell us anything of the sort. He wanted to believe
he did. He wanted to believe that Jama was a cruising deity,
omniscient, guiding naive cruisers to a superior destiny. I knew
then that Jama had gone insane. Totally insane.
It took 20 minutes and a panga load of Mexicans with a 70-horse
Johnson to pull us backward off that mudslick. All to the sounds
of "Evian...Evian...do you copy?", coming across the
vhf handheld radio. We gave the Mexicans a bottle of Bacardi
for their efforts. We left the boat anchored but trapped in the
San Blas estuary due to an ebbing tide. We paddled the rest of
the way into town by kayak.
This morning I can hear the shouting cadences of the local Mexican
naval regiment somewhere across the mangroves. The sound of a
bugle, too. The inside cabin of the Aviana, now that the sun
has risen, looks to be filled with dust particles. The particles
are, however, blood sucking no-seeums. And they're eating me
alive.
High tide is at 10. With luck, we'll then be free to go. One
thing I've learned through the past 24 hours sitting on the jungle
estuary, with the humidity and bugs is this: Jama's command must
be terminated. Terminated with extreme predjudice.
|
|
|
We owe a debt of grattitude to brother Jay Duncanson, swimmer-with-manta
reys, whale-chaser, shark-dancer, for the patience and aptitude
he displayed in learning how to design a website and then teaching
us.
Without him you'd be doing something else right now. |
Photos
from Mexico
