Pizza Benji's

11-21-12 – Stone Island Anchorage,(Isla de la Piedra) Mazatlan, MX

Taking  a break from touring Mazatlan

Back to an anchorage after five days of marina living.  The last five nights, 6 days have been great; being able to experience Mazatlan from the comfort of a nice marina.  While the surge on the marina ate our new dock lines for breakfast, it was associated with the El Cid resort.  As previously posted, that means multiple pools, a swim up bar, movies on the lawn and all the resorty type amenities.  (Like huge fluffy towels)  Laundry done for you, washed, dried and folded, delivered to your boat for $80 pesos a load.  It’s hard not to get used to this type of life.  We met a couple of people who had settled into the life after bringing their boats down the coast they had decided that Mazatlan was as good as it gets and after 5 years they still haven’t left.  We spent our time part time relaxing and part time getting stuff done.  We experienced the central Mercado with all its chaos, haggled for a dress, bought veggies, machaca, 25cent ice cream cones, fish and beef tostadas for a dollar US each for lunch. 

Elizabeth on the Malecon

A ride for six of us in the bed of a little Toyota pickup there and a modified VW bug on the way back.  Seatbelts are for losers here, just hold on.  Walked down the long beach across the canal from us and then took a 7.8 peso bus ride back to the supermarket Mega, that makes a super Walmart look small.    

 

 

 

Bought 2 kilos (yes almost 5 pounds!) of shrimp from the harbormaster with the understanding that we would pay what they cost?  Some commitments are fairly vague here, but it all worked out and the camarones were delivered as promised. 

That's a lot of shrimps

Our first batch of shrimp

 We found the cruisers palapa and had 25 peso liters of beer while watching a puppet show.  Yes, a puppet show.  It involved a lot of female lingerie, but even that couldn’t salvage it.  The 25 peso beers helped.  Of course we took full advantage of the pool and happy hour from 4 to 5 (or 4 to 7 if you talk to Migel and tip good)  We sat listening to the 8 AM cruises net on the VHF every morning to hear the latest weather, gossip and goings on.  And then this morning we left.  It took almost three hours to say goodbye to everyone.  Between coffee with fellow Haha’ers and our dock neighbor who had been at El Cid for 5 years and traveled Mexico since the 70’s, it was a chore to push off the dock. 

El Cid Marina

 

 We now find ourselves at Stone Island Anchorage with almost 15 pounds of shrimp between three boats for Thanksgiving.  Should be yummy.

Benji's with the anchorage behind

The cruisers guide suggested we try Benji’s for pizza, which we couldn’t resist.  Apparently Benji’s has more customers during the weekend as we were the only people there tonight.  Thru Elizabeth’s increasingly good Spanish we were able to have a great time with our host (and his family)  He came running as we pulled up to the beach, helped us with our dinghy pulling it  up the beach.  As we wandered around the palapa that apparently served as the restaurant, his house and his friends house (whos father owned the place), we played with her children, he offered us some of the ceviche they were having for dinner and we talked about his shrimping and fishing.  It seems he had lived there his whole life, never traveling very far.  It was very peaceful here he said.  The fishing and shrimping was great in the bay we were anchored in and we were only the second set of Americans to eat there that week.  It was mostly Mexican locals apparently.  He admired my straw hat and when prompted about the guitar displayed next to his tent he didn’t really know how to play it.  We talked the whole time his friend made our garlic shrimp pizza.  It was if he felt obligated to keep us company while we waited and it was almost expected that Elizabeth would want to hold the baby Elija who was crawling around in the open air crib.  As if by holding the baby we would know that they were good people.  He shooed away a random beach dog that smelled our pizza and sat diligently just out of touching range waiting for some scraps. 

Our host - we traded hats for the picture

 

After dinner he showed us his small boat and was quite proud of how large his shrimp net was.  He then helped us launch our dinghy and held it for us while we got in, making sure we knew that we were welcome again tomorrow.  All this with not a word of English.  Like I said, Elizabeth’s Spanish has come a long way.  It was a great evening and seemingly very representative of the hospitality and pride we have been experiencing here in Mexico (at least since leaving Cabo) 

Time to think about how to prepare our 5 pounds of shrimp for Thanksgiving!

Here We Come Mazatlan

11-16-12 – 50 miles from Mazatlan, MX – Sea of Cortez

 

Anchorage at Cabo.  You can see Autumn Wind on the left

 

Entrance to Puerto Los Cabos Marina and resort

It seems like I may have been a little harsh on Cabo San Lucas last time; but after our stop in Puerto Los Cabos and the city of San Jose Del Cabo, it was mostly spot on.   The marina at Puerto Los Cabos and city of San Jose Del Cabo were everything that Cabo San Lucas wasn’t.  The marina was beautiful; although not quite finished after many years of construction.  But what has been completed is great.  Artwork and sculptures are everywhere along the pathways, and while I should probably know more about their significance, it made for a nice setting.  Our walk in to the old town of San Jose Del Cabo was once again the opposite of Cabo San Lucas.  With a nice town square, a large art district; for those of you into such things; friendly people and the feeling of a real city.  There were school children coming home from school, stores for people other than Gringo tourists and with only a few exceptions no one was trying to hawk their endless crappy tourist souvenirs to us.

Enjoying fresh tortillas at the mercado

We visited the central mercado where one can buy everything from fresh fish, veggies and meat, to straw hats, clothes and any other assortment of things; all under one little roof.  Next door I got to order my first fresh tortillas.  ½ a kilo of corn and ½ a kilo of flour.  Still hot to the touch.  In case you’re wondering, that’s a lot of tortillas; and only for $21 pesos. ( about $1.80 USD)  Then a couple of cervezas for $1.50 each.  It was nice to be out of the hype of Cabo and in a more normal city.

After our fairly long walk back with our still warm tortillas we had cocktails looking over the marina with friends from s/v Silk and Wizard and then were invited to dinner on s/v Alcyone where we had a small mountain of fresh caught fish from their friend on s/v Willow. 

Back at our boat as we were getting ready for bed and an early AM departure we got a knock on the boat by the security guard.  We had never checked in and he now decided we needed to give him our passports to guarantee we would pay for our “slip” (with no power or water leading to a little building still under construction) in the morning.  Not being very keen on giving a random guy our passports on a dark dock off of a dusty little road in Mexico we resisted this request for some time.  He was obviously with the marina, but it still didn’t sound like a good idea.  Not only did we not want to turn over our passports, but we didn’t want to wait until 9:00 AM to retrieve them as we had planned a 2:00AM departure.  Explaining all this to someone who doesn’t speak English and essentially was just trying to do his job and follow the rules was interesting.  After much gesturing and Elizabeth’s ability to decipher just enough Spanish he called someone else who eventually let us pay that night.  In the end they even went for a 10 minute drive back to the office to get us a receipt and were quite apologetic about the whole situation, even though it was really our fault for not checking in.  Crisis averted but we had severely cut into our sleep time so after 3 hours of sleep we woke back up to take off for our passage to Mazatlan, some 180 miles away.

No Landing Zone!

If the success of a passage can be gauged by the food you eat, this one has been great so far.  Between the chicken quesadillas on fresh tortillas for lunch, fresh made pumpkin bread to give the boat that smell of fall in the Midwest, and pizzas for dinner we’ve been doing pretty well.  We had some bird visitors earlier today as they tried to land on the spreaders while we were under sail.  They were never very successful on our boat, but listening to the VHF is appears others had to chase them off their boats as they were pooping everywhere.  The things you get to be interested in with two days on your hands and nowhere to go.  50 miles to Mazatlan where we’ll probably spend Thanksgiving.  All I know is that I heard rumor of a swim up bar at the marina.  We may just have to stay more than two nights…

Sunset on day 1 of the passage to Mazatlan

 

So, We've actually made it to Mazatlan now and are looking forward to a few days of not moving.  I also put together our trip from San Diego to Cabo on the "My Spot Adventures" link to the right so you can follow the route.

I Survived Cabo Marina



Elizabeth raising the Mexican Courtesy flag

11-11-12 - Cabo San Lucas. MX

I survived the Cabo San Lucas marina, just to now be trying to survive Cabo San Lucas anchorage.  I know it's a hard life but someone has to do it.  In reality there is nothing relaxing about either of these locations.  One benefit of both is that you can have your very own dance party aboard every single night as you listen to the cheesy semi-last year American Dance music blare over the marina and now the anchorage until the wee hours of the morning.  The marina has that nice stuffy hot sweaty feel like a club while the anchorage has the benefit of making you feel drunk all day as you roll back in forth in the endless swell and tourist jet-ski, panga and dance party on the water boat wakes.  (We did just witness a spontaneous fireworks display off the  beach just now, probably for holy day; Sunday)

So if you can't tell Cabo has been a crazy adjustment from 2 weeks of sailing down the coast, alone on night watch with no sounds or other people to talk to; spending a few days in remote Baja peninsula villages with dirt roads (if any)  to a crazy harbor with apparently few rules and tourists everywhere and the associated debauchery that they bring.  I can honestly say it like no other place I've been.  Hopefully I will not have to be in another place like it for a long while either. 

Cabo San Lucas Marina

I can now say I've experienced Cabo and I'd like to leave please.  Alas, we have a few days to kill while waiting for some weather to blow thru the Sea of Cortez.  So, I might as well enjoy it while I can.  A trip to Lovers Beach and the sea arch is planned, a day of watching drunken idiot tourists be, well, drunken idiot tourists will follow.  I have made up a sign I now carry that says "No Gracias" so the people selling things on the street know that I do not need any Cuban cigars, carved wooden turtles, chicklets, "almost free" silver necklaces and bracelets, blow, coke, weed or hookers.  There is some debate about the people, especially children, begging on the street.  It's certainly not pleasant to see and you can read about the intricacies and nuances of this situation if you wish.  But it doesn't seem to fit the mood of this post. 


View from the cockpit.  Not too shabby

Sunset over the anchorage

Cabo is a place of juxtapositions.  People begging next to multi million dollar sport fishing boats (all with American hailing ports) Huge fancy new hotels with much lower class living situations just out of sight and amazing green mountains in the distance.  Tourists here for a few days to party and locals doing their best to make a living off them.  Its great to have made it here and I can't wait to experience the slower less commercial side of Mexico.


Channel 69 - The Pleasure Channel

11-7-12 – Lat: 23.36 Long: 111.00

45 miles off the coast of the Baja peninsula, 80 miles to Cabo San Lucas, night watch, 8:00 PM, no wind, motoring at 5.5 knots.  80 miles to Cabo sounds  close, but if you do the math we still will not arrive until 2:00 PM tomorrow.  Yeah, we move pretty slow.  What to do for the next three hours while Elizabeth and Laura get some sleep for their watches to come?  If you can’t find things to do to entertain yourself for hours at a time,(remember TV, internet, and cell phones aren’t options) traveling on a sailboat may not be for you.  This is where I turn to Channel 69 on the VHF.  Better known as the “Pleasure” channel. 

The VHF radio is always an important part of your boat gear, but is generally thought of as a piece of safety gear.  A way to call for help in an emergency.  There are many channels designated for different purposes.  16 is for emergencies and hailing other boats only.  Don’t let the Coast Guard catch you chatting away on this one or they publicly chastise you over the radio.  Other channels are set aside to let commercial boats announce their intentions so everyone knows where they are going, others yet are for ship to ship communication etc, etc…  And then there is Channel 69 set aside for “Pleasure” or at least that’s what scrolls across the bottom of the screen on my VHF.

Channel 69 - The Pleasure Channel

For our trip from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas with the Baja Haha, they have designated channel 69 as the working channel for people to hail each other and to conduct the morning nets and inform the fleet of 115 boats about the weather and what’s happening in general.  In theory, everyone monitors this channel all the time, and one boat would hail another, pick a different channel to go to and then conduct their business on this other channel, leaving 69 free for other to hail each other.  It mostly works that way.  Some people forget what channel they are on and conduct their conversation on 69 untill someone else pleasantly, or not so pleasantly, reminds them to “take it to another channel”  The thing to remember here is that everyone can hear you.  In this day when a phone call is heard by yourself and the other person alone, it is very hard to remember that everyone who cares, or is just bored on night watch like me, can “follow” you to whatever channel you choose to go to.

So I know that s/v Perseverence has a bad rear seal in their transmission and need more 30 weight oil, but a guy who has the same transmission says you can use regular old motor oil; in fact he once ran his with sea water in it for 250 hours while on a passage and it didn’t hurt it.  I know who is picking up the teenagers from shore and taking them all back to their respective boats.  I know that someone and someone spend a lot of time talking late at night; and so does everyone else.  I know who caught a 56 inch dorado, who won the election, and when someone asks someone else about the weather they just downloaded, I follow them to another channel and then I know the weather also.  At first I felt bad about following people to other channels and ease dropping on their conversations.  That is until I went to another channel with someone to have a talk and then another person interjected their thoughts.  Unbeknownst to me we had been followed.  From what I can tell, it’s what you do.

The channel gets really interesting when we all gather in an anchorage and everyone is calling their friends to visit and socialize.  Or after the beach parties, there are endless calls for missing flip flops, I can’t find my crew member, my dinghy oars are missing, there’s a blue kayak floating out to sea and on and on.  You can sit in the cockpit and listen to the radio for hours, following the conversations that fancy you and ignoring the others.  It’s better than TV, maybe because it’s actual stuff that’s happening.
You get to know people’s voices and generate opinions of them over the radio.  On some boats it seems only one person ever talks on the radio.  Some people are very needy and have a million questions about stuff that was already talked about.  Some people are very paranoid at night and feel the need to call out the latitude and longitude of every boat they see on their radar within two miles to make sure they are aware of each other.  Some people see the need to announce every time they catch a fish, in fact they have so many fish they are releasing then if they are under 60 inches.  Somehow they think everyone in the fleet needs to know this.

Either way you look at it, the Pleasure channel is just that.  It’s where you get you news, find the weather, report your problems, hear about the beach party tonight, call your friends after  each overnight on the water and find out their position to see who snuck by who in the night and the list goes on and on.  Just remember; you never know who’s listing!

The crew in Cabo celebrating our arrival!
On our neighbors s/v Alcyone

 

Baja Haha Leg 1

11-2-12 Turtle Bay, MX

Ready to Go!

We made it to Turtle Bay.  Leg one of the Baja ha ha is in the books.  This post will probably be coming to everyone many days late as we have not yet had the time to figure out our Mexican wifi system.  Leg one from San Diego to Bahia Tortuga (Turtle Bay for gringos) was 353 nautical miles for Autumn Wind.  Not too bad considering the rhumb line was 344 NM.  We spent 76 hours making the first passage; that’s three nights and four days of sailing, sleeping and eating. 

Leaving San Diego with 115 friends

First night sunset

We departed San Diego with 115 other boats, the fire boat was present shooting water into the sky and it was quite a sight as everyone set their spinnakers in light air just out of the channel.  Soon the bigger boats; which is almost all of them; pulled away and we found ourselves in the back of the pack sailing along pleasantly.  And the rest is sort of a blur.  It’s hard to believe that in 76 hours of not leaving a 34 foot boat you can accomplish almost nothing.  We ran 3 hour watches.  So that meant you had 6 hours off between watches.  This may seem like a lot of time, but somehow the time flies by and next thing you know someone is waking you up for your next watch.  Now everyone has had 6 hours off between work days at some time.  It makes for a long next day.  That’s how we felt as we repeated the 3 on 6 off scenario for four days.  At some point all you really wanted to do was catch a couple hours of sleep no matter what time of day it was.  That may sound sort of gloomy.  In reality it was a great passage, but no one said no to an early bed time once the anchor was down.



Day 1 pics

The weather was excellent which allowed us to eat well.  How does weather and food go together you may ask?  Well when the weather is nice you can cook, when it sucks you can’t; at least not very well.  Imagine cooking in your kitchen as it rocks back and forth.  Stuff slides off the counter, as you lean into the stove to keep you balance.  At least the stove and oven swivel, and we have little arms that hold the pots in place as the boat heels.  Still no one likes to spend lots of time down below in bad weather.  So that’s how the two go together.   We ate BBQ beef, made two loaves of fresh bread, bagel egg and ham sandwiches, homemade chili with cornbread, breakfast burritos and to top it off fresh caught yellow tail tuna and then ceviche tacos the next day.  So we didn’t lose any weight on this passage. 

Yes, that’s right we caught our first fish!  Admittedly, it was about a $200 dollar fish at this point with the license and hand lines we bought.  We had fun pulling it in, killing it and filleting it.  This was an adventure for someone who has never really been into fishing.  To make the whole thing even more fun we accomplished the entire operation with the spinnaker up. 

Laura with our fish.  How
do you filet this thing?

Speaking of the spinnaker.  It’s a good thing we have one.  It got a workout on the first leg.  One morning we set it right after the morning net at 7:00 AM and carried it all day until midnight.  Without it we would never have kept up with the pack.

There we some late night chats with other boats over the VHF, always nice to know someone else is out there.  The SSB receiver we bought actually worked, thanks to Elizabeth’s dedication to spending hours listening to static to learn how to tune it in.  We were able to listen to the morning net where everyone checked in and reported their position and they updated the weather for us.  That way we were able to keep track of our friends on other boats.

One of the many highlights of the passage may have been within the last 10 miles as the dolphins were surfacing everywhere, birds were diving for fish and two humpback whales surfaced 100 feet off the side of the boat.

Not much went wrong or broke.  One shackle on the boom preventer and one fork got thrown overboard with the dish water.  (we do our dishes in a bucket of saltwater to conserve the fresh water, it was dark and just got overlooked)  Minor issues for a 350 mile passage. 
So the first leg is history, we are in Turtle Bay for only one day and then it’s back to sailing. 

Our Baja Haha pumpkin