Allora Voyage

The first time you throw a rock in the water as a small child, it must blow your mind. Even teenagers still get a thrill if the rocks are big enough. You don’t see a whole lot of old men down at the beach chucking stones into the sea and grinning. Further proof that the enemy of joy might actually be predictability. So much for Christmas.

In the category of truly unpredictable, who knew that throwing out compostable scraps could be anything other than a chore? The bioluminescent soup in Don Juan, with a new moon, was off the charts. We needed something to throw overboard, cuz we knew it would be good, so we hurried excitedly with our compost bucket to the starboard deck. It’s impossible to adequately describe the crazy, LSD-like effect of the the splash which burst outward like blooming flowers of neon fireworks and burning green fire-lit ripples that spread out across the dark harbor. We immediately followed with one of Diana’s stones that she’d gathered for her mosaic work, which she was willing to sacrifice. It was the only other thing we could think of that we could throw overboard. Insane! Even better! We both howled. I’m sure the coyotes looked up a little worried about the competition. Then Diana couldn’t help it and she jumped in to make the wild green fireworks herself (despite the fact that the water is in the low 60’s this time of year and the desert evening temps are pretty cool). Swimming back to the boat was even better with her whole body fluorescent under the surface and the kick of her feet and pull of her hands swirling off in plumes of green sparkles. Gathering a bucket of skipping rocks moved up to the very top of our shore list. We can’t wait for it to get dark!

It may be that it took us until then end of February to have our first real glimpse of the kind of days we expected this to be. Where we did not feel pinned down by a norther, or compelled by a schedule. We sailed where to the wind blew. Upwind actually, but we followed the course Allora was happy to take, without tacking and found a place that had what both of us were looking for. A breakthrough mosaic project, and fishing.

For the first few days we were here a small panga with fishermen visited and fished hard at the points of rocks on either side of the small cove where we anchored. I studied them with binoculars trying to decide what techniques they were using. Two younger guys with hand lines, and the owner of the boat with a spinning rod. The anchored and the handliners went to work. I did not see them catch more than one small fish, and wondered if they were catching bait. But it really looked like the spin fisherman was using a lure and jigging. I saw his rod bend a few times, but the fish seemed to get away. Then they moved to the other point and fished until almost dark. The next morning I went to the point where they were with my 11 weight (because the other rods are still buried under the aft bunk), and my spinning outfit with a white bucktail jig with rubber bait. There was very little breeze so I drifted and cast to the rocks, getting one strike almost right away, but the fish shook the hook in a few minutes. I decided my drag was too light for setting the hook and cranked it down a bit. It didn’t take much longer, maybe twenty minutes and I hooked a fish that pulled with conviction. The spin outfit bent over double as whatever it was ran deep for the rocks. Definitely a lot of fun, but I really wanted to know what it was so I didn’t want to lose it. I finally got the fish to the surface, some kind of grouper I thought, about four pounds. I tried killing it with a dash of tequila on the gills (heard talk of this working), but that only seemed to invigorate him and he made a mad dash from my hands back into the water. I resorted to more caveman-like tactics to subdue him. The fishermen were moving from their morning spot over to where I was fishing, so I decided to motor over and intercept them. I wasn’t sure how they’d feel about my fishing in their spot, or if they might be unhappy that I’d taken a nice fish. They were smiling as I pulled up and apologized for not speaking Spanish, so I hauled the fish up where they could see it. They seemed impressed and smiled. I asked, “Come se dice?” which was intelligible enough for them to inform me that it was a Cabrilla. The owner of the boat then lifted his own, the same size or a little bigger, which he’d also caught at the point. He asked to see what I was using and showed me his lure, too. I then did my best with sign language to confirm that it was okay to eat the Cabrilla. Not only okay, but very good was the answer. Bueno? I asked. Buena, they corrected. And it was, maybe one of the best filets of fish I’ve ever had. Super yummy.

My next trip out I decided to stick to fly fishing to see what might happen. I tied on the smallest Deceiver I had in the fly box and cast it out as far as I could, stripping it back the way I would on a river for trout, maybe a little faster. The fly would arrive with a bunch of interested fish, darting at it but not really hitting it. I tried a little faster, or maybe not, maybe I was just lucky but I hooked one. It fought hard, harder than any trout, but was seriously outmatched by the 11 wt. I let the line go slack, and the fish got off, though I’d gotten a pretty good look at it. A few minutes later I landed one, and had a heck of a time getting the hook out, destroying the fly in the process. I bent the barb down on the next fly, but didn’t get any more strikes after that. I looked the fish up when I got back to the boat and decided it was a Triggerfish, which my mother says is one of her favorites. The Mexican fishermen weren’t around to ask if it was okay to eat and since it’s a reef fish, we’ll wait until we can get a confirmation. We don’t want a case of ciguatera.

Finally, I went out to the point of rocks. I’d tried it once before but was really intimidated by the current and waves. I tried anchoring but couldn’t even reach bottom with Namo’s little anchor. This time it was a little calmer. Right away I brought in a school of long slender fish that were very aggressive with the fly, slashing at it and attacking; one even came out of the water after it, but none of them were getting hooked. I checked my leader and it was a little chewed up. This time I thought I knew what kind of fish it must be, a Sierra Mackerel, which I’d heard about. A few more casts, a few more strikes and then WHAM! This fish bent the rod and ripped line out of my hand. For me the first real fish here on a fly. It was a great battle and a gorgeous fish. It’s mouth was full of teeth so I was really glad to have bent the barb down and to have a pair of pliers, so I could release the fish without touching it.

I fly fished some more without luck, then switched to the spin outfit and caught a small Cabrilla. I had to drag it with me to row Namo away from some rocks and then I let it go. I decided, just for the heck of it to make a few more fly casts as I drifted out along the shelf of this outer rock. I’d made my last cast when suddenly a really big fish showed up behind the fly – at least thirty pounds and given where it was it must have been a yellowtail tuna. I stripped the fly faster but it wasn’t fast enough… but exciting because it was so unexpected. I tried a little more, including with the spin rod, but no luck. Diana would have loved sushi for dinner. Maybe next time.

The new plan, was to drive up to Loreto to pick up the Grandmas and then to base out of La Paz and sail when the weather smiled. A late lunch with our Moms, Haley and Wyatt on the old square in Loreto was a great way to end the year. It was, as it has been, surprisingly chilly. The puffy’s have not retired yet. The bonus was a night in a hotel with a room several times bigger than our boat and a shower that seemed to have unlimited hot water. We amortized our guilty pleasure against our usual super spartan showers on board and the cold showers we’ve been finding at Baja marinas.

The 4+ hour drive north to Loreto included a nice taqueria in Constitution, which was super cheap even when you add the 200 peso bribe paid to the polizia on the way out, for missing a stop, “three stops back.” The smiling cop started at 1000, and Diana’s probably right that I could have gotten off for less than two hundred if I was a better negotiator. When I was motioned to the curb in La Paz for not “a-stopping” again, I got the policeman down to 120. He used his cell phone to find someone who could translate his extortion into English while his armor vested buddy stood by looking imposing but uncomfortable. Neither of them liked it when I raised the money visibly above the window. Both cops made sure to shake my hand and assure me that we were amigos.

The weather smiled so we sailed to Isla Espiritu Santo, to the anchorage at the southern end, Bahia San Gabriel, with a big wide beach and an old pearl farm and rookery of frigate birds. Haley climbed the mast for the first sunset, challenging a fear that seems perfectly reasonable to me (I haven’t been up there yet). Camille did it the next night, whooping and hollering the whole way up (so that’s where Diana gets it) and then Haley did it a second time, determined to get a better shot. She’s been photographing the whole time she’s been with us with projects in mind for her program at ICP. We had some trouble with the windlass picking up the anchor in the morning, and had to figure out how to use the manual adapter to crank the last 25 feet in by hand, but otherwise it was exactly the kind of trip we were hoping for with our mother’s. We used the last bit of wind to haul up our spinnaker to dry it out and were cruising along so nicely it was very hard to turn around, but we were headed exactly the wrong direction. We dried out our code zero next going only marginally closer to a course toward La Paz. The electronic chartplotter predicted an arrival at our destination in about a week and a half at that VMG (velocity made good). It was a pretty view of the island, and seemed like the perfect conditions to spot a whale, but no luck. So we motored and dozed our way back to our slip at Marina Cortez. The next day Haley left from Cabo for San Francisco.

One of the silver linings of Namo’s wandering was that German gave us the info for finding the whale sharks that cruise the shallow end of Bahia La Paz gulping down whatever it is they gulp. Namo bravely carried the five of us out, those at the bow learning the advantages of dinghy driving as compared to being a passenger. Hint: it’s even drier with a few bodies ahead of you to absorb the spray. Swimming with these huge fish (technically neither whales nor sharks) was as inspiring as it sounds. Wyatt and Diana got whacked by a tail more than once. I guess if you are that big and live on food that small, you don’t have time to worry about the strange creatures swimming alongside. The view from the dinghy was thrilling, too, as the giant sharks slipped by underneath us, three times our length.

Our last trip with the Grandmas was to Balandra, a beautiful little anchorage on the channel out of Bahia de la Paz. Officially, Diana’s first captaining of Namo, which went well, except for some extra rowing at the end. The shore party arrived certain they deserved margaritas. We had marlin for dinner and went to sleep as the wind began picking up from the southwest (instead of the forecast NNW). By midnight,  Allora was beginning to hobby horse in the steep chop, and the first our our neighbors peeled off. The anchor looked good, so I reset the anchor alarm and we slept for another hour or so. Then it was time to start tightening things down. I was happy we had Namo up on the davits, but we’d left the outboard on so she was heavy. We went around tying stuff down as two more neighbors in the anchorage headed out. We decided to give it another hour. Diana could no longer sleep, nor Wyatt. I tried in the forward cabin, but got a little seasick for the first time ever. We decided to leave. It took a while to get everything put together, and not much fun as Allora was really hopping now. Diana put in the lee cloth for Camille’s settee so she wouldn’t be tossed out of bed. Another boat left, and one followed us out at 3:30 leaving only one boat still braving the tumultuos little bay. We motored back to La Paz, and the waves diminished a little, though it was still rough, even in the harbor. My stomach and the strong current made for a very messy docking, and I was glad there were few witnesses.

Wyatt’s edit of our whale shark swim:

It’s hard not to think about how much grief a little extra twist on the sail locker might have saved. Details count on a boat. There isn’t much leeway for missing or not quite completing even small jobs like a knot too quickly tied, or a hatch forgotten. Behind all the pretty sunsets and white beaches and the general impression we are certainly guilty of reinforcing ‘living the dream’ as if it were exclusively living a dream, there is the reality that there are a thousand of opportunities for tiny mistakes that can devolve into nightmarish problems when Poseidon gets cranky.

After a day at Isla San Francisco dealing with the hatch fiasco, we settled in to grill some of the cached marlin for dinner. Haley got out her flash to photograph the pelicans using our stern light to fish. Neither she nor I, noticed that the dinghy which I had tied to the stern wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t until after dinner that Wyatt noticed when he went out to put it up for the night. I’m calling her “it” right now, because that’s how we referred to her before her walkabout. The wind had come up from the north right after sunset and apparently that was enough for the knot I tied to pull loose.

It was dark and really blowing now, and it’s hard to describe the feeling of disbelief looking out sternward at the wide open mouth of the anchorage. A couple little mistakes were making us feel hopelessly out of our depth. Could we really have lost our dinghy and outboard? Could that really be happening? Though we knew it must have been loose for an hour at least, we could not imagine just letting it go. We pulled up our anchor and headed off into the night straight downwind. Because problems on a boat come in more than pairs, of course we immediately also started having bizarre issues with our Raymarine compass. We abandoned our quixotic quest when it became clear that even if we could find a ten foot dinghy by moonlight in miles of ocean, conditions would be too rough to recover it.

We motored back to Isla San Francisco and anchored in a new spot. There is no question that we have bit off a lot in our quick transition to intrepid sailors. Old salts we are not. We’ve been asked many times how we sailed Allora over the continental divide when people see her port of call, Bozeman Montana. And it’s an obvious joke that contains a kernel of insight. We are still whatever the opposite of fish out of water would be. Though there was nothing dangerous, or really that original, in losing an expensive dinghy, it was mightily disheartening. Speaking as the would-be-sailor who tied the too-skimpy knot, I felt like the nubiest of nubes.

Losing something certainly is the full proof way of realizing how important it is to you. Getting a new dink in La Paz was going to be outrageously difficult and expensive. We looked at the map, made guesses on how fast the dingy would move in 18 knots of wind. It could be miles away after a night of it — the dictionary definition of hopeless. But Diana was not ready to give up, and I believe her response to the situation says more about our actual readiness for this adventure than the poor knot I tied. In the morning she got on the sat phone and asked Marina La Paz to report the loss to the port captain and also asked if they would announce it on the morning cruisers net. Then she got on the VHF and contacted our neighbors in the anchorage. One of them was already leaving, headed south, possibly the right direction. The next boat, ‘Adagio’ who must have woke up and wondered why we were no longer anchored next to them, but half way across the anchorage, had a few suggestions, most notably that we contact a boat “Willful Simplicity,” people who’d been in the area for years and had a home in San Evaristo. Adagio suggested they might be able to get in touch with the panga fishermen in the area so they could be on the look out. We had already decided that we could not pick up the Grandmas in Loreto without a dinghy and had to go back to La Paz. Still, we had time to head up to San Evaristo if we wanted at least one day of fun, which we felt had been in such short supply for Haley and Wyatt since they’d joined us. It was a beautiful day for sailing and we were tacking out of the island when we heard Willful Simplicity hail Adagio, and realized she was the sailboat we could see just a few miles north of us. Diana got them on the VHF and they told us that they’d already talked to the panga fishermen who all agreed that the dinghy would have washed ashore somewhere between a seasonal fishing village named Portuguese and Punta Coyote. They were “certain” that we’d find our dinghy. We got a GPS fix for the village and then sailed over to the shore just north, so upwind, of Portuguese. With binoculars we followed the coast downwind looking at every rock for our runaway dinghy. For anyone watching our path on the tracker, hopefully this sheds some light on our wandering trail. Besides the surge of hope from Will Simplicity’s optimism, we were also cheered by the beautiful scenery, the rugged Sierra Gigantes looming over the Sea. I’m certain that very few visiting sailors have experienced that coast as intimately as we did.

Unfortunately, the day ended with blurry eyes, without finding the dinghy. We decided to head to the closest anchorage two hours due east on Espiritu Santo, arriving just as it got dark. In the morning, we sailed back with a really nice wind to Punta Coyote and continued the search. Despite the beautiful sailing, the stress of the situation was taking a toll. We had sailed from San Diego with a deadline to get Maddi on a plane, and then immediately headed north with a deadline in Loreto, never mind the complication of holidays. We felt like we really hadn’t had a chance to catch our breath. San Diego had been a mad rush, too, so really we were pushing too hard. Everyone was feeling it. Allora experienced a little less than perfect harmony as she reached across with the wind on her beam.

We sailed along the coast from Punta Coyote south with only a few false alarms that momentarily got our hopes up. Finally, we needed to head for La Paz or try to arrive in the dark, which didn’t seem like a very good idea. We furled the jib, and turned the motor on (so we could make some time up) and turned back east having scoured 40 miles of coast line without any luck. We were a sad lot. Diana went to find her phone to call Marina Cortez to see if we could get a slip and found that she had a text message. It read: “Hello I’m Eileen from Marina Cortez, today port captain called and talked about your dingui please contact us.”

As Wyatt would say… Whuuttt!!!??

Diana called and got a few more details. A dinghy was reported found that “matched our description”… the message had been passed along with errors for translation, so it wasn’t absolutely certain. But how many ‘dinguis’ get found on a given day? We poured all of our sense of relief in the unbelievable possibility that we might get our dinghy back, laughing about whether our long lost little inflatable had finally earned a name. We’d always thought about calling her Namo, which is slang in Rome for “andiamo” (let’s go). I suggested Walkabout Namo, for our wandering, under-appreciated little runaway. Haley came up with the winner: ‘Finding Namo.’

German Obaya, who works at Costa Baja Marina, takes tourists out to see the whale sharks then up to Los Islotes to snorkel with sea lions. He found Namo bobbing around west of the Espiritu Santo (very near the point we sailed across the same morning to continue our search, too busy bickering to make good lookouts). Just by chance he’d wandered much father out than he typically goes, trying to find his clients some humpbacks. He was a little reluctant to approach. Who knows what you might find in a boat drifting on the ocean, but two laws of the sea were invoked. The first is the actual law of salvage, which means if you rescue an abandoned vessel at sea… it’s yours. The other may be less official but it seems more practiced, which is, you have a duty to help if you can. He quoted his Japanese mother’s saying to us (after joking about the salvage laws) “what isn’t yours belongs to someone else.” He called the port captain and towed her home.

Among the many lessons that followed from the obvious, that hatches have to be double checked and knots well tied because the consequences are so serious, was the bigger issue that was creating a lot of stress. It’s something we knew intellectually but perhaps did not fully appreciate in practice. Deadlines and sailing do not mix well, though they are also more unavoidable than you might wish. Dropping and picking people up at airports, doesn’t jive well with avoiding upwind sailing in eight foot seas at a five second period. Even though we had initially several days to get to Loreto, it was upwind, and the winter weather in Baja can be surprising. We would have made it if not for Namo’s walkabout, but it would have kept us busy. Maybe too busy. No time for essential regrouping.

Haley’s video of the magic:

We set the code zero with a light breeze as we pulled out from the marina just in time for the wind to die altogether. Before we conceded the point to the slick and glassy sea and turned on the engine, Wyatt and Diana decided to get cooled off on the swim platform. Just as Wyatt put his leg in to test the water, a humpback whale surfaced not fifty feet on the stern and blew. His first ever whale encounter was straight out of the script for Jaws. What we wouldn’t have given for a hydrophone to listen to them chuckle at their little whale prank, so perfectly timed. It took just a couple heart thumping minutes for everyone to decide it was time to get in the water with masks and snorkels. The two humpbacks stayed with us, playing and dancing and nosing curiously out of the water for almost three hours as we took turns gazing down into the magnificent deep at these amazing creatures.