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.