Tortugas
February 17, 2010
21:00
Since we are once again offshore, I figure I should continue my little log here. Today was a great day because we left Ensenada. No hard feelings Ensenada, but you were just way too much like Los Angeles for our tastes. We cast of all out lines and sailed out of Bahia de Toros Santos and are now en route to Bahia de Tortugas or perhaps Bahia San Quentin.
We did a little motor work to get going, but as soon as we got up a good amount of sail, we were once again one with the wind. We had to do a few tacks to get around rocky ol' Punta Banda and at about 1600 we kicked on the diesel to finish the task. Speaking of our motor, our diesel is running much more smoothly after the overhaul done by Baha Naval. They basically just cleared the sea strainer and flushed the heat exchanger, but it's made a lot of difference. She now only overheats when we push her hard. We motored a little above idle for about an hour with no problems. I figure she's just an old engine with a lot of hours and as long as you don't push her too hard, she keep a reasonable temperature.
So we're once again on a passage. What have we learned from our last 10 day passage? 4 hour watches are too long. The new plan is to try a 2 hour watch schedule for the night: 2 hr on, 2 hr off, 2 hr on... This still allows us a full sleep cycle (90 minutes) if we fall asleep rather quickly. And most importantly, it won't bore us to pieces. This way we will retain more vigilance, promoting safety aboard! The schedule for tonight has me doing the 2000-2200, 0000-0200, and the 0400-0600 (dawn!) watches.
This has been a pretty good first watch so far. The chill isn't too bad nor the wind too high. I can remain comfortable with jeans, a sweater, my sexy yellow sailing jacket, and a Nepalese beanie. While it doesn't feel humid in the least bit, the clear air is drenching everything in its reach. The watery air almost hyrdrates as I breathe, a rather soothing sensation. The stars are like I've never seem them before on a passage. They've become more defined the farther away we get from Los Angeles. The belt of the Milky Way is prominent and the surrounding sky is a thick splatter of stars. The ride is a bit bumpy due to a 4 foot swell and our beloved quartering waves, but we are making a lot of good southing. The only negative portion of this watch was an issue we had with one of the fishing boats out here.
A little while ago I noticed this guy on the horizon. I assumed he was going home to Ensenada and was going to pass us on port. But a scan a few minutes later revealed he was heading directly for us. So he didn't see us, I don't blame him: we're a little, poorly-lit sailboat without even a masthead light. We need some illumination, so I take out one of our high-powered flashlights and shine it on the mainsail. He alters course. To a direct intercept course. He gets closer and closer as I continue shining this light on the sail and eventually we kick on the diesel to give us an extra push away from him. He then fell off his course and turned around. We concluded that either he was being territorial or he had a school of fish he was pursuing. Whatever the reason, it was disconcerting.
Speaking of fish, we caught our fish one of this trip today! We've had a line out practically the whole convoluted sail down here waiting for a nibble. Sadly, most of the time we've been pretty far offshore where fish don't tend to roam. But yes! We got one. A beautiful tuna/bonita/sierra. They have so many names. She was a great size and gave us a couple of fillets for dinner. It was an omen for how wonderful our passage is going to be. I'm sure of it.
February 18, 2010 2nd Day at Sea
12:00
It's another beautiful day for sailing off the coast of Baha. The sun is warm, the air is fresh, and the water is that deep blue hue I missed so much while in port. And, once again, most importantly, the wind is blowing us where we want to go. We've broken out a brand new sail to harness it today. It's come to be named our clown spinakker. Putting it up made us realized we're not quite ready to become a two-man racing crew, at least not yet.
It took us about two hours to set this sail. Needless to say, it was a bit of an ordeal. The first part was pretty easy. We gathered and set up all the necessary rigging hardware. This included bringing out our last two blocks as well as our last two shackles. We then put the spinnaker in a spinakker “sock”. A spinakker sock is basically a sheath for the sail. You hoist the spinakker, in sock, up with the halyard and then tug on a line to pull the sock to the top, exposing the sail to the wind. It's supposed to make it easier to set and douse, frequently, unruly spinakkers. Ours didn't have that effect.
Instead, our sock bound up the top portion into a tight wad disallowing the spinakker from taking its balloon shape. This made it basically useless. So we brought down the whole rig and removed the troublesome sock from the whole picture. Hoisting up the spinakker sans sock was a much easier task. It went up as I held onto one of the clews (corners the lines attach to) to keep it from flying out of our reach. We attached the clews and got it up again to a nice coast. The wind was barely perceptable, yet the spinakker held its balloon shape quite nicely. We've altered course to make it around some very distant islands and it's now a reaching spinakker as well.
I actually just did a bunch of calculations to find out the exact course we need to make as well as the distance the islands are from us. I pulled out all the usual tricks to do this: trigonometrics, converstions, and the godly proportions. It turns out we need to make a 162 degree magnetic heading (which I just set in) and the point where we come closest to the islands (about 10 nm off) is 305 nm away (at an, unlikely, straight course). If we retain our speed of 6kts the whole way, it will only be 50 more hours to make this point.
So last night, we actually ended up doing 3 hour watches instead of 2. I found it to be quite a healthy median. While I didn't feel like I slept for very long, I did feel relatively alert and in good health. My mood hasn't really changed from its hopelessly optimistic standing that followed me out of Bahia de Toros Santos. And I can't complain. Dan's resting up while I'm standing watch. I don't think it's too necessary because only a blind man could miss this sail, but hot bunking is the name of the game for our passages. I surely wouldn't object to a few more days of this, especially if it warms up as we continue south.
February 19 2010 3rd Day at Sea
[I didn't post log time, I must be getting tired at this point] Well last night gave us a little excitement. About an hour into the darkness, right as dinner was nearing completion, I spotted a light on the horizon. It was one of about 10 lights we see a night, so I just started keeping my eye on it between meal preparations.
As soon as I got my taters with stew and made myself comfortable in the cockpit, I notice that the light have gotten quite a bit closer and they are of the variety that usually stand on a very large ship: the mast head light and bow light of a freighter or oil barge. These boats, when cruising along at normal speed, take three miles to stop and a quarter of a mile to even make a course adjustment. An ocean-going yacht's most dangerous predator. He was giving me a starboard running light (green) so it seemed he should pass aft of us without any need for course alteration, but the empirical data was giving me a different scene entirely. After about 10 minutes of vigilantly watching him, he has made no perceptable movement other than gaining a whole lotta ground. So it was time for us to alter course. I changed course to make a bit of westing in hopes that I would see him moving off to our side, but he still only gained ground. Dan soon made the executive decision to turn on the diesel and make a straight westing; this would be a course perpendicular to his. We were soon relieved to find him finally making off aft of us and we ate heartily. The rest of the night was pretty uneventful other than a wind shift and some sail changes.
I decided to once again wrack my brain with navigational mathematics today. My task today: figure out the correct heading to hit our waypoint 10nm off the islands, but this time, there we didn't have any charts that I could draw a line on. It had to be a purely rational venture into navigation. It took a half an hour for me to finally get an answer (I'm a little rusty), but when it correlated with the GPS I got an immense feeling of satisfaction. Now I need to learn the basics of using a sextant, and I'll be a navigating pro! He's some of my jerry-rigged navigating procedures for when we were off the available charts:
February 20, 2010 4th Day at Sea
16:18
Let me start out by saying we've once again successfully anchored! This time in Bahia de Tortugas. Bahia de Tortugas (Turtle Bay for you less Mexican folk) is a 7-mile-across, fully-sheltered bay. It lays at the midpoint of Baha California, halfway between Cabo San Lucas and Ensenada. The entrance is easy (assuming you have a chart) and the anchoring space immense. There is seriously 7 square miles of anchoring area of or less than 30 feet. That's primo anchorage real estate inc case you didn't know, but I'm sure you did.
To the north of our anchorage, is a small town of less than 1,000 people. It's located exactly in the middle of nowhere: 135 miles of unpaved road to highway 1. The economy subsists on the fishing exploits of its inhabitants . I can only observe it from afar as we haven't made landfall yet, but I'll tell you what I see. It's built along the coast of a beach that is continually combed by 4x4s and dirt bikes. It continually blasts loud Mexican music. There's reportedly good food in town that we'll have to explore tomorrow as we row ashore. Here's the town on the northwest side of Turtle Bay.
Enough about the unexplored scapes of Bahia de Tortugas, how about the rest of the passage to it? A bit after I last left you guys, the wind died. We hopelessly poled out the genoa to try and catch any puff that came our way. There was nothing to catch, though. It slatted around on its pole for a while as the sun began to set. Accompanying the magnificent sunset, there was a sudden shift in wind. The usual trade northwesterlies gave way to a brisk breeze coming from the southwest. A front was coming in to give us a beam reach straight to our bay! That spectacular sunset:
Night had fallen by the time I got my sails trimmed in and we were now cruising towards Bahia de Tortugas as 7.5 kt (our maximum theoretical hull speed). There were 4 islands and a point that all had to be cleared to port and I already knew there would be some traffic compression around them. It was only 10 minutes into my watch when a masthead light appeared on the horizon directly aft. Soon enough, another, lower, light accompanied it. A freighter. I kept my eye on him for a while while maintaining course. A few minutes later, he showed me his running light: green. This was the exact same situation we found ourselves in the night before. According to his running light, he should cross aft and pass to port, but the night before's events still had me on edge. I held course and, to my relief, it began passing to port. The danger had arrested. As that one disappeared over the horizon, another appeared. And this happened thrice more. Not once during my entire three hour watch did I not have a freighter in my sights. My sightings of them slowly waned from evoking fearful emotions to those of intrigue.
Only twice were course alterations needed by me and usually only for peace of mind. Dodging freighters in shipping lanes has now become a normal. It's a bit disconcerting at first, but it's all part of cruising. It's a completely different lifestyle. I successfully evaded freighters around the point for three hours and then handed the helm off the Dan. He brought me to the edge of twilight, 0530, before once again adjourning his watch. I noticed when I got up there that he had doused the foresail which would prove to be a good thing.
As I rode her into dawn, I began to actually see these landforms I was avoiding. Before they were only lighthouses and chart points. Now, with the coming of the day, they were actual silhouettes. This greatly reinforced my navigation Dan knocked off for a nap just as the wind started building. It got up to about 20 knots with 25 knot gusts before the rain hit.
Sadly, we were on a downwind course when the rain came. This meant the dodger provided no protection from the downpour. So I huddled up next to the compass and tried to hold course. I ended up getting so wrapped up in the compass that I didn't notice we were now sailing by the less. I'm sitting there huddles out of the drenching rain when CRASH. The boat lurches from one side to the next. I knew immediately what had happened. Dan had popped his head out of the hatch not so sure. I had committed an accidental gybe. This is where the stern of the boat passes through the wind (as opposed to a tack)) and the mainsail, pivoting on the mast, slams violently across to the other side. Luckily, nothing was damaged. Dan later revealed to me that he thought it was the sound of us running aground.
With the help of Dan, we sheeted in the main and got back on course. The wind eventually completely died off and then clocked back around to the regional northwesterlies. We made Bahia de Tortugas without a hitch. I'm guessing it's the weekend because the town is still booming. They're looping the same Mexican-style song and riding their dirt bikes around the small beach. For some reason there's a siren that keeps going off even though there isnt a paved road for a hundred miles. I'll probably never understand.
February 21, 2010
12:55
We´ve made landfall! I managed to find a little internet cafe and am giving you guys a treat. I hope this is worth my 20 pesos to ya´ll.
The plan now is to bay and cove a bit. We´re both still exhausted from our passage and we´re not quite ready to make another multiple day passage. There´s a sheltered bay about 50 miles down the coast that we plan on sailing to perhaps after some shopping today. Wish us luck!
February 17, 2010
21:00
Since we are once again offshore, I figure I should continue my little log here. Today was a great day because we left Ensenada. No hard feelings Ensenada, but you were just way too much like Los Angeles for our tastes. We cast of all out lines and sailed out of Bahia de Toros Santos and are now en route to Bahia de Tortugas or perhaps Bahia San Quentin.
We did a little motor work to get going, but as soon as we got up a good amount of sail, we were once again one with the wind. We had to do a few tacks to get around rocky ol' Punta Banda and at about 1600 we kicked on the diesel to finish the task. Speaking of our motor, our diesel is running much more smoothly after the overhaul done by Baha Naval. They basically just cleared the sea strainer and flushed the heat exchanger, but it's made a lot of difference. She now only overheats when we push her hard. We motored a little above idle for about an hour with no problems. I figure she's just an old engine with a lot of hours and as long as you don't push her too hard, she keep a reasonable temperature.
So we're once again on a passage. What have we learned from our last 10 day passage? 4 hour watches are too long. The new plan is to try a 2 hour watch schedule for the night: 2 hr on, 2 hr off, 2 hr on... This still allows us a full sleep cycle (90 minutes) if we fall asleep rather quickly. And most importantly, it won't bore us to pieces. This way we will retain more vigilance, promoting safety aboard! The schedule for tonight has me doing the 2000-2200, 0000-0200, and the 0400-0600 (dawn!) watches.
This has been a pretty good first watch so far. The chill isn't too bad nor the wind too high. I can remain comfortable with jeans, a sweater, my sexy yellow sailing jacket, and a Nepalese beanie. While it doesn't feel humid in the least bit, the clear air is drenching everything in its reach. The watery air almost hyrdrates as I breathe, a rather soothing sensation. The stars are like I've never seem them before on a passage. They've become more defined the farther away we get from Los Angeles. The belt of the Milky Way is prominent and the surrounding sky is a thick splatter of stars. The ride is a bit bumpy due to a 4 foot swell and our beloved quartering waves, but we are making a lot of good southing. The only negative portion of this watch was an issue we had with one of the fishing boats out here.
A little while ago I noticed this guy on the horizon. I assumed he was going home to Ensenada and was going to pass us on port. But a scan a few minutes later revealed he was heading directly for us. So he didn't see us, I don't blame him: we're a little, poorly-lit sailboat without even a masthead light. We need some illumination, so I take out one of our high-powered flashlights and shine it on the mainsail. He alters course. To a direct intercept course. He gets closer and closer as I continue shining this light on the sail and eventually we kick on the diesel to give us an extra push away from him. He then fell off his course and turned around. We concluded that either he was being territorial or he had a school of fish he was pursuing. Whatever the reason, it was disconcerting.
Speaking of fish, we caught our fish one of this trip today! We've had a line out practically the whole convoluted sail down here waiting for a nibble. Sadly, most of the time we've been pretty far offshore where fish don't tend to roam. But yes! We got one. A beautiful tuna/bonita/sierra. They have so many names. She was a great size and gave us a couple of fillets for dinner. It was an omen for how wonderful our passage is going to be. I'm sure of it.
 |
| From To Tortugas |
February 18, 2010 2nd Day at Sea
12:00
It's another beautiful day for sailing off the coast of Baha. The sun is warm, the air is fresh, and the water is that deep blue hue I missed so much while in port. And, once again, most importantly, the wind is blowing us where we want to go. We've broken out a brand new sail to harness it today. It's come to be named our clown spinakker. Putting it up made us realized we're not quite ready to become a two-man racing crew, at least not yet.
It took us about two hours to set this sail. Needless to say, it was a bit of an ordeal. The first part was pretty easy. We gathered and set up all the necessary rigging hardware. This included bringing out our last two blocks as well as our last two shackles. We then put the spinnaker in a spinakker “sock”. A spinakker sock is basically a sheath for the sail. You hoist the spinakker, in sock, up with the halyard and then tug on a line to pull the sock to the top, exposing the sail to the wind. It's supposed to make it easier to set and douse, frequently, unruly spinakkers. Ours didn't have that effect.
Instead, our sock bound up the top portion into a tight wad disallowing the spinakker from taking its balloon shape. This made it basically useless. So we brought down the whole rig and removed the troublesome sock from the whole picture. Hoisting up the spinakker sans sock was a much easier task. It went up as I held onto one of the clews (corners the lines attach to) to keep it from flying out of our reach. We attached the clews and got it up again to a nice coast. The wind was barely perceptable, yet the spinakker held its balloon shape quite nicely. We've altered course to make it around some very distant islands and it's now a reaching spinakker as well.
 |
| From To Tortugas |
I actually just did a bunch of calculations to find out the exact course we need to make as well as the distance the islands are from us. I pulled out all the usual tricks to do this: trigonometrics, converstions, and the godly proportions. It turns out we need to make a 162 degree magnetic heading (which I just set in) and the point where we come closest to the islands (about 10 nm off) is 305 nm away (at an, unlikely, straight course). If we retain our speed of 6kts the whole way, it will only be 50 more hours to make this point.
So last night, we actually ended up doing 3 hour watches instead of 2. I found it to be quite a healthy median. While I didn't feel like I slept for very long, I did feel relatively alert and in good health. My mood hasn't really changed from its hopelessly optimistic standing that followed me out of Bahia de Toros Santos. And I can't complain. Dan's resting up while I'm standing watch. I don't think it's too necessary because only a blind man could miss this sail, but hot bunking is the name of the game for our passages. I surely wouldn't object to a few more days of this, especially if it warms up as we continue south.
February 19 2010 3rd Day at Sea
[I didn't post log time, I must be getting tired at this point] Well last night gave us a little excitement. About an hour into the darkness, right as dinner was nearing completion, I spotted a light on the horizon. It was one of about 10 lights we see a night, so I just started keeping my eye on it between meal preparations.
As soon as I got my taters with stew and made myself comfortable in the cockpit, I notice that the light have gotten quite a bit closer and they are of the variety that usually stand on a very large ship: the mast head light and bow light of a freighter or oil barge. These boats, when cruising along at normal speed, take three miles to stop and a quarter of a mile to even make a course adjustment. An ocean-going yacht's most dangerous predator. He was giving me a starboard running light (green) so it seemed he should pass aft of us without any need for course alteration, but the empirical data was giving me a different scene entirely. After about 10 minutes of vigilantly watching him, he has made no perceptable movement other than gaining a whole lotta ground. So it was time for us to alter course. I changed course to make a bit of westing in hopes that I would see him moving off to our side, but he still only gained ground. Dan soon made the executive decision to turn on the diesel and make a straight westing; this would be a course perpendicular to his. We were soon relieved to find him finally making off aft of us and we ate heartily. The rest of the night was pretty uneventful other than a wind shift and some sail changes.
I decided to once again wrack my brain with navigational mathematics today. My task today: figure out the correct heading to hit our waypoint 10nm off the islands, but this time, there we didn't have any charts that I could draw a line on. It had to be a purely rational venture into navigation. It took a half an hour for me to finally get an answer (I'm a little rusty), but when it correlated with the GPS I got an immense feeling of satisfaction. Now I need to learn the basics of using a sextant, and I'll be a navigating pro! He's some of my jerry-rigged navigating procedures for when we were off the available charts:
 |
| From To Tortugas |
February 20, 2010 4th Day at Sea
16:18
Let me start out by saying we've once again successfully anchored! This time in Bahia de Tortugas. Bahia de Tortugas (Turtle Bay for you less Mexican folk) is a 7-mile-across, fully-sheltered bay. It lays at the midpoint of Baha California, halfway between Cabo San Lucas and Ensenada. The entrance is easy (assuming you have a chart) and the anchoring space immense. There is seriously 7 square miles of anchoring area of or less than 30 feet. That's primo anchorage real estate inc case you didn't know, but I'm sure you did.
To the north of our anchorage, is a small town of less than 1,000 people. It's located exactly in the middle of nowhere: 135 miles of unpaved road to highway 1. The economy subsists on the fishing exploits of its inhabitants . I can only observe it from afar as we haven't made landfall yet, but I'll tell you what I see. It's built along the coast of a beach that is continually combed by 4x4s and dirt bikes. It continually blasts loud Mexican music. There's reportedly good food in town that we'll have to explore tomorrow as we row ashore. Here's the town on the northwest side of Turtle Bay.
 |
| From To Tortugas |
Enough about the unexplored scapes of Bahia de Tortugas, how about the rest of the passage to it? A bit after I last left you guys, the wind died. We hopelessly poled out the genoa to try and catch any puff that came our way. There was nothing to catch, though. It slatted around on its pole for a while as the sun began to set. Accompanying the magnificent sunset, there was a sudden shift in wind. The usual trade northwesterlies gave way to a brisk breeze coming from the southwest. A front was coming in to give us a beam reach straight to our bay! That spectacular sunset:
 |
| From To Tortugas |
Night had fallen by the time I got my sails trimmed in and we were now cruising towards Bahia de Tortugas as 7.5 kt (our maximum theoretical hull speed). There were 4 islands and a point that all had to be cleared to port and I already knew there would be some traffic compression around them. It was only 10 minutes into my watch when a masthead light appeared on the horizon directly aft. Soon enough, another, lower, light accompanied it. A freighter. I kept my eye on him for a while while maintaining course. A few minutes later, he showed me his running light: green. This was the exact same situation we found ourselves in the night before. According to his running light, he should cross aft and pass to port, but the night before's events still had me on edge. I held course and, to my relief, it began passing to port. The danger had arrested. As that one disappeared over the horizon, another appeared. And this happened thrice more. Not once during my entire three hour watch did I not have a freighter in my sights. My sightings of them slowly waned from evoking fearful emotions to those of intrigue.
Only twice were course alterations needed by me and usually only for peace of mind. Dodging freighters in shipping lanes has now become a normal. It's a bit disconcerting at first, but it's all part of cruising. It's a completely different lifestyle. I successfully evaded freighters around the point for three hours and then handed the helm off the Dan. He brought me to the edge of twilight, 0530, before once again adjourning his watch. I noticed when I got up there that he had doused the foresail which would prove to be a good thing.
As I rode her into dawn, I began to actually see these landforms I was avoiding. Before they were only lighthouses and chart points. Now, with the coming of the day, they were actual silhouettes. This greatly reinforced my navigation Dan knocked off for a nap just as the wind started building. It got up to about 20 knots with 25 knot gusts before the rain hit.
Sadly, we were on a downwind course when the rain came. This meant the dodger provided no protection from the downpour. So I huddled up next to the compass and tried to hold course. I ended up getting so wrapped up in the compass that I didn't notice we were now sailing by the less. I'm sitting there huddles out of the drenching rain when CRASH. The boat lurches from one side to the next. I knew immediately what had happened. Dan had popped his head out of the hatch not so sure. I had committed an accidental gybe. This is where the stern of the boat passes through the wind (as opposed to a tack)) and the mainsail, pivoting on the mast, slams violently across to the other side. Luckily, nothing was damaged. Dan later revealed to me that he thought it was the sound of us running aground.
With the help of Dan, we sheeted in the main and got back on course. The wind eventually completely died off and then clocked back around to the regional northwesterlies. We made Bahia de Tortugas without a hitch. I'm guessing it's the weekend because the town is still booming. They're looping the same Mexican-style song and riding their dirt bikes around the small beach. For some reason there's a siren that keeps going off even though there isnt a paved road for a hundred miles. I'll probably never understand.
February 21, 2010
12:55
We´ve made landfall! I managed to find a little internet cafe and am giving you guys a treat. I hope this is worth my 20 pesos to ya´ll.
The plan now is to bay and cove a bit. We´re both still exhausted from our passage and we´re not quite ready to make another multiple day passage. There´s a sheltered bay about 50 miles down the coast that we plan on sailing to perhaps after some shopping today. Wish us luck!
I'm enjoying reading about your adventure. I havn't seen stars like you described since I was a child (and that is some 40+ years ago) hehehe.
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