LandfallVoyages

A good steady wind combs the grey cotton wool clouds into a smooth wispy mass that knits itself together pretty well, only showing thin in a few spots, with stars shining through. It’s coming on 9 at night and the fat November moon keeps climbing higher in the sky, dragging her mantle of stars and clouds across the heavens. It glows like an opal where she draws the clouds close, shining an incandescent light the palest of pinks, bright whitest grey, and bordered on all sides with silver blue strands. We’ve been sailing since 11:32 this morning and I can’t believe we made it out here, after all.

We almost didn’t. The night before, we got everything ready, finally got the autopilot calibrated and working well, all our stuff stowed and lashed away, tanks full, a ton of food…it was good. Morale was high, crew jitters mostly contained, and if we left in the morning, we should be hitting Turtle Bay with plenty of light about 51 hours later. First thing in the morning, we got hit upside the head with such a shitstorm of drama; it nearly torpedoed the whole trip. Never even saw it coming on the radar.

The first thing had to do with our neighbor Chester getting busted sneaking another underage boy from town onto his boat after dark. It sort of made the whole copping to it-I’m gonna get help- thing feel disingenuous. Emotionally, it’s hard to feel ok about leaving Eli’s friend when it’s so obvious that Chester has no intention of limiting his sex life to adults of consenting age. I know, beyond a shadow of doubt, that if he were to try and lay a finger on Eli’s friend, that kid’s parents would introduce Chester to a whole new way of life. As a eunuch, perhaps. In a persistently vegetative state, no doubt. Because that’s the kind of awesome they are. Truly, the finest people around. Still, it’s hard not to feel like sailing away is also a little bit like abandoning that wonderful kid to the predation of our sicko neighbor.

The second chunk of drama had to do with some other friends who were intending to sail down Baja to Vallarta in an untested Catalina 27 with no engine and only 20 gallons of water. Not a lot in the way of electronics or experience either. The whole marina was worried as hell about them and a good deal of our morning was spent talking about the realities of sailing vs. the romantic illusions we all have about what it’ll be like. In the Coast Guard, I can’t tell you how many people we had to rescue after the ocean up and smacked away their rose-colored glasses and let a little reality in. The sea is beautiful and alluring, but she’s also a stone cold bitch who rarely suffers fools. She’ll let you slide once, maybe twice, but you go out there willfully unprepared and like as not she’ll swallow you whole and that’ll be the end of that.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for sailing now with a smaller boat vs. waiting around until you retire and have the money for a bigger boat. Cruising on a shoestring? A-ok by me. Not quite an old salt when it comes to sailing? Also all right, as long as you go Bumfuzzle-style and have a boat you can rely on, multiple GPS/Chartplotter devices to back up your lack of navigation skills, a weather guru only an email away to help you figure out those good weather windows, radar to keep you safe from things that go bump in the night, and don’t forget the autopilot–hella nice for keeping you on track and minimizing fatigue. Also, an EPIRB should be considered a mandatory part of basic safety equipment.

So yeah. After spending hours and hours listening to all the horror stories about everything that can go lethally wrong on a sailboat between Ensenada and Puerto Vallarta, Steve and Eli got pretty well spooked. Can’t say as I blame them much because really, there’s nothing but a whole lot of desert for hundreds of miles most of the way. It’s not like skipping down the coast of California, where you can always find a safe harbor to pull into and little things like drinking water and fuel and food. Also, medical facilities are nearly always close at hand in California.

Instead of slipping our dock lines and triumphantly sailing on South, we sat in the pilot house talking over our options and a little bit freaking out all over the place. Steve and Eli were of the opinion that we maybe ought to miss this weather window and try again in a week or so; take a couple of day trips out to Todos Santos before we went for Turtle Bay. I was…pissed.

I mean, we’d come so far, both in miles and experience. When we first started out, it was tough. We had some undeniably rough passages right off the bat and it took the guys and Nala a while to get their sea legs. I guess, if we’re being honest, I always expected that my experience and comfort level out on the water would be enough to buoy them up. I kind of thought I could carry us a while and then they’d have logged enough miles to be comfortable out there. To look for that horizon and feel the same excitement, that visceral tug that pulls your soul inexorably toward the next port until you’ve got no choice but to follow.

It drives me nuts because Steve and Eli have gotten really freaking good at this stuff. I mean, we’re a hell of a crew out there—when things are great but also, more importantly, when everything takes a crap. Still, fear and doubt and anxiety worm around in their brains until that’s the only thing they see. They forget things like when we were coming into Newport and the gear shift cable broke, right as we were coming up to the Cop docks. I don’t think it took a more than half a minute to get Eli at the helm down below, Steve on the wheel outside and me in the middle relaying messages back and forth. We brought Landfall in like pros, like we trained for that exact failure so much that when it happened it was no big deal. Nobody watching had any idea the Morse cable had snapped. I was so proud. Because we hadn’t trained for that specific problem; we just reacted and it was awesome.

“I’m not spending the winter in Ensenada,” I said. They both looked at me like the crazy woman I am. “Yesterday you guys were ready to go. We are ready to go. The conditions are right. It’s time. What are you afraid of?” And that’s when all the stories poured out–the boats that broke, the vessels lost, people dead for no good reason—it just kept coming, washing over me like ice, like death, swirling around the cabin, higher and higher until I was sure it would drown this dream we have.

In the end, we decided to commit to going out to the nearby island of Todos Santos, and if things felt all right at that point, we’d keep going, otherwise we’d go back and wait some more. Maybe do some day sails. It was an achingly beautiful day, the wind just fresh and really no swell to speak of. We slipped away from the dock with no expectation of staying gone, but the farther we got from Cruiseport, the more relaxed everybody was and after an hour or so, we decided to just keep going. “Shut up,” Eli said, laughing, “Don’t even say you told me so!”