It serves me right for having waited almost a month before writing any of this down, but the sail to Turtle Bay is largely a blank for me. My strongest impression is of how well Dave and Mary and I got along.

Dave was a no-brainer for me in terms of crew choice. He and I were classmates in college, so have known each other for over forty years. Besides that, he's a really nice, really great guy with my sort of humor. He's an experienced sailor, though not offshore. He's a minimalist, at least he was when it came to packing his bag for the trip. Now, admittedly, I'd told him he needn't bring foulies, since I have some on board that fit him, but I think he only actually brought a couple of pairs of shorts and a couple of tee shirts and a toilet kit. Whatever, it all fit in one day pack.

Mary was more of a gamble, although my spidey-sense told me she'd be a good crew from the first time I'd met her. That was at a Ha-Ha-organized crew/captain meet-up in Alameda, an event I only serendipitously was there for. In search of cheap (i.e. free) moorage in San Francisco, I'd moved from Berkeley Marina to Oakland YC in Alameda. (Odd, I know. Who screwed up and put the Oakland Yacht Club in Alameda instead of across the channel in Oakland? Doh!) I found out about the event after I'd been at OYC a couple of days, went on a whim, and met Mary. How lucky was that? You can read more about her in a separate "Rogue's Gallery" post. In contrast to Dave, she arrived with a backpack, checked baggage, and a travel guitar.

According to a tidbit of wisdom I've recently acquired, I am now a fisherman. I've caught a fish, isn't that the only qualifier? More accurately, WE caught SOME fish. They'd had a few promo tables back at the captain/crew meet-up in Alameda, including people pitching Mexican marinas and Mexican liability insurance, and the authors of Charlie's Charts were there selling their Western Coast of Mexico edition. At the same time they were selling a hand-line fishing set-up consisting of a long nylon line that incorporated a bit of shock cord and what seemed like a ridiculously simple fishing lure, ...a torpedo of cedar with a nasty looking hook. That's it.

The shock cord introduces a loop of slack into the line that jerks taught and sets the hook when a fish hits the lure, but you wouldn't think that a fish would be attracted to the lure in the first place. I was guaranteed a bite, though, so I invested the $30 or so and took it back to the boat with me.

Whaddaya know, it DID work! We decided to try the rig somewhere south of the Coronado Islands and at first I wasn't impressed since we'd been trolling it boringly along at our cruising speed of 5-1/2 to 6 knots for a couple of hours. Mary just happened to look over at it and noticed the shock cord was stretched out to the limit of the slack line and excitedly commenced to hauling it in. At the end we found about a two foot yellowfin tuna!

Now what to do? Mary'd had some experience fishing with her father, so led the attack on the poor creature. I'd already assembled my fishing gear according to the rather entertaining instruction sheet that came with the hand line: a large plastic bucket, a length of small diameter rope, and a knife. Not at hand was the recommended bottle of cheap booze with which to anesthetize the fish, but I ended up sacrificing some of my Captain Morgan's spiced rum for the cause. The tuna was not particularly appreciative of my taste in liquor.

So, while Mary hoisted up our catch, I fought to maneuver a loop of rope over the flipping tail. We then inverted the fish and attempted to pour rum into its gills, wasting more than went in. Frankly, I didn't notice much effect, but it assuaged our guilt and allowed us to think we would be considered more humane than otherwise as we proceeded, according to instruction, to cut into the animal's main arteries and bleed it out in the bucket.

Our skill in this bleeding process left something to be desired as well. The bucket caught most of the blood, but several days later when we had the wherewithal to wash the boat down, we were scrubbing brown splatters off on the far side of the boat. Yech!

The other two of us leaned over the bucket in morbid fascination while I attempted not to make a butchery of cleaning the proud, golden fish. I won't get into the gruesome details here, but I was nominally successful and ended up with two nice filets, vacuum sealed and packed against the cold plate in the refrigerator. Two more were cooked on the barbecue with oil and lemon for dinner that evening. Muy delicioso!

There are a couple of other events that I'm now prompted to remember by the photos. First was the giant squid attack, which went unnoticed since they were only three inches long plopped silently on deck sometime during the night. Dave ate one the next morning to teach it a lesson and we were no longer bothered by such hideous beasts. The other was Mary's culinary feat of baking a chicken pot pie at sea. My FAVorite!

After around 240 sea miles, we staged our arrival in Bahia Tortuga in the dark. Making a cautious approach, we were baffled by what we saw ahead of us versus what we were told to expect by the charts and our preconception of what an isolated Mexican town should look like. Between fishing boats displaying an assortment of imaginative lighting arrangements and what I could only conclude were the tail lamps of vehicles moving ashore, we felt our way in. Wow, the town looked a lot bigger than we'd thought it would be, spreading over the entire northeastern expanse of the bay.

We wove through a field of anchored Ha-Ha-ers, working our was as close as we dared to what appeared to be the municipal pier, and dropped the anchor in the middle of a reasonable expanse of empty space. Though relatively uneventful, the trip had taken two long nights and two-and-a-half long days, so we were all ready to enjoy some uninterrupted hours that could be invested in sleep instead of watching the dark ocean go by from our spot at the helm.