Well after three months it's finally time to bid farewell to Ensenada. Most of the work is completed on the boat so at the end of this month (today week as I pen this) we back out of the slip (berth) and head back up to San Diego. We will spend a month in San Diego finalizing a few things on the boat, doing some provisioning (it will be great to buy food with instructions that we can read), catching up on good ol?? American hamburgers and hash browns before setting off south again in the Baja Ha Ha Rally at the end of October.
Ensenada and Baja Naval (the yard we stayed at to do the upgrade work on Volare) has been a great place to do the stuff we have done. The only problem has been that we have stayed about six weeks too long. Most of the big jobs were completed by the beginning of August so there hasn't been a lot to do since then. There is really no where to go, sailing wise, because there are no overnight anchorages in this part of the world. We could have headed south about 70 - 100 miles to explore (can't go further than that because it's hurricane season and we are hunkered down north of the hurricane belt - sort of like being in Brisbane during the summer when tropical north Queensland is subject to Cyclones), but then it's a serious bash to windward to get back up to Ensenada. During summer (which we are just coming to end of) the prevailing wind is 25 knots out of the North West, short steep seas and about 4 knots of southerly setting current. Boats returning from the winter cruising season on the Sea of Cortez and ports further south refer to coming back as the "Baja Bash”. You forget about sailing and just motor into it and consider yourself lucky if you make 1 or 2 knots across the bottom.
For those geographically and climatically challenged, this is why we head south at the end of October. In theory the hurricane season will be over (as winter approaches) and we'll get a downwind ride all the way to Cabo San Lucas. At last count there were nearly 200 boats entered in the Ha Ha which on world standards ranks right up there with the biggest cruising rally/race of its kind. The start coincides with the ?official” start of the Mexican cruising season (remember… no hurricanes after October) and most boats will spend the season in Mexico then do the Baja Bash back home in April/May before next hurricane season. Some, like us will be leaving from Puerto Vallarta to make the crossing to French Polynesia in March/April. The significance of this date is that by that time a big high pressure system (called the "North American High”) that sits over North America during summer moves south by then creating ideal North Easterly winds for the crossing of the Eastern Pacific north of the equator. These NE winds gradually get confused once we reach the Intertropical Convergence Zone (doldrums) about 3 ??" 5 degrees north and south of the equator and are replaced by South Easterly trade winds once we are south of the equator which will carry us onto French Polynesia.
Here endeth the climate lecture.
Ensenada has had its moments…. We?? ve met some great people, shared some very funny moments, got sick, got better, got dirty, got clean, learned a few words of Spanish and learned to walk around inside the boat at night without bumping into things.
One of the things you don't do in Mexico is drink the tap water. We learned the hard way. For the first two months we were filling our tanks from the hose and boiling the water before drinking it. Not good enough. Debbie came down with something that necessitated a trip to the doctor. She was sweating a lot and the doctor said "no problemo, you need muchus hormones” and proceeded to inject her with 100 somethings of Testosterone. Well I sometimes forget that she's only 5 feet nothing and isn't as strong as me when it comes to pulling on sheets (lines) but I don't think either of us wanted a Debbie Swartzeneger on the fore deck. The blood tests that were taken subsequently came back with a positive reading for a form of typhoid so now I had a muscle bound midget with some disease that we thought had gone out during the London plague. Fortunately a dose of drugs of questionable origin seemed to do the trick and within a week her symptoms seemed to have past.
Needless to say we no longer use the tap water except to wash the boat. We buy our water instead and it arrives in 5 gallon jugs and is supposed to have been purified. We haven't commissioned the water maker on the boat yet because the water here in the harbor is too dirty and oily. But as soon as we are out of here next week the water maker comes into action and we will be drinking water so pure we have to take a supplement of vitamins to replace the minerals we normally get from tap water.
There is a restaurant just outside the shipyard that is the unofficial ?Ensenada Yacht Club”. It's owned by an English lady who came here about twenty years ago on a cruise ship, got off to look around for the day, met a Mexican and married him (I don't believe it was on the same day but soon after). He was a chef and after some years they bought the current restaurant. Every Thursday night the expatriate community (mainly "yachtistas”) gather there because from 5:00 to 7:00 it's two for one drinks followed by free food. Whisper the word "free” to a yachtie and you'll be knocked over in the rush. Depending on whether we are drinking beer or Margaritas on the night, the whole exercise usually ends up costing 50 to 70 pesos (about US$5 - $7) so it's pretty good value. Debbie's new best friend is a lady we met there last week. She's from Melbourne, is in her late 60's and is a retired heart surgeon. She's had a few husbands and the last one was an American who died a few years ago leaving her, in her words: "filthy effing rich”. She owns two houses here in Mexico, has bought each of her children in Australia hotels, goes back to Australia every few months to see the kids and they come over twice a year and mum takes them to the Caribbean for a few weeks of diving. She's lived around Ensenada for 11 years and loved it. However, there's a bit of a crime wave happening here at the moment so she's selling up and thinking of moving to Belize.
The three marinas here in Ensenada a full of people (Americans mainly) who have come down here to stop over to do work on their boat of whatever and who have just stayed here. There's an old fellow on a boat across from us. His boat is completely covered in shade cloth and he disappears down there and surfaces once a day to go to the toilet. No one knows what he does down there all day but I think he's been there for about five years. There's a retired marine staff sergeant who's married to an ex marine nurse and they live aboard with three huge dogs. After walking the dogs in the morning you never see them because they spend all day downstairs watching DVDs. They've also been here for a few years. They are both heavy smokers and once we borrowed a few DVD's from them but we had to leave them out in the cockpit because they smelled so badly of cigarettes. We can't imagine what their boat is like downstairs ...it would be like one giant smoke encrusted fur ball. Then there's Ron who did four consecutive tours of Vietnam with the Special Forces. He's restoring an old wooden schooner and I think he still sees VC coming at him at night after he's had his few scotch and sodas to put him to sleep. Then we have Dave, a retired submariner who lives with a white poodle called "Gigante”. Dave's a great mate, and being an ex-submariner, knows his plumbing. He just keeps doing things to his boat and talks about going south but I doubt he'll ever do it. Debbie has her Friday Friends - a couple of girls we've met at a local restaurant. One of them lives with her husband on a ranch outside of Ensenada anf the other lives with her husband on a boat at Marina Coral (the posh marina four miles north of here). Every Friday they all go off somewhere together - to the wine country, to galleries or just shopping. Yesterday they spent most of the day at the pool and spa at Marina Coral.
And finally there's Jean - a singlehander from San Francisco who has spent 14 years sailing around the world. He spent time here getting his boat repainted before departing last week for the final stretch home to San Francisco. We became very good friends and shared some very good times together. It was a sad day when it came time to let go his mooring lines and see him back out knowing that perhaps we'll never see him again.
This cruising lifestyle is wonderful in that the people you meet along the way have such diverse interests and world experiences. The downside is that most often there comes a time when you need to say farewell.
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Comments [2]
20/08/2006, Ensenada
With sirens blaring, first two police cars arrived on the scene. Then the Paramedics turned up ??" also with sirens blaring. Then if that wasn?? t embarrassing enough, the Fire Brigade arrived with siren blaring and a horn that sounded like a freight train. All of them driving down the wrong side of Route 66 to get to the scene of ?the emergency”. This must have been the biggest thing to happen in Barstow for quite some time. After all this I was starting to wonder when the team from CSI was going to turn up.
Having set the scene, I?? ll back up a bit.
Deb and I decided after a few months of pretty constant work on the boat, we deserved a holiday so we took off to San Diego and rented an Avis car with the intention of doing a big anti-clockwise loop through California over a three week period.
We picked up the car at lunchtime on Monday July 31st and headed east on Interstate 15 towards Las Vegas. We stopped around 5PM at a little whistle stop town in the desert called Barstow (literally a whistle stop ??" its only reason for being is the intersection of two railway lines. It was straight out of ??~Thelma and Louise?? ). It just so happens that the main road in Barstow is Route 66. We checked into a motel and went out to hit the town (no pun intended). Driving up Route 66 we stopped at a shopping mall to buy something (I forget what) and driving out of the car park I needed to go left to head towards somewhere else we wanted to go. After driving on the left hand side of the road for 40 years, in a split second I let habit take control and looked to my right to make a left hand turn. This is something you definitely don?? t do when driving on the right hand side of the road. BAMMMMM!!!!!! We were sideswiped by Consuella from Mexico coming up Route 66 at a great rate of knots.
That?? s when all the action in para 1 started. No one was hurt and in fact apart from leaving our front fender, head light and number plate scattered across Route 66, both cars suffered minimal damage (one of the policeman did need to cut Consuella out of her airbag). After the dust settled and pleasances exchanged I went to the supermarket we had just exited and bought a roll of gaffer tape and sticky taped the front of the car up and drove back to the motel. Needless to say the Paramedics and Fire Department were redundant. The next morning we drove into the local Avis office and drove out with an upgraded car AND a full tank of gas and got on our merry way without further incident. That God for insurance.
We spent three amazing days at Vegas, visited all the hotels and saw three shows. ??~Zumaniti?? by Cirque to Soleil was incredible. ??~La Femme?? (a take off of the Crazy Horse from Paris) was boring (Greg) not so for Debbie and ??~Viva Las Vegas?? was downright terrible (mind you it was free and it was at 4:00PM in the afternoon so what do you expect?). It continued to amaze us for the three days that the whole place was built in the middle of a desert and now features some of the most elaborate hotels the world has seen.
On leaving Vegas we headed NE, then across though Death Valley on the way to Yosemite National Park. We were lucky because they were having a cold snap in death valley. At the base of the valley it was only 107F. It?? s usually in the high 130?? s this time of the year! After surviving Death Valley we drove north with the Sierra Nevada mountain range off to port. Believe it of not, there was snow on the mountains and were driving in 90F. We spent the night in Bishop before heading the next day to Yosemite. I remember clearly studying glaciers in high school and looking at photos of Yosemite Valley. Today it is still exactly like that old text book. Debbie cooled her feet in the pool at the bottom of Yosemite Falls and we picknicked on a rock beside the icy running water of the Yosemite River. The water was icy ??" although it was in the mid 70?? s at some points on the drive in to the Park we were above the snow line.
Continuing on from Yosemite, we spent a night in an historic old gold mining town called Sonora before driving into Sacramento the next stay to catch up with good American friends. We met Keith and Susan in Australia last Xmas. They?? re slowly circumnavigating the world in a Catalina 470 and they were home in the States taking a (hopefully) short break. We spent a couple of nights with Keith and Susan then drove to Lake Tahoe for two days before returning for another night with Keith and Susan and then driving into San Francisco. It was great to catch up with my aunt and cousin there (I flew to San Francisco for the weekend to attend my cousin?? s wedding 36 years ago. Needless to say I used to work for Qantas and could travel free). We stayed at cousin Sharon?? s house that night and it was sweet to see the wedding present I gave her still hanging on the wall.
Next day we drove down the coast highway to Monterey and lunched in the same restaurant on Fisherman?? s Wharf we lunched at on our honeymoon in 1971 and again when we took Mia to Monterey a number of years ago. The food was just as bad now as it was then but it was the thought that counted. An afternoon wandering around the streets and shops of Carmel topped off our walk down memory lane.
The following day we drove to San Simeon and spent the day at Hearst Castle, which we both agree was probably one of the major highlights of the trip. Unbelievably spectacular. He didn?? t start building it until he was 56 years old and during the main building period he was spending a million dollars a day on construction. No wonder the SLA kidnapped granddaughter Patty to try and make a buck.
After over-nighting at Santa Maria we drove into Los Angeles the next day and after a brief stop at Catalina Yachts we checked into the Travelodge just off Sunset Blvd. Hollywood. After the very dubious place we stayed in the night before, the Travelodge felt like Hearst Castle. We took a tour of the star?? s houses and caught up on all the gossip that afternoon and the next day was spent at Universal Studios.
Finally, last Wednesday (August 16th) we drove down to San Diego, bought some wine casks, pickles, mustard and other necessities that can?? t be got in Mexico, spent the night, then more shopping at West Marine on Thursday before dropping the car off at Avis (this time unscathed) and rendezvousing with a friend who drove us back to Ensenada on Thursday night with twice the baggage we left San Diego with just under three weeks before.
There?? s only one more major job to be done on the boat then we sail back up to San Diego at the beginning of October in preparation for the Baja Ha Ha rally at the end of that month.
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13/07/2006, Ensenada
Well, time certainly does fly, we've been in Ensenada a month now and I must say my Spanish hasn't got any better. As we're in a seaside port with lots and lots of visitors we manage very well.
"Hola" - hello - that's an easy one, everyone says it and Santiago, the really nice afternoon Marina Manager just came past reminded me of that one. Many words are the same as French and Italian, so it makes understanding a few things better.
Our floating home is now high and dry - don't be concerned, I don't mean high on a reef. We were hauled out today and we're in the shipyard now, so hopefully it will only take about 3 days but then again, that's Mexican days. At least I get to eat out quite a bit, the main reason being we can't use the water drains etc… whilst we're on the hard. At least the bathrooms are close, marble and very clean.
This week has been pretty eventful. On Monday we made another trip to San Diego for more boat shopping; didn't stay over this time. One of the friendly Yachties drove us up but coming back to Mexico was a different story. The way NOT to cross the border!!!! All was going smoothly; we caught the Trolley bus at San Diego's Old Town at 3.30pm which takes you to the border. We boarded the bus to take us over the border. We walked the first time with bags of shopping, so this time we thought we'd do it the easy "Gringo” way. We got to the terminal in Tijuana, all still going fine. As it was about an hour and a half before the bus, we roamed the fascinating streets of Tijuana and of course realised then it was Happy Hour. Most places here seem to have 2 for 1 drinks at Happy Hour. So a couple of Marguerites and Tacos later we boarded the bus for Ensenada only to find ourselves crossing the border once again into the US. They'd put us on the wrong bus and it was the last bus of the day. Although we didn't feel calm at the time, Greg was very persuasive as they didn't initially feel it was their fault. Fortunately, after another bus trip to yet another terminal he spoke to the boss who organised a refund and drove us across the border again to another bus company. Finally at 10pm we arrived backed in Ensenada, a couple of hours later than planned.
The main reason for wanting to get back was that I had volunteered Greg's help with our dinghy to a New Zealander who needed a tow. John and Trisha had been sailing their yacht around Mexico, Cuba and other places for three years without an engine. They had bought the boat for a very good price in the States knowing the engine was a bit dicky. When it finally failed and couldn't be repaired, they just decided not to put another engine in. So Greg's job, with my help was to pull him out of the marina and over the bay to the ship, Dockwise Super Servant 3. It was great because he could leave the mast up on the boat and we just manoeuvred it in. It was like a big dry dock, they submerge the back end of the boat, you motor your boat in, then when all the boats are in they let out the water. The fascinating part was as we were coming in, the galleon that was used in "Pirates of the Caribbean” was coming out. They manoeuvred this giant vessel out with a hand controlled remote device, a perfect job. Our job done we dinghied back to "Volare” and John came over with a very nice bottle of Hardy's Shiraz for our troubles.
Next morning, we were just sitting on the boat, as you do and there was a knock, knock on the hull. An Aussie was walking along the boardwalk and spotted our Australia flag, he just couldn't resist, and had to make a visit. His name is Kiwi White and he's a Tuna Spotter and Diver from Port Lincoln in SA, working here in Mexico. So we spent a very enjoyable hour or two over a good cuppa learning all about the massive Tuna Industry, extremely interesting. He had spent time in Japan and of course couldn't believe that we'd been to the massive fish market in Tokyo.
It's time to close, after having a morning picking up my newly framed family collage of family shots. I chose a typical Mexican frame, carved in Pewter with little blue tiles around the border with the little Mexican yellow sun on each tile. Now we can lie in bed and look at the family each morning and think of them as we start are day.
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