Life at Sea - Last Passage Along the Pacific Baja Coast

It's 5am again, I just came on watch and relieved a tired Allan, who gets the next 4 hours in the Sensory Deprivation Room. Our cabin is surprisingly quiet with all the hatches closed, and dark, with the hatch covers in place, so it's a great cocoon for sleeping.

Me, I get to see those stars again! I haven't seen this many stars from the Earth in decades! We had plenty of sky in my former job - and the stars are pretty awesome at 35,000 feet, but most of the time we had the lights on enough to keep us awake and to make star watching difficult. Occasionally, crossing the Atlantic, we'd catch a glimpse of aurora borealis, and turn all the lights down, get our chins right up on the dash, eyes close to the windows, and admire the show. But work duties beckon after a few minutes and it all goes back to business as usual. Out here on the ocean, with no cities anywhere nearby, the stars come almost all the way down to the horizon. I have to do double-takes on some that mimic approaching boats, but when they continue to rise I get confirmation - not a boat.

This passage has been good. The forecast promised good sailing wind the whole time, but we had to motor for the first few hours as it flopped and slapped the sails around. But since early afternoon we've had the sails up, including our gorgeous new screecher - a big, puffy thing that loves to take small amounts of air and turn them into speed. Right now, with just 10 knots of "apparent" wind and only the screecher out, the boat speed is a respectable six-and-a-half knots. (There are different kinds of wind: there's the virtual kind, or "apparent wind" - the kind you feel when you stick your head out a moving car window alongside the dog, and there's actual real-life wind, like when you're standing on a street corner and can't keep your hat on.) Occasionally we have both the big screecher and the diminutive, but solid jib sail out, either spooning each other or the jib pushed out to the other side to take advantage of a following wind. In any case, it's beautiful.

This boat makes a lot of crashing sounds. When we first experienced "hull slap" - a phenomenon associated with multi hulled boats where the water coming under the boat between the two hulls gets confused and tangled and forced up and into the floor of the main cabin, which stretches between the two hulls. Sometimes the slap is so hard, everything on the table jumps. In certain seas, this happens over and over again. In other seas, the water hits the hulls in different ways, there's whooshing at the sterns as we ride up and over a wave, or creaking in the rigging as the boat moves from side-to-side, or sometimes, like now, the wind catches the sail halyard just right and makes an eerie rhythmic sci-fi hum. It's a constant cacophony of thumps and bangs and slaps and shudders, and makes me wonder what we did to piss Neptune off to such a degree. Believe it or not, we get used to it. I can really see how someone in a similar boat might hit a refrigerator or a cargo container in the north Pacific and not really know it! (Yes, this happened, and I totally get it.) Allan deals with it by sometimes putting his Bose noise cancelling headphones on and disappearing into a movie. I deal with it by ignoring it, mostly. There's enough noise in my head to drown it out. But sometimes you hear a sound that's just a bit different and you run out to see if you've actually hit something. So far, so good.

At night, we keep the cabin lights low. We have a big battery-operated candle that glows on the cabin table, and a string of tiny lights wrapped around the ceiling that create a soft non-reflective ambiance. The chart plotter is dimmed way down, also the radio lights. We have red lights that illuminate the steps going into each hull, and a soft light in the galley. Since we mostly read on our electronic devices, this works great for us. I can go out and check the horizon every 10 or 15 minutes and not have to adjust my eyes, and overall, it's just a nice atmosphere. Now, I can see the eastern sky starting to glow, soon it will be day and I can switch all the mood lighting off.

During the day we're getting a bit of a passage routine going. We have meals at pretty regular times. We tend to snack a lot. We exercise, including doing about 45 minutes of yoga every other day. The yoga is fun, because a lot of the poses are one-legged poses. Doing that on a boat is a challenge, we have to make major modifications like holding onto a table but at the same time it develops all those teeny-tiny supportive muscles in the feet and legs, so it's an excellent challenge. We also have TRX straps that attach to a handhold in the cockpit roof. With those we can get some pretty good upper body work. So I'm feeling my Covid-induced slacker body getting stronger, which is good, because bathing suit weather is drawing near!

The weather warms with every tick south. We went from nights in the low 40's in Ensenada, with 5 blankets on the bed, to just a light bedspread, and I know that will fall by the wayside in another few hundred miles. We look at that collection of coats and hoodies and fuzzy jackets now and realize we have enough to fill the guest cabin. Pulling out the shorts and short-sleeved shirts feels great.

We get projects done: yesterday we re-purposed a stretched-out safety tether (the thing you attach to your life vest, and then to something on deck, so if you fall overboard you don't drift off into infinity, but rather get yanked alongside the boat trying not to ingest too much water until someone pulls you back up.) The old tether was converted into an anchor stretchy deal for Dinghy McDingface. There is a name for it, of course, but let's just say it's a thing that allows you to drop a little dinghy-sized anchor from the stern as you approach a dock or shore, continue forward toward that dock or shore, tie off a long line to it, get out, and then let the dinghy go - the stretchy thing, which you'd installed before you dropped the anchor, yanks the boat back out, away from the dock or shore, so it doesn't rub up against rough surfaces or put itself at risk. It's a neat trick, but we didn't have one on board. What we did have was a sail mending kit, the stretched-out tether, which has a really strong polyester woven casing with super-fantastic hooks on either end, and strong new elastic. Allan did the sewing - it was too much for my little sewing machine which made throw-up sounds every time I tried. So he got out the cool wooden-handled sewing thing that you use to fix heavy things like sails, read the directions, and got to it. He did a fabulous job and didn't make throw-up sounds, and now we have the slickest anchor stretcher thing!

Checking the engines before we left on this last leg, Allan found quite a bit of water behind the port engine compartment. Leaking rudder post? Other small hole in the boat? Then we had the presence of mind to taste it - not salty. Most likely the cockpit shower hose got knocked slightly on as it was stowed in the tight little compartment and leaked down into the compartment below. We checked it later and no more water, so we're not sinking.

We also did more stainless polishing on the rails, and continue to work on the white lifelines, which got pretty grimy in the boatyard. The boat is looking darnright spiffy, and we love these calm-water passages with smooth sailing to get things done. When the seas get rough, we don't do much but look at each other with exhasperated expressions and do a lot of grunting and sighing, which we did a lot of the last 6 hours, when the wind picked up and the seas got all messy and confused. But it was hard to complain - the boat was screaming along at 9+ knots! We got into Cabo a few hours earlier than planned. So this was a good passage, hull slap and sci-fi whining notwithstanding.