The first night in Marina Vallarta, Pierre, Sylviane, Jody and I had to celebrate our arrival in Puerto Vallarta, so it was off to the local bar for mass quantities of margaritas.
The following evening we finished shooting the last scenes of the video. Our mail finally arrived, and that afternoon PANDAROSA arrived in the harbor, finishing their circumnavigation of the world.
We motored the 62 miles northwest to San Blas as there was no wind. This had been the case all the way up from Panama, and we still had 1,200 miles to go.
After a rolly night in San Blas we motored up to Isla Isabella. This is one of my favorite islands and, aside from being beautiful, it also has more birds than Bill Gates has dollars and that’s a lot. The film guys did some filming of the boobies and frigate birds that were nesting all over the island, and I got to play repairman on the boat.
It started when the windlass took a big poop. Without it we got to raise our anchor by hand. That’s about as much fun as skinning live rhinos. I repaired the electric cable with the help of Shawn and when we were finished it was a job Mickey Mouse would be proud of.
The heavy cable leading to the windlass was run from the batteries to the windlass. We traced it for about half an hour, trying to find where it was bad. Finally we traced it to a place under the holding tank. We didn’t have enough spare cable on board to replace the whole run, so we cut out a five-foot piece that was rotted, and crimped it in place using some copper tubing as electric fittings, and a pair of vice grips to crimp the ends. It worked!
Then, while tightening the fan belt on the alternator my hand slipped and water started to squirt out of the refrigeration systems heat exchanger.
Four hours later Shawn and I finished making a truly Rube Goldberg replacement for it, but it worked. Then the expansion valve in the reefer took a big poop.
A few hours later I had replaced the bad valve and recharged the system. It didn’t work well, but it worked enough to cool the beer.
We noticed the forward running lights were on, and the switch was off. I got to play follow the wire for the next few hours.
As we approached Mazatlan it was almost an anti-climax when the bilge pump stuck on, and we found that the relay switch had taken a large poop. It was soon bypassed and the excess amounts of water that flowed from our aging packing gland was once again pumped back into the sea where it belonged.
We arrived at the new Mazatlán marina and found a heaven for boaters. The first two days were free, and we were only staying three days.
While there we did a crew shuffle. We shipped Brian off to Arizona with a sore throat, threw Pierre and Sylviane forcibly onto a plane (it was freezing and raining in Brussels and they didn’t want to go!) and loaded Tom and Vicki, both from the South Bay area of South California, onto the boat.
The first night we went out for dinner with the whole gang. When they started to hand out the free poppers, Tom couldn’t say no. A popper is a double shot of tequila with a drop of Seven Up which is slammed on the table and forced down the throat of unsuspecting gringos. This is the way Mexico gets back at us for taking Texas.
By one a.m. “Fall Down” Tom had earned his nickname the hardway. He fell down in the disco, he fell down in the street, he fell down in the cab and had to be dragged down the dock onto the boat, where he fell down on deck and spent the night, half on and half off the aft storage box.
We woke him the next morning with John Phillip Sousa’s rendition of Stars and Stripes Forever at full blast on the outdoor speakers of the boat. When his eyes slammed open and he jerked upright to smack his head on the mizzen boom he was greeted with a fresh shot of tequila. The following day we took pity on him and let him sleep it off.
About midday, our new crewmember, Vicki, showed up. As it turns out this was a very auspicious day. A couple of years later Vicki would become the Associate Publisher on the Magazine Latitudes & Attitudes, which I started at the end of the voyage.
But first it was time to sail to Cabo. I mean we sailed to Cabo. Not motored like we’ve done most of the trip up from Panama. We actually put up those big white pieces of cloth and the wind filled them and we turned off the engine.
After a great sail of about 185 miles we pulled into Cabo San Lucas. Cabo is like our home away from home and we were busier than a Girl Scout leader whose troop had gone into a biker bar. We hung out Mike Grazenich’s Latitude 22 most of the time. He’s an old riding partner who now looks like Jerry Garcia, only Mike’s still living (we think!).We met some new folks during one of our nightly forays into the deep mists of Cabo’s nightlife, and spent our last day on the boat sitting around discussing the different way of life in Tulsa and Kansas City.
An old friend from Redondo showed up in the form of Lester the Molester, who was now living in Cabo, so we signed him on as additional crew, gave poor Vicki to Mike as a going away present, and once again, in the morning we headed north.
They call the trip up the Baja Peninsula the “Baja Bash” and there is a good reason for that. As we rounded the tip of the Baja we were hit right smack dab in the snout with 30 knots of wind and rough seas. We were slammed down like an unwanted stepchild to where we could only make about two knots, and for the next 36 hours we beat into winds that would make most boaters prefer the coal mines of central Pennsylvania as a way of life.
Unfortunately some four days later as we sat in the third anchorage in as many days, we watched the wind meter spin at about 25 to 30 knots and waited for a lull. Each day we would slam into the seas and winds like some demented scene out of the old Victory at Sea intro. Water over the bows became a way of life, and the salt spray coated the whole boat like a sugar cookie. Not only that, but the water got cold. The 90-degree waters of Panama became 80-degree waters in Mexico, but we could live with that. As soon as we rounded the tip of Cabo the water got colder than a well digger’s derrière. Like in the low 50s.
So here we were, getting beat to death with ice cold water splashing over us, making no speed at all, and burning fuel like it was free, and all this to get back to Redondo Beach. It would have been easier to go back to Tahiti.
After a week of bashing headlong into heavy seas and winds it started to subside as we got to within a hundred miles of San Diego. Even if we didn’t have a chart to tell us we were getting closer to the U.S., the idiotic chatter on the VHF radio could have told us. I think the height of dunderheadism was this anal retentive clod who came onto the VHF radio calling “Coast Guard! Coast Guard!” When both the San Diego and Long Beach Coast Guard stations came on the radio to help with the life and death struggle he was going through, he explained that he was having trouble with his cellular phone, and wanted them to help him make a call.
We stayed a last night anchored in the Coronado Islands just 14 miles from San Diego Bay. It seemed strange sitting there having dinner looking across at the multi-million lights of California.
Once in San Diego it was like old home week. As we tied up at the Kona Kai Club my friend of 20 years, Billy Jack, was waiting on the dock. He’d seen us come in. While we were saying hello, Marty Fogel, who’d lived across the dock from me in Redondo some 20 years ago, pulled in with his dinghy to say he saw us come in and had just moved down. As we were having breakfast the next morning we ran into Jack who was overseeing the rebuild of a 1930s schooner for our friend Ted. We’d met the two of them in Cabo four years ago, again in Cabo two years ago, and they had flown in from Vegas for my fiftieth birthday a few years back.
Later that day Karl, the marina manager from Puerto Vallarta showed up bringing us copies of a two-part article that was done about us when we were in Vallarta. It was almost like being home, yet we were still two weeks from our real homecoming in Redondo.
For the next two weeks we were busy as we tried to get our varnish back into shape and entertained a bunch of folks who came down from Los Angeles.
Every day someone would come down, or we’d bump into old cruising friends, and not once in the two weeks did Jody and I have an hour to ourselves. We did manage to get to the zoo and Sea World, but only because friend Neil kidnapped us.
While in San Diego Diesel Dan tried to get the generator running for us, but it was toast. After dumping over $7,000 into trying to keep it going, in the end it was as about as useless as ears to a punk rock drummer. He pulled it out and said he’d take it home and sell it to someone, sending us the money he’d get for it. We never saw or heard from him again.
All too fast it was time for us to head towards Redondo. We set sail just before dawn from San Diego and headed towards Catalina, where we have started and finished the last four voyages, at Twin Harbors. The 80-mile sail to Avalon Harbor was idyllic with a 10-knot breeze off our stern, and it was only through the strongest will power that we didn’t just set the auto-pilot a few degrees to the west, and head straight to Hawaii. Of course if we’d done that we wouldn’t be able to piss off all our friends at home, so we shrugged our shoulders, grinned at each other for a few minutes, and then sailed on to Catalina.
As we started to come into Avalon we decided we wanted our last days at sea to be a little less “citified” so we turned out of the city’s harbor and headed up-island to a little anchorage I knew around the other side of Long Point. Just as we were starting to drop our anchor we heard LOST SOUL being hailed on the VHF radio. It was Jill and Curt on NAMAHANA, and they’d come out to welcome us. Saying goodbye to our last night at sea alone, we kept the anchor on board and headed the last few miles into Twin Harbors. This is where we always start and stop our expeditions. When we picked up the mooring we could see the lights of Redondo Beach 24 miles across the Catalina channel. As NAMAHANA pulled in beside us I knew the trip was over. We were home.
In the previous five years Jody and I had sailed over 50,000 miles and visited 50 countries. We had anchored in over 300 different anchorages and stopped at 150 islands. In that time we had a dozen different crew people, 40 guests and used over 22 mechanics who spoke six languages other than English. We shot over 3,500 35 mm slides and 30 hours of video.
And after two days in civilization we realized we could never stay for long and started to plan our next adventure.
