Author: Dennis Rae Maggard

There’s a poet in me.  He loves romantic beginnings.  He wants to know the history of every place he visits.  He wants to invent a history of La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, the fishing village on the northwest shore of Banderas Bay on the Mexican Pacific.

In my invention, the village has been there for 700 years.  The Huichol are there tending their nets on the beach while their women hack away in their small fields of mais along the arroyo before the green mountains begin their ascent.  A young man rests in the heat of the day beneath the ageless huanacaxtle trees in the center of the village.  Daydreaming about wrestling matches with the other boys in the village, he is restless.  He is small for his age, so in his reveries he imagines he is bigger and stronger.  The largest boy in the village bullies him at will, but not today.  In this daydream he leaps deftly to one side as the bully rushes him, tripping the bigger boy and pinning him to the ground.

There is talk in the village of Cortez.  He marches with 100 men in protective skins of sky iron.  They ride on mythical long-haired beasts with four legs like dogs but much greater.  They take what they desire.

Beneath the huanacaxtle tree there is a stirring of leaves and a dog barks madly.  It is Cortez.  The boy does not have time to think.  He hefts his fishing pike as the Spaniard jumps from the great dog beast and pulls a sword from a scabbard studded with gold sequins.  The boy leaps to one side, tripping the man, then runs his pike through his chest and pins him to the huanacaxtle tree.  The arms of the dead man are spread in a cross like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and forever the village is known as The Cross of the Huanacaxtle.

But it didn’t happen like that.  The history of La Cruz is much more recent.  It became a fishing village in the 1930’s. Only a couple of decades before sleepy Puerto Vallarta was discovered by Richard Burton and Ava Gardner in The Nght of the Iguana.  In those years there was a large cross under a big huanacaxtle tree near the waterfront.  Simply a cross, with no obvious purpose, and that became the name for the town.

The first thing we saw as we sailed into the La Cruz anchorage were two humpback whales, actually swimming through the anchorage.  In thirty-five feet of water and in between the anchored sailboats, these gentle creatures showed first their dorsal fins and then their silent flukes as they sounded beneath the surface.  We never saw them come back up.

We launched the kayak in the smooth anchorage to paddle into town.  “Hey, Pamela!”  we heard as we passed Adios, a boat we knew from La Paz.  “Are you racing in the Banderas Blast?  We need crew.”  And so we were recruited as hired guns to race with Craig and Jane the following couple of days.  When you’re out cruising, you never really know what you’re going to do tomorrow or the following day.  The days have a way of unfolding themselves.

We tied up the kayak in the marina and followed the walkway into town.  The first thing we saw as we walked into the village was the huge huanacaxtle trees in the square by the waterfront.  There was a local music festival going on and all the town was sitting under the ancient trees.

In the town we ran into Larry who we’d also met in La Paz.  Larry, Joe, and I had jammed on Rapscullion with Pamela Bendall who had just published her book, What Was I Thinking?, recounting her adventures as a solo sailor down the coast of North, Central, and South America.

“I’m going to introduce you to the musicians in town,” Larry announced.  “This is Russ.  He plays harmonica.  And this is Stevie the bass player, and Bobbie plays acoustic blues guitar, and Chuck over there plays electric guitar.“

Larry told me all about the La Cruz music scene.  “There’s a blues jam at Philo’s on Monday night, another jam at the British Club on Tuesdays, good Flamenco on Friday at the Black Forest, and always something going on at Octopus’ Garden.  Hey!  Hear that?  That sounds like a rock band at Ana Bananas.  Wanna check it out?”

“What?  Down that dark street there?  Is it okay to walk down there at night?”

“Certainly,” said Larry and off we paced along the dark cobblestoned path of a street that revealed a lavanderia and a tortilleria by day.

During the following day’s race on Banderas Bay we came in second place and met Dick who’s lived in La Cruz for a number of years.  He was in his seventies, had run a bed & breakfast in the nearby surfing town of Sayulita, and now was retired and living just up the street from the tortilleria.  He gave us instructions for using the local bus system.  We needed to figure out how to get to the airport to pick up our boys who were to spend their college break with us.

“Now, to get back to La Cruz from the airport you have to walk across the bridge over the highway,” Dick advised.  “The taxis at the airport have to pay a tax, so it’s lots cheaper taking a taxi or a bus on the other side of the highway.  Now, there’s a marlin taco shop on the other side of the bridge near where you catch the bus.  Best tacos anywhere, with real smoked marlin.  Now, they don’t sell beer at the marlin taco shop so you have to go down just past the bus stop to get a couple bottles of beer at the little tienda.  Coldest beers anywhere.  Now, you get your bottles of beer at the tienda then take them back to the marlin taco shop, and they have a deposito at the marlin taco shop so they pick up the empty bottles there.”

“Uh … OK.”  Why was Dick telling me all these details about a taco stand?  What could I possibly do with all this mundane information and how could I possibly remember it?

It turned out that in the next four weeks we made six different trips to the airport to pick up and drop off the boys and flying to and from Oaxaca.  We followed Dick’s detailed instructions to the letter and got marlin tacos and cold beer with every airport run.  I found myself repeating Dick’s instructions later to various cruising friends who were coming in and out of the airport for the holidays, each time watching their expressions as I repeated the details.

When the boys arrived we sailed to Nueva Vallarta and Paradise Village.  It was as if we were magically back in the USA.  There was a Starbucks coffee shop by the bus stop, a Subway sandwich shop by the mall, and plenty of prosperous gringos beside the pool or arranged in neat rows along the beach.

“You guys are not Paradise Village people,” one of the cruisers in the Baja Ha-Ha had told us.  “Go to La Cruz.  La Cruz is real.”  What could he mean by that?

We spent Christmas Eve at Punta de Mita at the head of Banderas Bay, then Christmas Day at Islas Tres Marietas, a marine sanctuary, climbing on rocks and snorkeling along the reefs.  In the late 1960’s, Jacques Cousteau  led an international outcry to prevent the Mexican government from bombing these uninhabited islands.

Pam and the boys gave me a GoPro video recorder for Christmas.  The boys threw handfuls of pretzels over the side of the boat and made underwater movies of hundreds of pretzel-eating fish.  They were jumping off the sides of the boat and filming underwater explosions when Joe arrived on Cygnus.

“I’ll just swim over and say hello,” he said as he dove into the blue water and swam up to Pamela’s swim ladder.

“Watch out for the explosions,” I warned.

We sat on the deck in the late afternoon sun as the boys made their movies and Joe told us more about the La Cruz music scene.  That evening we sailed back to La Cruz.  Pushed by light westerly winds we glided past humpback whales, then anchored at La Cruz listening to dolphins splashing beside the boat and exhaling loudly in the calm waters.

For New Year’s we wandered the streets of La Cruz in the rain looking for entertainment for the boys.  At Octopus’ Garden we had dinner with Robin and Mark from Mintaka, who we promised to sail to Polynesia with.  Just before midnight our waiter brought us each a dozen grapes.  He beamed as he set the bowls of grapes in front of us.

“You take these grapes,” Robin explained, “and you put the first one in your mouth twelve minutes before New Year’s.  Each minute you put another grape in your mouth.”

“You do what?” I asked.

“Yhuh hmput fmuggen” explained Pam with five grapes in her mouth.  “It’s a Mexican tradition.  At midnight with all twelve grapes in your mouth you make a wish, then you swallow the grapes.”  At about six minutes to midnight my mouth was so full of grapes that my eyes bulged as I tried to breath and make more wishes.

Ten days later, after touring the Oaxacan countryside in the pursuit of mole negra and artesian tapestries, the extensive ruins of ancient Monte Alban,  and the seaside villages of Puerto Escondido and San Augustillo, we found ourselves once again in La Cruz.  The town was starting to grow on me.

“¿Pamela, si?” confirmed the señorita at the lavanderia who washed the Oaxacan dust out of our clothes.  After taking our laundry once before to this corner laundromat the young lady remembered the name of our boat.  I was beginning to feel at home in La Cruz.

So what is it about La Cruz that is so appealing?  It’s not a romantic fishing village.  Rather, its tiny network of streets are dusty in the heat of the day and muddy after a rain.  Many are cobblestoned, but with potholes and mud puddles.  The buildings are somewhat dilapidated and run-down.

I think its a combination of many small things that keeps bringing us back to La Cruz.  A wonderful market of organic greens on Sunday morning.  A fabulous fish market filled with dorado, tuna, and shrimp.  A funky shack by the main road selling grilled chicken on skewers over a fire.

And a brand new marina with lots of space, water, fuel, and wi-fi.  Plus, a good anchorage, seldom rolly, and capable of sheltering dozens of boats.

Not least, its where we continue to meet all our cruising friends as they make their way down from Cabo, the Sea of Cortez, and Mazatlán.  Everyone stops in La Cruz for a while, and the evenings we’ve spent having dinners and drinks on our boats, or listening to blues bands playing the funky bars in town, or simply enjoying tacos in the streets of La Cruz, have all been magical.

But what is the final thing about La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, that elusive ingredient that other towns do not have?  Its the old huanacaxtle trees.  Their trunks are easily ten feet in diameter.  Their canopy tops provide shade for the entire village square.  The curve of their expansive branches is as graceful as the arc of a gothic cathedral’s flying buttresses.

In the coming years La Cruz will “grow up”.  The ever-expanding pace of development that spawned from The Night of the Iguana will eventually make its way around the entire Bahia de Banderas and condominiums will one day consume La Cruz.  The laws of supply and demand, the growing middle class of Mexico, and sun-hungry Norte Americanos will conspire to turn the friendly fishing village into a bustling urban center like Puerto Vallarta.

But the huanacaxtle trees in the village square are destined to remain forever protected because the name of the town makes it so.  The cross is gone, but the trees remain.  And while the town named after these trees may not have a romantic past, the huanacaxtle trees will inspire its romantic future.

Music blasting from all quarters is a common treat in many of the Mexican towns we’ve visited on sailing vessel Pamela.  It’s sometimes used as a way to attract shoppers into a store, with huge black speakers placed on the walkway in front of the store thumping loud enough to crumple the concrete sidewalk.  I pass by these storefronts walking fast as I can with fingers stuffed into both ears, wondering if this is karma payback for the times when I played seared-ahi electric guitar solos so loud that the band’s bass player had to hide behind his amp stack.

Mazatlán is no different, particularly the large mercado area where the local bus drops you off on your way into town.  Here the hundreds of vendors compete to attract shoppers for sunglasses, T-shirts, chicken feet, pig heads, you name it.  In the din of a swelling cacophonous rancor they tempt you with “HOLA AMIGO!” and wide smiles as they gesture grandly toward their rack of T-shirts.

But walking two blocks out of the mercado area you enter Old Mazatlán.  You notice the colonial buildings and the small tree-lined streets.  You see fewer people walking these streets, especially compared to the busy mercado a couple of blocks away.  But most of all you realize that you can hear again.

And what an aural feast as you make your way further into the old town!  There is classical piano coming from around the corner.  Then a jazz trumpeter, very good, playing mixolydian and phrygian scales.  Down another street you hear an operatic soprano.  Where do they get these records from, you wonder aloud.

And then you begin to realize what is actually happening:  classically trained music students, cloistered in their studios, are practicing their art in the heat of the day.  These are real people playing real instruments, and playing them very well.

The blaring speakers in the shops of the mercado seem like another dimension in time and space.  Another universe altogether.  An assault on the senses that must be endured like a kind of gauntlet before the traveller is allowed to experience the Eden of the classical old town.

On another level, the art studios of Old Mazatlán beckon.  There are two dozen or more that participate each month in a Friday Art Walk.  Some of them are galleries showing beautiful renderings from the area’s many painters and sculptors.  Some are the studios of the artists themselves, where you can admire the work as you meet the actual hands that produced it.  These artists seem like real, everyday people, you whisper to yourself.  Common people like you and me, yet with the indomitable determination to practice their passion day after day.

Some of the galleries are restaurants and bars.  We wandered into one called Delirium on Calle Sixto Osuna, with a half dozen rooms to stroll through to view paintings or sit to have dinner.  In a room that opened out to the street sat a young man working on a laptop while an iPad wired to the house speaker system played a documentary about Mexican artists.

The music from the documentary was tasteful and interesting.  The images from the video drew my attention further and soon I was absorbed.  There were young men with acoustic guitars, groups of singers in a cappela choruses, an elder rocker singing passionately into a microphone as he stabbed at his electric guitar.  I was transfixed.  Any kind of documentary about real musicians telling their true story always draws my full attention.  The feeling from my gut is visceral.  It inspires me.  It tells me to go pick up my guitar and express something true.

“Muy interessante,” I said to the young man in the corner.

“Yes, it is,” he replied.

Pam arrived from the adjacent room with two glasses of red wine.  “You should see this painting over here,” she beckoned.  “Look at these colors!”

A young woman with Italianate features chatted with us as we strolled through the adjoining room.  The young man in the corner, smiling and speaking educated English very rich in vocabulary, told us more about the studio.  He introduced himself as Juan Pablo, and told us he had recently built Delirium with the young woman, who introduced herself as Ana Paola Osuna Corona.  Juan Pablo Sanchez King y Ana Paola Osuna Corona y Delirium a Sixto Osuna.  The poetic syllables and the red wine made my head swim.

We sat in the room that opened out to the street and sipped our wine as we told our respective stories.  Juan Pablo and Ana Paola were taking a break from an online media career and starting an artistic venture in Old Mazatlán, while we were taking a break from Silicon Valley and sailing our boat across the South Pacific.  We ordered more wine and continued the conversation, captivated by their enthusiasm and love of life.

“Will you have dinner?” asked Juan Pablo.

“Certainly,” we replied.  We had planned to visit a well-regarded restaurant called Topolo a few blocks away, but that could wait until tomorrow.  “What do you have?”

“Tacos,” announced Juan Pablo.

I waited for Pam to blanche, which she did a half a moment later.

I’m okay with tacos.  They’re simple and soulful.  I could eat them everyday  and then have my tomb stuffed with them to lead me triumphantly into the afterlife.  Not so with Pam.  Having lived in the French quarter of Switzerland, she’s been spoiled by sauce bearnaise and Gruyère cheese.  You will never find either of these on a taco.  You can live longer than Methusula’s 969 years, and tack on 31 more to complete the epoch, and still you will not find Gruyère cheese on a taco in Mexico.

Ana Paola brought the tacos to our table.  There were wonderful.  They had exotic names.  The one called Zen had shrimp, local chiles, and Gruyère cheese.

“Gruyère cheese!” I exclaimed.  Juan Pablo grinned.

The Angelópolis featured portobello mushroom and mole poblano artesanal, foreshadowing the delights we would experience later in Oaxaca.  The Vegano included pesto.  The Sorpresa was mysteriously presented with no explanation at all (“no te diremos que tiene sólo que está delicioso”).

We walked out into the warm evening feeling satisfied and satiated, then caught a pulmonia, a three-wheeled motor-cart, back to Marina Mazatlán at the far edge of town.

A few days later we were back in Old Mazatlán.  There were still a few galleries that Pam needed to track down.  Besides, we had discovered a cafe with wonderful cappuccino, which justified the rollicking pulmonia ride into town.  I turned a corner to hear a piano recital hidden within monastic walls, then gazed into the window of a gallery restaurant to see Juan Pablo beaming at me.

“Hello!” he grinned.  “Come meet my friend from Germany!  We’re working on a project.”

Juan Pablo’s friend from Germany was a professional photographer.  He showed us a photo of a brown paper bag placed flat on a table with something scrawled on it.  I squinted at the image.

“What do you think it is?” asked Juan Pablo.  His friend from Germany began videotaping our reaction.

“Well … it looks like a Tree of Life,” I ventured.  “There is a canopy here, with ants climbing up the trunk.”

The videocamera flashed a red dot every half-second.  This was real-life being captured real-time.  I couldn’t respond with a silly obscure quip.  I had to think about it.

“There is another Tree here,” I motioned to the other side of the drawing.  “This one seems to be the mirror image of the other, or maybe the roots.  One is moving up to the heavens while the other is grounding itself with the Earth.”  I was on a roll.  “The ants here are moving up the tree in groups of two, while the ants in the Tree above are moving in triplets.”  I waited for a knowing nod from Juan Pablo.  He stared at me while his friend from Germany recorded everything.

“What do you see, Pamela?”

Pam’s view was more anthroposophical.  “There is a balance here represented by the separate sides of the tree.  And yet there is also the symbol of an onion, suggesting the idea of multiple layers.  Layers often represent the many levels of consciousness.”  Juan Pablo was spellbound.

“So … what is it?” I asked him.

“My friend and I are starting a new project,” he explained.  “We sat down at a table with this piece of paper and began drawing, each on our own half without looking at what the other was doing.  After a few minutes we turned the sheet of paper around and started marking on the drawing of the other.”

“You didn’t know what each was drawing?” I asked.

“Not until we turned the sheet.”

“And the ants moving into self-actualization?” I queried.

“Ants?” responded Juan Pablo.  There went my theory of triplets.

“So what does it mean?” I persisted.

“Not sure.  But we thought that before we start this project we should collect our ideas in abstract form and then superimpose one upon the other into a formulaic blend.”  Meanwhile the friend from Germany, a true professional, faithfully captured the entire encounter without blinking.

I felt encapsulated in art in motion.  At the vortex of fact and fancy, enterprise and indulgence, forward thinking and quiet mind.

We waved goodbye to Juan Pablo and his friend from Germany, then ventured further down the colonial street to find the elusive cappuccino.

A couple of weeks later an email arrived from Juan Pablo and Ana Paola.  When our voyage is done will we come back to Old Mazatlán to present our experience in the Delirium gallery?  “You can show your photos, and parts from your boat,” Juan Pablo encouraged us.  I imagined a multimedia presentation with acoustic guitar followed by a reading of my prose, illustrated by Pam’s watercolors, and with a worn impeller and corroded sacrificial zincs nailed to a board on the wall.

I rubbed my chin and thought hard about this idea and began to warm to it.  Our worldwide debut, our sailing adventure expressed as a multimedia art exhibit in Old Mazatlán, with the colonial streets alive with strains of chamber music and modern jazz echoing from hidden courtyards.

Such inventiveness!  Juan Pablo’s creative mind innovating new experiences with the freshness and tang of poblano.

But who would come all the way to Mazatlán to see the exhibit?

Everyone!  And Juan Pablo Sanchez King and Ana Paola Osuna Corona.

It will be the art event of the decade that you will surely not want to miss.

Happy New Year from s/v Pamela in Banderas Bay, Mexico!  In this video update we depart San Francisco and sail down the California coast to San Diego to join 160 other boats in the 20th annual Baja Ha-Ha rally to Cabo San Lucas.

At 11:00 a.m. the sun was starting to get hot and the shade of the Dockside cafe looked pretty good.  A cold drink was in order.  I heard English spoken in the corner at a table overlooking the little harbor.

The two men were indistinguishable from each other, both in their mid-sixties, portly and bearded, with gray pony tails, khaki cargo shorts, and Hawaiian shirts.  The woman sitting with them was similar, minus the beard.

“I’m gonna have me one more beer then go have my afternoon nap,” announced one of the men.  “That’s what I’m gonna do today.”  His face brightened into a broad grin about the day’s plan.

“I’ll do the same,” said the other man.

They laughed heartily for a moment, then paused as a dinghy with a small noisy outboard motor put-putted out of the harbor.

“Two stroke,” said the woman.

They say there’s tar at the bottom of the anchorage in La Paz, Mexico, and if you try to raise your anchor the tar holds you fast.  The bottom is actually sand, good holding, with a tidal current that swings your boat in a circle twice each day.  There are lots of boats in the free anchorage, and they swing independently through the current in a movement called “the La Paz waltz.”

There are beautiful old-style yawls and sleek modern Beneteaus sharing the anchorage with derelict dismasted boats that have turned into barnacle-encrusted havens for pelicans.  The pelicans are quiet and stately, albeit numerous, and deserve a peaceful place to rest, so the derelict boats serve as an ornithological sanctuary.  Or an eyesore.  The anchorage is well protected in a long estuary.  It’s a convenient place to set your anchor for a while, maybe years, making the easy trip to the dinghy dock the primary event of the morning.

The primary event of the evening, of course, is bringing in the dinghy for a trip to Rancho Viejo for arachera, a high grade of carne asada, tucked into a taco de mais and smothered with chili peppers, accompanied by an ice-cold Negra Modela.

It was time for a pause.  We had sailed nearly 1000 miles down the Baja peninsula, around the cape, and up into the Sea of Cortez.  We  had endured four days tied up to a pier in Cabo San Lucus, where, because of my shaggy hair and scraggly beard I’d been offered every kind of illicit drug by the various street merchants pretending to sell Cuban cigars.

“Hola, amigo.  Pssst … I got it!”

“Got what?”

“I got it.”  Wink wink.  He deftly turned the cigar box over to reveal what was hidden on the other side.  He definitely had it.

“Pam, he’s got it.”

“What?  Got what?”

“Should we get some?”

“What are you talking about?”

Pam was oblivious to the street offers happening with regular frequency on either side as we strolled along the wharf.

We sailed into La Paz with about fifteen other boats that we recognized from the Baja Ha-Ha.  Mintaka, Maluhia, Celebration, Betty Jane, Tillie, Cygnus, Ariel 4, some in the marina, some anchored out.

“What are your plans?” I asked everyone.

“No plans at the moment,” was a common reply.

“We’re going to sail out to Espiritu Santo and Isla Partida, probably anchor in Caleta de Partida to tuck in against the swell from the southwest, then tack up to San Francisco, San Jose, hopefully as far as Agua Verde before we have to turn around.”

“Oh.”

Maybe I was over-thinking it.  Everyone was ready for a good long pause but I was still making travel plans.

Our few days in La Paz were not much of a pause.  I was still in “get it done” mode.  I had the propane topped up and the zinc replaced on the end of the propeller.  We spent a half a day at the TelCel store to get our Banda Ancha 3G device to plug into the Mac — this would provide internet while in proximity of any town with a cell tower.  We roamed the streets for fresh produce and discovered the side street where the local organic farmers sell fresh lettuce, basil, and cilantro.  Our efforts to find a good cappuccino had paid off.  Now it was time to move on and see the Sea of Cortez.

We rode a southerly up to San Evaristo, a tiny fishing village about 60 miles north of La Paz on a crescent of sand surrounded by tall mountains.  Then the grand tour was interrupted by a northerly blowing gusts up to 30 knots down the Sea.  Back in San Francisco Bay, a day sail with 30 knots is somewhat common.  But going north up the Sea banging into waves and wind that high is a big deal, and the advice from sonrisanet, a Ham radio frequency with regular forecasts for the Sea of Cortez, was to find a protected anchorage to sit out the three-day blow.

We met Walter on the beach at San Evaristo and he helped us buy a fish.

“La pescadero es se vender?” I queried a fisherman who was cutting up a fish under a palm frond shelter.  My Spanish is bad and getting worse.  I was asking the fisherman whether he was putting himself up for sale.

Walter intervened, explaining that these fish belonged to someone else and the fish-cleaning crew were actually hired to clean the fish.  The fish were to be taken to La Paz and sold.

“They brought in a nice halibut this afternoon.  I would hold out for the halibut,” Walter advised.  He was the spitting image of an elderly David Crosby (of Crosby, Stills, and Nash) with a Crosby-esque mischievous twinkle in his eye.  He was from Santa Barbara but and had been coming down to Baja and San Evaristo for the past 50 years.  The fisherman on the beach knew him well.

He led us a short way down the beach to speak with a man sitting in the shade of a small concrete-block building.  He seemed to be haggling with the man about the halibut.

“I think you could get it for 50 pesos,” he coached.  About four dollars, a good price for a fresh-caught fish.  “I want to get a little piece of it for sashimi.”  The man took the halibut out of an ice chest in the back of a pickup truck and showed it to us.  It was a nice five-pound fish.  Best of it, it was a white fish, not like the oily blood-red skip jacks I had been catching on my hand line.

Pam pulled out a 200-peso note to pay the man but he frowned.  Walter explained that the man could not break the 200-peso note.  Then Walter made a deal with Pam for his sashimi.  “Look,” he said.  “You give me your 200-peso note and I’ll give you back two 100-peso bills plus a 10-peso coin.”  The haggling in Spanish and the mathematics seemed to confuse us.  Were we getting ripped off somehow?  This was turning into a minor adventure, and I decided to run with it.

“Will they clean and filet the fish for us?” I asked.  Walter translated this to the man and the man pointed at two other fisherman standing about.  One of the fishermen had a hard unfriendly look, a lean muscular build, and a brand new pair of yellow rubber boots.  He took out his filet knife and began working on the fish, deftly cutting along the spine and removing the bones, using a garbage can lid as a table.  Pam blanched as he tossed the filets on the unclean surface.  I noticed that he placed them skin-side down, keeping the meat clean.  He delicately cut between the skin and the flesh, then handed me each clean filet to place into a plastic bag.  His hard look dissolved as I handed him a 20-peso note and respectfully thanked him for his work.

Walter got a small piece for his sashimi.  I wasn’t satisfied with this.  After all, he had advised us as to where and how to get the best fish, he had secured for us a nice deal, and had provided translation services.  I asked señor yellow-boots to cut one of the filets in half, then gave it to Walter as a tip.  He smiled broadly, and now we were all smiling.  Walter took his sashimi back to his camper, a small pickup with a shell and a hard-bottom dinghy on top.  He was definitely taking a pause.

I wondered what I would do for four days in San Evaristo.  We prepared the halibut, kayaked around the small bay, snorkeled on the rocks by the point, and simply watched the days go by.  As the sun rose each morning, the jagged mountains to the west turned red.  The clarity of the morning light showed every crevice, ridge, and valley of that rugged range.  The wind grew stronger as the days passed and the boat sailed around on its anchor, but we were secure and happy.

A few days later we were back in La Paz.  We anchored next to one of our new friends, then met all of the others as we paddled the kayak to the dinghy dock in the marina.  How magical to see our friends again!  We had sundowners and dinner on Celebration, ran a 6K fun run with Ariel 4 and saw a movie about their Northwest Passage (yes, they sailed from Sweden over the top of North America to join the Baja Ha-Ha fleet in San Diego), went out for arachera with Mintaka and Maluhia, had a guitar jam with Cynus, chatted with Betty Jane in the market, and delivered a gift of fresh bagels to Tillie.  We made new friends as we joined a guitar jam on Rapscullion.  We entertained our friends, old and new, with tales from the north, about Isla Partida, San Evaristo and the halibut.

What was the news from La Paz? we asked them.

“Not much.  It got windy.”

With an audible crack, the rain began to come down in solid sheets.  I watched it for a moment, blinking.  How could it be raining in Baja?  The area gets about two inches of rain each year, yet it was now raining three inches in the length of time that it took me to comprehend it.

The half-dozen customers in the small palapa restaurant, mostly cruisers and gringo wanderers, stood up and gawked as well.  The sky was a mass of angry gray-black clouds scudding east across the little bay of Ensenada de Los Muertos, the Cove of the Dead.  Los Muertos is a good resting point on the way from Cabo San Lucas to La Paz in the Sea of Cortez, primitive and protected, with good holding and a palapa serving wonderful guacamole and ice-cold cervezas.  The village fathers want to change the name from Los Muertos to Los Sueños (dreams, deep sleep; illusions), which is good salesmanship.

There were eighteen boats swinging at anchor, probably more than there had been in the previous seven days combined, many of them from the Baja Ha-Ha.  Pamela was among them, barely visible through the rain storm that seemed to be getting stronger by the minute.

I put down my cerveza.  I had left all of Pamela’s hatches open and now she was getting drenched inside.  Paper charts left on the navigation station, the bed sheets in the forepeak, the exposed radio equipment, and my laptop.

The kayak was up on the beach above the high tide line, about a quarter mile away.  I couldn’t quite see it through the rain.  From the kayak to the boat was another quarter mile.  I felt helpless.  How could I possibly get to my boat in this rain storm?

I squinted like Clint Eastwood for a moment, then stuck out my jaw like John Wayne.  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I told Pam.

“I’ll get you another beer,” she replied.  What a gal.

I sprang into action.  The gawkers stepped aside as I leaped from the open-sided palapa and out into the storm.  I ran fast across the wet sand, out across the beach and past the panga fishing boats hauled up on the sand.

I knew what the gawkers were thinking.  “Wow, look at him run.  He’s sprinting out into this storm, what moxie.”

Winded from the sprint, I reached the kayak where I’d left it at the high tide line, then dragged it into the water and into the surf and leaped inside.  With the paddle I stabbed at the water on each side of the boat like a man driven mad.  The muscles in my neck and shoulders began to throb as I displaced massive amounts of water.  The smooth-bottomed kayak planed across the water as the driving wind whipped the tops off the waves and brought them slashing into me.  In a few minutes I reached Pamela  She was rolling heavily in the swell and wind; the westerly wind hitting her bow while the Pacific swell from south-south-east pushed hard against her beam.

I grabbed her boarding ladder and sprang over the rail and into the cockpit, then dove down the companionway into the salon.  I slipped on the floor, totally wet from the rain coming down through the big hatch and side ports.  I quickly closed all the hatches and ports and dogged them down tight, then mopped up the water with a galley towel.  The Mexico chartbook was drenched and I wiped it with the towel as best I could then laid it out on a berth to dry.

The ship was now secure, the mess cleaned up, and the work done.  The theme from Rocky thundered in my brain.

Gonna fly now …

I felt supercharged.  Rather than sitting back down in the palapa and finishing my beer I had done a truly great thing by dashing across the sand and sea to come to the aid of my little ship.  It was still raining, but not nearly so hard, as I boarded the kayak again and pointed her back to the beach.  The waves were bigger now and steep from the opposing wind gusts and sea swell, and lifted the little kayak causing her to surf fast onto the beach.  At the right moment I leaped out and pulled her up onto the beach before the breaking wave could swamp her, then dragged her up to the high tide line.

The decathlon was nearly finished.  I stretched out my legs once more as I sprinted across the open beach, humming Chariots of Fire through my ragged breath.

I knew what the gawkers back in the palapa were saying.  “Look now!  He’s running back.  Look at him go, and after paddling hard through those steep waves.”

They would all stare as I bounded back into the palapa dripping wet.  They would clear the way for me.  Probably one or two would stand and cheer spontaneously, their chairs crashing to the floor behind them, and then the rest would join in, chanting and clapping furiously.  The bravest ones would slap me on the back and say, “Good job, old boy, saving the ship like that” while the shy ones would whisper among themselves, “So agile.  How does he do it?”

The beach past the fishing fleet became rocky and I stepped hard on a shell with my heel.  It hurt.  I sucked in my breath and continued jogging, wiping the rain from my eyes with my soaking shirt sleeve.

I paused outside the palapa to wipe my sandy feet.  The gawkers were there.  They hadn’t watched me come up from the beach.  They were all peering intently into their smart phones.

“Oh, you’re back already,” said Pam.  “Everything alright?”

“Yes.  I took care of it.  Where’s my beer?”

“Oh, the waiter took it away.  I didn’t order another one.  I didn’t know when you’d be back.  Look!  The sun’s back out.”

The rain had stopped and a little sunshine was poking through the clouds.  In a few minutes Baja returned, sunny and warm and starting to dry.

 

 

 

The trebly notes of Andy’s banjo rang out above the rousing chorus as clear as a bell.  Clear like the aquamarine anchorage of Bahia Santa Maria, Mexico, clear as the belt of Orion rising on the horizon.  Joe hammered out the chords on his guitar while Kevin softly strummed and Tom bent down the major third into a blue note on his harmonica.  I heard them but did not see because my eyes were shut tight to illuminate in my mind’s eye the fretboard of my travel-worn Martin guitar.

If I had a boat, I’d go out on the ocean.  If I had a pony, I’d ride him on my boat.

It was a musician’s meet-up on Kevin’s big catamaran, a pre-party before Party #3 of the 2013 Baja Ha-Ha Rally from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas.  Over a hundred thirty boats lay at anchor in the chop of the eleven-mile bay.  A stiff breeze churned the waters of the anchorage, relatively placid compared to the rolling seas we had encountered after the becalmed start of the rally at San Diego eight days prior.  We were all a little weary after the force 5 winds — defined by Admiral Francis Beaufort as 19-24 knots in which “small trees in leaf begin to sway” — but the rhythm of the guitars and harmonica and the up-beat of the banjo lifted our spirits high.  We had sailed five hundred miles to get here and had another three hundred ahead of us.  And so very worth it all.

And what a week of sailing through highs and lows!  Pam and I were still newbies at cruising and that made the high and low points particularly spiky.  In the morning you do an ecstatic gorilla dance in the cockpit as you land your very first yellow-fin tuna, while at midnight you curse in the darkness on your knees peering into the bilge to determine why there are twenty gallons of salt water coming up through your floor boards.  You find serenity in the perfect balance of wind, waves, sails, and pendulums that keep your self-steering gear in harmony with the powerful natural forces all around you.  You feel utter despair as your spinnaker sheet wraps itself around the boat’s keel while the tack line rips off the bow light as you retrieve the sheet all covered in anti-fouling paint.  You smile to yourself as you consider the silliness of a spinnaker sheet that will never get a barnacle stuck on it.

Are we really sailing all the way to New Zealand and back?  Well, yes, but that’s a scary thing to think about.  This is the Ha-Ha!  It’s the gateway to our new cruising life, a life you live in the present, not the future.  Your plans about future cruising should be slippery like the hitch in your quick-release mooring line, not fixed like your headstay.  Another cruiser told me, “We write our plans in the sand at low tide :-)”.  I find myself blabbing out to everyone, “We plan to sail all the way to New Zealand and back!”, involuntarily cringing at the thought of Neptune hearing about my land-based plans.

You make fast friends when you cruise a sailboat, and the Ha-Ha introduces you to new friends you will probably see throughout your tour of Mexico and beyond.  When I announce to the fleet on my VHF radio that my watermaker has stopped working I get several offers of assistance, and when I meet these guys at the beach party later they each ask about the watermaker.

These guys become your real teachers.  At Party #1 in San Diego you prick up your ears when you hear Mark say he’s sailing to New Zealand next March.  Maybe, like me, you’ve taken all the sailing courses offered by the local sailing school, you’ve chartered a boat a few times in the British Virgin Islands, and you’ve read about Joshua Slocum sailing alone around the world in 1897 and Tristan Jones sailing up the Amazon River looking for Lake Titicaca.  You know how to sail a boat.  But now you’re learning how to live on the boat day by day and take care of yourself through all kinds of exhilarating episodes and mis-adventures.  These crazy sailors who come to do the Baja Ha-Ha year after year are showing you the real tricks of the trade, like how to lift your new outboard engine onto your dinghy without dropping it into the bay and how to ask the panga fisherman in Spanish if he can come around in a half hour to give us a lift to the beach.

Neal teaches me how to catch a yellow-fin ahi and fillet it.  Sailing into Turtle Bay, I’m topping a salad with the wonderful raw ahi when he tells me, “Hey, do you have coconut milk on board?  Let’s catch another ahi and make poisson cru for the beach party this afternoon.”

“Go for it, “ I tell him lazily as I plop myself down on the foredeck with my ahi salad.  The sun has come out and the deck is now warm so I take off my socks, then my shirt, then roll up my pant legs.  I yawn heavily.  “You’ve got one hour to catch a fish.  Good luck.”

I lift the fork to my lips and admire this fresh ahi that we caught and filleted yesterday morning, but before I take the bite I hear Neal shout “Fish on!”   He’s kidding me, right?  A half hour later we have this new ahi filleted and in the refrigerator.  A couple days and three skipjacks later we have this process well-choreographed, but somehow we can only catch a fish when someone sits down to a breakfast or lunch.  As a cruiser you quickly learn how to gut a fish while you hold your bowl of yogurt between your knees.

The poisson cru was a hit at Party #2 at Turtle Bay and the story of how we caught that ahi wove yet another yarn into the hundreds of stories shared by all the Ha-Ha cruisers at Party #4 at Cabo San Lucas. We now had common stories about each other.  We had experienced the same green flashes at sunset, the same rising of Orion after midnight, and the gradual changing of ocean water temperature from 56°F at San Diego to 80°F at Cabo San Lucas.

I reflected on that musician’s meet-up as I sat on the headlands of Bahia Santa Maria overlooking the myriad boats swinging at anchor and watched my new Ha-Ha friends dancing and playing beach volleyball below.  A panga fisherman landed his craft easily through the gently breaking surf, a free man in a wilderness of blue sea and brown mountains.  Two riders emerged like ghosts from the dunes beyond and led their ponies up the barren undeveloped beach.

I recalled Andy’s banjo, the harmony of our instruments, and the moving chorus of his quirky Lyle Lovett song.

And we could all together go out on the ocean.  Me upon my pony on my boat.

Ah, freedom.  We have a good boat, Pamela, and we’re sailing her on the ocean.  What is the next step after the Baja Ha-Ha?  Slow down, for sure … and go find that pony.

 

 

Oh my, what have we taken on?

I have gone from one chaotic whirlwind to another!  Making sure the boys are settled, packing up the house, wrapping up two jobs, sorting out finances, planning for the care and feeding for our dog Little Bear, and the most moving:  saying goodbye to so many incredible friends and family.  Oh, and simultaneously preparing for the sailing part:  taking advanced sailing classes and researching what we will need when we’re out there and living aboard Pamela for two years.  A lifestyle we have never experienced before.

When we left the dock I was full of apprehension and anticipation.  Had we taken care of everything essential?  How will our incredible sons fare?  And Little Bear?  Not to mention our new home, Pamela, being rigged, maintained, and stocked properly.  At that point I simply had to accept that we had done all that we knew to do and pray that we didn’t miss anything critical.

I have sailed out the Golden Gate in my sailing classes but never in Pamela.  Would I be overwhelmed standing my first midnight watch alone at Pamela’s helm?  Dennis and I would need to stand watch all through the night, alternating three hours on and three hours off.  I knew I could do it but would it be too frightening, challenging, exhausting, exhilarating, enlightening… ?  It was all of these emotions!  That first overnight passage was a big accomplishment for me.

 

I was very content to watch the sun rising on my 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. watch.

 

 

 

 

I don’t think I have ever experienced so many “firsts” in such a short period of time.  Standing watch for several days and nights, entering strange harbors and anchorages at night, refueling the boat in some challenging places (like the fuel dock at Morro Bay at low tide, 20 feet above the boat), and now my first regatta, the Baja Ha-Ha!

Seeing California from the ocean is quite dramatic.  Following the coast southward is spellbinding.  And seeing and hearing the barking sea lions, pods of dolphins and whales, huge red-and-yellow jellyfish, and playful sea otters adds a sense of relationship and connection with the sea.

One last aspect I would like to describe is the deeply touching feelings I have after hearing and experiencing the thoughts and feelings of friends and family wishing us a safe and successful journey. It brings out our deeper core love and respect for each other.  What could be more important in life?

The west wind hit us with a stiff 25-knots from dead ahead as we tacked out the Golden Gate in a series of zig-zags that took nearly half the day.  Then, turning south as we rounded the rocky point where the Cliff House ponders whether to slide into the sea, the wind backed around to the south — Murphy’s Law! — and continued to whip us hard in the face.  The seas were sloppy, the ship’s motion confused.  We were freezing!

I quoted Captain Joshua Slocum, in 1897 the first man to sail around the world alone in a sailboat.  Off Cape Horn the wind drove freezing sleet into his face so hard that it broke the skin.  “But what of that?” he commented in his log.  Pam gently reminded me that I was not Joshua Slocum yet.

Pillar Point was only twenty miles away, but at this rate we’d get there well after midnight; so we fired up the diesel and pushed her hard into the wind at five and half knots.  Pillar Point is a tricky harbor to enter after dark, but we made it easily enough and gave ourselves a high-five as we dropped anchor in the middle of the calm harbor.

The following day we rested in the harbor and revived ourselves with bowls of steaming clam chowder.  Then we anchored in Santa Cruz just off the pier and in front of the huge Santa Cruz Boardwalk amusement park.  The night air was filled with the screams of young people being hurled about on Giant Dippers, Double Shots, WipeOuts, Cliff Hangers, and Fireballs.

In Monterey Bay we sighted our first humpback whales gorging on anchovies!  The water was as calm as glass as we motored quietly through the windless, foggy morning.  In Morro Bay we passed several sea otters playfully lying on their backs in the calm water.  The weather was warm and beautiful, and after our first chilly days and nights of sailing we were happy to climb out of our foul weather gear and into our shorts.

 

 

Warm at last in Morro Bay

 

 

 

 

 

Sunset on the way to Pt. Conception

 

 

 

Seeing your first sunset at sea is a magical sight, but somewhat ominous as the dusk begins to settle around you, the temperature drops, and you realize you will be sailing all night long through the darkness.  You bundle up tight wearing several layers of wool under your foulies.  You set your instruments to show your course and your radar to show the passing ships and fishing boats.  Then the moon rises and you realize it won’t be total darkness after all.  You begin to notice the tiny flashes of phosphorescence in the wake alongside the boat.  You settle into a good audiobook.  And a short while later your fellow crew climbs into the cockpit to announce that your watch has ended and you can now catch a couple of hours of sleep before repeating this cycle a few more times before daylight.  If you are lucky you see the moon set into the sea just before the sun rises over the mountains of Big Sur.

We rounded Point Conception, that frightening cape with unpredictable gusty winds, at midnight in a flat calm, then cruised into Santa Barbara harbor to find civilization once again — delicious coffee, fresh baguettes and cheese, and wi-fi.

 

 

Basking in the Santa Barbara sun

 

 

 

 

 

Great coffee and wonderful friends

 

 

 

While in Santa Barbara we visited the local Waldorf School and performed for the 1st, 4th, and 5th grade students.  I played a couple of sailing songs on guitar and they sat completely motionless and enthralled.  Then we provisioned for the 800-mile trip to Mexico by visiting the local health food store and the fabulous farmer’s market.

In the Channel Islands we experienced the extremes of highs and lows — beautiful and lonely anchorages followed by a nasty encounter with a piling at the fuel dock in Catalina.  While attempting to reverse in order to bring the boat to a stop alongside the concrete pier, our feathering propeller refused to feather, causing the boat to surge forward rather than stop. (A “feathering” prop has a mechanism that changes the direction of the propeller blades by centrifugal force when you change between forward and reverse … in theory better than in practice.)  We struck a piling head on, crunched off the bow light, and bent the anchor resting in the bow roller.  The hefty clevis pin holding the anchor was bent into the shape of a V, and I had to take a hack saw to it in order to free up the anchor.  Cutting through your standing rigging is never fun, but you have to be able to drop an anchor at any time.  We sailed on through the day and night and I scalded myself when a flying cup of coffee covered the entire galley with a soggy layer of organic grounds.  We limped into San Diego for repairs as a cold front brought in a chilly fog.

 

 

Wild and lonely Anacapa Island

 

 

 

 

Channel Islands calm anchorage

 

 

 

 

On our way down the coast we’ve met several cruisers who will be in the upcoming Baja Ha-Ha Rally.  They’re all warm, friendly, and helpful.  They’re also a little cagey about their plans.  No one wants to commit to a long voyage across the Pacific, as if Neptune will hear and intervene to thwart all their untimely plans.

“We’re heading south and then we’ll see what happens next,” said one couple.

“We write our plans in the sand at low tide,” said another.

Not us; we blab out loud to anyone who’ll listen that we’re headed all the way to New Zealand.

Two more days before the Baja Ha-Ha Rally begins!  On Monday morning there will be one hundred and sixty-two boats leaving San Diego harbor in a massive clump of sails and spars.  I’m on pins and needles.

Crash!  A heavy jerk followed by the sound of broken glass.  The front end of the Prius was smashed in by a car that swerved into my lane as I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge after spending a day at Muir Beach with my sister Bodoe.  Everyone was all right, including Little Bear in the back seat, but with only three weeks before leaving on our long sailing journey and my to-do list totally full, I wondered how I would ever find the time to get it fixed.

We had just returned from a wonderful East Coast trip where we’d dropped off Julian at Boston College and seen lots of old friends in Martha’s Vineyard, Washington, Chapel Hill, Winston-Salem, and Asheville.  Tomorrow I would leave for Seattle, where Pam would fly in from Canada, and we’d see Lindsay at the University of Puget Sound.  Such travel plans!

Only a couple more weeks to pack up the house and stuff everything into a 37-foot sailboat.  And buy enough canned meat, spices, and coffee to sail across the Pacific.  And fix the sprinkler that broke so the garden would not completely dry up.  And paint the bedroom.  And have Dr. Peterson show us how to sew sutures into each other.  And deal with some new repairs needed to the boat, like bolting on the autopilot which I noticed was about to fall off every time I turned the wheel hard to port, and the dodger which had a big chunk of window knocked out by a flying jib line and now served as the perfect wind tunnel in high seas.

We managed it!  The Prius got fixed just in time for Lindsay to fly down from Seattle and snatch it.  I sold my beautiful old Mercedes 380 SL convertible, said farewell to Little Bear, and hauled a couple of dock carts of additional stuff to s/v Pamela as she waited in her berth with her gorgeous canoe stern sagging several inches lower in the water.

At sunset we slipped our lines and sailed her out of South Beach Harbor.  The storm was over.  Or was it?  The offshore weather forecast called for gale-force winds from the south …