As Gulf of
California crossings go, this one was our least favorite and most complicated. Of
course, it was only our third (counting both directions on the previous
trip), so that’s not much of a data set. Curtis had checked multiple weather
sources, including PredictWind and Windy, and we had agreed that crossing on
Sunday–Monday (February 18–19) gave us a good window between strong wind events.
The forecast called for little or no wind during the day Sunday, followed by a light
south wind overnight, becoming west at about 10 knots Monday morning, about the
time we would be approaching the Baja California Sur coast. As our destination
was almost due south, this sounded like a promising combination. We were also
trying to get across ahead of a strong northwest blow on Tuesday that was
predicted to last several days. Caleta San Juanico is a good place to hole up
during such a “norther.”
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| Sue at the helm in her warm foul weather gear and a beanie. |
The
daylight portion of the crossing matched the forecast, but the overnight did
not—it was decidedly LUMPY. In addition, there were a number of non-threatening
but aggravating glitches with our electronics, glitches whose sole virtue—if
you can call it that—was that they kept the on-watch person awake.
In fact, due to several factors, neither of us got more than an hour or two of
sleep during the 27 hours between departing San Carlos, Sonora, and anchoring
in Caleta San Juanico, BCS.
Our trip began
at 10 a.m. on 18 February with flat water and mostly cloudy skies; we motored
most of the day on Sunday and spent our time looking for birds and marine
mammals. The birding was good: we had the usual Brown Pelicans, many Brown and
Blue-footed boobies, several Common Loons winging their way north, pairs of Craveri’s
Murrelets flying away from us, two Red-billed Tropicbirds sitting on the water
and a third flying overhead, and a few flocks of Red-necked Phalaropes picking and
spinning on the sea surface. Black and Least storm petrels were near-constant
companions, dipping and flitting among the small waves. Perhaps our best birds
were several Parasitic and Pomarine jaegers—firsts for us in the Gulf (and in
Mexico)! In winter, the Pomarine Jaegers don’t sport their eponymous pompom
tail streamers, so it took some practice to separate them from the Parasitics.
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| Adult Brown Booby in the Gulf of CA. |
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| Red-necked Phalaropes in the Gulf of CA. |
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| Curtis during the non-lumpy daytime portion of the crossing. |
We also saw
a napping sea lion (all flippers up!), a mid-sized dark whale that as usual we
couldn’t identify, and a shark swimming
at the surface and showing a solid-looking, symmetrical first dorsal fin and
a much smaller second dorsal fin. Curtis took some photos and videos but
the shark didn’t let us approach for an ID. Prior to this one, the only sharks
we had seen in the Gulf were the large and amazing Whale Sharks.
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| Distant photo of shark fin. |
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| Sue estimating size of shark fin and looking at sharks in Reef Fish Identification by Humann & DeLoach. |
As evening came
on, the winds were still light but picking up. We motored on autopilot and enjoyed
a cockpit dinner of chicken noodle soup, homemade bread with caraway seeds, and
delicious San Carlos carrots.
After dinner, the winds increased enough that we put out the mainsail and jib and shut off the engine. An adult male Brown Booby flew circles around us, making several approaches to our port-side spreader but never braving the narrow landing between mast and shrouds and swinging backstay cable. He was probably eyeing it as a perch for the night, but after Curtis took a few photos and videos, we waved him off. He landed briefly on top of our mizzen mast, only inches below the whizzing wind generator blades, but we “convinced” him to move on from there too.
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| Early dinner in the cockpit. |
After dinner, the winds increased enough that we put out the mainsail and jib and shut off the engine. An adult male Brown Booby flew circles around us, making several approaches to our port-side spreader but never braving the narrow landing between mast and shrouds and swinging backstay cable. He was probably eyeing it as a perch for the night, but after Curtis took a few photos and videos, we waved him off. He landed briefly on top of our mizzen mast, only inches below the whizzing wind generator blades, but we “convinced” him to move on from there too.
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| Brown Booby eyeing our spreader (horizontal bar) as a good night perch. |
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| View from cockpit at dusk; navigation instruments are on "night" setting. |
Sue had her
first experience of literally losing her bearings during a sail change,
inadvertently steering the boat through 180 degrees without the usual visual cues
of wind and waves. Hmm, the little boat icon on the chartplotter is all of a
sudden pointing north (where we came from) instead of south. The crescent moon
that had been off our starboard side was suddenly off to port. Yikes, how did
that happen? The ship’s compass told the true story, but with Cilantro heeled over and the gimballed
compass swinging and gyrating like a flying saucer, Sue was flummoxed. With
Curtis’s help she got Cilantro back
on course, and the pointy sliver moon became a smirking orange Cheshire Cat
before sinking into clouds in the west.
Our
previous crossings had featured sailing winds during the day but mostly calm,
windless seas at night. By contrast, the mixed swell and wind-driven waves on
this crossing tossed us around quite a bit, giving Sue an introduction to night
sailing in more than a few knots of wind. Curtis had stood night watches in all
different weather conditions on a passage from New England to St. Maarten in
the Caribbean a few years ago, and he was rarely bothered except by squalls. Sue had sailed in
20- and 30-knot winds and bigger waves, but only during the daytime, when, though never comfortable with it, she could at least see the larger picture of
what was happening.
On a full
main and staysail, Cilantro coursed
and surfed on the dark, lumpy sea. She heeled and righted and generally seemed
to enjoy the exercise. There were small creaks and thumps and clicks and slaps
from all directions, including deep in the hold. The leech (trailing edge) of
the staysail shivered and snapped in its tautness. The autopilot ground its
high-pitched teeth to keep us at 30 degrees off the wind. The wind generator
atop the mizzen mast kept up its whine. The (not-in-service) running back stay
cables swung and swished across the mainsail on their too-loose bungies. There
was enough going on that Sue stayed wide-awake in the cockpit, trying to
interpret the sea conditions by feel and finding it disconcerting to be pushed
and tossed around by invisible bursts of wave energy.
Close-hauled
as we were, we didn’t make much speed, but we didn’t want to arrive in BCS too
early (i.e. in the dark), so slow going was OK. Around 11 p.m., Sue went below
for a rest, and Curtis stood watch. Little wind shifts kept Curtis busy. Sue
stayed busy, too, bouncing and rolling in the rollicking V-berth and sleeping
about 10 minutes in total. She got back up and joined Curtis in the cockpit. Neither
of us had much to say. Curtis felt queasy, probably mostly due to lack of
sleep, and Sue was thinking she didn’t want to do this (any of this) again. Curtis
sipped on ginger ale and we both snacked on Saladitas (Mexican saltines) to
keep something in our stomachs. Our nice bird sightings from earlier in the day
had faded to blips on the radar screen.
Meanwhile, our
electronics were grouchy too. The depth sounder rang its alarm on the
chartplotter every minute—or two or three—at completely irregular intervals but
probably averaging 30 times an hour, which is a lot, throughout most of the passage. It was telling us it
couldn’t read the depth, which was not really news, given that the sounder
can’t read below 400 feet and most of the Gulf is between 1,000 and 5,000 feet
deep. Sue really wanted to reason
with it, saying that we knew it was
deep out here and didn’t need reminding. Being a continuous alarm, it required
a push-button cancel on the instrument panel every time it sounded. Every so
often, the autopilot also acted up, turning itself from Auto (i.e. On) to
Standby (i.e. Off) without a warning or reason—the only signs being that its
high-pitched moaning ceased and Cilantro started
trending upwind. The watch person needed to promptly take the wheel and regain
the heading.
More
complications: The chartplotter refused to show the radar display, saying that
it was “invalid.” We weren’t even using the radar. We were using the autopilot,
but the chartplotter wasn’t speaking to it either (apparently our chartplotter
has “issues”). The dire message “Alert! Autopilot computer cannot be found”
kept splashing across the navigation screen and could only be cleared by hand
for a few seconds of chart viewing before it popped back up. Several times, we
considered turning the whole mess off and flying blind through the night. After
all, it’s a big sea—what could we hit?
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| Chartplotter showing Cilantro halfway across the Gulf of CA from San Carlos (Sonora) in the north to Caleta San Juanico (Baja California Sur) in the south. The distance is roughly 100 miles (statute, not nautical). |
Hours
passed and the sails held. Nothing broke or fell overboard. We made forward
progress at 3 to 5 knots. The wind generator generated lots of amps. The bilge
stayed dry. No one threw up (Curtis) or had a breakdown (Sue). Curtis took some
Bonine and slept for 45 minutes. A light salt spray coated everything outside
of the cockpit. Sue counted her blessings, or tried to. Curtis got up and Sue
slept about an hour. We made our slow way closer and closer to the Baja coast,
tacking west toward Bahía Concepción and then SSE paralleling the coast. We
never seemed to get much closer to land but it felt like progress nonetheless.
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| Curtis perched on the cockpit coaming to tighten the leech (and reduce fluttering) of our mainsail. |
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| Sue working on a blog post as we approach the Gulf coast of BCS. |
As the sun
rose behind broken clouds, the sea was steel gray to the east, choppy blue to
the west. We could see where we were (the chartplotter, for all its faults, was
not lying) and see the wind on the water. It was right on our nose, blowing 17
knots from the south, so we tacked a few more times, making infinitesimal progress, and then motor-sailed to Caleta
San Juanico to drop anchor and get some sleep.
Did we
mention the bananas? During the night hours, the helmsperson could not see much:
froth from waves breaking against our hull, occasional bioluminescence on a
distant wavecrest, the taut staysail illuminated by the spreader light, and the
running backstay cables arcing and twisting more wildly than they should have
been. Through the open companionway could be seen the main salon, illuminated
by a red light in the galley. Hanging from a grab bar on the ceiling were our
two fruit and vegetable hammocks, also swinging more wildly than they should
have been, due to small errors of installation and engineering (no names here).
The hammocks were filled with crisp apples and a couple of bananas. The bananas,
Sue noted, had been a pleasant yellow with friendly freckles at the start of
our journey. At the end of it, they looked bruised and tired (although they tasted
delicious in a hot oatmeal breakfast).
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| Cilantro's main salon, showing fruit hammocks (minus bananas) at left and general purpose hammock (stuffed with hats, gloves, and extra bags of chips) in center. Don't look at the navigation table at lower left; we can't stop covering it with $#*t. |
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| Bruised bananas after our lumpy Gulf of CA crossing. |
Sue was
going to end this blog post here and title it “Bananas in a Hammock: Crossing
to BCS,” but after reading it aloud to Curtis several times, she realized it
was breaking the cardinal rule of relationships: Never go to bed angry. That
is, don’t end a blog post on a down note.
So, after a
rough night, we had a few more hours of sunny sailing to do. There were very few
birds to be seen, or maybe we were too tired to spot them. “There’s a
Blue-footed Booby,” said Curtis in a matter-of-fact tone. Sue tilted her head
up to see the large black and white bird circling Cilantro. “Wait—it looks like a Gannet [an Atlantic species]. What
about Masked Booby?” YESSSS, it was indeed a Masked Booby, a rare wanderer to the
southern Gulf of California. Masked boobies are superficially similar to Gannets in their clean white plumage edged with black, but unlike Gannets, they have a yellow bill, narrow black face, and black tail. This one was a life bird for Sue and maybe for Curtis
too. (He can’t remember if he saw them in the Caribbean. One thing we celebrate
about our aging memories is that many
birds are life birds—for the second or third time!)
We finally arrived
in lovely and familiar Caleta San Juanico on Monday at 1 p.m. We anchored
easily in 18 feet of water, our new Rocna anchor setting abruptly and hard. Curtis
set an anchor alarm while Sue filled out the cruising log: 86 nautical miles traveled in 27 hours, 14 of which we sailed...mostly in the dark. We straightened
up the galley and cabin, napped a bit, reheated leftovers for dinner, and slept
for a solid 10 hours. Zzzzzzzzz.
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| Sunset in Caleta San Juanico, Baja California Sur. |
