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Oxnard to Panama |
Hello every one, The boat is loaded down to her water line. It must be time to stop shopping and start sailing again. We have two more days in Oxnard and then we are sailing South. We have had fun visiting with Grandma and Grandpa. On the medical front, Chris's foot got a clean bill of health and he should be all set for the upcoming adventure. Alyce managed to cut her hand about ten days ago, nine years old and nine stitches. It was a slice between her pointer finger and tall finger. She fell and tried to catch herself on a door jam and her hand rode down and ripped it self open. It didn't seem to slow her down much though, except for writing. She couldn't seem to write; but she managed to but a glove on for swimming, tape her fingers together for horseback riding and suffer through going to Magic Mountain. Sugar is going to take the stitches out soon, she has done a good job of healing. On the communication front, we got the Inmarsat-C running. We now receive 3-4 weather reports a day plus safety at sea messages and we can send and receive e-mails, for a price. We also got set up with a pocketmail machine and e-mail address. Pocket mail address is alcyone@pocketmail.com. We can receive messages up to 2000 characters, so far this message is about 1000 characters. We can use the pocketmail device any time we get near a land line phone. Until next year this time it should at least be every ten days ,if not more frequently, except maybe when we are going across the N. Atlantic. With the Inmarsat-C we will be able to receive any important messages that can be passed on through Grandpa. We have a birthday party coming up for Darby on Sunday. She will be six years old. Six years ago we were here waiting for Darby to be born and getting ready to head out on our South Pacific adventure. Nine years ago we were here when Alyce was a baby and we were headed down to Mexico for her first winter. We wonder what age the girls will be when we next sail through. Our next crew will also be arriving and settling in on Sunday, then we will be off on Monday. We are planning on checking in on the Pacific Maritime Net again, at least as long as they can hear us. Les in Hawaii thinks he will be able to copy us all the way to Panama. So our position will be reported on line again on www.bitwrangler.com/yotreps for anyone interested. That is about it for now. Happy Halloween! Wednesday, November 08, 2000 Hello Everybody, This is just a quick note to let you know that we're having some at-sea communications problems so for a while we may not be checking in with the ham radio nets that have been recording our progress on the internet. This does not mean anything bad has happened. More likely good stuff is happening that we'll tell you about as soon as we get into port. We'll keep working on fixing the tuner to the ham radio. Perhaps we'll be back in contact soon. If not, we're trying to get a new tuner lined up for early December. Otherwise everything is great. Right now we're tied to a dock at a marina in Bahia Navidad, about 300 miles north of Acapulco. (Future crew mates, don't get your hopes up. This tying-up-to-a-dock-at-a-gorgeous-nearly-deserted-resort is not the norm. It was just too cool to resist.) Anyway, it's this hotel/resort situated on a lagoon with a marina that looks (the resort) a lot like Hearst Castle. There is a three-level swimming pool with water slides between each level and a bar you can swim up to at the bottom. A beautiful volley ball court. Tennis courts. Restaurants. All sorts of stuff. And across a tiny body of water is a nice little Mexican beach community with restaurants and bars and not enough tourist junk to be offensive. We'll head off tomorrow for Acapulco, which should be a two day hop. After that is a much longer off-shore haul (about 800 miles) to Costa Rica. The weather is decidedly tropical. When the wind blows it is great. When the wind is calm it is hot, but we are all getting acclimated to that. Alyce and Darby had haircuts last night. Their necks are much cooler and they remain as sportily stylish as ever. We'll send more the next time we hit town. Fair winds, The Alcyone Crew Monday, November 13, 2000 Dear Everyone, We've made it to Acapulco and are having a good time. The mix of passages and shore leaves has worked out well so far. Our previous stop, Bahia Navidad, where we stayed at the luxury resort for a day and a night was capped by a memorable last night in town. We all went out to dinner in the little beach town across the way. Then, after Leslie, Alyce and Darby had returned to the boat, the rest of the crew went to a bar where Jeff and Chris had been invited to play music. The invitation had come the day before, when Sugar and Jeff had dinghied over to Barra de Navidad to check things out. They stopped for a beverage at a bar that had two themes - blues and Harley Davidson motorcycles. Jeff had his ukulele along and that won him an invitation to come by the next night and play. The next night was one of those cruiser evenings where you cut loose a bit and have a lot of fun. With Chris on fiddle and Jeff on guitar, they played for about an hour and a half - mostly Irish music which Chris is masterful and dramatic at. After a couple tunes they had a small, vociferous audience gathered around them buying them beers and shots of tequila. We'd already been drinking some before that, and the mix of music, an appreciative audience and boozy camaraderie made for a fine time. Sugar, Bridget, Chris and Jeff staggered back to the boat around 1:30 (Chris and Jeff staggering the most). All hands were ready for a 7:00 o'clock departure the next morning, but the previous evening will for a long time be referenced as, "Oh, yeah, that was the night when . . . ." The trip from Bahia Navidad to Acapulco didn't see a lot of breeze - we powered most of the way. It is getting hot and this is that transitional period when your system tries to adjust to the heat. A wind scoop has ventilated the forepeak sometimes, if you do laundry (salt water wash, fresh water rinse) and wear the results to dry on your body that cools you off, we have a small inflatable that we filled one morning with water to cool off in, Sugar and Mikey have bought hammocks and those are comfortable to relax in. Fishing report: between Bahia Navidad and Acapulco we caught several bonita (we only kept one - they're not very good eating) and one dorado. More dorado would be great. Coming into Acapulco we had a swim call and saw a snake-like animal swimming with us that may have been some kind of eel. There were also tiny jelly fish who selectively bit Alyce and one bite out of Bridget. Coming into Acapulco bay around five o'clock in the afternoon was a spectacular sight - a big bay with buildings perched along cliffs and climbing up the surrounding mountainside. There was an easy spot for us at the Acapulco Yacht Club (the fuel dock the first night, then we moved to a Med-style mooring) which has a pool and trampoline that the girls have been occupying frequently. We've been out exploring the town the past few days. Last night we all went into town and Alyce and Darby had their hair braided in cornrows by two Indian ladies who walk around the plaza of the Cathedral selling this service. It's cute and we'll see if it helps keep their heads cool. From there we went to dinner and then on to see the cliff divers. Now we're busying ourselves getting ready for the passage to Costa Rica. Acapulco's the last cosmopolitan shopping stop that Leslie is sure of for a while, so she's done a pretty good restocking of the ship's stores. We've topped off with fuel and water and are ready to tackle the 800 mile passage across the Gulf of Tehantepec. Fair winds, Alcyone Crew November 24, 2000 Quepos, Costa Rica Hello Everybody, We're anchored in a bay off the town of Quepos, our first port in Costa Rica following a nine and a half day passage from Acapulco. We got in at first light yesterday morning and spent much of yesterday looking around Quepos. Last night was our Thanksgiving dinner -- glazed ham, mashed potatoes made of potatoes and sweet potatoes, vegetables, beer, wine, soft drinks (we don't get a taste of these beverages underway) and for dessert, pumpkin pie. Leslie and Alyce spent much of the afternoon getting the meal ready. Chris came aboard a little later and contributed the pumpkin pie (his first, very successful attempt) and Sugar was prominent in the galley pulling things together for the last hour of preparation. The cooking and baking made it pretty warm down below, so at dinner time we brought out four or five battery powered fans and placed them strategically around the main saloon so the air kept moving as we enjoyed our feast. Now that it's over, the trip from Acapulco seems rather uneventful, but at the time it occasioned much reflection and some conversation. We left Acapulco Bay one evening under sail, having dinner on the cabin house as the sun set and the lights of Acapulco twinkled on the hillside. Sometime late that night the wind shut down and didn't really come back for about six days. It was one of the darnedest things you'd ever seen -- you'd think the ocean was mostly ripples and a faint, schooner-useless breeze. On and on we powered, occasionally setting a sail or two to try to use a little wind, although sometimes the more noticeable function of the sail was that it blocked the sun. We became skilled in the use of awnings and wind scoops and taking showers and doing laundry all with the goal of trying to stay cool. Alyce and Darby would find a shady spot under the awning up forward to do school work with Bridget or Leslie. Dinnertimes were a little bit of a trial because cooking heated up the boat. Heat like that is something you don't remember very accurately. We don't have a thermometer so we can't represent it with numbers, and maybe the numbers weren't that high. But at the time the heat was honestly the main topic of conversation. Here is a bit of a letter I (Jeff) wrote at the time to a friend that tried to capture it. "We're in the tropics on a boat made for the Pacific Northwest. A boat adequately ventilated for Washington State seems to retain heat extravagantly down here. If the wind doesn't blow (which has been the case for most of this trip. It was this way six years ago along mainland Mexico, too), the heat just sits and sits and grows and grows. The coolest natural thing here is probably the seawater and at 75 degrees it isn't cooling anything down very fast. When they hit the tropics, boats often have a problem with their refrigeration. Since the cold is created by heat exchange with the ocean water, as the water heats up, the compressors, etc., have to work harder and harder to keep stuff cool. Consider that the sea temperature in the San Francisco Bay is in the high 50's generally; here it is the high 70's. Blah, blah, blah. It is true, though, that, when the heat hits this boat, that that IS the theme. It is the lens through which you view everything else, it's the 20 lb. pack you carry around to do any chore, and it's the thing that crawls into your bunk with you at night." Okay, enough whining. I just wanted to do honor to natural forces at work. A wonderful thing happened just towards the end of our period of calm. We were powering along just after lunchtime. The seas had gone glassy calm and you could see anything disturbing the surface of the water. First we sailed by a big drowsing sea turtle floating on the surface. (We saw at least ten sea turtles on the trip from Acapulco to Costa Rica. And dolphins were so common -- we'd be a little blasé when, on a night watch, we'd heard the "spooosh!" of a dolphin breaking the surface alongside us.) Then Leslie saw a big fish boil a little ways away. It was a striking sight - glassy seas with this darker, moving circle of little agitated wavelets where bigger fishes were chasing a large school of little fishes to the surface. Dolphins were closing in, breaking the surface, from all directions. You could see everything so clearly -- it was very dramatic. For fun we chased the boil, maybe hoping to catch a fish. The dolphins played in our bow wake with the water so clear and smooth you could watch them swimming below the surface, then they'd come up and break the surface with a splash and a gasp. One of the dolphins (and later two of them at the same time) jumped straight up out of the water, wriggled and then flopped back in. We applauded and he did it again and again, about six times -- up and splash, up and splash. Something hit our fishing line -- it was a little bonita (not a very good fish for eating) so we let it go. After fifteen minutes we stopped chasing the boil and got back on course. The calm also meant it was very warm. One fun thing to do when it is warm and you are powering at a modest clip is to hang a boson's chair from the bowsprit and let people take turns dangling in the water, swinging in and out of the sea as the bow rises and plunges with the swells. We thought maybe we could get someone in the water while the dolphins were still playing, but they had become bored and left by the time Mikey made it in. Then Sugar decided to stop the boat a while for a swim call. He idled back the throttle and when the boat stopped moving we all jumped in. Diving into the water was startling. You broke the surface and went down into a layer of cool, refreshing seawater. Then as you headed for the surface, it grew warmer. The top six inches or one foot of the water was probably eighty-five degrees. It was such a contrast to the cooler water below. The different temperature waters weren't uniformly distributed. Sometimes you'd swim into a patch of cool water that came all the way to the surface; sometimes you'd be in this weird, bath-warm liquid. As we were swimming the fishing line that we trail sunk slowly down in the water and a big billfish -- a sailfish or a marlin -- hit our lure and suddenly, maybe 20 feet from the stern of the boat, this fish jumped straight out of the water, up on his tail, trying to shake the lure. We don't usually hook big sport fish (it happened one other time that I can remember, about six years ago). They're too big and strong to bring aboard anyway. We all started swimming for the boarding ladder. By the time we got aboard and started tugging on the line the fish had shaken the lure, but it had been a spectacular sight to catch out of the corner of your eye while you were swimming. Harry had his fins and mask on and was studying the little jellyfish swimming around the boat; Sugar dove on the hull; Harry, Chris and Mikey held a race around the boat; Bridget and Mikey swung spectacularly from the Tarzan swing. All and all, a neat swim call in the middle of the ocean. What else from that passage? There was a light wind day that we managed to sail. We had a current against us so our speeds hung distressingly in the low-four-knot range. But that day was made special by a peach pie that Bridget baked with Alyce and Darby. Darby kept running around asking if it was ready yet - ready to be put in the oven (no, the oven isn't warm enough yet), ready to be taken out (not done yet), ready to be eaten (not cool enough). We had it for afternoon snack and it was wonderful. Also that day we saw a number of pongas that came and gave us the once over. Pongas are sturdily made open fiberglass boats about eighteen feet long powered by big outboards. We saw three of them, which was impressive because we were about 45 miles offshore. One came alongside and wanted to trade a two-liter bottle of Fanta orange soda for some food (this took a little time and translation to determine. For a while we were just curious why he was shaking a bottle of orange colored liquid at us). We gave them two grapefruit, a loaf of bread and a cylinder of Pringles and let them keep their soda. They told us they were out of Puerto Madero, the southeast most Mexican port, and that they were fishing for sharks. Then they zoomed off. In one way the light winds spared us much of the traditional bashing that comes from crossing the Gulf of Tehuantapec. We didn't get our headwinds until about the sixth day of the passage, from the Gulf of Papagayo. Same thing, more or less, they are winds that blow strong over a low spot in Central America and impede your easterly progress. We first noticed that something was up when, as we powered, big swells from the east started bobbing us up and down. Then the wind filled in. We set sail and were glad for the strong, cooling breeze. After dinner we started reefing. A reef in the mainsail, then another reef in the mainsail, then a reef in the foresail. Golly, what were the winds? Twenty to twenty-five probably. The seas got larger and the spray started to break over the rail. The boat heeled over and you often really needed one hand for yourself to get around. We shut up hatches and the interior got stuffy. Here is Jeff complaining again: For the next three days it was nice on watch, although you couldn't really stay dry. Being wet isn't so bad, you'd get nearly nicely cooled off and who cares about being wet since the water is nice and warm? However, when you got off watch and went below into a shut-up environment in the tropics, then the saltiness on your skin and the stickiness of everything became wearing after a while. For a while, when you looked at the seas we were bashing into, it looked just like trade wind conditions sailing to Hawaii, except we were going into it. Reflecting on the different ways a boat can be. Much of the passage making that Alcyone will do is downwind, with nice big following seas and fifteen to twenty-five knots of wind billowing her sails. At those times she is well-ventilated (the hatches are open), a little water slops onto the decks during the larger rolls and the motion is a stately, rolly cycle that you can easily anticipate. You sail at an easy six to seven knots and life is wonderful. When the wind starts sneaking forward of the beam things get a little tougher - you batten down the boat, the motion is jerkier (although Alcyone has about the most comfortable "upwind" motion of any boat around), waves that come with the breeze start slowing you down to the four or five knot range, and the boat itself starts working harder than with the wind aft of the beam. This is why, for the most part, you follow the old trade wind routes and reel off the miles in style. Anyway, about three days of close reaching. We swapped one Costa Rican landfall for Quepos a little farther south. That wasn't hard - it is what cruising is all about. Everybody came through the challenge with flying colors. And everyone who slipped on the worn-out non-skid just in front of the companion way had some other colors too - the occasional black and blue. So here we are in Quepos. It is a neat little town, a cheap bus ride away from a rain forest park with monkeys, sloths, iguana, coatimundi (a large raccoon-like ground scrurrier), parrots and beaches. Quepos itself is very tourist friendly, in mostly a nice way, nothing obnoxious. It is a small town about five streets wide and four streets deep with a lot of expatriates wandering around. It is home to Spanish language immersion schools and restaurants and bars and shops. There is a pretty good supermarket and good fruit stands and you can change money easily and it has a couple of Internet cafes. The tourists you encounter are not the Cabo San Lucas variety of party animals - they seem more savvy, with a little more character. Our first day was spent checking in and figuring out the town. We decided to stay a while (from Thursday to Monday), because it fit our schedule and because the head winds had blown us out of the practical reach of some possible stops. Friday, Leslie, Jeff, Alyce, Darby, Bridget, Mikey and Harry went to see the rainforest while Sugar and Chris re-nonskidded the after part of the boat. The rainforest was a lot of fun - there was a freshwater waterfall to play in, luxuriant vegetation, and, when we had begun to think we really wouldn't see any animals, we turned a corner and there were white faced monkeys playing in a tree by the trail. This was very exciting to the girls. We later learned that the monkeys seem to be everywhere - almost like pigeons in a city, except they don't come out of the trees - and the Alyce and Darby, while convinced a monkey would make a great pet, could be coaxed away from a monkey sighting to go play in the surf. After the monkeys we saw the sloth. Sloth sightings, we have found through our little experience, are generally unexciting. A local guide points up at something brown high up in the rainforest canopy and you take it more or less on faith that you are watching a sloth. However we were treated to a spectacular sloth sighting. Right over a path leading down to a beach in the rainforest park, about twenty feet above our heads a sloth with its baby clinging to its fur was trying to move from the slender branches of one tree to the twigs of another. The sloth's motions were VERY deliberate and every so often it would look down at the fifteen tourists staring up at it, then with a resigned slowness resume its task of negotiating these two trees. This drama took at least five minutes and at one point as this careful animal made the transfer between the two trees she was swung with unslothlike alacrity downwards when her new tree proved less rigid than the previous one. She waited for the swinging to subside, looked around a little chagrined and then slowly got back to climbing. What else? There was a beach that people were using just like a beach - swimming and tanning (with some minimalist interpretations of European swim wear in view). Iguanas sunning themselves on the beach and rocks; monkeys coming down as close to the shore as the trees would let them to watch what was going on. Bridget and Alyce had to rush off from the rainforest beach to go on a rainforest canopy tour. This is a deal where they have put up a platform about seventy feet high and then strung cable from tree to tree. You swing along in a harness from stop to stop. Bridget said there were six or seven stops with the longest span being about 200 meters. On the tour there were Bridget, Alyce and a couple and five guides. Alyce couldn't decide if it was more fun than horseback riding (which came the next morning), but she agreed with Bridget in proclaiming it FUN. The next morning was horseback riding (a bunch of crew went out the night before and tried to recreate the Jeff and Chris drunken bar music thing from Barra de Navidad. We had some middling pizza and got to meet a couple of the town's stoners -- of which, on closer inspection, there may be a not inconsiderable number - but that was about it). Leslie, Alyce, Darby, Jeff and Chris went horseback riding - Jeff resplendent in a white straw cowboy hat he bought in Melaque. The ride comprised a trek through a mountainous rainforest (the guide, Rolando, pointed out distant sloths) and a bracing run along the beach at low tide. The rainforest part was impressive because the trails were very muddy and steep and our horses seemed gifted at negotiating a challenging terrain. Rolando was good company and good practice for Chris and Jeff to speak Spanish to. The ride on the beach was fun. Alyce got to canter. Darby got first to trot (she did very well for a girl whose feet didn't reach the stirrups) and then her horse, Pepe, was coaxed into a canter. With the help of his lively little mare, Ranchera, Jeff convinced Rolando he knew how to ride. Leslie's horse was cool - he had the blood of some "gaited" horse in him, so both his trot and his canter were very smooth. What else? Everyone has gotten ashore a lot. There's an Internet café where you can make cheap international phone calls via the Internet, so lots of crew have spoken with family. You can get your laundry done. Sugar has made friends at a couple of hardware stores chasing down Ospho and light bulbs and looking for rock salt with which to non-skid the deck (he and Chris ended up using sugar and it has worked fine). Sunday, we powered around the point and anchored off the rainforest park for a change of scenery. The morning was spent swimming (Darby figured out how to surface snorkel without getting water down the tube and made three or four circles of the hull, examining the anti-fouling) and in the afternoon we rowed dories to the beach and played in the surf. Harry and Chris have bought cool hats. Chris bought a cool shoulder bag in a kind of Guatemalan style. Chris, Mikey and Sugar all bought pareos. The girls are no longer sporting the braids they had done in Acapulco, although the braids lasted a surprisingly long time. After this newsletter was read and commented upon by certain members of the crew, I realize I forgot to mention that Sugar got his folding bike out of its bunk and did a couple of bike rides into the countryside. Also Mike was most proud of his own rainforest canopy expedition when he climbed about 100 feet up into a tree in the park and communed with nature. Tomorrow (Monday) we do a final provision and check out of Quepos. We'll probably have one more stop in Costa Rica -- a bay where there is a river running up into the rainforest - and then we'll begin the 360 mile push to Panama. I (Jeff) hope this hasn't been too detailed an account of our goings on. It is as much for ourselves as for anybody. If you don't write down the details, sometimes they slip away. Fair Winds, the Alcyone Crew |