May Cruiseletter
2 May, 2001
San Diego to Coronados
Well, we got to the island, but there was no protection from the northerlies, so we decided to press on Islas Todo Santos, which, unfortunately, is now unavailable for cruisers because of abalone farms in all of the coves, so we drove another hour to "Whalers Bight" south of Ensenada. Not a bad anchorage, a bit rolly, but stressful to approach in the dark because the fishermen have set nets, suspended by plastic barrels all over the place. We managed to avoid them all, fortunately! Got up the next morning and headed for P. Colnett.
Punta Colnett
We're anchored off a place call Punta Colnett, about 60 miles south of Puerto Ensenada. We're avoiding port of entry cities until Cabo San Lucas (so our 180 day tourist visas get the maximum time). Punta Colnett is just a round bit of mesa that sticks out into the Pacific. Around to the South is some protection from the swells and this teeny tiny little arroyo that just hoots with wind if you're dumb enough to anchor right in front of it. Luckily, Suzy already knew about that little feature.
Cedros to Turtle Bay
Let's just say that the passages from Colnett to Cedros was pretty lumpy and not too much fun. But, from Cedros to Turtle, a mere 40 miles, it was a delight. We sailed with the wind vane on a beam reach through midday until we rounded P. Eugenia. Then we were downwind enough in light winds and flat seas to fly the spinnaker for the first time! It is pretty rare to fly the chute to Turtle Bay, and it was wonderful.
Turtle to Bahia Santa Maria:
More light winds, but light swells too. We motored for about 24 hours, until we realized that we'd be too low on fuel. So we sailed for the next 20 in light and no winds. We should have sailed more in the first 24, but that's lessons learned. During the second day however, we had another very nice spinnaker run of about 5 hours. Because of the fuel situation, we decided to detour just another 20 miles to Mag Bay...
Mag Bay
We're here in Bahia Magdalena, mostly because we have had such light winds that we needed to top off with 55 gallons of fuel. We have had 2 spinnaker runs: one into Turtle Bay (almost unheard of), and another on the way here (because we ran low on fuel) for about 6 hours. We've had wales (and bales -- medical supplies, yeah, that's it, they were *medical* supplies, NOT), dolphins, sea lions, a multitude of birds and two tuna. One for breakfast and the other for dinner.
We had a small air leak in the water maker salt water feed line that essentially broken the siphon vacuum, so we haven't made any water, yet. I think that we fixed it today (the threads on one of the pipe joints was tight enough to keep water in, but not air out -- Teflon tape to "fatten" the threads and pipe joint compound to fill in the gaps and it seems better). We'll know for sure when we try to make water tomorrow in earnest.
We're anchored in a place called Man O' War cove. It is a tiny fishing village just north of the entrance to the bay. The street lights go out at 10pm (or so, this isn't Switzerland), when they turn off the generator. The port captain, Gregorio, is a nice guy. He drove out in his panga this morning to collect our "entrada" paperwork, then came back during siesta with the diesel.
Tomorrow he's promised to take us on a jeep tour of Bahia Santa Maria (which was where we had planned to stop before the fuel became an issue). He's got quite a little enterprise going here! We're going into town tomorrow, to check out of the port, take the tour, maybe walk around the 1 kilometer of "main street," get a hot dog from the little stand down by the shore (probably Gregorio's brother ;-). We think we'll leave for Cabo, another 150nm to the SE, Saturday morning. We'll have to spend a few days there, getting our visa, etc. paperwork done, maybe laundry and some provisions. Then off to La Paz!
Cabo San Lucas:
Arrived in Cabo Sunday morning. It was cold and foggy until about 10 miles from Cabo Falso, then the heat lamp turned on and we couldn't get our clothes off fast enough, heh. The Port Captain's office isn't open on the weekend so we couldn't get our paperwork started until Monday at the earliest, so we racked out for the afternoon. Monday, we got up, and although we were slow, we got to the agent's office before noon. Alas, Tuesday, May 1 is Mexican Labor Day, so everyone was closing early and we couldn't get checked in. *darn* we have to stay an extra day in Cabo. ;-) Since Tuesday was a holiday, we decided to do a little labor on the boat ourselves; change the oil and other general maintenance, some sewing, etc. We were done by noon. We listened to the radio, I caught up on some reading in the guide books (I read about where we were, so now I'm caught up!), and Suzy highlighted all the anchorages she's seen in the Sea -- we're running out of ink. Tuesday afternoon the wind started to hoot up and it's been blowing ever since. It may be a local phenomenon, but there's a thermal low in Puerta Vallarta that may be an influence -- I have to check the weather fax tonight.
On Wednesday I dragged the laptop into town and was (finally) able to get the linux pppd to talk to the Mexican ISP. Changing the comm parameters at every port is going to be a pain in the arse. But just so you don't think I've totally forgotten everything, here's the current (abbreviated) BoatNet: The laptop routes for a class C net and a class B for the VMware net. Suzy's mac is statically assigned 192.168.1.2 (easier than fudging with 2 dhcpd's). Since I don't have an internet connection, the laptop pretends to be the root server for the world and spoofs Suzy's e-mail server at best.com so she doesn't have to reconfigure her Eudora MUA. Meanwhile, back at the kernel, I'm running a Win98 VWware session, and inside *that* the HF-Radio e-mail client, Airmail. Airmail also has a small, mostly stupid pop3 and smtp server built in, so I run fetchmail from my linux shell session to suck mail from Airmail. I have sendmail set up to use Airmail as the "Smarter" relay (heh).
When I'm at an internet cafe, all of this changes. I'm using linuxconf to manage the config profile versioning. In "roaming" mode, I've got the Linksys card set up to configure eth0 via dhcp and ppp0 depends on what I need; which is usually not I've had before. But it's getting better! It only took me 45 minutes to get all of the ppp, chat, pap and ifcfg files tweaked, and that includes me getting the phone number and the logon password wrong!
While there, I run fetchmail to grab my e-mail off bitwrangler.com, as well as Suzy's, and my e-mail off of sailmail.com and winlink.org (they have pop3 servers -- beats trying to work a DX station once I've got the internet connection up). Oh, and Yahoo! will copy e-mail off of up to 3 pop3 servers, so I don't have to set up a special cc: in my procmail filter!
Copyright © 2001 Ken Mayer
