Who's the Fool?

Tomorrow, on April 1, we plan to finally set out from Panama.

At least it won't be a Friday.

We checked the wind forecast a month or so ago, and it looked quite good for our impending passage. Back then, you could pick up the trades quite close to the Central American coast.

But! There seems to have been a seasonal development. The North Pacific high has started moving poleward, I suppose, and the trades have followed it.

We're looking at hundreds and hundreds of miles of verrrry light winds - most often less than 5 knots - before we get to the trades.

We really hate motoring at sea, but it looks like we are going to suck it up for a motor-fest in the coming days...

It Must Be Good

Great friends of ours recently bought their first cruising boat.

In the nautical world, this is recognized as a dark and lamentable turning point in anyone's life.

Just joking.
Sort of.

We spoke with these friends of ours - really some of the most remarkable, steadfast, and simpatico people we have met in our decade afloat - right in that awful extended moment when the depths of their predicament had become fully clear. (Drop us a line, guys! We want to know how it goes.)

Everything on their new boat boat seemed to broken. They were looking at that insurmountable job list that is a part of most stories of how someone acted on the dream and bought their own traveling boat. And, I think, they were trying to figure out if the lake of expense and angst that had suddenly opened at their feet, demanding to be swum, was really going to be worth it.

We talked with these friends, just when they were re-evaluating their view of the sailing life through the new prism of boat ownership. At one point, one of them asked me if I ever got off the boat.

"Sure," I said somewhat defensively. "I get off the boat."

We have just spent a couple weeks anchored in Las Perlas Islands in Panama, poised on the verge of our big jump to Hawai'i.

Granted, I have been pouring heart and soul and considerable time into the scientific research that keeps us going financially, so my time budget would not be representative for most yachties.

But still, a few days ago I looked at Alisa, wiped the dust from my brow, and said to her, "I had my answer wrong. I should have said, 'Get off the boat? Why would I ever want to get off the boat?'"

Because, when I haven't been trying to understand the ecological implications of sea surface temperature-sea level pressure coupling in the North Pacific, I have been pouring heart and soul and discretionary hours into projects like those illustrated above: fixing the wind generator (partly successful) and renewing the nonskid deck paint in crucial areas (generally regarded as a stunning boat maintenance coup).

Meanwhile, our transmission has developed a leak that seems to have eluded my first attempt at a fix. And our busted telescoping whisker pole seems likely to set out for Hawai'i in a still-busted state. This is a really classic boat problem - it was broken when we reached Cape Town, got fixed there, failed nearly immediately on the trip back across the Atlantic, got fixed again at Ascension Island, and then broke immediately again.

So this is us, a decade into the sailing life, on a well-used boat, which are generally less maintenance than the marina-sitters of the world. We're always fixing something.

And yet, for all that effort, we are all four of us completely enthralled with the sailing life. Consider the days we have just spent at Las Perlas, off a deserted beach, in waters thick with life, at a spot that you could only get to your own boat.

See the beach fire pic above from Las Perlas - I expect that our next beach fire will be in Alaska.  See the photos of Eric below, swinging from a halyard.

And see the happy family, very much together, very much in the same boat, below.

Buying your way into that kind of living with some boat maintenance...who wouldn't make that trade?

Brown pelican, catching dinner

The End

I took a photo tour of the wrecks of Portobelo yesterday.

This sleepy anchorage took a heavy hit from Hurricane Otto last November.

Until Otto, Panama was considered completely safe from hurricanes.

Otto came ashore on the border of Coast Rica and Nicaragua, and it is the first hurricane to make landfall in Costa Rica since reliable records began, I believe around 1851.

It formed later in the season than any other major hurricane during the satellite era.

Given that Panama was considered to be well outside the hurricane zone, boats here would have been completely unprepared to ride out a really big blow. In Portobelo, eighteen or so yachts (I hear different numbers) ended up on the beach.

As you can see, quite a few were not salvaged.

A very informal survey of the wrecks suggests that metal boats are much more likely to still be in one piece, even if they have not been refloated. The glass boats are open to the tide, or resting on the bottom.

So, this was the end for a number of dreams, the sudden culmination of all the resources and effort that people expended to go to sea in their own boats. No sailor can look on these scenes with equanimity.

As you can see from the dinghy by the boat that is aground on an even keel, people appear to still be living on at least a couple of these boats.

The boat with the sails up, right in front of town, really caught our eye. Doveilyn, or Dorcilyn, I can't quite read the script on the hull. She appears to be a really nice little boat, and when we were first in Portobelo someone was still at work, apparently trying to refloat her.

But when we returned to Portobelo after being away for more than a month, she was abandoned with the sails up, in the same place where we had last seen her.

Finally, I think this is a really informative example of how a changing climate can catch people out. There is an incremental trend - Otto only came ashore 50 or 55 km farther south than the previous most southerly hurricane to make landfall in the Caribbean. But a very sudden, very abrupt event is embedded in that trend. If you're sitting in a crowded anchorage on the day that the definition of hurricane-safe areas changes, you get a lifetime of climate change impacts at once.

And I should close by noting that in addition to these wrecks and property damage ashore, 23 people died in Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua during the storm...

No Style

Alisa, waiting out a rain squall

Well, that's what you get when you get up on your hind legs and pontificate about what does and does not count as proper style, sailing-wise.

Or, as Alisa put it, "We chose this weather?"

The plan was to get to Bocas del Toro, about 150 miles away to the west of us, close to the border with Costa Rica. We could spend a week or two based there, and with any luck get up to the mountains at Boquete, and then make it back to Colon for our date with the Canal.

What could be simpler?

And, the weather forecast showed that we would get the last good sailing conditions before a prolonged spell of calm settled in. Of course, we would get caught by a front before we got there, and then would face 10 knot headwinds for the last 30 miles or so, but hey! We're Cape Horners and stuff. We're allowed to spit to windward! Not a problem.

So we set out in the morning, all fired up for an overnight sail and the promise of some natural history delights in a new corner of Panama.

The sail started off as a ripper. Eight knots, and not even trying.

We passed through the ship anchorage off Colon in the daylight, just as neat as could be.

And then, in the middle of the night, we got caught by the front.

I was awoken by an awful commotion on deck and stuck my head through the companionway to see Alisa in the act of being bedrenched by the mother of all tropical downpours, trying desperately to furl the jib, which was making a sound like coconuts hitting a sheet of galvanized tin.

Recognizing the better part of valor when I saw it, I limited my assistance to tailing the furling line from the shelter of the dodger and making encouraging remarks about how she could handle the situation better next time.

After the jib was furled and Alisa toweled off, it somehow transpired that it was my turn to go on watch.

The hours between 0200 and 0600 passed in the most perplexing sailing that I can remember. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to tack the barky through less than 170 degrees.

The wind was blowing about 20, dead from Bocas del Toro towards us. I had her reefed down, and first I sailed due north, and then I came about and sailed due south. The wind shifted, I reacted. It rained, I hid under the dodger.

And as the hours passed, we got exactly no closer to our destination. In addition to the wind, it was obvious that we were bucking a pretty serious current.

When Alisa awoke and the light of day was on us, I gave up and fired up the donk.

I gave her revs, I strapped in the reefed main, I boldly pointed the bow more or less where we wanted to go, and...

...same thing. First we went due north, then due south. And to the west we went not at all.

By noon, our patience was nil. The engine had been going at hard revs for hours. The forecast showed the same front sitting over us for the next day. And we were still working hard to get exactly nowhere.

And so, with enough angst and gnashing of the teeth on my part that I would blush to tell you about it, we made the decision to turn around and head back to Portobelo, from whence we had come.

For the first three hours we flew. Eight knots, not even trying.

And then we ran out of wind. And we were given the most arresting show of strange wave morphology, as the two opposing swells met each other and sent fountains of water shooting straight up into the air. It was a great illustration of just what a powerful swirl of current we had managed to land ourselves in.

And then, the wind came up, and we sailed back...straight into headwinds for the last 80 miles or so.

After about 46 hours under weigh, we dropped the anchor right back in the same full-ish harbor that I had been so eager to leave behind.

In retrospect, we obviously forget a long-ago learned lesson about how poorly the forecast models capture fronts, and how easily they can give you 20 knot headwinds instead of 10.

And, we forgot the advice of friends who had done the same trip a week or so earlier, and warned us about how hard the adverse current had made the trip, even though they had no wind at all.

But, more than anything else, it was yet another reminder of how humbling it can be, trying to get yourself from one place to another on a boat, even in the very benign arena of the tropics.

There are times in this life afloat when questions of "style" don't seem so immediate, and your only concern is to do what you set out to do without making a complete mess of things.

On the bright side, the tooth fairy managed to find us on the first night out, even with all the pointless sailing around that we were doing.

And this Portobelo that I had been so happy to leave behind...it doesn't look so bad now, at all.

No. You Can't Have Our Bow Line.

It was Cuba that finally made us tough.

At both Cienfuegos and Cayo Largo, we had to tie up to a marina dock to make our peace with officialdom.

At both of the marinas in question, Alisa glumly handed our bowline to the waiting marina worker, hoping against hope that this would be the time that the person receiving our line would know what to do with it.

No luck.

Both times, the worker took our bow line to the nearest dock cleat, pulled it as ever tight as he could, and then made it fast.

If you do that with a moving boat, and the dock cleat in question is towards the stern of the boat, only one thing can happen.

The boat is brought to a screeching halt by the bow. That's something like halting a trotting horse by the nostrils. The bow can only come slamming in towards the dock (and the stern can only go shooting out away from the dock) with a speed and violence that is commensurate with the force generated by the (slight) speed and (massive) weight of the boat.

In Cienfuegos, the dock was concrete. Alisa managed, with alacrity and disregard for her person, to fend off.

In Cayo Largo, not so.

In this case the dock was aluminum. We're steel. The resulting BANG was enough to make the onlooking mangroves shiver. Result - a big fat dent in the dock, and a teeny little scratch in our paint. I'll have to remember to hit that spot the next time I do touch-up.

The thing is, though, that while these were two quite egregious examples - "Great, you stopped us five meters short of where we were going. Now let's untie the poor boat and move her forward" - they were far from unique.

All too often, people running forward, eager to help you dock your boat, have no idea at all what to do. They grab the closest line on offer - from the bow - and, wanting to do something, pull on it or tie it off too soon and generally screw up everything.

As a result, Alisa and I had over the years developed a strong but diffuse aversion to any help docking the barky unless we really needed it. We couldn't exactly put into words why we hated help. We just hated it.

But Cuba made us see the light. Our dislike of help is actually very specific. It centers on the fascination that various forms of landlubber have for the bow line.

With recognition, comes solution.

Take today. I am about to jet off to Alaska to give the outstanding problems of boreal marine ecology my personal attention for a week or two. As such, our goal for the day was to get Galactic tied up in the marina where Alisa and the boys will live while the Mothership is captainless.

(I have discouraged Alisa from that hideous nautical custom of the relief skipper.)

We came into something of a screaming horror of a docking situation. Tradewinds right up our stern, and fresh. Our designated spot far far into the nether reaches of the marina, in the armpit where two docks come together with barely a Galactic-length between them. And the dock taking a little turn just before our slip so the trades would both be blowing us bow-first into the dock and towards the 36' Hunter (read: the single boat in the world that is less tolerant of being run into by 18 tonnes of steel than any other) that would be our neighbor.

Alisa and I were firm. We would not give up the bow line. The very nice worker with whom we were chatting on the VHF would get our spring. And he would bloody well like it.

Elias, as AB, was set the task of standing by with the bow line while Alisa tended spring and stern.  She explained the plan to him: "Don't give the man the bow line. He'll ask for it, but don't give it to him. We're doing spring line, then stern line, then bow last."

We came in, got the Mothership far far back in the trap of the narrowing docks, and predictably, I couldn't make the turn into our slip given the available room and wind speed.

A series of tiny little turns ensued as I repeatedly backed the barky up into the wind until we were nearly touching the boats at the dock behind us, and then risked a little forward gear to push our bow where it needed to be.

The dock worker, seeing everything not going to plan, began loudly demanding the bow line. That way he could give it a heroic tug when we got close, and our stern would go crashing into the defenseless Hunter, and everything would end according to the script that seems to have been written by the evil gods who govern all things in that third ring of hell, the marina.

Elias consulted with his mom. This grownup was demanding the line that he was holding. Should he give it to him?

Alisa stood firm.

Our helper had to make do with the spring.

And, except for a leetle hiccup when he decided that the spring line would be much more useful if it were led to a cleat downwind of us, rather than to the upwind cleat which was our entire hope and plan for stopping our 18 tonnes with the trades behind her (quickly set right by a burst of volume from the skipper's voice box), everything went perfectly.

It may be slow. But we do learn a few things as the years go by.

What Was I Thinking?

So, the time came to pull Galactic out of the water and give her a new coat of bottom paint.  It had been a year and four months since we hauled out in Valdivia, Chile, and we were pretty sure we didn't want to haul out in the Caribbean, which will be our next chance after South Africa.

I enquired at the boat yard here in Simon's Town, and found out that in a week their lift would be going out of service for two months.  They could get us out of the water.  But we'd have to do it that very afternoon.

Well!  Normally we plan our haulouts weeks in advance, giving us time to go through all the steps of locating the necessary supplies in a country where we know nothing, and then blocking out the time for me to do the work. (More and more, as Eric gets older, Alisa has also been able to help in the boatyard.)  But just then, I was buried in science work.  Haul out today?  It seemed impossible.

But then - deus ex machina - there is the cost of unskilled labor in South Africa to consider.  One side of this is a lesson about mastery that I am not keen for my sons to internalize: black people work on boats, white people sail them.  Another side of this is that we could haul out Galactic and I could continue to work at my science obligations while someone else painted the boat for us.

This is a very common approach for some yachties.  Really it is a cultural divide in the sailing world. Some people paint their own boats, others have them painted.  This one bit of information about a boat owner is all that you need to make all sorts of inferences about their approach to the grand adventure of sailing the world.  We are very much of the paint your own boat world.  I like to think of Enki as our great friends from the other side of the divide.

So, after a flurry of quick strategic thinking, it was on.  We would come out on the tide, with only four hours' notice.

We came out.  The tractor pulled us up the ramp.  I climbed down the ladder to look at Galactic's underbody, exposed to view.  And I was a little dismayed at what I saw...

I will pause here to note that there is another divide in the sailing world - between those who haul out regularly, and other people, like the wonderful crew of Mollymawk, who, if I have it right, last hauled out seven years ago.

Once again, there are all sorts of inferences that you can make about someone's approach, and their budget, based on which side of the divide they fall on.

We are on the regular haulout side of the divide.  But this time we took it too far.

It turned out that the one patch of bottom paint that we had assessed from the dock when wondering if we should haul out or not - peering down into the water from the dock at the side of the bow in the sun - that one patch turned out to be by far the worst bit of growth on the whole hull.  And it wasn't bad at all.  The bottom paint looked fine.  We could have gone another year without hauling out, no problem.

Later, I had the leisure to reflect that this is exactly what we should have done.  But we were out of the water now, and the boat was being set down, and we let the momentum carry us along.  If nothing else, we reasoned, we would be resetting the clock with a fresh paint job.

Someone else painted the boat while I was working on my laptop.  It turns out that I didn't really like having someone else do the job.  I found the painters about to make one big mistake, and from that point on I was torn between needing to keep an eye on things and not wanting to seem like I was always looking over their shoulders.  (As an interesting tidbit, it was in the yard that I learned about immigrant labor in South Africa.  The workers I asked were all from Zimbabwe or the DRC.)

When the job was done, we went back in the water, wondering if we were any better of than when we came out.

One of the things I love about people sailing the world on a shoestring is how tough they are about money, how resourceful they can be about not opening their wallets to get things done.  In this instance, we rushed ourselves into spending money needlessly, and I'm sure we would've acted differently if I wasn't working, and we didn't have money coming in.

So all our friends on the cheaper side of the spectrum can reassure themselves with our experience.  There's one more reason not to like work - it makes you spend money!

I, meanwhile, have resolved to be a more savvy yachtie.  I've got to be able to hold my head up the next time we see Mollymawk or (God forbid!) Ganesh.

The side story is that the timing worked out that we were on the hard for Eric's sixth(!) birthday.  There were three other foreign boats in the marina, none of whom we knew very well at the time.  They all rose to the occasion.  I don't know which one of them heard that it was Eric's birthday, but the word spread and they all came by with presents.  Meant the world to little fella.  And reminded me, yet again, of how much I like your average traveling sailor.

That's a dassie ("duhssie") on his cake.  Closest living relative of the elephant, size of an outstanding guinea pig.  They've been our favorite African mammal so far.

Live Bloggin' the Blast; or, Up All Night?

Elias baking "creation loaves" (his name)

Well.

This particular Monday night finds us standing anchor watch for the first time in the nearly eight years since we left Kodiak.

We were expecting strong westerlies tonight, but got something more than "strong".  Blasts of wind, water smoking, us heeling all over the place as we were blown through the anchorage.  We managed to get the inflatable on deck and deflated early enough, but we weren't quite quick enough at getting the engine started to motor into the wind and give the anchor a little help.  We dragged about a tenth of a mile before we started motoring into it.

We weren't the only ones caught by surprise - a commercial boat anchored near us had to get under way to reset their hook, and a couple of big working boats that must have been at the other side of the harbor came charging around, trying to get their anchors down, and eventually succeeding.

We ended up in 30 meters of water, which is a mite deep for anchoring when the water surface is smoking around you.   All thanks and praise to our 40 kilo Rocna, which did great considering the conditions, and reset quite quickly after dragging.  With a lesser anchor I'm sure we would have blown much further.

We also managed to get a second hook out without much drama.  We had already dragged into the deepest water around, and had tons of room downwind, AND the work boats kept their distance.  So all good thus far.

The boys slept through the whole thing.  How, I have no idea.

The irony is that we are only here, in the notorious anchorage of Puerto Natales, and not somewhere more sheltered, because we needed internet.  I've mostly been using it for my biology work, but now that I find myself up in the middle of the night, standing anchor watch, I can take advantage of the chance to post some recent pics.

There's nothing sillier than a blog that's "out of date", that's struggling to catch up with the flow of events.  But since we can only update pictures on the infrequent instances when we have internet access, I'll beg your indulgence and look back a bit.

Leaving Estero Peel

After we left behind the ice of Estero Peel, we found ourselves taking shelter in Puerto Bueno - where Bill Tilman's crew despaired at the idea of sitting for as long as two months while the climbing party did their thing on the Patagonia Icecap, and where Jorge Sarmiento found refuge in the 1570s, if you can believe the Italian Guide.

How anyone ever sailed in and out of a place like this with sixteenth century technology, I'll never understand.

Puerto Bueno

We loved Puerto Bueno.  It's beautiful, and it's surrounded by great hiking.

The boys had serious energy to burn after being confined to the ship in so many
other anchorages.  Note our mast in the background

Eric flamed out, threw a complete wobbly, and had to be packed out

Puerto Bueno is also the place where, memorably, we
finally caught the wily centolla...

...and saw a fox.  Sightings of terrestrial mammals are
rare in the canales

Canal Harriet.  That's a whale vertebra on Fernando

As we moved south into Canal Sarmiento, and then Canal Harriet, we noticed something...different.  It wasn't raining.  As I've said before, we didn't come to Patagonia to carry on about the weather.  But we definitely noticed when we got a day without rain.

Elias, Caleta Harriet. He recently wrote an email to our great (adult) friends
on Enki and signed it "your trusty mate".  That melted his parents' hearts

We were in Canal Harriet because it leads to Caleta Thélème, which we are
entering  in this pic.  (With just enough light!)  We were keen to visit that
Caleta because we count ourselves as friends of the eponymous boat.

Elias, lending a hand with shore lines in Caleta Thélème

Caleta Thelémè.  If you drop in, know that the Italian guide mis-identifies
the anchorage waypoint as the entrance waypoint

Packing the crew back to the boat, Caleta Thelémè

The old campaigner - wearing down jacket inside sleeping bag, sitting next to the heater

Sewing a new mesh bag for one of the shorelines, Estrecho Collingwood

Then, in Estrecho Collingwood, we got our second day of sun in three days.  Again, we don't go on about the weather.  But we did notice.

Estrecho Collingwood

Estrecho Collingwood

With a heavy French accent: "It was my dream!"

That's our anchorage?  We'll take it.  Isla Jaime, Seno Union

On the summit of Isla Jaime

Picking the pot at Isla Jaime.  They didn't catch nothin'.

Isla Jaime and Seno Union are where we broke off from the straight and narrow path to head for Puerto Natales.

But I'm noticing that the wind has died down to something reasonable, and the barometer has climbed from the Stygian depths of 968 all the way up to 977 mb.  It might be time to get some sleep...

I'll Forbear, You Forbear

Readers of this blog will know that I find unnecessary discussion of boat maintenance to be boorish, and writing about it to be worse.

Stupidity may be the greatest sin for the general run of humanity (according to Oscar Wilde, I think?). But focusing on means, rather than ends, is the greatest sin both for sailing writers and for sailors in general.

Some people can write entertainingly about sailboat maintenance, but I don't even try.

So I'll just refer you to this picture to the right, vintage yesterday, from the engine room of Galactic.

That would be our engine, off its mounts and hanging on end.

I won't go into any details, of course.  I will forbear from over-sharing.

The crew, ready to go crabbing

And I would beseechingly ask for a response in kind.  If you are an editor at that leading sailing magazine for which I have resumed a bit of freelance work of late, and you are wondering when those excellent ideas that I pitched your way will turn into actual stories - please, forbear from asking.

Bits of the engine on deck in Puerto Montt

And if you are one of my science colleagues, wondering when I am going to come through with a promised bit of collaborative work - well, I'm sure I'm up to date on that front, without anything outstanding.  But if I've forgotten something, please forbear.

And, if you're a regular reader of the blog, perhaps someone who is nursing their own plans to follow the salty dream, and you're wondering when we're going to get to los canales already, wondering when the blog will be saturated with photos of the towering spires and ice-encumbered waters of Patagonia - well, they're coming.  A delightful Dutch/Spanish crew (the other crazy people heading South in the winter) just left Puerto Montt yesterday, and we hope to soon do the same.

Meanwhile, I'll offer some pics from the final days of our month in the Chiloé region to close:

Black-necked swan

South American sea lions - lobos de un pelo

Wing 'n wing and reefed down

Sunrise with forest fire smoke

Brothers

More soon.