Month: March 2020

It’s been seven days since I published my last post. One week. And we all know how the world has transformed in that agonizingly long week. Here’s an image of what that week has looked like for us, a bitter sundae with scoops of anxiety, stress, and fatigue, topped with dissolving dreams, a sprinkle of hope, and a rotten egg on top.

I moved up our flights out of Mexico out of concern that the Mexican and French Polynesian borders would close, hoping that we could make it to the Marquesas to meet up with Tom to quarantine ourselves together, or at least to be in the same country. Obviously, I was too late. Since I had had no luck getting through to United Airlines in the days prior, I decided that once I had landed in San Diego, I would go to the United desk and make the change. Of course, the world had other plans. As we taxied to the gate, I turned on my phone to be met with news that French Polynesia had closed its borders.

The next few days was a flurry of research and emails, tears and chest-tightening anxiety. My parents, kids, and I headed north to Washington (no point in hanging out in Southern California when there was no end in sight for our waiting time). Barreling up I-5 in a loud, shaking RV and forcing back bouts of carsickness, I tried to find out what the news meant for arriving boats and their crews on board. I sent multiple emails a day and dug through Facebook groups of people looking for good information about what was happening. But things changed by the hour, certainly by the day, and the information I fed the guys a week ago is completely different today (when I write my book, I’ll try to get the daily/hourly details in there because it is shocking and, eventually, I hope, laughable). If it had only been our family together on board, it may have been a simpler problem to solve. Or not. But the problems are different with crew on board.

Challenge 1: Getting Brian home. Tom needed to get Brian to French Polynesia for his April 2nd flight. They’re less than 24 hours out from landfall, so he’s done that…. except that all flights from the Marquesas stopped on Sunday, and the last international flight out of Tahiti leaves today. There is a “refugee” flight leaving Tahiti on Saturday, so the goal now is to work with our agent and with French Polynesia’s repatriation service to get Brian on that flight. There is no guarantee – in fact, it’s probably unlikely because Tahiti is 900 miles away from the Marquesas – but at least we have a sprinkle of hope.

Challenge 2: Getting Roberto into Hawaii. Everybody was telling boats to divert to Hawaii, and many did. But the decision was not so easy for Korvessa. Roberto has a Danish passport, and while Denmark is a visa-waiver country, that does not apply to people arriving on boats of any sort; he would need a B1-B2 visa. After five calls to various Customs and Border Patrol agents, I learned that it might be possible for him to apply for a one-time waiver when he entered, but with the information inconsistent, and the consequence of getting it wrong being deportation and a “black mark” on his passport, it was too high a risk to take.

And so the boys continued to French Polynesia, with the only major change being that they will arrive tomorrow in Nuku Hiva instead of in Hiva Oa. Nuku Hiva is a larger town with more resources, including food, fuel, and internet. It’s also, on the plus side, reportedly one of the most beautiful anchorages in the Marquesas. They will have been at sea for 22 days. They are tired. They are sweaty. They ate the last of their fresh food yesterday. And to top it all off, there is a rotten egg somewhere in the pantry.

I don’t know what the guys will encounter when they arrive. They may have to do a 14-day quarantine. They may only be given a few days to stay. They may be welcomed and helped. They may be met with closed arms and grudges. I don’t know. The world is so full of unknowns right now.

One of those unknowns is what to do with the rest of our sailing trip. The only known is that it will not look the way we had expected it to look. Tom and I swap sailmail emails and satellite texts of 160 characters trying to process the information and the decisions ahead. Do the kids and I fly out in six weeks’ times and make our way through the only countries remaining open during this time, trusting that eventually New Zealand and Australia will open their borders? Do we hunker down and avoid going ashore in order to minimize contact and reduce pressure on already stressed resources and populations? With travel by plane being an unknown, do we go to American Samoa so Tom can work for a while? And, if so, what about Demon the cat, who, as far as I can tell, is not allowed there without a quarantine. But at this point, we would all be required to quarantine, so maybe that’s a moot point. You may read this and think, of course not! But know that it can take time to come to terms with disappointment. Dreams don’t dissolve in a poof, but in a slow drip as they melt into the icy anxiety and sadness pooling in our hearts.

Do we leave the boat in Tahiti or Hawaii, and come back to finish the trip when we can? Probably not. Our boat would be too far away and too hard to get to, and a ten month break would be a really awkward and uncomfortable time frame, the kids just getting used to being home when we would whisk them away again. We already did that after four months here last summer.

Should we bring the boat home to Anacortes? Maybe. And there are some strong economic arguments for this. It would require a passage to Hawaii, then a passage around the North Pacific High back to the Pacific Northwest, which we can manage. We don’t feel quite ready for being back, though. An intermediary idea is to sail the boat up to Alaska, have the kids join us, and spend the summer sailing it back down the inside passage. It’s remote, not many people. Appropriate, maybe, for weathering a pandemic. An intriguing idea, but still hard to wrap our heads around when we were preparing ourselves for the tropics.

But as those dreams dissolve and swirl into the anxiety and sadness below, so they become something new. Not the same sweet sundae we had planned to delve into, but maybe more of a milkshake. Lactose-free, hopefully, and maybe with something sweet on top – maybe not a cherry, but at least not a rotten egg. As we figure out what to do next, the adventure isn’t stopping; it’s just changing its form.

While Tom, Brian, and Roberto stink up the boat in the middle of the Pacific, the kids and I are surrounded by our own smells here in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. Carne asada sizzling on sidewalk grills, cinnamony-sweet churros frying in a vat, bright pink flowers powdering their pollen and trees oozing liters of sap, astringent cleaning products steaming off the sidewalk attempting to kill the remains of dog poop, fish carcasses, and scattered trash. And it’s all coated in the smell of jungle, a sweet, humid, decidedly green smell emanating from the cells of every trunk, coconut, and palm frond.

But it’s the sounds of La Cruz that I will remember most. Here in our little apartment in a very real Mexican neighborhood, complete with dirt roads, yappy dogs of all shapes and sizes, and barefoot kids playing with tops in the street, I wake every morning to the crowing of roosters and shrill shrieks and caws of unknown jungle birds. In the background is the hum of trucks starting their early days. And then out of the low din blasts a loudspeaker announcing something that is “DULCE CON CANELA!” I haven’t yet figured out what it is that is sweet with cinnamon, but I plan to find out.

If I walk the two blocks down to the main corner at 7:30 in the morning, it is a bustle of life. Trucks, scooters, bikes, cars and pedestrians dance around each other. Tables are out with tacos, tortas, and juice for sale. The smell is sweet and salty and mouth-watering. There are honks and shouts and exchanges of pesos. Trucks drive by full of men on their way to work, shouting at friends they see on the sidewalk. It is so full of life. Every few seconds, everyone is reminded of the DULCE CON CANELA, and people head toward the top-heavy, crate-laden motorbike to partake of something sweet with cinnamon.

If I head into the center of town at the same time, all is quiet. It is dead except for the few people out sweeping their front stoops and the occasional street dog barking at an iguana. It is in the afternoon and evening when the center becomes alive. School children yammer and screech on their way home. Delivery trucks bump their way down the narrow cobblestoned streets. A truck loaded down with mattresses blasts its product through a loudspeaker. Construction workers shovel and scrape and build. Live music blasts from bars full of retired gringos and vacationers. On Friday, the cloppity-clop of dancing horses resonates from the La Cruz Inn. And at sunset, the party boats full of bare, dancing, inebriated bodies make their way back to the marina blasting Mexican techno.

La Cruz grows on me as I write these words. We’ve been in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle for six weeks now, an eternity in the cruising lifestyle. And I like it. I like this small, Mexican beach town. And yet, it hasn’t grown on us in the same way that La Paz did. By the time we had spent a month in La Paz, we felt as if it were a second home. It was a place we wanted to keep coming back to. So, why hasn’t the charming town of La Cruz grabbed us in the same way? Why haven’t the cobblestone roads, muraled walls, and broad smiles of the locals enchanted us in quite the same way?

The first and simplest reason is that our minds have turned westward. Westward and busy. We explorers have spent our days crossing items off of lists and working on projects, and our adventurous souls did not venture very far past “what new taco place should we try tonight?” Our days were filled with preparing the boat and ourselves for the long passage to French Polynesia and then further across the islands of the South Pacific. While Tom went back to the States for ten days to put some more cash in the cruising kitty, I tackled the first round of purging and sorting (while we, conversely, got tackled by a cold bug going around La Cruz). But the to-do list has no interest in waiting for the phlegm to pass or the 90-degree afternoons to abate. The work continued, our mindset shifted further and further west, and I even started studying French. We haven’t really been fully present here, because our minds are in the middle of the ocean or in the customs office of some distant island.

But we weren’t the only ones. Banderas Bay is a hub for cruisers planning to jump the puddle to French Polynesia, and so everyone is somewhat busy and preoccupied with projects. The marina buzzes with scuba regulators, sanders, drills, clanging halyards, VHF calls, and Spanglish conversations about a myriad of boat services.

La Cruz is also a Kid Mecca. Marina Riviera Nayarit has become well known for its La Cruz Kids Club, which boasts constant activities to keep the kids occupied and entertained: chalk drawing, sushi making, knot tying, navigation skills, baby turtle releases, trash clean up days, talks on saving whales, and the list goes on. The marina also has another kid magnet: a pool. And the sounds of shrieks and splashes, shouts and whines, while the boat kids spent endless hours in the sun-warmed water will stay with me for a long time. It is here that parents bonded are forced to take a break and bond over the myriad joys and challenges we all face. To have heart-felt conversations about crushed dreams and painful decision points. To recall remote anchorages of calm and serenity to give our minds and bodies a break from the bustle of people and projects.

But the bustle of people is part of the second reason La Cruz hasn’t grabbed our hearts in the same way. So much of the bustle of the town is in English. I walk past countless restaurants and bars filled with pale, white faces chattering in distinctly North American accents being served by people with darker skin and darker hair. And even though I speak in that same North American accent, and even though I like supporting the local economy, I feel uncomfortable in this somewhat divided society. I have not yet fully processed or thought through this division (perhaps in a future post where I can reflect at more length). There is a reason so many tourists and snowbirds flock to Mexico; it is a warm, beautiful, hospitable, and a truly special place. But the segregation and the sounds of English everywhere invokes a discomfort in me that I am going to have to process as an American, a lifelong traveler, and a migrant of sorts myself.

I feel strangely more comfortable in the Mexican neighborhood of our little AirBnB, perhaps because it jives more with what I like to experience in international travel: a temporary home, an adoptive family, the chance to become a part of a living neighborhood and culture for a while. The neighborhood is both vibrant and calming. During the day, sales people walk through the alleys selling their wares: huarache sandals, baked goods, hot peppers, propane. Each evening, families gather on plastic chairs on the street and pass around plastic bowls of food and taco toppings. Quesadilla and taco stands pop up sporadically on the dirt roads or front stoops. Mariachi musics blasts from various doorways. Friendly faces greet us every day as we walk through the dusty lanes, filled with kids, puppies, cats, horses, iguanas, and just about everything else you could imagine.

La Cruz de Huanacaxtle will always be a place of transition for us. A transition between North America and the Pacific, between the first half of our sailing trip and the second half. A transition from the daily gunkholing of the coast to a cruising life of big passages between destinations. And perhaps even a transition for our family as we try desperately to reunite in a world that its shutting its borders all around us.

I realized, though, as I walked through my neighborhood and tried unsuccessfully to capture visually the sound of the jungle birds screeching overhead and the blaring of Mexican music out of a second story window, that as much as La Cruz will forever represent an intense time of transition for me, it will equally represent an awakening of my senses, of the smells, colors, textures, and sounds of this small vibrant city. Our last in Mexico. For now. And because I didn’t want to leave Mexico with any regrets, I went chasing down the Dulce Con Canela motorbike this morning to get a taste of whatever it is that he is marketing at top volume from his loudspeaker. It is bread. Sweet, fragrant, and full of carbohydrates and cinnamon. It tastes of Mexico.

Informational Addendum: The kids and I leave Wednesday afternoon for San Diego to spend some time with my parents (quarantined in a campground with a beach nearby, I might add). Tom is 2/3 of the way to the Marquesas and is no doubt ready for landfall. But is land ready for him? And us? Just yesterday, French Polynesia declared a required 14-day quarantine for all incomers to the country. For those on yachts, time at sea counts. For the rest of us, it does not, so the boys and I are expecting a period of quarantine in Tahiti before we can fly to Atuona. IF the borders aren’t closed completely. I’m trying to move up our flights to get there sooner, but more than eight hours of time on hold with United and resulted in nothing because I can’t get through, and my international ticket can’t be changed online. Additionally, they have banned inter-island travel except in emergencies or family necessities, so it might be possible for me to get to Atuona, but once there, we don’t actually know if we’ll be allowed to go anywhere else. The situation is fluid. Very fluid. And at this point, all we want to do is reunite our family so that we can just take what comes at us together from now on.

Someday I’ll ask Tom to write a piece on the same theme, though he’ll likely have a catchier title because he was the one actually out there. All I can do is evoke an image from the words he has fed me through satellite texts.

He and his friends are almost halfway between Mexico and French Polynesia. They have recently crossed the latitude 5N, which is where the dreaded Intertropical Convergance Zone currently starts. And by currently, I mean that beast is alive! It grows and shrinks, sways back and forth, and mottles itself with great purple swaths of calm and orange swirls of squalls. It is the band of weather at the equator where the north trade winds meet the south trade winds, and where opposing currents make you sail s-curves.

It is hot. They are hot. Tom is sweating rags full of his own salt water every day. He can’t walk barefoot in the boat for fear of slipping on his own sweat. The wind does what it can to ease the heat, but on a downwind sail, the boat steals most of the wind’s power for itself. The cat hates it. She has voiced her protest by peeing on Tom’s bed twice, so both duvets, all sheets, and the mattress are out of commission. Tom is sleeping on the square of foam we call our dog bed. And so it smells. A centuries-old smell of ships full of unwashed bodies and frightened animals. Bodily fluids seeping into the floor boards and into the bilge, following the same leeward currents of centuries of sweat and pee.

It doesn’t smell when Brian is cooking. Brian has taken over the galley, mastered the messy spice drawer, and cooks up whatever needs cooking. Until there is a fish on the line, and then the meal is of spicy poke, sweet sushi, or tart ceviche. A bluefin tuna was their prize yesterday, and the crew gratefully ate fresh fish over canned or dried meat. But the cabbage is probably starting to wilt, a few oranges showing signs of mold, and potatoes needing some attention. So there are probably still smells to track down and solve. Unless the boys’ olfactory senses are deadened by now.

They have had wind – with the exception of the third day out – and even the ITCZ may be kind enough to allow them to sail at least half of it or more. But the weak Pacific high has meant fluky and weak trade winds for them (12-17 knots, against the more typical 20-25), and they have appreciated their self-steering Hydrovane which keeps them on the same point of sail without their having to adjust the sails with every shift of wind. The big gap winds out of the Gulf of Tehuantapec in Mexico have driven some easterly swell in their direction, which has been hitting them right on the beam and making for an uncomfortable ride. Hence the disgruntled cat. Hence the gratefulness for pre-prepared frozen meals so that nobody has to brace themselves too long in the rocking galley.

Once at 2 degrees south – in about two and a half days’ time – they should be into the southeast trades. They should have more comfortable wind, more comfortable seas, but squalls multiple times a day. They might curse the fluky 35 knot gusts that hit them, but I doubt they will curse the brief torrential rains, which can wash away some of the smells of fish and sweat, though not of upset cat. The perpetual smell of salt water will be in their noses until one day there will be a whiff of something different. They will smell it before they see it. It will smell green and sweet and alive. They will smell land.

At 9:15 a.m. this morning, Korvessa pulled away from the dock in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. After filling up our two tanks and six jerry cans with diesel, the guys made their way to Nuevo Vallarta for the official checkout with Customs, Immigration, and the Port Captain. Yesterday, getting our pre-departure paperwork ready at the Port Captain’s office, I found myself choking up at the prospect of leaving Mexico, of our boat leaving Mexico. Today, I found myself choking up at Tom leaving Mexico, with no other country in sight for three to four weeks. It’s a weird feeling. I came back to our little apartment and just vegetated for hours while the I gave the kids free reign on their tablets. I’m going to have to return to actual parenting shortly, but in the mean time, I just needed some time to breathe out all the busyness of the last five weeks.

It’s been a whirlwind of activity to get ready for the passage to French Polynesia, stifled ironically by Tom’s severe cold and Mexico’s afternoon heat. I had planned on getting Tom to narrate a short video about what he did to get the boat ready, but that was simply not possible. Here is small sample of everything we did to get the boat and ourselves ready for the trip:

• Inspect all the rigging and hull.
• Inspect the engine and generator and service various parts.
• Install a solar panel as a bimini so there is a modicum of shade in the cockpit on the transequatorial passage.
• Fix the radio antenna at the top of the mast and check all communication systems.
• Strap down the dinette tables and floor boards so that they don’t go flying in the case of a knock-down.
• Purge the boat of anything unnecessary and find nooks and crannies deep in the bilge for storage.
• Pack the boat full of food, spare parts, and other essential supplies.
• Ensure we have paper charts of the whole South Pacific.
• Ensure that our paperwork is in order (there’s more than you’d think).
• Attend a bunch of seminars on weather, provisioning, rigging, South Pacific, etc to make sure we know our stuff.
• Be social. Though this last week, that took a firm backseat most of the time.
• Last but not least: Watch weather patterns: I watched the weather reports daily to start noticing patterns and developments. Tom will be downloading GRIB files (weather maps) and tuning into HAM nets to get forecasts and identify where the best place is to cross the ITCZ. We have also employed a weather router for this first big crossing. As much experience as we have in looking at the weather, this is a very apt time to listen closely to an expert.

By the way, except for the map, I have no pictures of any of this, because, well, because we were a little busy. So I will let you imagine the piles of tools, of food, of floorboards removed and Tom upside down in the bilge. Of overwhelmed, screeching kids stepping on backs, tool-bags, and Demon’s tail to get to the most inconvenient spot on the boat. Of a meowing cat and sweating, dripping humans. Of Lego pieces everywhere. Let’s just say it could sometimes be chaos.

But we lived through the chaos, and before I start to work on some more detailed posts about La Cruz, provisioning, and other things, here are some answers to a few FAQs we have gotten. Feel free to ask more, and I will try to respond:

• The passage to the Marquesas should take somewhere between three and four weeks.
• It will be somewhere between 2900 and 3200 nautical miles.
• Why such a range? You can not take a straight line to the Marquesas. You have to first get out of the light winds around Mexico, then get into the NE trade winds. From there, you follow the weather to find the narrowest and least stormy place to cross the Intertropical Convergence Zone (the ITCZ, which is full of zero wind and squalls), at which point you make a B-line south (probably by motor), then look for the SE trades to blow you toward the Marquesas.
• French Polynesia is made up of three major island groups: the Marquesas (tall and volcanic, like Hawaii), the Tuamotu Archipelgo (a collection of atolls), and the Society Islands (where Tahiti and Bora Bora are).
• We’re at the early edge of the window to make the crossing, though there are already quite a few boats ahead of us. March and April are when most vessels make the crossing because that’s when the North Pacific High has re-established itself, supporting steady trade winds north of the equator, but before the hurricane season starts in the north Pacific (May 15). Currently, winds look fairly steady at 15-20 knots for most of the passage, except for the next few days when some light air is moving in near the coast.
• There is more than 200 gallons of fuel on board, plus about 220 gallons of water (and a water-maker).
• Even with my forgetting to put the bag of cucumbers on the boat, there is plenty of food. Pretty sure they could make it four or five months. There’s even plenty of cilantro and scallions for as long they last.
• No, the kids and I are not on the boat for this long passage (better for everyone, we agreed), but we have plenty of shorter (2-10 day) passages ahead of us to get to New Zealand so we’re not missing out on that experience. Besides, we will have five flights to get to Atuona, which is kind of an epic journey of its own.

Another journey is in the attempt to document even a little of our adventure on video. Dylan and I have gotten a little behind on our videos, but here is a link to our latest production, which is about the day trip we took to San Ignacio in mid-December. Enjoy!