Bodhran anchored off Marina de La Paz:
Back in La Paz again, but not without a few difficulties on the way. I mean come on, I wouldn't really have much to write about if all I did was read books and lounge around under the awning whenever I'm sailing. So the first problem was leaving Isla Venados off Mazatlan. I pulled most of the chain in without difficulty. Then with about 15 feet left to go it became increasingly hard to crank the windlass. Well I've had this problem a few times on the trip, I must have caught another anchor right? Wrong, with 10 feet to go, I had to switch the windlass into low gear which boasts 1100lbs pulling power. I'm not sure how they measure that, I'm still the one pulling, but needless to say there's a lot of mechanical advantage there. Well I finally get the anchor up to within view a few feet under the surface and it's caught on not one but two large steel cables, one around each fluke. Without much hope of success I dropped the anchor back to the sea floor, turned the boat in various directions and tried to motor around to disentangle the cables. No joy. Ok, well I tried pulling the anchor up again. When it got near the surface it became increasingly hard to pull up even in low gear. Well I was able to get the cables to break the surface, but after that instead of pulling the anchor up, the windlass began pulling the bow down to the water. So I guess that's as far as I'm getting the anchor up with the cables on it. Actually getting the cables off ended up being far less problematic then the anchors that I had pulled up before. Because the cables were looped over the flukes and presumably attached to something on both ends, I ended up passing a line around each cable and securing them to the sampson posts. I was then able to drop the anchor from between the cables and then raise it again twisting it around the cables being supported by the lines attached to the boat. The first time I dropped and re-raised the anchor I only freed it from one of the cables, but I dropped that cable back to the briny deep and the it was easy to avoid the other cable on the second try. Wheew, so that took almost an hour and I was exhausted before I even left.
Two cables tangled up in my anchor. I've already got the lines attached that I used to clear the cables:
I sailed out of Mazatlan on a light southwesterly dodging the many shrimp boats and making a stately 3 knots under sunny skies. The wind died right after sunset and I ended up motoring through the night. I pulled my usual 15 minute nap schedule through the night until 5 in the morning when I awoke from my nap to thick fog. This was my first fog since leaving northern California back in October and I wasn't pleased to see it. I was even less pleased when I turned off the engine and heard the distinct low frequency whum, whum, whum, whum of a very large boat somewhere off my starboard stern quarter. I sailed at a knot and a half in the very light winds trying to keep the engine noise to my stern and turned on my spreader lights which reflected off the fog to create an eerily lit bubble around Bodhran which would hopefully be visible in the pre-dawn darkness to any reasonable lookout. I also put out a securite broadcast with my GPS coordinates on channel 16 to let anyone monitoring the vhf know exactly where I was at. I got no response on the radio, but after about half an hour I couldn't hear the engine noise any more and an hour later the sun was high enough to start burning off the fog. A little stressful, but probably no big deal, engine noise travels for miles over the water and whatever was causing it likely never got within a couple of miles of me.
Once the fog cleared, I fired up the engine and motored off into glassy calm seas. Looking down I was surrounded by massive amounts of bizarre jellyfish. The coolest were these chains of up to seven glowing jellies. I also saw my first giant manta ray, many pods of dolphins, and a couple of jumping sailfish. Nice day, until....once again my engine starts hunting around and dies. Damn! I haven't had this problem in a while. Turns out with my dirty hull I've been burning way more diesel that I normally do and I was just out of fuel, but to my dismay when I checked on the engine I saw water streaming around my prop shaft. Now this is a very bad situation. If the shaftlog is leaking, there's almost no way to plug it with the shaft in the way and my access to the area is particularly bad. Even worse, I was out of diesel in light airs and exactly halfway between Mazatlan and Bahia De Los Muertos with light southerlies forecast, but no wind right now. My heart was beating a million miles an hour as I investigated further. It ends up that my bilge pump hose, which runs under the transmission and very close to the prop shaft, had chafed through and was shooting two jets of water onto the shaft making it looking like the shaft was leaking. Greatly calmed by this discovery I cut the hose and put a 1.5in barb 2 barb connector I had on board onto the hose to join it back up. Problem solved. I put two of my three jugs of diesel into the tank, but decided that I wouldn't use the engine until I was close to land and then sailed in increasing southerlies for two days to try and make it to Muertos.
Calm sea filled with Jellyfish:
By the time I made it across the Sea and was within 10 miles of my destination, the southwind was up to 15 knots and had a 4 foot sea running. Southerlies are pretty uncommon in the sea and the usually protected anchorage of Ensenada de los Muertos was completely exposed to the seas and would have been a dangerous lee shore. So no rest for the weary. I'd already been out three nights, which is my normal limit for a single handed passage, but there was no good anchorage that I could reach within the 4 hours before sunset, so I set sail for the north end of Isla Cerralvo and the pass to La Paz. When I was within 5 miles of the tip of Cerralvo, the wind began to shift around out of the West and quickly built to 25-30 knots right on the nose whipping up a confused sea. I spent a couple hours under double reef main and staysail trying to beat my way to the point, but really wasn't up to the pounding that I was taking. So I doused the staysail and rigged Bodhran to forereach through the night making a slow 1.5 knots almost due north I went below stretching my normal 15 minute naps out into 30 minutes due to my slow speed and the lack of traffic in the area once the scheduled Baha ferry passed right after sunset. It was a cold and rolly night, but I made 20 mile northward and by sunrise had a reasonable angle to motor sail towards the pass to La Paz. So I sacrificed my precious reserve fuel and fired up the diesel to pound 20 degrees off a 4 foot head sea. The closer I got the pass between the Pichilingue and Isla Espiritu Santo, the fetch decreased and motoring became easier until six hours later reaching the pass, the wind died completely and with no fetch, the seas had flattened to nothing. From there it was just a 15 mile motor down to La Paz. I ran out of fuel again right outside the channel to La Paz, within a quarter mile of the Maria Costa Baha fuel dock. I put in my reserve 5 gallon jug, but was too tired to fill up now and motored off down the long channel to the La Paz anchorage. I dropped the hook and promptly slept for 15 hours until the next morning.
Gray whale that must have breached 20 times while I was riding a nice southerly towards Cerralvo channel:
Well rested, I spent 5 hours the next day trying to put old Bodhran back together. During that time I got a visit from KC off Boreas. I'd met KC, his wife Mandy, buddy Ryan and , at the time, 4 month old daughter Vianne up in Neah Bay back in September. KC filled me in on all the goings on around La Paz included the Pearson Triton 28 that had burned and sunk a few days earlier. The boat had belonged to Brian, another young singlehander in his late 20's. What was truly a tragic tale has turned out to be one of the most inspiring stories I've heard. The same day that Brian's boat burned, a group of cruisers got together and salvaged another old Triton that had been abandoned out in the anchorage, they dove on the burned boat to recover what they could, got one of the local yards to donate a haulout and yard time and organized a gear drive to start re-outfitting the new boat. There's also a fund raiser organized for next week. The new Pearson has been aptly renamed “Phoenix.” I met Brian last night and he's still overwhelmed. To go through the low of having your dreams, along with all you possesions, go up in flames and then to have the high of the community coming together the way they did all in the same day was almost too much to handle. I've got 10 days to kill before Jessica and Jon get down here. So I'll probably end up spending a good deal of time helping to get Phoenix into sailing shape so that Brian can get it north before hurricane season.
