One lucent and lovely day I'll return to my tale of Thailand in the name of consummation, but for now I jump to earlier this month when I was to help sail a Beneteau 45F5 to Hawaii from Marina del Ray, CA:
5 June 2012, Tue.
We leave Marina del Rey around noon, hoping to skirt around gale-force winds just southwest of Catalina Island. Though the seas are tumbling chop and there is a solitary red flag flying from the customs house – a small-craft advisory warning – we seem to succeed in edging past the worst of the wind, keeping just enough in our sails to lift us southwards at around eight knots. We celebrate with a few beers and watch Catalina fall off our starboard beam. Paul is the first of our crew to get seasick, emptying his stomach to leeward. I pull the midnight to 0300 watch, the first watch of a new day.
6 June 2012, Wed.
Light winds early in the morning prompt us to try and cut southwest through the lowermost portion of the area where the gale was forecasted to be, and by 1000 hours we’re heeling hard to port, sailing nearly parallel to the troughs of the ten-foot swells. It becomes a bad idea to go below-decks as fruit not properly stowed flies through the air and one’s stomach flip-flops in agonized empathy with an inner-ear all-ahoo. Both cooking and eating are kept to a minimum, prepackaged protein shakes are the order of the day; a generalized nausea is thus the background to what follows. The aft head backs up and the forward one reeks of piss and an unidentified foetor, the combination of which makes it nearly impossible to sleep in the forward cabin without gagging. There is also the gleeful thwap of Paul’s catheter – hanging, as it logically does, from the shower-head – against the side of one’s face as one flushes the manual marine head. Add to all of this the fact that I don’t have my own bunk and am obliged to play musical beds every three hours at night and my state of mind should be apparent to even the meanest understanding. When we nearly broach, twice, and seas begin coming over the starboard gunwale with shocking regularity, I ask myself what the hell I’m doing here. If mountaineering is the art of suffering, then this type of sailing is a crash-course in the science of torture. I try and get some sleep before my watch, expecting at any moment to be roused out and up in order to jump into the life-boat.
7 June 2012, Thurs.
I go on watch from 0300 to 0600, dawn patrol, and the seas are black, lit by the full moon with a saliva sheen, and very, very large indeed. The swells are probably fifteen feet high with a short period, which means they come in quick succession, and the fact that we’re sailing in their troughs means that every time one swell passes us and our keel cuts through the top of it, we roll with the correction of the auto-helm. Though our deep keel cuts like a snowboard through the swells, tossing and turning on an angry ocean is pretty far from sunshine and Jesus juice. Discomfort is not the word. I tether my life-vest to the jackline and sit in the companionway, cold, wet, and realizing that this is not even a fraction of what the wind and water have to offer in the way of raw power. Wind howls through the rigging at around 50 knots, the lee rail is buried in a foaming torrent and every so often a swell will break over the deck, sousing the poor watchman – me, in this instance – to the bone. However, three hours, no matter how arduous, is still just three hours, and when Cap’n Abel relieves me on deck the seas are calm enough for us to exchange a few pleasantries on the weather. One wave had completely ripped the 2x6 to which two reserve diesel cans were attached off of the lifeline stanchions to which they were lashed with four 175-lb test marine zip-ties (which, to my mind, confirms my suspicion that a zip-tie, no matter how ostensibly burly, is still just a plastic trinket and not a seaworthy securement). Luckily, however, the diesel cans were still connected with the nylon webbing which had lashed them to the board. One can was waterskiing off of our port quarter, held fast to its twin wedged between two stanchions; too banal an occurrence to be labeled a miracle, but striking nonetheless. We winch them both further inboard and tie them off. This is only the beginning of our problems.
It is found that the watermaker will only work on a starboard heel, an impossibility in these conditions unless we were to head in the direction opposite our destination; more, the water-pump has stopped working and we thus have nothing flowing from the tap. We must turn back to land: Ensenada, Mexico.
8 June 2012, Fri.
We motor sail almost all day, reaching Ensenada just before the marina office closes for the evening at seven. Almost immediately upon our arrival the Cap’n is pouring a rum and cola, an act he is to reprise at regular intervals this evening; he is drunk as a lord as we all stumble back to the boat to sleep after taking showers and eating dinner in the Hotel & Marina Coral’s excellent restaurant.
9 June 2012, Sat.
Alan and I make our way into town for a few important items. Alan, a recovering Mormon, had spent two years in northern Mexico trying to win converts for his church and is thus as perfectly fluent a non-native speaker of Spanish as I’ve heard. He will have ample opportunity to practice this skill over the course of today. A conversation of his with our cab driver ends in our finding a delicious place for fish tacos. We return to the marina to find Paul hard at work on the boat. The Cap’n, Alan and I opt for beers in the computer room instead. After several rounds of said beers we’re quite jolly and also a bit better informed, thanks to Google, about the course that the weather may take within the next couple of days. It looks like it could be a bit of trouble, with a tropical storm brewing down near Guatemala and slowly moving northwards while tracking us westwards. We somewhat boozily bring this up to Paul, and he is obviously unimpressed with the state of us and chomping at the bit to get going. We must, he says, leave on the morrow. We sail at daybreak. -Ish. But first, we drink. We go out to a bar called Hussong’s, an Ensenada institution and old fisherman’s hangout. Ambassador Alan befriends the entire place and we all get famously drunk. Back to the boat.
10 June 2012, Sun.
Hungover and hurting, the crew musters around 9:30, after the Hotel’s excellent breakfast buffet, to fill the S/V Rever with fuel and set sail again for Hawaii. Everything’s right as rain, except for the fact that we have no wind. We’re, as the song has it, motorin’.
11 June 2012, Mon.
Motorin’. I start weaving a lee-curtain for the galley, to keep any would-be airborne fruit from pelting the crew, my skill – learned in the Alaskan bush – at the double sheet-bend holds me in good stead. Uneventful. Cap’n Abel reveals the fact that he’s brought a head-wrench and veg. Grog rations increase. The wind freshens. Alan and I go forward to put a reef in the main, a butt-puckering maneuver in beam seas and doubly so in my very un-seamanlike street shoes which slide o'er the wet deck like oiled fish. The wind backs and veers and freshens further, so we furl the jib in, leaving just a small triangle pulled flush with the boat's midline to act as a stabilizer. We're entering another gale. When I go on watch from 2100 -- 0000 the boat's rocking and rolling again. Cap'n Abel relieves me and almost immediately the auto-helm fails, beeping like a teenybopper's cell-phone every five minutes and changing our course. We must now steer by hand through gale-force winds. Later in the morning our chart-plotter/gps shits the bed too. Luckily Cap'n Abel has a handheld gps or we'd be sailing by the binnacle compass alone. 200 miles out and we're turning back again.
12 June 2012, Tue.
Steering by hand through 40 knot winds isn't fun, but the heave and pitch of the boat isn't as bad in the cockpit. Paul celebrates his birthday with five hours behind the wheel.
13 June 2012, Wed.
I go on first watch and Cap'n Abel comes topside to join me. We pass a large tanker, lit up like a small city on the waves. They must think we're crazy and I might be inclined, just then, to agree with them. As we near the Coronodo Islands the wind dies a bit. We pull into the San Diego Yacht club around 1700 and go out for seafood.
14 June 2012, Thurs.
Alan and I debate the merits of continuing the trip. He most certainly will, but we both have misgivings. I tell Paul that I might not be joining them in the continuing saga; am conflicted about this as I feel a strong desire to see this thing through to its end, about as strongly as I feel that the end could be a bad one... Paul tells me that there has just been trouble for another boat on its way to Hawaii: a guy onboard had a stroke 1000 miles from nowhere. We go out to a local fisherman's bar that night and I meet Liz, a beautiful blonde with almond eyes. She invites me to stay with her and all of a sudden my plans have changed drastically. Looks like I'll be land-lubbing it for a while... From boat to boho in one day flat.
15 June 2012, Fri.
I'm an Ocean Beach local.
16 June 2012, Sat.
The S/V Rever is still in its slip at the San Diego Yacht Club. Liz and I go to the Del Ray Fair to see Joan Jett and Led Zep Again.
17 June 2012, Sun.
S/V Rever leaves port.
18 June 2012, Mon.
S/V Rever returns to port with the same auto-helm issues.
19 June 2012, Tue.
S/V Rever leaves port for the fourth time.
25 June 2012, Mon.
The S/V Rever is about 600 miles offshore. Godspeed, you salts...
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