Broken Passage

Broken Passage

Here I sit in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico in 1999 in the month called June. I had been sick on the leg from San Diego and I’ve just decided that it was not food poisoning as I had suspected but carbon monoxide poisoning from an exhaust leak and poor ventilation below.

Magic had been hauled out here to check her keel bolts, paint some on the hull, the leak overly taped and a newly purchased Aries self-steering vane installed.

It had been raining, and Ensenada, when it is wet and cold, is a morbid place with no environmental infrastructure to support its population when there is no tourism. And there is no tourism when it is wet and cold. But to me it was more the morale of the inhabitants that really needs some sort of up-lifting. When it’s cold and wet who is even slightly attracted to a place where everybody is grumpy and everybody was sort of grumpy because it was cold and wet and there was practically no tourism, meaning no money. It was the subject of each day. I had lived in Mexico for over eight years and had visited this pretty little coastal town of Ensenada years ago without ever having this type of feeling.

I hoped it was not a sign of Mexico modernising, but night after night I saw instead of the quaint walking posadas in the parks and plazas, kids were now doing their posada in cars whistling and screaming lewd remarks at each other, both boys and girls. There isn’t much else to do for youth that I had seen during that stay and the old traditions seem a thing of the past, a vacant memory or so I was being told by guys at the boatyard. The pace had quickened and boredom had resulted.

For a quarter of a million inhabitants there were only two movie theatres, but a video kiosk was on almost every other block. It was grey in Ensenada except at night where the few tourists lurk. Next to the tourist area there was a seedy, rutted red light district with high crescendo disco beats and multicoloured lights. The tourist area was kind of cute but the other showed no pretence at being anything but what it is.

I hadn’t been in Mexico for a couple of years so when I found myself saying words in Spanish without thinking how to phrase them and that it felt good. I did not have the vocabulary I once had and had just started an appreciation for nuance in the land of the short story. I surrounded myself with the language by only speaking to the locals, mainly in the shipyard during the day and soap opera entertainment on my little portable television during the evening. I walked and listened and wrote at night. I read newspapers at meals. I longed to get out of long pants.

Some weather fronts kept moving through keeping my impatience to leave and begin this part of my voyage in limbo. A weather window opened but got a warning from the Port Captain about bad stuff South but I checked out and rose sail to tack out of the Port of Ensenada. There was a little fetch at the exit but Magic was taking it without a bump. It plainly felt good to get going again. I used a good Southerly to beam reach over to the fuel dock at the Hotel Corale Marina. After not believing the chart or GPS that the entrance to the Marina could be so narrow I preferred it to the complications at Ensenada to get fuel and it felt like I was going somewhere.

Approaching the Marina my binoculars told me that it was about two Magic beams across and it was swirling around a jutting out point. The beam reach encouraged me to aim with a steady hand for the middle and do it. The closer I approached the wider it got and I was am relieved. I surfed in and rounded up to a facing dock under sail to the applause of a group of people I later found to be wagering if I could make the entrance without crashing, since as they said, nobody had ever seen the entrance that dangerous before.

After fuelling and worrying over the surf build up and wind increase I decided to stay the night. It cost an exorbitant amount of money so I used the two Jacuzzis, the pool, the showers twice, the washer and dryer, over stocked ice, topped off my included filtered water and looked for anything else I could get for the money.

The Port Captain opened the port the next day for ship traffic and I was out at the the dawn’s sun, close reaching in light Westerly airs toward the South of the protecting island of Todos Santos Bay. We were on our way with a full pulling Genoa, mainsail and mizzen toward sunshine and shorts. Turning around the point the wind turned also, moving from West to Southwest and on my nose. The breeze freshened so I furled the mainsail and turned on the engine to give a consistency to my miles forward.

There were two anchorages between here and the big Viscaino Bay, otherwise there was roughly 300 miles to Cedros Island and its harbour.

The wind change made for choppy seas inside the ten-fathom depth coastal line and the motion aboard became too rough for me to experiment with the self-steering arrangement, so I was captured by the wheel. We made good time to the first anchorage only to see twelve foot rollers roaring into its southern exposure.

The wind was on a steady increase as darkness and the second anchorage approached. The seas were confused, tall and in breaking surges. I could just see as darkness gathered that I had to forget the second anchorage for the same reason as the first. Then the rain fell, or was more thrown horizontally into my face making it impossible to see anything. The wind had a deep, wet whine. I only had a half rolled jib and the single-reef of the mizzen up. I had two jackets, two sweaters, long johns and corduroy trousers on and a foul weather suit covering all of that but I was freezing and as a result of the cold and being on the wheel continuously I was getting tired.

Around midnight the motion forward was about one knot, Magic was tossed, broached and pooped by gigantic seas of crashing cold foam. I rolled in more jib, turned off the engine and tied myself across the bridge-deck to rest. I actually slept for an hour in the freezing rain, tossing seas and exhausting wind.

Enough. The wind had increased and my motion forward was hardly anything fighting the chaos fighting me.

I pulled down and furled the mizzen and turned Stillwater around at about four in the morning, heading back toward Ensenada feeling defeated though the wind was still increasing. Like most sailors I don’t like to turn back on hard earned miles but this looked too serious.

It was not easy to regain the sixty miles to Ensenada. The seas were at fifteen feet on the main swell from the south with four to five foot breakers on their tops. The wind was steadily increasing from the Southwest, gusting to fifteen knots more than the steadier flow of twenty-five to thirty, like that. It was directly aft necessitating me to mind the helm constantly. The little bit of the jib I had up kept reminding me not to close my eyes by loud backwinding snaps. The current pulled us in tiny leeward swallows toward land that only grew hazy in the dawning light.

I kept misreading land points and building hopes that Ensenada’s Todos Santos Bay was just around each outcrop, bringing on out of proportion discouragements. I was tired. I was actually closing in on exhaustion. I could not leave the helm to go below and get the chart to know more accurately what I was seeing over to my right side.

I gave in and changed course away from both Ensenada and the shoreline. I put Magic on a broad reach, connected the self-steerer to the Northwest and went below to cook an egg sandwich and coffee. It was so peaceful below decks. Hardly any tilt just a slow upward rise feeling and a bit of rush downward. From this perspective below deck the world changed, I felt refreshed.

Above, with only the reduced jib pulling us I ate in the cockpit admiring the morning sea and sky greys. I sat still a bit chilled savouring the grittiness of the dregs of my coffee. I had to change course again or go three thousand miles to Hawaii. So, disengaging the self-steerer, comfort was a memory, as I settled back to the onrush of sea and wind at my back as I slowly mounted swells and drove speedily down their backs but my bow never went under. there was just the right amount of sail up. I smiled at bragging to myself about still be a sailor, a tired one but a sailor. The wind increased more but the swells were shorter with longer gaps. I must have been in deeper water.

As the day progressed the winds lightened and the thought swiftly flew by my brain to turn around again and give it another try. Glad that went by fast. I was tired. I kept steering, snacking on ginger snaps and apple juice I had thought to bring up. I arrived back at Ensenada in the dark of early morning. When the anchor went down the wind had come up again to steady forty-five knots and I had been under way for thirty-four hours. To get nowhere.

I cleaned up the boat in the dark and drank a lot of water, then tea, then hot chocolate. I went into my almost dry sheets and felt the luxury of it for only a moment before falling into a very sound sleep. To be awakened by a crushing sound of boat against something solid. Through the porthole, still darkness outside, I recognised another porthole, outside the sounds of people cursing and straining at something big.

I was still in an exhausted dream when I came out and there was a big motorboat alongside Magic. And we were not where we were when we anchored. I turned on the engine, apologising to the couple aboard the other vessel, their unseen dog barking frantically. I pulled up my chain and anchor, leaving the chain on the deck and the anchor hanging against the hull. I re-anchored in the hard wind and chop. I moved away from all other boats in the area and let out two hundred feet of rode, dug the anchor in from three different directions, sat in the cockpit a while to make sure she was holding.

I watched other boats in the harbour dragging and still felt unhappy about letting Magic hit another boat after being beat for so long after out unsuccessful bid for more southing. I fell asleep in the cockpit in the rain.

The following morning I took the dinghy and contacted the older couple aboard the motorboat and we agreed that there had been no damage to either boat. They sympathised with my having to return and turned out to be very nice. The port was officially closed again, so I sat again after my first broken passage.