Feliz Tortugas By MichaelLA PAZ, MEXICO

Eleanor urging her guy on. "Don't help
him," we said, over and over.

Back in D.C., for Eleanor’s fourth Christmas (2006), we began a family tradition. Christmas Eve, she and I baked a ton of cookies and made small parcels of them. On Christmas Day we walked them around our neighborhood. I waited on the sidewalk while Eleanor scrambled up the steps to friends’ porches, knocked on doors, and handed over ribbon-wrapped bundles.

That year, we spread butter, sugar, chocolate, and flour joy to only about a half-dozen homes, all good friends. The following year, we hit a few more houses, to include people we’d only ever waved to. By 2010, Frances had joined our team and we were a cookie-making machine, delivering over two dozen cookie parcels to friends, acquaintances, and total strangers. It was like trick-or-treating in reverse and the girls loved it.

We haven’t stopped since starting cruising. For Christmases in La Cruz, Victoria, Puerto Magdalena, and La Paz, our small galley has turned out large numbers of cookies to pass on. This year we made parcels of cranberry-pecan shortbread cookies and banana bread. We hit some neighboring boats in the anchorage; a couple stranded with a bad dinghy motor; and the security personnel we found among three marinas, the navy housing complex, and the Magote (a developed strip of land across the narrow bay from the city)—all the latter of whom must have drawn the short straw when it came to December days off.

At 5:00, we planned to host a Christmas dinner aboard Del Viento with our friends aboard Manakai, Norma and Christian. (They’re vegan, so we’re talking about a margarine and wheat gluten bonanza.) But when we got back to the boat after delivering cookies, there was an email from our friends who live on the Magote,. “Take the five o’clock ferry and meet us on the beach, we’re releasing turtles today.”

We’ve never done this and couldn’t believe our luck. Our hopes had been dashed for this year, there’d been no eggs laid there since the hurricane and nobody expected any. We shut off the stove, stopped dinner prep, and called Norma and Christian on the VHF.

“Can you stave off your hunger for a couple hours longer, in favor of doing something really cool?”

And it was cool. The little guys are determined, dragging their walnut-sized shells along the sand and into little wavelets that often flipped them onto their backs and sent them another foot or two back up the beach. But they’d regain their footing and plod back into the sea. Once past the tiny breakers, they’d paddle along with a bit more speed, holding their little heads up out of the water, vertically. They looked like little thumbs bobbing out to sea.

There was only a scant twenty to release and a half-hour after they were all gone, after the sun had set, we combed the beach with a flashlight and found five who’d been washed back ashore. They seemed spent, so the girls waded out over the bar to their waists, past the biggest surf, and started them swimming again. Chances are, maybe one out of this entire bunch will make it to adulthood. I hope your new year is better.

¡Prospero Año Nuevo!

--MR

Windy holding a little guy before his release.

 

 

Looking for stragglers after sunset.

 

Frances made the banana bread entirely on her own.
(photo courtesy Frances Robertson)

 

 

A small bundle of shortbread being readied.
(photo courtesy Frances Robertson)

Problem Solved By MichaelLA PAZ, MEXICO

Frances jumping off a rock this summer.
Looking at it across the anchorage from
Del Viento, I knew the rock appeared
deceptively small and I confidently
bet both girls 100 pesos each that they
wouldn't do it--I wouldn't have done
it at their age. But neither hesitated
and I lost about a case of beer's worth
of pesos. But I was sure proud.

I can’t think of any place more suited than a cruising sailboat to expose the differences between people, in terms of how they think.

 

Take Windy and I. I’m a quick and efficient problem assessor and solver (or I wisely realize when a problem doesn’t need solving) and can be driven to madness by Windy, whose approach can only be characterized as a painfully slow and irrational consideration of every conceivable angle before reaching a conclusion.

“There’s diesel in our fresh water.”

She said this about six weeks ago. I wrote about it here, what I knew then.

“How did it get in there?” she asked.

“I don’t know, must have come from a contaminated bottle that we dumped in.”

“It must have?”

“Sure, no other way it could have gotten in.”

Plain and simple, problem solved, not an open question that has to be analyzed for weeks, certainly not one that warrants repeated, frustratingly irrelevant questions to your husband about the boat’s fresh water system and how he plumbed it when he installed the new tanks back in La Cruz three years ago…okay, surely you see where I’m going with this.

“I figured it out.” She announced recently.

“Figured what out?”

“I know how the diesel got into our water tanks.”

“Not from contaminated water bottles in Bahia de Los Angeles?”

“Nope.”

And she’s right, it’s not from contaminated water bottles.

So here is the fount of the problem,
so to speak. Unlike a house, galley
sinks often feature a bunch of spigots,
some more than us. The main one
that looks like the one in your
house, handles all the fresh water,
whether pressure or pumped,
but no simultaneously. The smaller
tap in front of it is for pumped
salt water, that we can use to wash
dishes. And the little guy flush to
the sink behind it, that's our new
water tank vent.

Apparently, the fresh water tank vent hose that I’d left open to the bilge—the extra-long hose that I planned to someday plumb to the galley sink—had fallen into the bilge. (Of course, the bilge that is perpetually wet from the vent-line overflow that happens every time we fill the water tanks.)

So?

So, our fresh water galley gusher foot pump (we have two of them, one for fresh, one for salt) failed this summer and after rebuilding it and when I began to reinstall it, I realized that the screw holes in the wood base inside the cabinet on which it’s mounted, were worn, stripped. The bigger screw I then used in one of the holes busted the plastic mounting base of the pump.

So we switched to pressure water until we could get it fixed. (We’d not used pressure water in a year.)

So?

So when the pressure water pump drew from a tank with the vent line submerged in bilge water, it created enough of a vacuum to suck that bilge water into our water tanks. (The foot pumps never created such a strong vacuum.)

And there is diesel in your bilge?

No, but there was—traces that wept out of a fitting on top of that tank when we last super-filled it this summer. But now it’s in our fresh water tanks.

The good news is that after weeks of tank cleaning (vinegar, rubbing alcohol, dish soap), engine running (it’s in the hot water heater too), and incredibly profligate water use, I’m finally drinking from our tap (Windy and the girls aren’t there yet, but soon, very soon).

--MR

My Day Got Better By MichaelLA PAZ, MEXICO

A couple days ago I was moved by a story a fellow cruising parent (and colleague) posted on her blog.

On November 24, Behan Gifford posted a picture on Facebook of a small Burmese boy riding the scooter one of her kids had given him. The picture was taken in the Satun, Thailand boatyard where Behan’s boat is hauled and where this boy and many other kids live with their families in modest workers’ dormitories.

Six days later, the same picture was on her blog with a PayPal button and her pitch to raise money to buy more scooters for more of the boatyard kids. Three days after that, an astounding $1,400 dollars had been raised and Behan went shopping.

Read this post to learn what happened next and then—only then—watch the following video made by the crew of Esper, another cruising boat in the same yard. It’ll make your day. (Note: the video is 17 minutes long and starts with the story I'm writing about, but then features a several-minute update on their boat work. Fast-forward through this for now because most of the gifting story is afterward.)
 

Behan’s story highlights what a small world this is, and perhaps a benefit of it shrinking. Her's is an example of how a big impact can be made and simultaneously worked into our perversely busy cruising lives.

--MR

Books for Cruising Families By MichaelLA PAZ, MEXICO

Based on the emails we get, I think a big portion of the folks who read this blog are parents thinking about cruising with their kids. This makes sense. For five years I read every family blog I could find as we prepared to cast-off; they were good sources of information and inspiration and gave us opportunities to connect with families we were near. This is why I maintain links (eyes right) to more than 100 current and former cruising families.

But in the voyaging-with-kids genre, blogs aren't the only place to turn. There are good books out there too. Here’s a list of several that relate real and entertaining stories of family life afloat.

Blown Away
by Herb Payson

A 35^th anniversary edition of this book was just released this month—it’s that good and it isn’t dated. The author was a heavy-drinking nightclub piano player with a cocktail waitress wife, six kids, no boat, and no money. From those beginnings, the family managed to get out cruising and explore the entire Pacific Ocean, for years. The book is both serious and hilarious and a very good read.

 

 

 

Into the Light

by Dave & Jaja Martin

If you’re a family thinking about going cruising, you’re surely familiar with the Martins. But in case you’re not, they once circumnavigated in a Cal 25, many of those miles as a family of four. So if you’re waiting to go until you can afford a bigger boat, get some perspective. But this book is about the family’s next boat, a 37-footer they sailed north to Iceland and Norway and then further north. They even wintered over in Iceland and put the kids in school there. If you think you need to stick to the beaten path, read this book. Also, it’s just a good, compelling story. Dave opens it up on passage, in the middle of the North Atlantic, after he discovers a rusted hole in the hull with water coming in.

All in the Same Boat
by Tom Neale
This is the book that inspired me to suggest to Windy that we not wait until retirement to go cruising again. Tom Neale chronicles not just the story of the years he and his wife raised their two daughters to adulthood aboard a boat traveling along the Eastern Seaboard, but offers detailed how-to information in a guide-like format. This is kind of a dated read in terms of mining information, but still relevant in terms of the story of a family who was inspired to go and who made it work.

 

Boat Girl
by Melanie Neale
When you’re done with All in the Same Boat, here is a rare opportunity to read the perspective of one of the author's daughters, now grown and looking back at a childhood afloat.





 

Chasing the Horizon
by Fatty Goodlander

Capn’ Fatty is like no other. He is a self-described sea gypsy who cruises the world on a sunken boat he salvaged, and got himself a gig on NPR. His monthly Cruising World column is always humorous and insightful. This book chronicles (embellishes?) experiences he and his family had while cruising the Caribbean back when it was a comparative wild west. This is a collection of well-told stories with characters that could not be made-up. Who else could convince a co-worker that his ferrocement boat was an inflatable?
 

South From Alaska

by Mike Litzow

This candid, entertaining account of a new family who leave their Kodiak, Alaska home aboard a boat bound for Australia, is a must-read for any family with very small kids. Mike's first son was 9 months old when they set sail and it was not all easy going. The author invites you into his head from the start of their audacious voyage. The writing is both crisp and beautiful.





The Curve of Time
by M. Wylie Blanchet
Despite being published more than 50 years ago and based on voyages during the 1920s, this PNW classic almost reads like it was written about cruising today. But get this: the author was a young widow with five kids when she took off cruising the Salish Sea for summers aboard her 25-foot powerboat. How many of today's single mothers would make the same choice today? Part of Blanchet's motivation may have been to get out of the house so she could rent it out while they were gone and make money. Her tales are amazing.




I think I could turn up countess other tales, but I think I’ll stop it here, with the titles I’ve read and enjoyed or found interesting. Happy reading!

--MR