Category: sea life

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Keeping Busy

I want to convey to you our daily life.  Have you ever had a personal montage?  The underway life is a daily existence of extreme ritual, when you allow it to be, and that ritual allows you to focus on whatever you want with unprecedented clarity.  For 30 days of my life I have the opportunity to dramatically increase any skill set I want to study.  I describe it best to my mother when I emailed her:

I am spending my time sewing zippers on clothes and reading the Bible

(I feel like a monk)

…and learning French

(a Franciscan monk)

…and learning the ukulele

(a Franciscan monk with a toy guitar)

…and talking to Tiffany

(a Franciscan monk with a toy guitar and a wife….ok, fine, bad example)

This is my life for the next month…no Gregorian chanting though.

Allan spends his time developing his at sea tech support business …

… and getting an “A” for effort in his many attempts to land “the big one”.

Tiffany and Alison spend most of their personal time focused on the inspection of our cookie stores …

… and the restocking of our cookie stores (a chore in which I am sometimes impressed into service).

– Greg

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The truth about food on boats

We dine like gods out here!

To give you an idea, I offer for your consideration this typical evening “crew ration”

Stuffed peppers, avocado, fresh tomato salad and hand-made garlic bread… All par for the course for our dining experience (trust me, were you here you would not dare to dishonor the glory of our consumption rituals by addressing them as “meals” either).  Any fool who told you that people lose weight on long voyages was either a liar or someone who did not give proper respect to the culinary creation process.  Translation:  they did not have a duty cook, which is one of the major advantages of having more than 2 people on your boat.

In this sailor’s opinion, Allan probably made the best call of his ship captaining career when he took our advice of assigning a duty cook.  He actually did it cunningly well.  We have 2 duty rotations each 12 hours in length: Day watch and night watch.  During night watch, each of us stands a 3 hour and during the day watch, three of us stand a 4 hour shift and the 4th person’s sole responsibility for the day is to make sure the rest of us eat meals that would make Bacchus envious.  Tiffany and Alison typically take this burden on and they have done a fantastic job.   The reason for this is that Allan and I have both stated that Ramen noodles and a can of coke every night sounds like a fun experiment.  Alison agreed with this idea, however her idea of Ramen noodles is a travesty of college gourmet cooking.

Back to the duty cook thing.  The real advantage here is that the cook easily spends 4 hours (the length of a watch) preparing lunch and dinner.  Everyone realizes this, so none of the other watchstanders feel like the cook is shirking duty.  Also, because the cook doesn’t have to worry about a watch during the day, they can spend a lot of time creating excellent meals, despite having to deal with problems straight out of Das Boat:

Also, this way no one gets overworked between standing watches and preparing meals.

The cooks almost got a fresh sushi reprieve when we landed our first fish of the trip until we realized it wasn’t a good “eating” fish (what the heck else are fish good for!?)

– Greg

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Repelling Air Pirates!

Our last communication ended with our loyal crew recovering from a blitzkrieg-style home invasion from the booby birds.

Tiffany, Allan and I quickly devised a counter-strike offensive.  Luckily, between Tiff’s years of nautical experience, Allan’s fighter-jock skills (no, really – F-16s!…these birds seriously picked the wrong boat to mess with…) and my supreme knowledge of the multiple uses of sailing line we routed the enemy and chased him squawking into the night.

With the main thrust of their attacked repelled, their forces routed and in shambles, the enemy made a final, desperate play for a beachhead on our extremely delicate solar panels, which our reserve forces quickly repelled.

Unfortunately they kept coming back, growing so bold as to land on the boat hook as we attempted to poke them with it!  Eventually, with both sides weary from literally hours of intense non-stop action, our side proposed a truce: One bird on the dingy, as long as no one poops.  Of course he defecated easily twice his own body weight onto our small boat and at first light his fellow bombers attempted to join him, so we rejoined the battle this time determined to offer no quarter…

Though we survived the brutal hand-to-halyard combat of that night, our boat still carries the scars of the battle …

… and, as you can see from that video,  we must remain constantly vigilant for skirmisher forces lying in wait to catch us unawares.  For we are alone, cut off from other allied units, hundreds of miles from shore and should our efforts fail, we would be overtaken before help could arrive.  There is no truce, no peace.  That is the lesson the “night of the attack of the boobies” taught us.  A lesson we pass to you, my friends, from the front lines.  Pray for us as we battle on…

– Greg

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Attack of the boobies!

Ladies and gentlemen, today I am here to talk to you about the perils of boobies.  (no, we are not about to talk about pre-marital sex here.  It’s the name of a bird dude.  As in blue-footed boobies (or orange-footed, whatever)).

Don’t let the cuteness fool you.  These little warm weather aviary ambassadors of the devil himself have been with us since our departure.   My friends, as the crewmember with the most seaborne combat experience (hey, I am a trained boarding officer) I have led our valiant efforts to repel these determined air pirates for several days now.  Though our first attempts were admittedly crude and pathetically unsuccessful.

We only suffered a minimum of self-inflicted casualties …

… and have recently upgraded our techniques.   The scales of victory slowly tipped in our direction and our safe voyage appeared assured…until the enemy, under the cover of darkness, marshaled their forces and without warning staged their own personal Tet Offensive…

The enemy struck without warning, on all fronts and we were initially clearly overwhelmed.  Pressing the advantage one of our foes grew so brave as to land in our cockpit and make a dive for the hatch below decks! Allan had to literally tackle this squawking, flapping Captain Jack Sparrow-wanna-be with a rug while Alison pelted them both with a fruit basket (more friendly fire) and cast the beast from our vessel into the murky darkness. (sorry, no video on that one, happened a little too fast.)

The battle rages on…

– Greg

(On another booby note, we ran into someone with a t-shirt that said “I love boobies” and a cartoon of 2 little blue booby feet on it 🙂 – Tiff)

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Still Walking on the Wild Side

Though the great indoors has its fair share of wildlife, the great out of doors in La Cruz is also not to be missed.

One of the greatest things about having your own means of water transportation (or at least the ability to hop on someone else’s) is the freedom to go whale watching! La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, the Mexican town we’ve been spending so much time in, is on the Banderas Bay (along with Puerto Vallarta). The Banderas Bay is one of the places Humpback Whales like to hang out during the late winter/early spring. It’s interesting – seeing a whale from a Coast Guard cutter elicits an entirely different response than seeing one from a sailboat. In the Coast Guard we almost hated whales, because we had to call the Captain, stop our engines and wait for them to get themselves sorted so we didn’t run them over. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to hit a whale with a 210 foot ship, but man were they frustrating – when you’re a junior officer you never want to have to call the Captain! Being on a sailboat is way less stressful and you just get to enjoy the wonder of seeing these amazing animals.

Oh, and here’s Greg first experience fishing with a net:

(I would like to point out that I have caught several fish at this point, albeit not with this particular method. Also, did anyone else catch Tiffany’s comment about no one driving the boat!? – Greg)

And just when you thought it was safe to eat calamari, think about this:

We’re still doing swimmingly out here in the wild! How’s life in civilization?

~ Tiffany

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Walking on the Wild Side

Wandering around town, sailing on the ocean, heck, even sitting in the bar or the coffee shop – all of these are great opportunities for communing with the local wildlife (and the not-so-wild also). We’ll start this off with the town segment.

When strolling through town, which of these animals do you expect to see? A – Cats, B – Dogs, C – Iguanas? Well, if you guessed Iguana, you’re right!

(Why? Because the cats are in the bars hustling drinks, of course! –Greg)

Also expected viewing while in a Mexican town of any size are chickens, pigs, horses and…children?

(Oh and now I finally understand why they started enacting those spitting in public laws back in the US. –Greg)

There was a cool restaurant/coffee shop in La Cruz that had free internet (yay!) at a decent speed (double yay!) and as a side entertainment factor they had a fountain with turtles in it – I know, not that interesting. What made it interesting was when the dog would come by and jump in the fountain with the turtles 🙂

~ Tiffany

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Mazatlan, MX – 3rd

Mazatlan, MX

With the help of Mary-Ann on s/v OLD MOON we found another Mexican wine.

For my last entry on Mazatlan, I’ll focus on our transportation options. Yes, I realize that the topic of transportation would not typically be notable. Here it is.

Getting around presents some interesting alternatives. There are a lot of options for taxis but all of them are a little short on the safety department.

You could take the bus but be warned, you aren’t getting anywhere quickly on the Mazatlan bus system.

You’ll be happy to know that we made it to the local English speaking church on time (they have English speaking churches here…it’s a tourist city). The other transportation option is to rent a car; however, be forewarned that mode of transportation comes with its own inherent additional risks in this town thanks to the unique layout of the curbside parking. Gotta wonder what someone was thinking when they planned this out:

How about horses? Horses are safe, reliable, even fun and in Mexico apparently they are bilingual…

Ultimately though, it is the call of the sea that eventually reaches all of us. Well, all of us that sail on boats at least. I found a ride with Jake on s/v MALOOSE on an overnight transit down to San Blas. For those of you who have been keeping up with this blog, you will know of my long standing battle with Tiffany over the existence of the “supposed” green flash. This battle came to head under a beautiful sunset leaving the port.

Naturally, Tiffany was in another country when this happened.

– Greg

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Dominique, FVI

Dominique, FVI

I got a report from Tiffany who is dealing with the many challenges of teaching a sailing class on a luxury sailing yacht in the middle of the French Caribbean.

Sailing teaching supplies are in short supply. Fortunately, Tiffany knows how to improvise.

Also, class disruptions are frequent. Some are welcome, for example, dolphins dancing and leaping around the boat in crystal clear water is always a good time.

Other distractions are well, not so welcome. Remember kids, this is a French colony we’re talking about here. (And it wasn’t the cute ones who were naked! It was the dirty old men! ~ Tiffany)

So naked men are just prancing around my wife while she gets paid to work in a tropical paradise and I’m 500 miles away. Yeah, great. Just great.

Despite the distractions, the upside is that the field trips through tropical rivers seem pretty interesting

…and the immigration procedures are, to say the least, apparently a touch more relaxed than what we Americans are accustomed to from our Customs officials.

That’s probably because the local government is attempting to rebuild after a mild natural disturbance caused a slight population decrease a few years back.

I asked Tiffany the question that was on your mind. Well, on my mind at least. “Honey, after the guy in prison survived a night of being encased in his cell by a tidal wave of molten lava…after he survived who knows how long in his cell without food and water before rescue crews made it to this remote little island, and somehow managed to find him…after all that, did they put him back in prison or was he considered ‘rehabilitated’?”

She said the brochure didn’t say. How do you not include a detail like that?

Anyway, so my wife is surrounded by naked prancing men and the land might just decide to explode and randomly kill everyone without notice. Neat place.

– Greg

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Mazatlan, MX – 2

Mazatlan, MX

So I thought I was doing OK with the fishing thing…then I met this guy,

Yeah, my biggest fish so far is about 15 lbs. My first question to Marcus was “So what do you do with it!?” Being as Mexican Airlines has a weight limit of about 50 lbs, they might charge a slight overage for a 500 lbs fish and that’s a lot of fish to eat in a week. Marcus’ answer is that the sport fishing guides allow him to take as much as he can eat, then they donate the remainder to a local orphanage. So everyone wins, except for the fish. He pretty much lost when he upchucked his lungs. Which, interesting side note, is apparently normal for them when they are suffocating or so I’m told.

On less disgusting note, we went out for a little Mexican baseball. We stopped for some tacos on the way and John showed us an example of cruiser technology at its finest.

Now as for the baseball game. Look, baseball is baseball. People throw balls, people hit balls, bases are stolen, you know the drill. What makes baseball interesting (at least to me) is what goes on around the games and in Mexico, a lot goes on around the games.

Does the local dodge dealership need their own cheerleaders? Really?
The highlight of the evening though were the fans. The drunk fans. The drunk, very spirited, extremely supportive of the home team, CANADIAN fans.

Notice that guy in the back wearing the blue polo? We started cheering “fear the deer” a few minutes before the video and he called out to us

“en espanol!”

To which I replied

“but then it won’t rhyme!”

He nodded sagely as if this argument made any form of legitimate sense…or maybe he just had no idea what I said. Either way, between guacamole hot dogs, the Pacifico girls, and drunk Canadians, good times were had by all.

– Greg

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