The Great Escape

Olympic Mountains from Victoria


Many of our friends have remarked that we are so lucky to have escaped the recent frigid weather back home.

An Aside About Escape
I suspect escape through travel (or maybe any other way) is an illusion. First, it seems that my tiresome self stowed away on this voyage and brazenly struts around (knowing how impossible it would be to ship her home):
-Should I keep on colouring my hair? I mean, is there a time a woman should just go grey gracefully? Or am I too young to go grey? You know, I’m tired of all this upkeep. For that matter why not just cut it very very short. What a release that would be, so quick to dry after swimming. But then I’d have short grey hair. Oh dear, I don’t think I’m ready for that. Etc. Etc.

-Oh, maybe I should just stop trying to be a creative artist. What kind of career is that anyway? When I get back I’m going to get a real job. Etc. Etc.

Second, the expenses of life go on. Only the wind is free. Though once in awhile we can trade a T-shirt for a fish.

Meanwhile, back home snow falls and rainstorms have flooded communities, leaving city and home drains unable to keep up with the run-off.

An Aside About Plumbing:
It is hard to be happy if plumbing isn’t right. On the boat it’s pretty simple. We have two choices: we can pump into the holding tank and then try not to think about the fact that we are carrying our sewage around with us. Or we can pump overboard and try not to think about the fact we are pumping it into the sea.
In Mexican cities the smell of sewers often wafts up from the streets. I suspect very few cities have any treatment at all. Progressive plumbing is a long pipe. (For that matter sounds like Victoria).
But people seem to accept the smell as an inescapable part of life. Once, on a plane, I sat next to a man from Lima who ran a chain of hotels. He had a terrible time convincing local staff from small towns, that it was important to clean the washrooms so that they don't smell. “Why do you want to do that?” they would ask. “A kitchen should smell like a kitchen. A bathroom should smell like a bathroom.”

A few days into the New Year, we had plumbing problems of our own. First, with a septic system pump in our house on Protection Island, the other with a flooded basement in a Victorian house in James Bay, we were charmed by when our guard dropped a few years ago. A flood in November resulted in the replacement of its 100 year-old sewer line, but in January the house flooded for the second time.

And so it was that I found myself flying back over the miles we covered so slowly months ago. Which brings me to another facet of the escape illusion. That we are very far away. From the plane I could look down on the coastline of Baja, its long sweeping beaches, offshore islands, and deserted bays, and ponder that we had sailed every inch of it.
My flight times were: 1 1/2 hours from La Paz to LA, 2 hours LA to Vancouver. 2 hours from flipflops and T-shirts to coats, mitts, hats, boots…

A few days later I stood freezing as Mike from the construction company explained to me that they would have to replace the entire perimeter drainage of our quaint house (for the price it would be to rent a small villa in Italy for a year). Still I reminded myself, these are the problems of the privileged.

And there were bonuses. I got to check in with our house on Protection Island, being lovingly cared for (along with the cat) by Louise. And I got to touch base with friends who I have missed very much: Jane, Carol, Denise and Mike, Hazell, Maria, Trudy, Darcy, Jude, and Mary Jo. (Though missed Liz and Frances). Even fit in a run on my beloved Newcastle Island.

Just wish I could have left that little whinger home, but she’s leaning over me now, wheedling away about how I’m never going to finish that novel.

Back in Baja, together with the boys.  We have just visited Isla Carmen, where we walked up an arroyos thick with resin-y, thorny desert plants, and flowering shrubs that were swarming with Costa’s hummingbirds (the males sporting Shriner-purple throats).
This morning we woke at Isla Danzante, to the sound of Pelicans plunging all around the boat. The bay was full of little silver fish and schools of rays, soaring like birds, the tips of their “wings” rippling the surface.

Lindsay and a Tarantula

Monday in La Paz

Today we finally found the English bookstore (Allende Books). I bought a copy of an Isabel Allende book I have in Spanish (it took me half an hour to translate one page, so I am looking forward to having an English version on hand).
We had heard about the hairless dog of the Aztecs, so were fascinated to meet the bookseller's four month old Xoloitzcuintle (they call them squintlees sp?). They look like flying foxes and are so hot to the touch that they are recommended for people with arthritic hands .


Perla



Then I wandered over to the central plaza, across from the church to draw.


It was a quiet day, the park full of mothers and children, and idle young men. The shoe shine stands were empty....



I drew quick portraits of these two children and they decided they wanted to paint too.

Espiritu Santo

An island called holy spirit is probably an auspicious place to spend Christmas. (Though, if you're more secular, Kim offers his own translation: spirit of Santa island). It lies just over ten miles from La Paz, but it feels a world away. The water is so clear you can see all the way down to the anchor. Pufferfish flutter lazily along the hull; brilliant blue King Angelfish poke around coral heads and where the water shallows over bone white sand, pelicans and terns hover over tinsel rivers of schooling mullet.

The land is vivid: red, ochre, chocolate brown; dry and crumbling, studded with thorny shrubs and cardon cacti.
Circadia, filled to the brim with people, food, and drink, wallowed gently from anchorage to anchorage. Along with Kim and I, Lindsay and Sophie, we had our good friend Trudy on board as well as old friends from Portland Oregon. An especially wonderful part of the holiday was having the children (Heather, Claire, and Hannah) of these friends along (who we have known since they were babies). It is one of the under-rated delights of this stage of life--we get to discover the adults all the kids have turned into. Along with Stuart, Sophie's friend, they were superb companions: curious, intelligent, thoughtful and a lot of fun.


Trudy


On Christmas Day, Trudy, a friend Derek, Heather and our family hiked to a ridge top to watch the sunset. We celebrated New Years (with the Portland gang) with a bioluminescent swim under a brilliant starry sky.


The days melted away as we drifted between swims and snorkels, beach walks, kayaking, and swinging in the hammock.
Hannah and Claire




Sophie

And now the journeys home begin. The flight back to Portland left yesterday. We just put Sophie in a taxi for the airport, (a tough one, as we won't see her now until summer). Lindsay just finished his degree, so we get to keep him for awhile. He heads back to Victoria in late January.

It was a Christmas season we will remember for a long time, though we never forget, in the midst of these exotic waters, that our hearts' home is on our (snowbound!) island, and among the friends we won't see for many months. We wish all good things to you in the year to come...Alison



Kim, Stuart, Sophie, Alison, Lindsay, Charlie, Claire, Hannah, Terri

La Paz

In The Log From the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck wrote in 1941: "La Paz grew in fascination as we approached. The square, iron-shuttered colonial houses stood up right in back of the beach with rows of beautiful trees in front of them. It is a lovely place."

It is so lovely that I think many boaters just wash up here and never leave. There seem to be a lot of extremely relaxed people in flip flops, strolling back and forth on the docks; their boats look like they haven't been sailed for years.

I have already fallen under its sway and find I can sit on the deck watching Pelicans for hours, doing face plants, fishing just a stone's throw from our boat. I never get tired of watching them come up, their fleshy lower beaks full of squirming fish. In the morning they sun and preen on these nearby pilings.


A curious bird is the pelican

its beak can hold more than its belican (Ogden Nash)




There are wonderful bronze sculptures along the waterfront. I love this one. It's called El Viejo y el Mar? The Old Man and the Sea?
There is a poem with it. I've translated it (crudely)

I have a paper boat.
It's made of a page
on which I wrote my dreams.
It has no anchors or moorings.
I want to sail the seven seas and the eighth
where I will run aground in the longed for port.
Has anyone seen the bright beam of its lighthouse?

Guillermo Gomez Mac 2004

Images from Magdalena Bay

   We rounded Cape San Lucas at the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula yesterday around noon.  It was a little strange.  Houses, condominiums and hotels cling to the cliffs and beaches of the cape as thickly as intertidal life on the deserted beaches to the north.  We are happy though to be able to tie up to a dock, and to catch up on sleep and correspondence!  Tomorrow we head north for the first time since we left home. Onwards to La Paz, where we'll pick up Lindsay, Sophie, and friends for holiday-making. 

Snowy Egret, mangrove estuary

About a Boat

Okay, I can see why a blog about a sailing trip might eventually talk about the boat.  Circadia is a J120.  It is 40 feet long, 12 feet, three inches wide, with a 7 foot draft. It is a little unusual to cruise a J120--they are mainly known as race boats. She is fast and light and has an extendable bow sprit from which a spinnaker can be launched easily.  In high winds, like we had one night coming down the west coast of Baja, she just keeps on sailing, but tends to surf over chaotic seas rather than dig in as a heavier boat would.  I have to admit, I'm still not used to these kind of conditions and still feel like I've survived a near death experience...But back to the boat: unlike most race boats, the interior is pretty, (white, with wood trim) and comfortable.  There's a double berth in the fore peak and also aft.  The salon has cupboards and lots of book shelves.

the fore peak; note sprit (spinnaker pole)

 

The main salon

The Galley is small, but everything is in arms reach! There's a two burner propane stove with oven. We don't use the oven much, although lately, sailing in remote areas, Kim bakes bread. Our eating habits are a little different from home. Less red meat, more fish (which has been easy to get from local fisherman on the west coast of the peninsula).  Hardly any butter, lots of olive oil; very little sweet stuff, plenty of wine (which we loaded under the fore peak boards in San Diego).  We bought an ingenious little 12 volt fridge before we left the US, which to our delight is just tall enough for a bottle of white wine. 

Kim in the galley

Living in the Light

San Juan Capistrano, Edgar Payne, early 1900's

It has rained twice since we left Vancouver Island in mid-September. At first the blue skies were like drinking champagne every day. Eventually I longed for rain. Some mornings I would wake up and imagine the sound of the snapping shrimp under the dock was the light patter of drops on the skylight, but then I’d stick my head out the hatch and there was the San Diego sun, sometimes veiled with sea fog, but climbing resolutely out of it by mid-morning.
I used to love fall. You know that old “My sorrow when she’s here with me thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be…” But in recent years my sorrow moved in around mid-November and by January even she was getting kind of pissed. So I was pleased to check out of a whole winter of rain, which where I live would put everything under three feet of water if it didn’t run off or evaporate.
And it’s not exactly like I miss it now. It just feels weird. I start thinking about how much of what we are is where we come from. For instance, what would Neil Young have been like if he didn’t come from that town in North Ontario, where he had nothing to do but stare at the blue windows behind the stars? Would he have felt so helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless, if he grew up in San Diego?
Maybe Jesse Winchester, shivering in his Montreal flat, put his finger on it when he wrote that song to a lover, fled to California: “if you are never cold girl, who’s gonna keep you warm, you’ll take the sun for granted, you’ll run from every storm.”
Still I can see the appeal. I recently went to a show of California paintings from the early 1900’s. I don’t know what California painters are painting now, most contemporary painting seems kind of tortured, but back then they were called the California Impressionists, painting landscapes (which would be considered sentimental now) bathed in that gorgeous light. I think they were happy.


Monterey Cypress, Edgar Payne, early 1900's


Even the California poets seem less morose than most. Kay Ryan, the Californian who was recently named American poet Laureate writes:

“The Best of It”

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

I’m sure people suffer anxiety in California. Judging from the cosmetic surgery advertisements in local magazines, at least some of it seems to go along with trying to look as good as possible in skimpy clothes and the unforgiving light. But let me just say (except for perhaps the homeless men who seemed to inhabit every public bench, which is another, sadder story) I didn’t see much evidence of it.
Which brings me to my final question. Do we each get a standard amount of happiness? Do we either take it measured doses, as we might living in sunny latitudes. Or do we use it up in spurts, running on empty in our northern winters, and guzzling it down in the summer?
Me, I guess I’m too old to give up my existential angst very easily. It may have been doped by all this sunshine, but I can feel it, like some desert plant, biding its time, waiting for the rain.

PS

Circadia at anchor, Turtle Bay, Baja

We left San Diego a week ago and are now sailing down the west coast of Baja (which is long and mostly deserted). Many wonders along the way though: pods of bottle-nosed dolphins, estuaries full of northern breeding ducks, grebes, geese on their wintering grounds; my first ever sighting of a Burrowing Owl in the wild.
Plan to be in Cabo in a week or so…