1man1boat

I’m alive. I slither around the deck, water and sun in a tug of war, waves fracturing into a hundred fingers running from my hair to my toes. I hang onto whatever, grateful for the inanimate objects, a rail, a rope, a cleat, anything that will hold me onto the deck. I’m cursing, but smiling. Finally! “Ventura” is behaving herself, and I am close-hauled into the northeast trades, the asphyxiating grip a failure and Latin America lessening for every bucking wave.
I left Cartagena, Colombia yesterday, heading NW. “Ventura” squirms under me. Even she knows this is different. Maybe she suspects I’ve had another lover. Lovers can feel things like that. But right now she is all forgiveness and optimism.
The sun is bright between puffy tradewinds clouds. The ocean’s as warm as amniotic fluid. I wear nothing but a pair of shoes. (The non-skid coating on the deck bites like a rasp.) Waves hit the hull from the side and hope showers down. I can’t be on deck more than a few seconds without being drenched.
Nowhere on earth is the chasmn between promise and accomplishment as wide as in Latin America. “Ventura” has been stuck there for a year. Many years ago I accompanied my first wife to Latin America. She had cancer. Mexican doctors sold hope. She died. A loathing was born in me.
Sure, there’s a certain romanticism to slow motion destruction. I sat on deck at night in a boatyard in Panama listening to howler monkeys while I downed Malarone pills with swigs of rum straight from the bottle. But everyone is a potential victim. The only people you don’t rip off are your own family. People are proud of their last names, not their countries. I looked at myself in Latin America and felt like I was one piece of fruit in a piled-high fruit bowl molding and rotting under time lapse photography. You can get anything you want in Latin America, as long as you don’t really want it. The people are friendly for the most part, and 99 percent of them are totally fucked. Their skin is too dark. They have the wrong name. They have no chance. They live in racist prisons run by oligarchs who skip the corridors and rattle their keys to the beat of a stupid ditty about the joys of globalisation. Why don’t they revolt? Because in the simple choice between the darkness of an AK-47 and the smiles of one’s kids in a dirt-floor hovel, most pick the smiles. I guess I would, too. It’s like solo sailing, I guess, you just make your universe so small that all that’s left is the smile of the eternal now.
Anyway, more about adventures in Panama and Columbia later. Needless to say, a lot of it was funny, as long as you can drown your conscience in irony. I just wanted to let you know that I was free and smiling and sailing northward.
The weather is supposed to deteriorate tonight, with 25 to 30 knots of wind and steep, saber-toothed seas. We’ll see. But right now I’m free.
David

I’m in my underwear, on my back, in a pool of diesel, glistening in sweat, yanking on a fuel hose. My feet are sticking up out of the cockpit locker. My head is under the diesel tank. “You fucking bitch,” I yell as loudly as I can. My ears hurt because there is nowhere down here for the sound to go. I hate this fucking boat. “You piece of shit whore, you’re not worth 25 cents!” With that the hose pops off the tank and my face is sprayed with diesel.
I have been working for over a week to fix “Ventura’s” fuel problem. Every once in a while, the engine just dies. Not because there is a problem with the engine, but because there is a fuel blockage somewhere. The last time it happened was June 3, about six miles from Panama City. It had been a night of thunder, lightning and total white-out, blinding rain. And ships everywhere, black, throbbing monsters that sneak out of the night, so close you can hear their engines, a guttural menace that feels like animal lust or hate. One passed by so close I had to look up at its nav lights. I could smell it. It’s engine throbbed, and I thought that must be what it’s like to die in the jaws of a lion, it’s breath on your neck and the sound of its heart the last thing you ever hear.
In the midst of all that the engine died again. I changed fuel filters. That bought a couple of hours. Dawn. We’re in the tidal current off Taboga Island, only six or seven miles from Balboa, Panama. Dozens of ships are at anchor, chained, but still hungry and dangerous, since we are drifting and there is no wind. I finally discover I can run the engine at low RPM, so we motor in to Balboa at slow speed, alongside the channel that enters the Panama Canal, under the watchful (I imagine scornful) eye of Flamenco Signal Station, who control vessel movement near and in the canal. Finally, on Sunday, June 3, we pick up a mooring at Balboa Yacht Club.
Now that’s a place. People don’t come to Balboa Yacht Club, they end up here. It burned down 10 years ago, so it operates out of a temporary bar. We’re talking a corrugated steel roof on poles. No walls, just a run-down bar and a few cheap tables with plastic chairs. They serve beer, rum and Coke in carafes, and the worst food known to man. (Keep in mind that while I singlehand I contentedly eat cold Chef Boyardee spaghetti straight from the can, so for me to say food is lousy….) Behind the bar is an ancient household refrigerator (you remember the ’70s when household appliances were colors like avocado green and pee yellow) and young women who never, ever smile. But I kind of like the place anyway. After all, a bar isn’t about decor, or even smiles. It’s about stories. And everyone here has a story.
Panama collects misfits the way gearbox oil collects slivers of worn metal. These are people too odd for the machinery of modern life, so they end up telling stories to strangers. There’s the guy who once made a living smuggling contraceptives from England to Ireland, who delivered a boat for a Polish prince and nearly died in a storm, only to be rewarded by the prince’s party at which Keith Richards and the rest of the stones showed up. And there’s the guy with a limp who’s been in the Zone (back when it was a Zone) for nearly 40 years and tells stories about everyone but himself. I asked him how he got the limp and he said, “Oh, it was a mix-up once.” Someone else told me he had been in the military. “He used to jump out of things,” I was told. Some mix-up.
And then there are the taxi drivers. They hover around like fruit flies. To be fair, they are the most optimistic people on earth. Each one claims he can get you anything. Need a 1-1/2 inch bronze hose barb? No problem, the place is just over there, he’ll take you there. Eight dollars per hour to drive you anywhere. Of course it’s all bullshit. The taxi drivers have no more idea where to get that bronze hose barb than I do, but they happily drive you from hardware store to plumbing store to car parts store in search of it. I am sure I could have told one of these drivers I wanted a perpetual motion machine and he would have told me the place is just over there.
I am sorry to leave Balboa Yacht Club, with it’s scratchy Salsa music, drumming rain and mangoes falling off the trees and rolling down the corrugated roof while everyone waits to see if it was ripe as it falls off the edge.
It took me over a week to get my engine running smoothly. Eventually I had to replace the diesel tank. I don’t know much about Panama City, since I spent my time there contorted inside a boat, but I do know all the places to buy fuel hose, barbs, filters and epoxy. Finally, it is time for the canal, a 40-mile serpent that swallows sailboats whole.

We’re approaching the Panama canal, about 150 miles distant. It feels like were in the middle of a freeway, riding a bicycle between lanes. Big ships are everywhere, passing us on all sides. There is no traffic separation scheme here, so the ships pass each other port-to-port, starboard-to-starboard and they overtake each other (and us) on whatever side seems like fun. I won’t be sleeping much the next night or two….
It’s gray and raining. It’s been that way pretty much since the beginning of May. To anyone thinking of retiring down here, I suggest first sitting in the shower for a month before you make up your mind. We decided to pass by the Western Panamanian islands, though they are supposed to be nice. But we’ve had enough of watching howler monkeys, toucans and orchids in the rain. We got all the jungle we could handle in Costa Rica, and the beaches aren’t attractive in the rain. On the other hand, sitting in a dry restaurant after taking a warm shower in Panama City is very attractive.
We should arrive in Panama Sunday morning. Most of the official offices (immigration, customs, canal authority) are closed then, so me may have to hang out for one extra day so that we arrive on Monday. In any case, we’re almost there!
David and Gunilla

Golfito is a town sinking into the jungle. I like it here, but I suspect most people don’t. It’s a place of peeling paint, vines, a certain past, humidity, alcohol and some aging, slightly overweight ex-pats who are desperate to figure out how they could ever live in the States on 10 hours of work a week and still afford three full-time household employees.
Golfito was once a main harbor for banana shipments. Bosses from United Fruit sipped gin and tonic on the wide verandas of painted wooden houses while mosquito netting hung over their beds. But that all ended 25 years ago. The ships don’t come any more. The cranes on the wharf are rusting. Most of the prostitutes got older, but some got younger as yanks and Europeans came in search of teenage sex in a town where the law is a shrug.
It is rainy season now, which means that the steep jungle hills above Golfito ooze water and mud. It’s hot here and even the earth is sweating. I can’t quite figure out why people stay here, or why anyone new comes. Of course, I’m here, but I am attracted to the weightless odor of interia, and this place is as languid as the steam rising from the rotting leaves in the surrounding rainforest. Maybe there’s fertilizer there, or maybe it’s just fetid. It’s a place where broken dreams and new dreams have reached a sort of equilibrium. Even plans have mildew here. Like I said, I kind of like it. Sighs have a certain authenticity. I am glad to have landed (or bounced) here for a bit.
I haven’t been writing recently because I wanted to write about singlehanded sailing, and that’s not what I am doing anymore. I miss being alone at sea, far out at sea, especially at night in the dim red lights, listening to the sound of water like amniotic fluid against the hull. I miss putting in that second reef, hanging on to a boat gone beast, water flying everywhere, me stumbling, slithering, grabbing for anything while water two miles deep scratches at my boat, and then “Ventura” is back on her feet, and I’m back in control, and as we shoulder through another big wave, spray in my eyes, I can taste it, and I am arm wrestling with God, a draw, at least for the moment. I miss my ascetic cocoon, cold cans of spaghetti, stubble on my face, and fear, my constant Siren, licking the back of my neck.
“Ventura” has been silent for a long time. She only talks when she is sure I’m listening, and she’s pretty sure I’m not listening to her now. She’s right. There have been two people aboard for weeks now. Gunilla is with me. So I talk to Gunilla, and “Ventura” has been reduced to a bunch of fiberglass, bulkheads, wires, winches and other inanimate stuff. She’s just a boat now, a small and uncomfortable one at that, and I have someone else to talk to. And caress.
I don’t really like sailing when there are other people on the boat, but I can’t stay in Golfito forever — cheap beer and entertaining misfits notwithstanding — so we’re off on Thursday for the final leg to Panama. It will take us about three or four days, probably with little or no wind, drizzle, sometimes blinding rain, and dozens and dozens of ships converging on or leaving Panama. We should arrive in Panama next Monday or so.
The current plan is to transit the canal around June 14 or 15. Gunilla will then fly back to Sweden. I’ll put “Ventura” in a new yard on the Caribbean side of Panama and then, after getting her ready for a long stay on dry land, I’ll make my apologies and also fly off to Sweden on July 1 or so. “Ventura” and I will get back together after hurricane season for (I hope) some time together alone in the middle of the ocean.
We’ve spent nearly a month in Costa Rica. It’s not all nuts. Gunilla had wanted to visit Costa Rica for years, and now she has. She loves it. God created Costa Rica early on, before He got bored. We’ve been in the wilderness, on the sides of volcanos, on horseback, in rapids, under waterfalls and rescued from a river by a jungle guide on a motorcycle. And then there are the monkeys and toucans and spiders as big as your hand. And the rain. It has been constant since the first week of May, five inches some days. But the clouds look spectacular, as if they might reach down and grab you by the throat. If you haven’t been here, come. Maybe not to Golfito, but come. Go to the jungle, where the muddy cliffs meet the sea, where the trees collapse into the waves, where the wilderness meets the wilderness. It’s a sight to behold!
Fair (and dry) winds.

Approaching Golfito in southern Costa Rica. Doug and I have been motoring for four days. Mostly no wind, though we had 30+ knots for a while a couple of days ago in the Papagallo. Now cloudy with lots of squalls and lightning. Never seen so much lightning. What’s the highest point around here? Oh, right….
Called “Land & Sea” in Golfito to get a mooring. I was worried about arriving on a holiday (May 1) and being stuck on the boat until immigration and customs were open the next day. So I asked Tim at Land & Sea about whether I could get off anyway. “Yeah, sure, if you keep a low profile in Golfito,” he says. “What’s that mean,” ask, thinking I wouldn’t be able to visit a restaurant or even take a shower. “Don’t start any bar fights and stay away from the hookers,” he says. Golfito sounds promising.
I’ll write more soon.
Fair winds,
David

Many people have written, wondering if something has gone wrong.  Well, the short answer is no.  The long answer is my plans are changing daily.

 The boat is on a mooring at Barillas Marina Club in Bahia Jiquilisco in El Salvador.  Doug has joined us.  So Gunilla, Doug and I have rented a car and driven inland, exploring both El Salvador and Guatemala.  We are currently in Antigua, Guatemala.  Rough plans are for Gunilla to fly home on Wednesday and for Doug and I to sail “Ventura” to Nicaragua and then on to Costa Rica.

David’s longer term plans are one of the following:

1. Get the boat through the canal by May 15 and then make a non-stop dash for Florida, trying to beat the first hurricane.  Obvious problems with this approach at this late date.

2. Chill for a bit in Costa Rica and then head south.  Far south, aiming for the Horn in November or December.  Climbers climb Everest.  Sailors round the Horn. 

3. Turn right and head for New Zealand via South Pacific Islands.

4. Try to find a secure place to leave the boat south of the hurricane belt.  Easier said than done.  Still looking.

5. Just hang out between 0 and 10 degrees N latitude until November.  Learn Spanish.  Read books.

 I’ll let you know.

 Fair winds,

David

Off the coast of El Salvador. Smelled a wood fire last night, perhaps someone cooking, the scents of humanity blown out to sea. Someone asked me once what I miss at sea. Smells. There are no smells at sea, except those we create ourselves on the boat. No musty leaves, no dust, no asphalt, no cut grass. I think the lack of smell is what makes the deep ocean so inhuman.
I have a new toy, one that is destroying old friendships. When Gunilla came down, she brought a GPS chartplotter. I had asked for it because we would be sailing along the coast down to Panama, and I felt it would be safer. It is a wonder! Its little screen shows detailed charts of anywhere in Central America. And it shows exactly where we are. It has reduced my navigation work load from hours per day to minutes.
And yet it is soulless. I have a special relation to the stars, the planets, the moon and sun. I know them by name, by sight. I know their schedules, when Sirius sets and where on the horizon. I know their personalities, Antares, red and burning at the heart of Scorpio. As I write, the moon is just rising, and I am not surprised, since I know where the moon is always, even when she is on the other side of the planet. She is a close friend, a confidant, who I see every day. I depend on her, but she is so familiar that I don’t express my gratitude very often.
I depend on her. I suppose that is what worries me. I depended on her. This new chartplotter makes all these friendships with the heavenly bodies unnecessary. I feel a sorrow and sense of loss. I look up and I WANT to depend on these old friends. I want to need them. But now I don’t. I think one day I will leave all the technology ashore and rejoin my friends.
We will be ashore in a just twelve hours. That is exciting. But I’d still rather be at sea. Since Gunilla came down, we have joined with other boats, other couples, cruising south, from harbor to harbor. Ours is now a life connected to people, chatter on the radio, dinners ashore, plans, conversations till late. I am enjoying this new way to sail. But oh how I miss the solitude of nights alone at sea.
Today we passed many fishing lines drifting at sea. Guatemalan fisherman come out here in open boats and set the lines, hundreds of yards long, with dangling, baited hooks. For us in sailboats they are a danger, just waiting to hang on a rudder or, worse, foul a propeller. I can’t believe these young fishermen do this, so far from land, in tiny, open boats. Last year three Mexican fisherman lost their engine and drifted for months, for thousands of miles, finally drifting to the Cook Islands. What desperation drives people to seek a living like that?
We are traveling with two other sailboats, new friends, safety in numbers, perhaps. We stopped yesterday in the middle of the sea to swim, jumping off our boats, laughing. I had never done that. As a singlehander, I live by the creed, “If you fall off, you die.” I have branded into my psyche the imperative that you never, ever get off the boat. So I am always connected to “Ventura” by a harness. I have never jumped off her into the water, never in all these years, even when I have been becalmed for days. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Until yesterday. What better sign that my singlehanding days are over, at least for now?
Gunilla is slowly getting to know “Ventura,” adapting to a place that is as personal to me as the inside of my lungs. I think it is hard. I am trying to be sensitive to her plight. And yet “Ventura” and I are a unit. She is an extension of my body. I know without looking where each line is, each cleat, each flashlight. I don’t think about where things are on “Ventura” any more than you think about where your chin is when you scratch it. And now Gunilla is here, and the flashlight is not there when I reach. It is as if the combined David/”Ventura,” the organism that we have become, is losing its motor skills. I am starting to see “ventura” as a boat, rather than as an extension of my body.
It is a different way of sailing, of being with the boat and the sea. Not necessarily a bad way, just different. The dolphins have been absent the past few days. I think they sense the difference, too.
On the other hand, there are the turtles. We have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands. They drift, seemingly asleep, quite large, surprised when we get too close, swimming away, though I hit one a couple of nights ago. I’d like to stop and talk to one.
We’ve had little wind the past three days. On the one hand, that was fine while crossing the gulf of Gales, the Tehuantepec. But we have been motoring almost constantly, only sailing a couple hours at a time now and then when a gentle breeze passes by. The engine has been a problem, stopping repeatedly. It may be than I have dirty diesel in the tank. It sounds like fuel starvation, the engine slowing and then dying. I have changed fuel filters five times now, a messy job, especially in the heat on a rolling boat. The fuel filter is mounted deep inside a cockpit locker. But maybe the problem is solved. The engine has run for well over 24 hours now without a hiccup. But it roars. In this heat I have removed the covering from the engine compartment so the engine would cool better. But Gunilla and I have to scream to hear each other. I trust we can remember to not scream when we turn the motor off.
Fair winds,
David

The Gulf of Tehuantepec. Flat calm. I’ve been gritting my teeth for days now, in anticipation of crossing this 240 miles where it blows gale force 140 days per year. But today, nothing. Other than a little unpleasantness this afternoon — 20 or 25 knots on the nose with some steep chop — it’s been benign. Still, it will feel good to be across. Even though it is flat calm now, I feel on edge. It’s like having dinner with a murderer.
I guess I should change the name of the web site to “2people1boat.” Gunilla came down to Huatulco a few days ago, carrying two huge duffel bags of spare parts. There was much chatter in Marina Chahue in Huatulco in advance of Gunilla’s arrival. I had spent some time with some of the cruising couples. (Just as an aside, singlehanders get treated like stray, sick kittens in harbors. People put milk out for you, scratch you behind the ears and say things like, “poor boy, how did you get so messed up, well, it will be all right.”)
Anyway, I think some of them were curious as to how it would go when another person moved into “Ventura.” I wasn’t curious, I was terrified. “Ventura” has been a singlehander’s boat for 16 years. Everything on board has its specific place. I am surrounded by familiarity. Being on “Ventura” is for me like lying against a lover. Every curve of my body knows every curve of hers. I love this boat. I love Gunilla, too. Like I said, people were curious, especially the women.
It’s been hard. I’ve been stupid, and I think now both Gunilla and “Ventura” are angry with me. It seems the boat is siding with the wife. I could feel that this afternoon as we were bucking the short seas. “Ventura” had no rhythm. She was glaring and tense, pounding onto the waves, crash, splash, spray up over the boat as if “Ventura” had hit the water with a sledgehammer. There was nothing seductive. Even the rainbows in the high, arching spray seemed violent, like the splatter of blood between boxers. I was curt and irritable, cursing at anything around me, which, of course, consisted of Gunilla, “Ventura,” and the ocean.
I told Gunilla I would try to improve, to be more welcoming, more flexible, more open. Tonight, in the blackness, in the weak and anxious light of a waning moon, I kissed “Ventura” and told her I would be hers, as well. And the ocean. Well, it is no more the medium of our travels than a parent is the medium of our success. I forgot it the past few days, and it seems also to know. I am no longer alone out here, and to give proper attention to all whom I love, well, that is more than I could do. I need to match my breathing to theirs.
Huatulco was fun. Finally a Mexican town with Mexicans. After Cabo, which is a mental suburb of Los Angeles, the towns of Huatulco felt real. It was like putting on a cotton shirt after years of wearing synthetics. Kids everywhere. I have read that Mexico’s population is younger than in the U.S. Here I could see that it is. 11:00 at night, and the town square is full of youngsters, teenagers laughing, people relaxing under huge trees full of chattering birds, all savoring the shade of night.
The boat is fixed. Most important, I have fixed the gooseneck fitting, boring out and tapping new, larger holes in the mast, and then screwing the gooseneck on, bedded down with gobs of compound. I think it is better than when it was new.
So we set off today, we and four other boats, to cross the infamous Tehuantepec. I will write more later. In the meantime, Gunilla is sleeping, I am relaxing in a bath of faint red night lights, eating peanut butter and jelly and drinking a Coca-Cola. It’s almost like singlehanding.
Crossing the gulf,
David

I have only once before seen the ocean this calm, 13 years ago when I was stuck for a few days in the middle of the Pacific High on the way back from Hawaii.
It is almost surreal. The water is smooth as glass. Not a ripple. “Ventura’s” wake trails behind for a mile or more, like a daydream. There is a long, long swell from the southwest, presumably from a storm in the southern hemisphere. It is as if the earth were breathing, asleep. The subconscious memory of wind. An occasional fish floats at the surface, surprised when “Ventura” comes close.
I am on the way to Bahias Huatulco, a series of small bays in southern Mexico. I will arrive late Monday night. The engine hammers around the clock. It is a new engine, a Yanmar 3YM30, and I trust it can handle the strain of pushing hour after hour, for days, in 90-degree heat. I am running it at only 2,000 rpm, a speed of only 4.1 knots, partly to conserve fuel and partly to be kind to the engine.
Once in Huatulco, I will take on more fuel. Gunilla will join me on Wednesday. She will stay with me. We plan to motor down the cost, first to the Mexican border, then past Guatemala. We’ll stop in El Salvador. And then on to Costa Rica. That will take us perhaps 10 days. We will then continue motoring and sailing along the Costa Rican and Panamanian coasts, perhaps arriving at the canal around May 1.
This is a huge complication, since it is now looking like I may not have the time to get the boat across the Caribbean before hurricane season starts on June 1. If that is the case, I will have to find a marina or boatyard in Panama or Costa Rica where I can leave “Ventura” until after hurricane season ends on November 1 and then continue the journey then.
I’m still absorbing the implications of this big change in plan. It will be a different adventure.
Fair winds (ha!),
David

Here are some phots from Cabo San Lucas. I apologize for the delay in posting. Unlike David, I can’t use the “no wind” excuse to explain my tardiness. Click on the slideshow above and you should get the controls that will let you view the thumbnails and select different images. Or just sit back and watch the slideshow.
In Cabo David spent a lot of time going up and down the mast. While up there he snapped a couple shots of the marina in Cabo, so that explains the pictures that look like they were taken by someone sitting at the top of a very high pole.