1man1boat

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.

Spent the whole afternoon with absolutely NO wind. Just bobbing around. Spoke to the weather guru on the radio who thought I’d see more of the same for weeks. He predicted four more weeks to get the last 1,200 miles to Panama.
I give up. Time for a new plan. I turned on the engine and pointed the boat toward Huatulco, Mexico. That’s 340 miles from here, toward the Northeast. Partly the wrong direction, in other words. The new plan is to motor there and then sail/motor along the coasts of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, picking up fuel along the way as needed.
So off we go, motor thundering, back to Mexico….
More later,
David

I gave in and started the engine last night. I needed to charge my batteries, so I figured I could run the engine in gear for a few hours during the middle of the night and at least make a few miles headway at the same time. So between midnight and 3:00 I motored along at about 4.5 knots. The sea was completely calm. I could see individual stars reflected on its surface. It is beautiful, but spooky, to be on a sea this big and this flat and this dark.
The battle against the light air continues. I am lucky to make 75 miles per 24-hour day now. I have nearly 1,400 miles to go. The arithmetic is depressing. The forecast is for more of the same for at least a week. So I probably have about three weeks left to Panama. By then I will be really, really tired of being on this boat. I assumed that I could be out here for a month getting to Panama. I didn’t think it would take six weeks.
Small problems have arisen. One (maybe not so small) has to do with the gooseneck connection between the boom and the mast. I discovered yesterday that the six screws that hold the gooseneck backing plate to the mast had worked loose. Worse, one of the six holes in the mast is now stripped so I can’t refasten that screw so easily. I suspect the problem arose due to the banging of the boom back and forth for days on end in all this light air. I took some thin, high-strength line and lashed around the mast at the gooseneck and then cinched it down tight. I certainly hope this holds to Panama. Once I am there I will have to drill out the holes and then re-tap them one size bigger and put in new screws.
I have found two bugs on board. One very clearly was a cockroach and the other might have been a small roach. I worry that I got them aboard in Cabo.. I noticed an announcement at the marina that management was fumigating and requested boaters to also fumigate their boats to deal with “the infestation.” I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now I am not so sure…. The last thing I need is a bug infestation out here.
Some readers have expressed skepticism about my flying fish story. So I am enclosing a picture of two flying fish that landed on deck the night before last. There is also a squid. They also seem to hop aboard with some regularity.
And then there is the hitchhiking bird. I see these birds out here almost constantly. They seem to travel in pairs, though sometimes 10 or more show up at once. They are quite graceful, swooping low over the water, gliding just inches above the waves. I have no idea what they are called. The wind was so light yesterday and the boat was moving so slowly that one of them decided to pay a visit. He landed on the bow pulpit and stayed for 15 or 20 minutes, allowing me to get quite close. If anyone knows what these birds are called and knows anything about them, send me a message. I’m curious.
Drifting toward Panama,
David

I am completely becalmed. It is just before midnight. The spinnaker hangs limp, moving only when the mast sways now and then in the old swell. It is 1,400 miles to Panama.
The weather forecast for the coming week is discouraging: very light wind in this area. I may be here for a long time. I will be lucky to make 50 miles a day, and then only if the wind picks up to a few knots during the daylight hours. I have enough water to last at least another 30 days and food for that long as well, if I am careful.
Most sailors in this area dread the frequent gales that blow out of the Gulf of Tehuantepec. I long for one, mainly because those gales sometimes create 20 to 30 knot winds as far as a couple hundred miles from the gulf. If that were to happen, I could at least motor to an area with wind. But there are no Tehuantepec gales forecast for the next week. And it is getting late in the season now, so there may not be strong gales in the gulf.
I had assumed there would be light winds on this leg, but not this light and not for such a long period. At the moment it seems unlikely that I will make Panama by April 10 as I was hoping. April 20 may be a stretch. Surely by the end of April I should be there.
It is not easy to sit becalmed all night in a boat 250 miles at sea and 1,400 miles from one’s destination. I am reluctant to sleep since I don’t want to miss even the tiniest breath of wind.
I need to conserve power now, since my primary source of electrical power is the towed generator, and it only works if the boat is sailing. The computer and the radio consume a lot of power. So my posts will be less frequent for a while.
Talk to you again when I have wind.
David

Ugh, Panama is a LONG way off. The good news is that I am now at the half way point between Ventura and Panama. I’ve got 1,500 miles to go. The bad news is that I have no wind.
It is very hot, maybe 85 or 90 degrees (my thermometer broke yesterday when a spinnaker sheet caught it and broke it in half). I have maybe 2 knots of wind out of the north. I’m flying the spinnaker with a triple-reefed main. (For most of the night I had no main up. It just blankets the spinnaker. But I just tried triple reefing the main so that I catch a bit of the breeze lower down towards deck without blanketing the spinnaker.) I am making 2 knots at best. If this continues, that will be less than 50 miles in 24 hours.
The weather forecast is for more of the same for another week or so. So God only knows when I’ll get to Panama.
It is frustrating sitting out here just bobbing around in the heat. I have little shade on deck and it gets very hot down below. I guess I just have to tough it out for another 10 days and then hope I can find a little more wind further on.
Not much more to say right now. It’s pretty out here, but I don’t notice. I just want to move.
David

Some stories are too strange to be true. I wasn’t planning to post anything tonight, but this just happened….
It’s been an uneventful day, which is just the way I like it. The only thing that broke was my Xantrex Link 20 battery monitor. That’s more a nuisance than a real problem. But I have to say, I am tired of all this electrical stuff breaking. My next boat will have only kerosene.
And then I saw a ship, a big roro car carrier, this afternoon. I spoke to the ship on the VHF. First of all, I was surprised he answered. Usually they don’t. I think they don’t want to find out that some dumb sailor needs help, which they are required to give, so they just pretend to not hear. And then this guy spoke good English, which is also unusual. Turned out they are on their way to Balboa, Panama just like me, coming from Asia via a waypoint north of Hawaii. They’re on a great circle route from the waypoint (i.e. the shortest route between two points on a globe) to Panama, which means there are likely to be other ships on the same track during the night. Another Screaming Meanie night.
Anyway, it was about 9:00 this evening and I decide to sit in the cockpit and cool off. The seas are soft and regular. The wind is just enough to drive the boat at about 5.5 knots. I am wearing only my underwear. The moon is half, straight above, and there is enough light for me to imagine that I can see well. I’m relaxing with my head back, listening to the purring of the water against the hull. My mind is slip sliding toward thoughts of my wife and whether she’s in bed yet and…. And then — plop, flip, flop — a flying fish lands right in my lap! I swear this is true. Of course, it took me a few seconds to figure out what it was, and during those few seconds I had a lot of strange thoughts. So the fish, which is perhaps six inches long, flutters and flops all over the cockpit before I could catch it and throw it back. Which makes that flying fish both the unluckiest (after all, he landed in the only boat for many miles) and the luckiest (he landed in my lap and I threw him back) flying fish in all history. And it also means that the next time I fantasize about my wife, I won’t be in the damned cockpit.
Some stories just have to be told.
David

It started reasonably enough. I was naked and about to pull the pop top on a can of corn. Those two things were unrelated. I was naked because I had noticed that I stunk. There are two kinds of singlehanders: the punctiliously clean kind and then, well, the other kind. I belong to the other kind. But eventually even I notice the smell and realize I need to take a bath and change my clothes.
Taking a bath is fairly easy on “Ventura,” at least in the tropics. The air is warm and the water is warm. I strip, sit in the cockpit, reach over the side with a bucket and grab water. Then I dump it over my head. I lather up with “Joy” dishwashing liquid. “Joy” works in salt water, unlike other kinds of soap and shampoo. Rinsing just entails more buckets of salt water, of which I have an infinite supply.
The trick is getting the salt water off my body. For that I use some of my precious supply of fresh water, maybe a gallon. I have one of those sun showers they sell for camping. It’s basically a plastic bag that is clear on one side and black on the other. If you fill it with water and lay it in the sun with the clear side up, the water gets very warm within an hour or so. Then you hang the bag — from the boom, in my case — and water sprays from a small plastic nozzle. Works like a charm, aside from the fact that everything is swinging about wildly in 10-foot waves.
But not today. Today is completely overcast, so I didn’t want to use the sun shower. Instead, I stood in the kitchen — which on Ventura is also my navigation workstation, my bedroom, my living room, and storage room — and took a sponge bath. I threw the sponge overboard after I was done. I was that dirty.
So now I’m standing there, naked and trying to dry off, not wanting to sit down on deck because waves keep splashing over the boat, trying to figure out how to kill five minutes. Since I’m in the kitchen anyway, I reach into a locker and pull out a random can. (I often eat this way — just pick a random can and eat whatever I get.) As it turns out, it’s one of my absolute favorites, Jolly Green Giant corn and it even has a pop-top.
Just as I am about to pull open the can — heck, I can already taste the corn — I hear a thumping against the hull. Now on a sailboat hundreds of miles from land, things knocking on the outside of the hull below the waterline are never good. This is not a fish wanting to visit. Something is broken. So up I jump on deck, peering over the lifelines, and I see a line, the spinnaker sheet, trailing in the water. A block has come loose from the toe rail and is hanging in the water banging on the hull. (I’m not using the spinnaker today, but the lines are tied off on deck, awaiting their next use. Well, they are supposed to be tied on deck. One got away.) I’m also trailing a propeller connected to a generator that creates electricity as well as a taffrail log, a smaller propeller that spins and turns a dial and tells me how far I’ve gone. So now there are three lines trailing the boat, and the spinnaker sheet is tangled in the self-steering rudder and is about to tangle with the other lines. I look like a boat being chased by serpents.
I realize quickly that I need to stop the boat. Easy, you might think. But sailboats don’t have brakes. So I head her quickly up into the wind, into the 10-foot waves, and the whole time I’m thinking, “shit, I just got dry again and now this!” The boat does its best imitation of a bucking bronco, I grab for the only piece of attire I know I need — my safety harness — and I (and every part of me) hang over the stern trying to tame the serpents. I’m pulling in on lines, acutely aware of the blocks, winches, rudder and tiller all inches from the only swinging serpent I REALLY don’t want to lose.
I got it all in, of course, and set “Ventura” on her way again. And I’m thinking, “If only the ladies at Curves could have seen this.” Now you know why sailors always wear pants.
By the way, the corn didn’t seem so good after that, so I reached in for something else. Fruit cocktail.
Hang loose, but not too lose.
David

The wind is warm. Finally. We are well into the tropics. The moon is waxing, now more than just a sliver, in the west. The moon is my reassurance. She throws down silver feathers on the sea, calming the waves and my nerves. She is above Venus. Orion stands guard, but idly, since the moon is so much stronger than she appears.
“Ventura” glows faintly red from within. At night I use only red lights in order to preserve my night vision. Down below, “Ventura” appears soft and warm. A towel sways on a hook as “Ventura” rolls with the sea. The waves and the boat seem to caress each other tonight. I swear if I were to reach out right now and touch her, “Ventura” would be soft and alive.
I listen. Sounds are like emotions; they rest like layers of sediment, placed there by our past, challenging us to mine them. The boat creaks, a block above deck rasps as a line pulls taut, my head rests against the hull and I hear the soft rustling of the water as it bids its constant farewell. I am separated from the sea by a quarter inch of hull. I always think of amniotic fluid as I lie here. I am born out here. The wind is quiet tonight, breathing as if asleep, and I have to listen attentively to hear it, as I might lying in bed checking that my wife is breathing.
And then there is the music. Every day I play something, often over and over. Today it is classical guitar, the second movement of Joaquín Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez,” played by Pepe Romero. Only the second movement, again and again. Why this way? Is it not boring? But the same moon rises each night, and still I am in love with her. Why not a piece of music?
I only discovered this music recently, at a concert conducted by Boris Brott. I mentioned my fascination with this concerto, and Boris Brott and Diane Duncan of the symphony gave me a CD just before I left on this voyage. The moon, the sea and my mood did not all align until tonight. Thank you, Boris and Diane, for a night of life and memory.
David

It’s a small ocean. You never know who you’re going to meet. Well, OK, it wasn’t really out here on the ocean, but it was in the slip next to me when I was in Cabo several days ago.
“Ventura” was resting in slip B-26, next to a sport fishing boat named “Diamond Cutter.” The skipper of that boat climbed down from the fly bridge and I couldn’t resist asking him, too. You see, I’ve been hunting for one of the prior owners of “Ventura” for years. I had heard he was a singlehanded sailor named John Lappala. John supposedly added the Aries windvane (the self-steering gear) to “Ventura.” He also knew the first owners, the Parkinsons, who had bought “Ventura” in England and sailed her to San Francisco in 1969-70. So I thought John could fill in many of the blanks I had in “Ventura’s” history.
Years ago I had heard that John was the skipper of a large boat down in Mexico. So everywhere I went in Cabo — the docks, bars, chandleries — I asked people if they knew John Lappala. No luck, though someone did tell me he skippered a 67-foot boat called “Kemo Sabe” and had been in Cabo as recently as last September.
So Ariel steps onto the dock and I ask: “Do you happen to know a skipper named John Lappala”? Ariel looks a little worse for wear, having just come in from fishing. His shirt is smeared with blood. He likes to talk. But first he wants a beer, which his fisherman client throws to him from the boat. “Hey, Ar-ar-ar-iel, catch,” he yells as the beer arcs toward me. A bloody hand reaches in front of my face just before the beer breaks my nose. It seems Ariel stutters occasionally, and the client has re-christened Ariel to Ar-ar-ariel.
Anyway, Ariel lights up with a big smile. “John Lappala? Damn right, we’ve been buddies for 20 years. You want his phone number?” I tell him that “Ventura” is John’s old boat. “Really? John’s told all kinds of stories about sailing that boat. Is that really John’s boat?”
It turns out John is in a marina on the Mexican mainland right now and is glad to talk on the phone. “What a blast from the past,” he says when I tell him who I am. He can’t talk much right then — something about repairs to “Kemo Sabe” and divers under the boat and alligators in the marina — but we exchange email addresses. So eventually I will be able to fill in “Ventura’s” past.
Ariel is suddenly very interested in my trip. “So you’re sailing all the way to Panama?” he asks. “That’s a long ways.” He wants to know how many people are on the boat. “Just me,” I explain. Ariel explodes with curiosity. “Just you! Just you! You didn’t even bring any pussy?” Ariel shakes his head. “Man, you gonna go blind!”
Talk to you later. I have to clean my glasses. I don’t see so good.
David
PS. I’ve had moderately good wind the past two days since leaving Cabo. Last night was dead calm, though, and even the spinnaker just hung limp. But now I’ve got 10 or 15 knots of wind from the north and the forecast is for more of the same. So I’m making about 5 kts in the right direction. It’s been a quiet day and I’ve been napping on and off.

A grey and windless afternoon. An occasional creak from “Ventura.” The sea is the lifeless color of steel. Even the birds have given up. I am alone and Panama is 10 million miles away.
The wind has been unusual the past day. I left Cabo in perfect wind, a beam reach of about 15 knots. “Ventura” loved it and we clicked off 6.5 or 7 miles each hour. I thought I might reach a 150-mile day, if only the wind would hold. Alas, not today. The wind weakened last night, then freshened from the southwest this morning. Just after dawn I was beating south into 15 or 18 knots of wind. The wind almost never lows out of the south or southwest here this time of year. The swell was from the northwest and the wind waves were from the south-southwest. It was a sloppy, bumpy mess. It reminded me of sailing in the Baltic, except it is warmer here.
The beat to windward was a reminder of other long tropical windward days sailing back from Hawaii. “Ventura” has low freeboard and acts like a submarine in those conditions. Water washes over the deck. I had forgotten to turn a dorade vent over the head, so water splashed in destroyed one roll of toilet paper. That’s why I took six. During the pounding (and a fairly light pounding it was), a shackle unscrewed itself. It held my “Dutchman Boom Brake” which hangs from the boom at the vang bail and acts as a preventer and keeps the boom from knocking me unconscious in an accidental gybe. I had forgotten to tape that shackle closed. All cotter pins and shackles are taped or wired shut on “Ventura.” But I had forgotten that one, so of course it worked its way loose eventually. Even though the wind was only 18 knots or so, it was enough force to deform the shackle. Since I don’t have a spare of that size, I spent an hour this afternoon trying to figure out how to bend it back and make it align again. I had more than enough time, of course, so eventually I wrestled it back into alignment and it hands on the boom again.
By noon the wind had almost completely died. The weather guru thinks that by tomorrow night I will have a moderate northerly wind and that should hang in there for at least a few days. So his advice is to just try to work my way south or southeast in this very light air for another 24 or 36 hours until the wind fills in. So I have the spinnaker up. I have tried dropping the mainsail completely so it would not blanket the spinnaker. I think I am making a couple of knots boat speed now.
I bought some cans of food in Cabo without being sure what it was. I opened one today, something called “Chilorio.” It’s some kind of shredded meat. I suppose it would be good mixed with something else. I bought it in the human food section, not the pet food section, so it must be OK to eat. I think I have five more cans. I have other food, so maybe these cans will make it all the way to Panama.
“Ventura” is creeping along, maybe making 3 knots now. This kind of weather makes me sleepy. Maybe I can sleep my way to Panama.
David