3 March 2010 South End, Isla Santa Catalina 25.6026N 110.7760W
Isla Catalina Picassa Pictures

I vacillate between making this a sailing blog, a travel blog and a life blog. We’re seeing some amazing things and moving from place to place, but we’re also embarking on a new lifestyle which has all the boring accoutrements of any day-to-day life, but with an adaptive shift appropriate to life on a boat – which just happens to be moving from place to place. So the places we see and visit, are neat and exciting and fun to describe, but many people have been here before us and done a better job describing than I could. The details of sailing from point to point, are probably only of interest to sailors planning a similar trip. And I’m not sure anyone would be interested in the tedium of a family of four adjusting to life in 400 unsquare feet (and not 100 u.s.f. for each of us – the engine room alone is probably 30 s.f. the squarest space onboard). And then there’s the whole topic of how we got to this point in our lives now, shedding the golden fleece to sail past the west end and all. In some ways that was the final chapter in some other book, meanwhile we’re working on the living happily ever after part of that old book. So while some of you know already know some bits, and some of you are interested in other pieces. I apologize to all who find the bits and pieces I tackle on a given entry tiresome as I jump from one theme to another.

So a short update with the travel log theme. After 3-4 days in Puerto Ballandra, we headed over for to Isla Santa Catalina for another couple days. This Baja Catalina is a rarer destination in these parts, we were the only sailboat in the small cove, although we were joined by a small tour boat for half a day. It was odd to suddenly be surrounded by people, after being fairly isolated for awhile. We anchored adjacent to the big “elephant” rock that decorates the west side of the cove. My favorite part of this island was the stands (groves?) of huge Caldron cactus and giant Barrel cactus, both just starting to bloom. We’ve not seen these barrel cactus on any of the other islands. According to our Baja Plant Guide, the Indians used them for food for their pigs and cattle, so plant populations on islands closer to land, may have taken a hit. A man-sized barrel cactus can be hundreds of years old. “Barrel” is only marginally descriptive of their form – the young ones are perfect balls or eggs, mature ones rise up like great columns, and on some of the really old ones the cylinder starts to sag, reminiscent of the fleshy folds on the torso of a well fed baby. They’re all very photogenic.

On the life-on-a-boat theme, we’ve been spending a lot of time on projects. Frank finished painting the cockpit. I’ve tackled a couple sewing projects – with screens for the hatches being the more urgent (It’s difficult to focus on algebra with yellow jackets buzzing around your head). We’ve not been to a town since we left La Paz, so we’ve been testing our provisioning skills. A little more flour per day and a lot more milk will keep the crew happy for our big passage, otherwise, I think we’ve managed pretty well. And we’ve got some work to do with organizing cupboards. There is a constant balancing act on a boat of having adequate storage, and having easy access to the things you’ve stored. If your kitchen were healed over 15-20 degrees, and your kitchen floor and all it’s cupboards were violently moving up and down 1-2 feet, and your stove-top supply bottle of olive oil ran dry, you too would want to know exactly where the funnel was (no way you can count on a steady-hand-over-the-sink free pour), and you probably would not want to remove all the fishing gear from the cupboard before you could reach your Costco sized Olive oil container. And you really probably would not want to to move all the cushions off the dining room chairs – which double as the living room couch – to reach it either, which means that the Costco sized container, must be near the top of one of the cupboards closest to the kitchen (if you use as much olive oil as we do). Sounds logical, but there are a limited number of those cupboards close to the kitchen, and an infinite number of handy things you need to access frequently that want to go there, since close to the kitchen is also close to the nav station and close to the cockpit, and close to the office and close to…well suffice to say that the easy access cupboards near the kitchen are in high demand. Complicating this easy access issue, anything you take out of a cupboard must also go right back in, or risk becoming a dangerous projectile once you’ve set it down. So all objects need a secure home – salt, pepper, spices, supply bottles of oil, vinegar, soy, maple, syrup etc. And our kitchen is the size of a broom closet in most homes – which is why the stove-top supply bottle of olive oil is so small that it requires frequent refills in the first place. The final coup de grace that may dissuade other happy families from following in our footsteps, is the fact that the nearest grocery store may be 2000 miles away and if you have any neighbors, they’re not likely to have an extra cup of sugar, or you may not be able to get there to borrow the cup of sugar, so you truly have to bring it all with you, it’s a lot to store, and it takes a lot of trial and error to find the exact right spot for a given item. We do attempt to be fair in allocation of cupboard space, but it’s not a democratic process, and the captain gets the final say. Although as we’ve discovered, too little of the easy access cupboard space for the crew, can result in it’s own mutinous conditions with nothing ever getting put back in it’s place, and a chaotic mess to live in (beyond even our normal chaos). So we’re going through the cupboard dance, with items shifting from place to place in an attempt to find the perfect fit for all the puzzle pieces. I just hope that when we set sail for 20-40 days, I can still find the funnel.

xoxomo