Jynene and I arrived in San Diego harbor around 5am on October 25th. The Baja Haha started the morning of the 27th, and we hadn’t yet found a boat to crew on. We fully expected that we wouldn’t find a boat and would end up flying to South America, but figured we had nothing to lose trying. After sleeping for a few hours in the car, we decided to check out the local marine stores to get information on how to find a boat. The first store we went to, Down Wind, had a bulletin board with a bunch of boat parts for sale or boat parts needed, some apartments for rent and whatnot, but also three or four listings by skippers looking for crew for the Haha. We wrote down the names and numbers, left our own little sign, and made a few phone calls while driving to the next marine store. The folks working at Down Wind were confident that we’d get a ride. The first skipper we called was Erik, and he said he was at his boat and had been about to leave the boat to walk the docks looking for crew. We immediately drove over to his boat for an on-board interview. Well, we were both in luck, Erik and us! Erik was happy to have folks with little experience because he thought it would be more fun to show people how to sail than to just sail with people who already knew what they were doing. He had so far wrangled one other crew member-Jan, who had a bit more experience than Jynene and I and had sailed with Erik down from Sacramento. There was still as scramble for crew, though, because Erik really wanted at least 5 folks to make the night watches a little shorter and easier. He ended up calling a couple from Seattle who had posted on the Latitude 38 sight that they’d be available last minute to crew, so that’s how we gained Eric (dubbed “EJ” for the duration of the trip) and Marylin, a couple in their late fifties who had a lot of racing experience but no blue water (ocean) sailing. So then there were six! On Sunday, Jynene, Jan and I went to Trader Joe’s and Walmart for provisioning. We also went out to dinner with Jan’s daughter and her boyfriend who were awesomely helpful driving us around, were extremely interesting, nice and fun, but who were not able to join us for the Haha. On Monday morning, we filled the water tanks, hoisted the sails, and joined the fleet of a few hundred boats leaving San Diego bay on the Haha! The weather forecast called for rough seas and the Coast Guard issued a small craft warning, so Jynene and I were pretty worried about sea-sickness. We donned those pressure-point wrist bands and some Skopalomene patches, drank ginger tea and emergencies to stay hydrated and hoped for the best. Everytime our stomachs felt off, we thought we were getting sea-sick, but most of the time, we were just hungry…we didn’t end up having any major issues for the whole trip.
Sailing out of the harbor to Turtle Bay: We sailed in high seas and strong winds for three days and two nights to Bahia Tortuga…Turtle Bay. This was my first sailing experience outside of a few weekends of lake racing several years ago in New Mexico (yes, although I’m from Massachusetts, my first sailing experience was in New Mexico, watching out for tumble weeds getting caught on the rudder). A naval air station sits on the San Diego shore, so the departing Haha fleet was seen off by a few sets of F18 fighter jets, an A-10, and, most interestingly, a submarine with it’s head sticking out of the water…how cool! The submarine was surrounded on all sides by escort cutters with police lights on; apparently there wass some concern that the watercraft designed for stealth may be overlooked by boaters more accustomed to scanning the horizon for white hulls and sails. That sub was huge!
On board our own watercraft, Jan was at the wheel, and he and Erik were talking in some foreign language consisting of numbers and nautical lexicon: “Heading 1-0-3?”; “No, fall off 10 degrees”; “That catch 15 lengths off our Starboard has better wind higher up.” “Well, let’s haul in the sheet and slack the lazy sheet; the Gennie’s luffing.” Oh no, I thought, Erik is going to kick me off the ship first time he asks me to do something….I have no idea what they’re talking about and it all sounds so complicated I probably won’t be able to decipher it by the end of the Haha, either. I watched the other crew members responding to the commands to haul or slack the main, lazy, and active sheets and hoped I’d picked up on the pattern. Before long, Jynene and Marylin made sandwiches for lunch, passing each one up to the other three mariners and myself up on deck. The helmsman (the driver working the big, cool looking wheel like you see on pirate ships) gets fed first, so the sandwich came up from the galley (kitchen) through the companionway (that’s the entrance to the living quarters below deck) in on hand, and got passed through three other hands in the cockpit (that’s where most of the sailing action is done in the stern, or back, of the boat deck) before making it to its intended recipient. Yikes….I’m going to have to get comfortable with other people touching my food with their bare hands! (You, dear reader, may not think this situation merits an exclamation point, but my stomach is turning with the mere remembrance of that first hesitant bite). Oh well, I had to eat, so bottoms up. I was still worried about getting sea-sick…we’d only been under way (out to sea) for about an hour, so I ate that sandwich slower than I’ve ever eaten any sandwich before, listening and feeling very closely to my belly for signs of protest. Somewhere in the middle of this ceremony, Erik told me to slack the main. Oh no! Had my close observations paid off? This meant I had to find the crank with the rope connected to the main sail and loosen it, giving it more rope so the sail would swing out and catch more wind. I grabbed what I understood to be the main sheet (sheet means rope connected to a sail), un-looped a few coils from the crank, and got the rope to slack a few very abrupt inches at a time. Erik said, “You need to use both hands, like this,” and demonstrated the proper way to let the sail out smoothly. Of course, using both hands meant I had to hand my sandwich to someone to hold onto…Yuck! More hands on my sandwich! I gave it to Jan, who had just turned the helm over to Marilyn, and let the main out. First nautical command executed (somewhat) successfully, I settled in and enjoyed the rest of the day. I got my shot at the helm, as did everyone else. After we all decided manually steering the boat for several hours at a time is extremely tiring and monotonous, Erik told us there was another crew member we would all welcome onboard….Otto…A.K.A. autopilot. All you do is set a heading (compass direction, expressed by a number between zero and 360) using the wheel, and flip a little switch. We all embraced our newest crew member and set him to work immediately.
Sailing 24 hours requires that someone be up in the cockpit at all times (Otto is great, but protests his long working hours sometimes by veering off-course, and he doesn’t have eyes to see things that might be crashed into, and he can’t change sails to adapt to new wind conditions), meaning there is some loss of sleep, familiarly titled “Watch”. This was one term I knew, as the military occasionally directed me to stand some sort of watch or another for an entire night. Watch on Viking II was actually less painful than the watches I’d stood before, though, because there were six people on board to share the sleep-loss with. We set up a 12-hour watch cycle consisting of six two hour watches. The cycle staggered experienced and inexperienced sailors in the following way: for two hours, each individual was on watch, awake, paying attention, doing what needed to be done to sail safely and quickly. For the two hours following the watch, each individual would sleep on one of the benches in the cockpit, available to help whomever was on watch. The watch cycle went from 6pm to 6am, and 6am to 6pm, with a lot more flexibility during daylight hours when everyone was awake. I loved watch! I had the 4 to 6 shift, which was perfect for my sleep schedule. I am a morning person. I struggle to stay up past 10pm (in fact, one thing I enjoyed about sailing was that everyone went to bed with the sun…sun sets at 7, everyone goes to bed), and if I get woken up at night I have a tough time falling back to sleep, particularly if there’s a lot of noise, as there is below deck on a sailboat. I loved the solitude up on deck in the middle of the night. I love using my headlamp to do everything. Out at sea, the boat rolls rhythmically, constantly, back and forth with the waves. Below deck, the rolling can feel like the boat’s about to snap in half because all sounds are amplified, like the sails catching wind and the mast taking the load, and the water slapping on the side of the hull; but above deck, it’s a completely different experience: quiet, peaceful, and relaxing. The stars at night a few dozen miles off-shore are amazing! The sky is full of stars…you can see the milky-way clearly, and if you scan the sky for just a few minutes you’re sure to see at least one shooting star. I love the sense of the immensity of the universe that comes with looking at stars, a sense of possibility and the amazing and mysterious way the universe is put together. Then, I got to watch the sun rise at the end of my shift. To top it all off, enjoying the waves above deck rather than fearing that the boat was going to snap in half below deck, I got the best two hours of sleep in the cockpit after my shift.
The second morning out to sea, I got off my watch and decided to make breakfast for everyone. Meals on a boat are very communal, with people taking turns preparing food for the crew and washing dishes. I wanted to cook eggs and potatoes with onion, mushroom, and cheese. Cooking on a boat is hard! The waves constantly roll the boat side to side, making walking, standing, pouring, cutting, opening refrigerator doors, and setting anything down on the counter downright treacherous. First, I retrieved the ingredients from the refrigerators at the front of the cabin. There was one fridge with its back on the starboard (right) side of the cabin, and one on the port (left) side. Well, the eggs were in a carton on the port side, which was a problem, because we were sailing with a port tac. This means that the wind was hitting us from the port side. When the wind hits the sails, it propels the boat forward, but it also tips it to the side, or heels, with each wave. With this heel, I couldn’t open the port refrigerator without everything in the fridge falling out onto the floor! I waited a few cycles of waves to get the feel of the rolling and try to time my fridge-door opening for when the boat was upright, and get the door shut before we tipped off the wave. Alas, I screwed it up! It took me too long to get the egg carton out, the boat heeled before I could shut the door completely, and every beer-can, mustard bottle, and other round object fell off the shelves. Some things fell on the floor (luckily, nothing broke), and other things got stuck between the door and the shelves, preventing me from shutting the door so more things kept falling out. Marylin was near by, so she ran to my rescue, and we went through several cycles of waves, opening the door to clear out the hinges when the boat was upright, pushing the door as far closed as it would go to prevent more items from falling when the boat heeled. It was a comedy or errors. I almost shut the door on Marylin’s hand a few times, but we finally got the fridge closed. Marylin went on her way, and I brought the ingredients for breakfast back to the galley. Jan joined me to help me cook, which was a great thing because I needed the help! He cut and cooked the potatoes while I cut and cooked the veggies and prepared the scrambled eggs. I cracked the dozen eggs into a big bowl that was sitting on the counter, but realized I needed a fork to scramble them with. The waves were rocking the boat back and forth, so I let go of my hold on the bowl of eggs and observed whether the rocking would cause the bowl to tip or not. The bowl was steady, so I took a few steps to the right to grab a fork. And we got hit by a wave bigger than the others. The bowl of eggs flew off the counter and landed upside-down on the carpet at the bottom of the companionway latter. Ick…what a sticky, dirty, gross mess, and I wasted an entire carton of eggs! I cleaned it up as best as I could, ventured back to the fridge and got more eggs (with better timing, I didn’t repeat my earlier fridge problems), and Jan helped me cook up the eggs without causing any more destruction.
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