Sailing Wondertime

They say that it takes six months to really slow down and enjoy cruising. Or maybe it’s a year. Whatever it is I think we are finally there.

I realized this while making lattes this morning. It’s our second day of hunkering down in Ensenada Grande while the fierce northerly winds buffet the other side of the island. We haven’t been ashore in two days and talk about the idea of putting the outboard on the dinghy today and venturing to the beach.

It’s 11 am and I am tidying up our oatmeal breakfast dishes, which consists of piling them into the sink to wash sometime later in the day. “A latte sounds really nice today,” Michael mentions from where he sits on the settee, watching the girls color and draw at the table. It’s sunny and warm, not a cloud in the sky, and I’m still feeling awake from our first cup of joe hours ago. “Yeah, that does sound good,” I reply and start getting out our coffee paraphernalia: our Aeropress and filters, the coffee beans, the grinder, the soy milk, the chocolate soy milk, my vanilla syrup, the frother, our latte cups. I set a kettle of water on the stove to heat.

Meanwhile both girls take note of the action in the galley and pop their heads up above the sink. “Chocolate milk! Chocolate milk!” they chant in unison. “How about some Mexican hot chocolate?” I ask. “Yeah!” they declare with glee.

I get out another pan and measure two cups of milk into it, light the burner, then drop the Mexican hot chocolate tablets in to melt. Meanwhile, I pour some chocolate milk into the frother for Michael’s mocha, set it to heat, then grind the beans.

An hour later, I am sitting in the cockpit with my hot vanilla latte and a book. People are now clamoring below for a snack. “Twenty minutes!” I tell them. “I’m going to enjoy my coffee now!” For the next 45 minutes I sit with my feet up in the sun letting Michael handle the deluge of requests down below from the girls while I read a chapter in my book and sip my frothy hot drink.

When I am done I get up and stretch and go back inside to get started on lunch which we’ll need to power us for an afternoon of digging holes on the beach, writing practice in the sand, searching for shells, climbing on rocks, and watching fish dart through the shallows. We have a full day ahead.

We are currently anchored at the north end of Isla Partida, in Ensenada Grande waiting for the northerly winds to finishing blowing themselves out so we can continue northward. The night before last we’d been anchored in San Gabriel. Just after settling in for a movie, the wind starting blowing from the southwest, right into our formerly peaceful anchorage. We spent the night bouncing up and down in the wind waves with only a fitful, half-awake sleep to get us through the night.

The next morning the southerly winds were still blowing so we were up early to take advantage of them, hoping to reach Isla San Francisco 25 miles north. As we expected, the breeze gradually petered out as we sailed up Espiritu Santo/Partida. We took down our spinnaker and motored for about 10 minutes. Suddenly the northerly we’d hoped would wait until later in the day to arrive, arrived. It didn’t just gradually build as winds typically do. Nope. One minute our Windex was spinning around with no wind whatsoever to guide it, and the next a steady 15 knots was blowing down on us from the north.

Five minutes later we had 25 knots, with gusts to 30. Michael and I looked at each other after watching the building windwaves for a minute or two. “Turn?” “Yep.” We steered the boat to port and high-tailed it back to Ensenada Grande to wait for the winds to die down over the next several days. With only our staysail up, we were making six knots directly for our coveted anchorage. Not an hour after the northerly started we already had 4-6 foot wind waves pushing us around. The Sea of Cortez is intense indeed.

Ensenada Grande is hardly a terrible place to be stuck in. We are surrounded by turquoise water and huge pink cliffs of volcanic rock sculpted by wind and waves backed against a sky that seems impossibly blue. There is a white sand beach which we had to ourselves to play on today and criss-cross trails that meandered inland a bit through desert scrub and cactus.

Back on the boat, the girls busied themselves with their workbooks and Magic Tree House audiobooks and Michael and I busied ourselves with our Lists. Our mission right now is to just relax and simply enjoy the next few weeks of slow exploration in the Sea, as once again a deadline is looming. By March 15th we’ll start our nearly month-long sail across the Pacific Ocean to the Marquesas Islands, our first stop on our South Pacific Adventure.

But rather than the dread that many a deadline evokes, when we get out our lists of things to do in the next seven weeks we feel butterflies. We are nothing but excited at the journey ahead. We look ahead in our South Pacific guidebooks daily, and realize that we are not dreaming anymore, but planning. All we really need to do is relish the beauty of Baja Mexico, pack some food and supplies onboard, and go.

When the wind picked up yesterday and we were barreling along with just our tiny staysail up, the sea a froth of whitecaps and spray I looked around at the beauty of it all and realized I wasn’t nervous a bit. I watched Michael as he calmly adjusted our course so our leeway wouldn’t send us south of our destination. I peeked down the forward hatch and checked on the girls who were in our bunk looking at books, oblivious to the howling wind outside. The anxiety I’d felt each time the wind built six months ago was gone. In it’s place is a calm confidence that Wondertime can handle this and much more with grace. And now after sailing several thousand miles together, I see that so can we.