A Choice to be Made

Of all the various things that come to trouble the human mind, having to make a hard decision may be one of the most difficult to endure.  I can think of no more agonizing moments in my life than having to make a quick choice without much information—like what to do this moment when night was coming on, the engine wouldn’t start, and it was now or never for an uncertain anchorage with rocks under our lee or a night blown out to sea.  Neither choice was good in that situation, far away at the northern end of Newfoundland, and though my decision involved toil and unrest, it worked out to have been the lesser of the evils before us.

There is much art in the genteel city of La Paz

But that particular dilemma was still in the far distant future as we wandered the streets of La Paz, eating cheap and delicious tacos from stands at the open-air market, exploring the old town (we have a thing for Spanish colonial “Old Towns”—they make for great wandering among crooked, random streets…), and basking in plentiful groceries after weeks of desert cruising.  Rather than the agony of a decision swiftly to be made, the choice before us brought the slow torture of the endless raking over of options, possibilities, and pitfalls.

We had left California with a pitifully short stack of envelopes, each containing a monthly budget of $500, and some loose cash which together didn’t add up to even a year of cruising if we could keep within each envelope’s limit.  While the boat was full of supplies and nothing had yet worn out, and while we were in desert places where money can’t be spent, it was fine.  But it was evident even that early on that the situation was not sustainable long-term.

Washing cloth diapers….every day.

Those are the easy sort of choices to make: the ones that put enough little things on one side of the balance, that there’s really nothing more to think about.  But how far down the coast to go, and where the point of no return, where moving forward would be easier than coming back?

Our first ambition, while building the boat, had been to sail to Hawaii and the South Pacific.  I had seen, sailing from California to Cabo in a 13-day slog, that Ganymede could easily handle that sort of thing, but we didn’t know how it would go with the girls on board.  Our sheltered cruise down the Sea of Cortez had been sort of a test, to see if we could work the boat and care for the girls at the same time.  Turned out, what with diapers to wash nearly every day (we used cloth, rather than trying to keep enough disposable ones on hand: there was simply nowhere to put them), the need to stretch little legs on the beach, and the demise of the homemade self-steering vane, we decided it was better to keep it coastal.

Ill-designed windvane.

It was the timely windfall of some writing contracts for BoatUS magazine that tipped the scales toward a bolder move.  We already had a regular column of sorts in Cruising World magazine, continued from the series begun when we were building Ganymede, but that money was a sort of trickle-charge: always welcome, but not enough to really live on.  With a feature to write for BoatUs, we felt confident the monthly envelopes would stretch as far as the Panama Canal.  Once across that, we would be in waters we knew well from cruising in Capella—our first boat—and it’s not far to Florida and potential work from anywhere in the Caribbean.

We only stocked a little in La Paz, knowing everything would be cheaper on the mainland—just enough of everything fresh for a comfortable week—and made sail for Los Frailes. This is the traditional jumping off place for Isabella Island, just inside the Sea of Cortez, and a place of lovely clear water and a gorgeous beach.  We wanted to spend a few days there, just to swim and watch sea turtles and shoals of fish swim by, but the anchorage is wide open to the south, and we were warned of weather on the way.  Best place to ride out weather, if there’s not a snug harbor close to hand, is out at sea, so we headed out for the crossing to Isabella Island.

We’re not the sort to reef simply because it’s getting dark—better to keep up speed while you can—but knowing a blow was on the way, we were just starting to put a second reef in the main when out of nowhere the blow arrived, with the suddenness and force of an avalanche, in the deepening twilight.

It was instant pandemonium as I abandoned the main to let fly the jib halyard, gathered armloads of the billowing cloth out of the water and clapped a sail tie on it.  Ganymede was nearly on her beam-ends with the main only half-reefed and flapping fit to bust, but the gaff and sail were so pinned against the shrouds I had some trouble forcing them down.  Fortunately, I’d done a lot of nighttime reefing on the previous offshore passage, and Danielle has the knack of feathering the boat into the wind just enough to get some slack, and together we got the mainsail completely down.

When the adrenaline subsided and there was nothing else to tie up right now before it could be carried away, I wondered whether I should get out the storm try’sl.  Trouble is, by the time it’s blowing hard enough to need it, it’s really hard to bend it on.  We’d already used it twice since leaving San Francisco, and it had been difficult enough those times.  It was blowing lots harder now than any time before, and Ganymede was making five knots under bare poles and ill-stowed sails.

Well, five knots is not bad, and so I hunched over the tiller in the shrieking wind, wondering what we’d do if it blew any harder.  We learned later that that storm did serious damage in La Cruz, putting all sorts of boats across each other’s dragging hawses, and others who were caught by it at Isla Isabella were still shellshocked when we met them a week later in San Blas.  For some it was the catalyst that pushed them to quit cruising and return to life on shore.

But we knew nothing of all that yet, on that first wild night passage with the children on board.  We just knew we were lucky nothing important had carried away, were grateful for a seakindly and sturdy boat, and were numb with relief that we weren’t still in Los Frailes.  It was the first step toward a plan bolder than just kicking about the Sea of Cortez, and coming through that dreadful blow unscathed served to confirm somewhat that wherever we finally chose to go, we had a boat that would take us there.

Kicking around the Sea of Cortez
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