Pacific Crossing 5200nm in C&C 3/4T 33 ft.

I left San Francisco for Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, and stayed there about six months. Back in those days Cabo was very primitive with no docks in the harbor - we tied med style to the wall but it was so shallow that we had to go ashore in a dinghy by pulling ourselves along the mooring line. The nearest water source was a single stand pipe, and the water was polluted, so we had to sterilize it with iodine. Every month or so the harbor was so polluted by the boats, that the harbor master kicked us all out and we had to anchor in the bay for a week and it the waves were big enough to overturn the dinghy as we struggled to get ashore.

But is was a great place to stay.

Every morning I would climb the hill to Hotel Sonesta? and sit under an umbrella and have breakfast. I always took a book and spent an hour or so drinking coffee and watching the harbor activities from above. Lunch was in one of the street cafes open on all sides. We once went o the movie theater and brought our own chairs from the boat. It was on the other side of town. When we got there we were told there was no movie this night. So back we went.

Corona was 25 cents. A meal $4 (this was 1988.) I met a lot of interesting people during thoes six months. A Canadian sailor and his dog in a boat he built with no engine. He was going home to Canada via Hawaii. I watched him as he kedged his way out of the crowded harbor using his dinghy to  row an anchor 50 feet ahead of his boat. Then he clambered on board and pulled the boat to where the anchor was located, dropped a second anchor, and rowed the first to a new location to repeat the performance.

A Dutchman arrived who had only one weeks experience on a boat yet planned to sail 2800 nm to Hawaii alone. He had no charts except Shell Oil road maps, and he didn’t know how to navigate. He expected to find Hawaii by sailing due West until he came across an Island. He was a very experienced traveller - his stories were fascinating. I taught him how to use a sextant, and how to deal with emergencies, and in the end he decided it was just too risky, and sold his boat, and went to Panama and Columbia by road with a New York taxi driver ( a girl) who had driven all the way from NY to find adventure.

A family with five kids aged 5 to 11 arrived in Cabo with plans to sail to Fiji. The skipper had bought this 55 ft yacht in Vancouver and learned how to sail it going down the California coast with the owners. In San Francisco the previous owners left the boat, and his family moved aboard. They went from marina to marina, but when they hit Baja California they had to anchor in Bays, and they didn’t know how to anchor. In Cabo, where I met them, they confessed they didn’t know much about cruising, but they were determined to make a trip as a family before the kids all went to College. He was a lawyer. Somehow they made it to Fiji where he got a job with the Government. The kids flew back to school in Canada. He sold the boat.

When my six month visa expired, I moved to the PV area, to a marina in Nuevo Vallarta, which was a condo resort with a big marina, but in those days there were only a dozen yachts in the marina and the condos were empty. There was a small grocery store at the marina. For fresh bread and other stuff we had to walk a mile to the main road to catch a bus into Puerto Vallarta. Sometimes it was so crowded I had to stand on the outside of the bus. Inside there ofter were big holes in the floor which I had to straddle.