Hop Aboard: A day in the life — Part 3

It’s 8:35 p.m., but knowing we will miss two hours of sleep for our night watches grants us the excuse we need to go to bed early. The boat is usually quite by 8:30 p.m., tonight is no exception. That is until Lauren’s shout cuts across the silence. I jolt up from my book.

“Everyone, quick! Get up!”

She’s on the evening watch and my first thought is something is wrong.
Then comes the words we’ve been waiting for: “Dolphins! Dolphins in the bioluminescence — get up here!”

I swing from my perch and charge up the stairs. Somehow Laina has already made it from her bed to the bow of the boat by the time I’m even to the cockpit. Clinging to the rope in the dark I follow the sounds of her and Lauren’s shrieks of laughter. Then I see it, alongside the boat sprays of stardust streaming from the backs of the dolphins as they leap toward the bow. Like underwater ghosts they come from afar, glowing beneath the black of the water and swooping towards us, growing brighter the closer they get to the to the boat, until finally they burst through the surface in a spray of glittering underwater stars. A plentiful pod is surging to the boat, coming to play. When I reach the bow the entire swath of water in front of us is teaming with glitter as the dolphins keep pace with the boat, jumping and dashing between each other, cutting and twisting back and forth from one side of the boat to the other. Mere feet from us, every move they make creates a trail of light. Their bodies are great silver shapes beneath the surface and their tails send a fin-shaped spray of starlight that stretches into a trail behind them. For a moment, I just stare. Then I fling myself to the net beside the girls adding a shriek of enthusiasm to their unstoppable bubbling laughter. Every move the dolphins make is accompanied by our shouts of excitement, punctured only by our yelling for the others to join us. Seth appears and stands at the cable rail. Soon Bob and Charlene (she usually doesn’t walk around on the boat at night with her shaky balance) also make their way to the net — it’s not as if they could sleep anyway with our involuntary cackling and shouts.
Charlene’s enthusiasm immediately matches ours, and the 70-year-old woman sounds like a school girl.
“Oh wow! Wow, wow, wow. This is amazing!” She giggled right along with us. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life!”
For a moment I was so touched I stopped laughing. Hearing  a woman in the last quarter of her life who has traveled to so many places, sailed for 15 years and seen so much, be so excited just made it sink in what a truly special experience it was. Bob too said he had never seen anything like this in his 15 years living on a boat full time. How lucky were we to see this after only a month on board?

My moment of retrospection was interrupted by a dolphin blowing water and a glistening stream of bioluminescent specks into my face. I was right back to cheering them on.

 

(Because we found it impossible to capture images of the dolphins swimming in the bioluminescent waters, here are photos of watching the dolphins by day. It’s a poor substitute, but hey, I guess you had to be there.) 

The dolphins surrounded the boat for more than 30 minutes, and then as they started to drift away so did Seth, Bob and Charlene. But Laina, Lauren and I couldn’t take our eyes from the water. Even when the dolphins were gone the darting of little fish caused meteorites below the surface. When were finally about to turn away, chilled from the wind and being drenched in salt water from the spouting blow holes, we started to see from afar the ghostly shapes moving back toward us from all directions.

They were back.

We yelled for the others to come back out as the dolphins swooped toward us but apparently for some spending a half and hour staring at dolphins playing in the milky way is enough. Not for us. We stood at the rail watching as they returned and then until the glow of the last dolphin finally disappeared beneath the surface again. Still we couldn’t turn away for fear of missing something. Eventually, wet and tired, we forced ourselves to leave the rail. Together we counted to three and spun all at once so that one of us wouldn’t see something irresistible beneath the surface and call the others back.

Hop Aboard: Crossing the Tehuantepec

My only warning is the brief lurch as the bow of the boat dips, then a wall of water crashes over me, and, ironically, the Fundamentals of Sailing book open in front of me. This is our first indicator that things could be a little different in the Golf of the Tehuantepec than the placid waters we’d experienced so far. 
I jumped up, as the boat pitched again, and ran to grab ahold of the guide line, for the first time really needing the rope rather than just using it as a precaution. The rope spans from the cockpit to jib sail and in addition to raising the sail also serves as something to hold onto to when walking across the boat. We usually hold it just to keep Bob from yelling, “One hand on the boat!” Now I used it for fear of being thrown over the low wire rail between me and the ocean, which, for the first time since we had joined the boat, was forming white caps. 

The increasing intensity came as no surprise. We had spent the past three days in bays surrounding Huatulco waiting for an opening in the weather in which to cross the Tehuantepec. The golf spans 260 miles and is backed up against the narrowest portion of mainland Mexico, allowing for winds to funnel down from the Golf of Mexico and creating a high potential for gale force winds. In addition, this hazard is expected to be the greatest during the months of January and February. We are right in the midst of “gale season.” 

So, back in Huatulco, when Seth’s scanning of weather reports yielded a prediction of a three day weather window, we lifted anchor the next morning. 

But still, as I rushed into the cockpit with my sundress drenched in salt water, I knew the choppiness and dipping of the boat only startled me because I was an amateur, spoiled by nothing but smooth sailing on the steady catamaran. For now we had nothing of gailforce winds often present at this time of year and the swells — which seemed big to me — were nothing to concern the captain. 

The boat continued to roll and pitch enough to keep us all in the cockpit unless we needed to go out to adjust sails, but by the time darkness fell it had subsided enough to let some of the crew sleep and to not pose too much concern for the lone watchman throughout the night. 

This was only day one of the crossing. 

By the time day two arrived the sea was so flat we could see turtles swimming under the surface of the water and the only wind was straight on the nose of the boat, making it useless for us to even lift the sails. We motored through the calm seas, with our only concern dodging the fishermen’s nets that occasionally appeared out of nowhere and forced us to make sharp turns to avoid them. It was easy to see why the nets were so plentiful in the area. We caught three of our own fish back to back on our trolling lines. 

And the rest of the crossing passed without another wave, proving to the Tehuantepec, for the brief span of time we occupied it, to be as gale-less as the rest of the coastal waters. 

Hop Aboard: Off to Sea

It’s a rare moment when being splashed in the face with salt water makes you lean in for more — but when the culprit of the spray is a dolphin, it’s one of those times. Our first day at sea and I was laid out across the front of the catamaran watching dolphins twisting beneath the surface of the deep blue water and periodically jumping from the water inches from my face. In the hours since we had left the boat-filled Zihuatanejo harbor we had seen multiple pods of dolphins, passed three whales, caught a stunning skip jack tuna and seen heards of sea turtles glide past the boat.We were being spoiled, Lauren and Seth assured us as the tuna was being cleaned. Between the majestic marine life and the calm seas it made our first day adjusting to cruising seamless. Other than the slightly more intensified rocking and the interruptions of someone hollering with excitement anytime they spotted a jumping dolphin, life was pretty much the same at sea as it had been in the harbor. Occasionally sails needed to be put up or taken down, at which point Seth, who grew up sailing, gathered us around to give us lessons on raising the sail or adjusting the angles. There is also much to be learned about the GPS, autopilot and radar features on the boat. Bob teaches us how to steer the boat, both by adjusting autopilot or turning the classic silver wheel in the center of the cockpit. These are all things we must learn before our first solo night watch. Also how to stop and start the engines, speed up or slow down, and what to do if there is an emergency: wake up Bob. 

When we’re not following someone around to try to learn as much as we can about the process that is underway, helping with cooking or cleaning, the rest of the time is ours. It feels like we have much more free time now that we are away from the port and activities such as swimming, snorkeling, paddle boarding and going into town are no longer an option. But sadly busy days aren’t the only thing we parted ways with in Zihuatanejo. Maca, our Chilean sweetheart, decided to switch boats to continue the rest of the trip south. She has a flight booked out of Costa Rica so joined a boat that was leaving the port sooner and planning on making a faster journey. So now heading south on VIVA it is just six of us, Bob and Charlene, Seth and Lauren, and  Laina and I. Being constrained to a 44 foot vessell, concerns about crew dynamics were one of the many leaps of faith we had to take when we joined them, but so far the group seems to be a seamless fit. Our spare time is spent reading, playing cards, practicing Spanish, learning more about sailing and just staring out at the sea waiting to see the skyline be broken by the silhouette of a dolphin.