Sailing
Toward
Daybreak

by
Lane Darnton

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	Sailing Toward Daybreak, in print or in electronic form, is protected by copyright law. I reserve all rights connected with it. What this basically means for you is, don’t try to sell it or distribute it yourself. It is intended for your personal use and enjoyment. You may download it and print it for reading. You may, and are encouraged to, share the URL for this web site with others. However, neither the downloaded file nor hardcopies may be reproduced or distributed in any form including email, upload to a web site or file sharing service, without written consent from me. To request such consent, e-mail lanedarnton@socal.rr.com.

Author’s Note

		While the subject matter of this book is cruising under sail, its primary concern is the scope and breadth of living that can become available when one leaves one's work-a-day existence behind long enough for a real sea change to occur. I hope that it will assist sailors who are considering going cruising to prepare themselves for the realities of cruising life, and encourage sailors who have toyed with the idea of cruising, but have not made plans to do so, to consider seriously getting their plans started now.  For non-sailors who suspect, more acutely with each passing year, that a conventional path simply isn't going to get them anywhere they really want to go, I hope this book will encourage them to step outside those boundaries and get a taste of the freedom and satisfaction for which they yearn.
		I don’t sugarcoat the cruising life. For me, the raw truth has always been more useful — and considerably more wonderful — than the sales pitch surrounded by slick ads that you find in cruising magazines and other advertising-dependent media. If you feel the same way, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to daybreak.

Acknowledgement

	The completion of this book would not have been possible without the overwhelming generosity, encouragement, and gracious good wishes of my wife, Lynn, who supported our two children and me by going to work each day in downtown Washington DC while I wrote it. There are very few women in my acquaintance who would be willing to work full time while their man sits at home following his creative muse at the expense of the housework. For that reason and a thousand others, Lynn is very special, and I love her very much.

								Lane Darnton
								February 14, 1997
								(Valentine's Day)

Table of Contents

Chapter 1	First You Say You're Going To Go	5
Chapter 2	Then You Go	9
Chapter 3	Blown Away In Baja California	15
Chapter 4	La Paz or Bust	23
Chapter 5	A Sea Of Problems	28
Chapter 6	The Sea Of Cortez	33
Chapter 7	The Mexican Gold Coast	47
Chapter 8	The Region Of Fear: Acapulco, Tehuantepec and the "Banana Republics"	65
Chapter 9	Slowing Down In Western Costa Rica	78
Chapter 10	Idling In The Gulf Of Nicoya	103
Chapter 11	On To Panama	119
Chapter 12	The Panama Canal: A U.S. Beachhead In Latin America	135
Chapter 13	Easy Living In Kuna Yala: The San Blas Islands	144
Chapter 14	Hellbent Through The Western Caribbean	158
Chapter 15	Welcome to "The Real L.A.": Lovely Lower Alabama	176
Chapter 16	Western Florida:  Your Money Or Your Life	192
Chapter 17	This Bright, Blue Paradise: The Central Bahamas	202
Chapter 18	Summer Camp in Georgetown	223
Chapter 19	Reluctantly Northbound: The Abaco Cays	230
Chapter 20	Toward A New Dream: The Southeastern Tidelands	244
Chapter 21	A Sudden Stop In Swan Creek	269
Chapter 22	Letting Go	283
	Afterword	291

Daybreak:
That moment when the first faint light of dawn
 barely distinguishes sea from sky,
and the dark night begins to die.

Chapter 1
First You Say You're Going To Go

However attractive the notion may be of sailing off to some tropical paradise and lazing away one's remaining life, in reality cruising is not an escape. It's not even a vacation. It's just life — a cheaper, freer life, perhaps, but not without expense, perils, anxieties, and logistical concerns. If this were not true, it would not be worth doing. In life, I am interested in satisfaction, aliveness, love, redemption, freedom, consciousness, appropriate living, and integrity — that is to say, in being whole. These qualities I have not found in modern civilized living in quantities sufficient to suit me. In hindsight I can see that I wanted to find a new way to live, but this was not clear in the beginning. My family and I went to sea with hope and intention, but not much of a plan. When you are seeking something you can't even name, no plan is possible. All you can do is start, and hope for inspiration.
	I have felt since childhood that this American Dream is more complicated than life ought to be. Of course I prefer it to starvation in the slums of Calcutta, but it is human nature to want more and better than one has got. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” didn't get dreamed up by folks content to sit around making the best of a bad deal. The complexity and demands of my life had grown inexorably over the years until they seemed certain to exceed my capacity to endure them, so I started looking for a way out. People call this a "mid-life crisis", a term which clarifies nothing, empowers no one, and serves only to distill life down to a digestible, bite-sized concept suitable for your weekly news magazine. It doesn't begin to elucidate the klaxon wake-up call experienced by intelligent, responsible adults who, planning ahead in an intelligent, responsible way, realize for the first time that they are in a position to plan ahead all the way to their own deaths — and probably should. At this juncture we may notice that the lives we dreamed as youngsters of living when we grew up does not in the slightest resemble the lives we ended up with. We may see that our sense of adventure, once pervasive, is now extinct. We can’t recall the last time we felt as if we were on the brink of great things. How did our hopes and dreams lose luster? How did the imagined joys of adulthood, shining in our minds as children, boil down in the end to sex, booze, and the privilege of driving?
	Now we look to see if there's anything here worth getting excited about. Are our lives scintillating? Are our imaginations absorbed by bold opportunities? Are our futures brilliant with hope and promise? Or on the contrary, are we in utter bewilderment over where in god's name we thought we were headed when we bulldozed our way through college and grad school? Is our current experience of living worth the price we paid, and continue to pay daily?
	Modern civilized life is characterized by a somnambulence that is amazing once you see it for the first time. When we are so young we can't imagine the everlasting consequences of our tiniest choices, we send our lives in directions that only become clear years later. When we have grown up, some time between the ages of thirty five and never, most of us are so invested in where we’re heading that the idea of a course change seems unthinkable — and there’s no outcome guarantee now any more than there was in the first place. Of course, at this later stage we might be better equipped to choose intelligently — but our history says it’s not a good bet.
	There was nothing grandiose about our decision to leave. I was fed up. I wanted to cut and run, to check out, to get gone. I'd had it. After liquidating our land-based life entirely, my family and I departed Los Angeles in a forty foot sailboat with enough money to last about two years. We thought it would be three, but we were wrong. (Such is cruising.) Our plan for afterward amounted to this: we'd cross that bridge when we came to it — and make damn sure we were back in the States when the money ran out, not steaming in some banana republic backwater swatting mosquitoes and worrying about malaria. We hoped we might learn something in the process of cruising that would shed some light on our future. If not — well, then we'd be nothing but a helluva lot poorer when we got back in harness.

	This all happened slower than it sounds, absurdly so. Even land-bound in the Los Angeles basin, I loved being married to my wife Lynn, and I enjoyed my private life. Amid mind-numbing urban sprawl we lived in the pleasant little town of El Segundo — pleasant except for the industrial odor and hum of the Chevron oil refinery immediately to the south, the incessant roar of Los Angeles International Airport immediately to the north, and the stink and stigma of LA's second largest sewage treatment plant immediately to the west, whence came the afternoon breeze.
	El Segundo may not be Los Angeles, but it's in the Los Angeles megalopolis, which goes on forever. It extends across five counties, cannot be encircled by car in a day, and is so huge that it seems there's no world beyond its borders, no world other than itself. Los Angeles is so vast and thick with people it is virtually impossible to "get out of the town" for a weekend, and to own a home there requires two substantial white collar incomes. The saving graces are the weather and the fact that there are a few such incomes to be had.
	Professionally I was miserable. I complained to Lynn constantly about my job. For thirteen years as a scientist and engineer I watched my enjoyment dwindle while my responsibilities, the bureaucratic stupidities, and my salary all increased. I did less year by year of what I enjoyed, both at work and at home, and spent more of my energy on work-related concerns. My relationship with Lynn, my highest priority, declined in quality, my relations with my children fell short of my desires, until I began to realize that my salary was tied to the amount of pain I could stand. It became clear that a career plateau existed above which I would not have the stomach to rise. And the next promotion would put me there.
	It was time for serious thought — and yet, though I had sailed since the age of nine, though we had owned a pocket-cruising sailboat for years and cruised it everywhere we could think of, I had never for a moment entertained the notion of long-term blue-water cruising. I subscribed to every imaginable sailing and cruising periodical, and read each one cover to cover every month, often in one sitting. I had read every book about cruising I could lay my hands on. I owned and had studied charts and cruising guides for areas that interested me. I'd studied cruising sailboats and their design. With a background in physics, I'd even designed a few. I knew what type I'd buy should the opportunity arise. But it didn't.
	I'm not stupid, but I certainly can be slow. The facts were clear: I hated working, and I loved sailing. An obvious course of action should have been . . . obvious. But it wasn't, not for a long time. I needed some sort of nudge. What finally provided it were a few simple words I ran into somewhere, quite by accident, which have since become branded upon my brain:

People just don't understand how simple going cruising really is. There are only two things you have to do. First you say you are going to go. Then you go.

	There was an almost audible *klunk* a few centimeters behind my eyebrows, the kind you feel when your entire life lifts off the ground a hair, shifts imperceptibly to one side, and comes down in a whole new place where nothing looks the same anymore. It couldn't be that simple, I thought. If it were, I could start any time. Like, now.
	Sensing peril, my logical, sensible side (I do have one) instantly spoke up. Wait just a minute (it said). Lynn is eight months pregnant, you've got a colossal mortgage, and you said you were planning to have two children. Doesn't this cruising notion conflict with all that?
	Well no, not really (I thought), not if I can convince Lynn. But I had better be really sure. I figured to give the idea a week to settle, said nothing, and went to work in the morning only to spend the day obsessed with the idea of not being there like it was a real possibility — being out sailing instead, and not ever coming back — and I began to see that the notion wasn't going to go away.
	Married folks can't afford to have stuff like this running around loose in their heads for very long. I had to talk to Lynn. I came home from work and lit a fire in the fireplace of our tiny den. Lynn arrived, and we settled down on the couch in front of the flames. She knew something was up. I'd have poured her a glass of wine if she hadn't been pregnant. She enjoys wine. Too bad, I thought. Wine would help.
	Communication between spouses happens differently for every couple. It's a matter of extensive trial and error. I don't have a great deal of tact, of which Lynn often feels compelled to remind me, but I figured I'd take the same tack I'd taken when I proposed. She was unloading grocery bags in the kitchen of her apartment while I sat on the counter being generally useless, and I just blurted it out. No sense waiting for a "better" moment, I figured. The question's up, it's in the air. She knows I'm going to ask, and she probably knows what her answer will be. If it's yes, it's yes. And if not — well, no carefully prepared romantic occasion is going to change it.
	She ranted for days afterward about my lack of romance and finesse — after she said yes. I really appreciate her ability to put first things first.
	I hoped cruising wouldn't be a bigger deal than marriage, though one never knows. Forging ahead with temerity (my strongest suit) I said, "Uh, Lynn. I've decided I want to take our family cruising. I've thought about it a lot. I think we could leave in five years, after our second child is two or three years old. I want to cruise for at least two years, and maybe as many as seven. Until then, we'd have to save a bunch of money, live more frugally, and give up a few things we might otherwise have. But I believe it'll be worth it. What do you think?"
	 Lynn is impressive. I like being married to her. I don't know many women, three weeks shy of delivering their first baby, who would have displayed such equanimity. She just asked a few questions, like "What brought this on?", "How much do you think it would cost?", "Where would we get the money?", and "What about school for the children?" — relatively minor stuff, for which there were easy answers. But then the brick, the real objection.
	"I love my job. I love my career. I'm not ready to give them up."
	"Yes," I responded, "I know that. But will you be ready, in five more years?"

	Her answer, not very much later, was yes. And suddenly, just like that, we felt as if on the brink of great things.

Chapter 2
Then You Go

	Great things? Someday, maybe. We still had reality to contend with. We didn't have a suitable boat, we didn't have any money, and we hadn't even had our children yet. Our first child was due in thirty days, which pretty much answered the question of whether we'd go cruising before or after having children. So we did the only thing we could. We laid plans.
	We said we'd leave on the fifth birthday of our first child, figuring our second would be toilet-trained and walking by then — not essential, but why make life difficult? We said we'd spend at least two years cruising, more if we could find the money. As seafaring novices with parental concerns, we'd avoid long passages. Tahiti would not be in the cards. We'd head for Central America, turn left at the Panama Canal, and try to get as far as the Chesapeake Bay. We'd set up a budget, do our best to stick to it, and keep a year of funds in reserve for emergencies. We could not afford insurance of any kind.
	This seemed like a good basic plan, but a lot can happen in five years — or six and a half, as luck would have it — plenty of time to have everything possible go wrong, and to reconsider the entire concept more times than I care to discuss. If we'd known then what we know now  . . .  ahh, but that's the real dilemma, isn't it? We never know enough the first time around, and life's too short to do everything twice. Life is a hard teacher, and the education it provides is ass-backward: first comes the test, then the lesson. In order to learn from one’s experience one must first have experiences — by which time it's too late. The entire human intellect may simply have arisen out of an attempt to compensate for this basic fact of life.
	In the course of this attempt, we go through changes day by day, week by week, month by month. They aren't obvious at the time, they only become so later. Life is a pretty stupid, mundane, boring process for the most part. I'm not talking about life as we remember it, conceptualize it, and wrap a story around it after the fact. I'm talking about life in the present, in real time, the immutable, uncontrollable moment-by-moment existence in which, except for isolated moments of crippling pain or abject terror during which the most profound and indelible learning imaginable takes place (yet which we try to avoid like the plague), nothing much worth discussing ever happens. For six and a half years some things went right for us and some things went wrong. We had negligible control over any of it.
	Roxanne was born and life was idyllic (if you don't count working for a living). Our little house appreciated unimaginably, and we started dreaming of a really nice boat and a really long cruise. Roxanne grew, and Lynn conceived again. If such a small, cheap house (by Los Angeles standards) could appreciate so much, it seemed obvious that a larger, more expensive house would do even better. So we went shopping, bought twice as much house for twice as much money, and Tania was born.
	Six weeks later, as Lynn prepared to return to work, we lost our in-home child care for the fifth time. Looking at Tania, a helpless pink infant no longer than my forearm, we couldn’t face placing another newspaper ad, phone-screening another hundred or so marginal Third World applicants, interviewing several, picking one, handing over our precious little girls, and hoping for the best a sixth time. We bit the bullet, and Lynn went on unpaid leave. No problem, we figured, our savings could cover us for a month or two. We'd take a rest. We needed one. Then we'd face up to this child care business and resolve it, once and for all.
	Two weeks later the improvement in Roxanne's spark and aliveness, clearly due to Lynn’s presence at home, was unignorable. When Lynn's boss finally called to ask, "So, when are you coming back?",  Lynn replied, "Um, I guess I'm not." At considerable cost, we had arranged for excellent child care. Perhaps there's a lesson here.
	Lynn was blissfully happy, which was worth a lot, but we were literally eating our meager cruising savings. Nonetheless, we still had The House. The House would appreciate, right? In Los Angeles, they always do. We just had to keep paying the mortgage somehow.
	At this point the housing market stopped as if someone had pulled the plug. Buyers evaporated. Nothing sold for a year. Still no problem (we thought), the market will hold up. It'll start moving again. We may not get rich, but we won't lose money. It only takes one buyer. One stupid buyer, we should have been thinking, and there sure weren't any of those around. Had we been the only ones? Still, never in history had the SoCal housing market actually gone down. We didn't understand what it means when no one is buying. Assuming there are people who actually want to live there, it either means that no one can get a loan, or that buyers and sellers are in a standoff over price, waiting to see who flinches first. But interest rates were low and still falling. Banks were begging for customers. Getting loans was not the problem. Buyers had lost faith. They were fed up with the price of SoCal housing, and they had stopped paying for it. We, as it happened, had been among the last to do so.
	Fortnately, my salary slowly increased, and in time Lynn started consulting a few hours a week, so we were no longer raiding our savings each month. And since our plan, such as it was, said we were going to go cruising in six more months, it was time to get a boat. We went shopping and found Daybreak, a Freedom 40 cat ketch. The down payment annihilated our savings, the loan increased our total debt to record levels, and we became 100% dependent on the housing market. In financial parlance this is known as being "heavily leveraged in an undiversified portfolio". In other words, we had all our eggs in one basket, and most of them were borrowed. Live by leverage, die by leverage — and learn the risk too late. Oh well. Roxanne was four and a half. Tania was two. We had said we would leave by Roxanne's fifth birthday. We put the house on the market.
	The Berlin Wall had fallen. The Iron Curtain had dissolved. The Soviet Union had disintegrated. Desert Storm had swept through Iraq, consuming forty five billion dollars in forty five days without even killing the guy who started it, but the bill had to be paid anyway. Defense contracts evaporated. The industry on which both our salaries depended wheezed and shrank like a punctured balloon. Like thousands of other managers, I started laying people off. Southern California lost 100,000 high technology jobs in twelve months. "Downsizing", the scourge of the nineties, arrived like a pestilence. Reorganizations began. Oily phrases appeared in memos from upper management: lean-and-mean, technology-based market leverage, Continuous Process Improvement, "right-sizing" . . . the ghastly game of professional musical chairs had begun. When that happens, no one is immune when the music stops.
	When people lose jobs, their homes tend to follow. Tens of thousands went on distress sale, and the market imploded. Mortgage defaults occurred. Home buyers got the message immediately (but we didn't): the longer they waited, the less they’d pay. In El Segundo things were aggravated when a large condominium complex was completed nearby, siphoning off the first-time buyers who drive the market. Roxanne's fifth birthday came and went. During her sixth year of life, we would receive three offers on our home.
	The first was for what we had paid. We should have taken it, but we didn't. Bad mistake. Six months later we dropped our price and got a second offer which was worse — an open affront, an insult to our freshly lowered price. Again we should have taken it, but I swore to Lynn, I refused to lead the market down. Proud, silly me, and what goeth pride before? I was about to receive an expensive lesson: When the market is going down, only those who lead it make a sale.
	Six months later, around June, we’d missed our departure date by a year and dropped our price right into the cellar. Almost simultaneously, a disk in my spine exploded, causing a long night of ungodly pain and paralyzing my right leg. I was in the hospital the next day for spinal surgery. Great timing. We promptly received our third offer, a sickening, pathetic offer. Out of the hospital, trussed up in a back brace as stiff as a bridge caisson, I hobbled to the computer and opened a spreadsheet. Real estate was in a hideous slide. I was horrified to discover we were losing eight months of cruising funds for every month we held out. In four more months our cruising fund would be ZERO and we wouldn't even be able to pay off the boat. It could be a decade, or never, before things improved. What if one of us lost a job? Lynn's consulting work depended on one person, who picked that moment to announce his retirement, citing the management upheaval. Disaster.
	If we signed the offer we'd be free, though with barely enough money for two years of cruising. It was now or never. We gulped, and signed. Never again, we swore, would we be hostage to a piece of real estate. Or to a job. Or to a boat. We got 90% of what we’d paid. Today you can buy it for 80% of that. I shudder to think that if we still owned it now and wanted to sell, at close of escrow we’d owe the bank $94,000. We escaped in the nick of time.
	In the next fifty days, while I limped around pathetically wondering if I could recover sufficiently to be able to sail by November, we liquidated our entire land-based existence.

	Selling, giving away, and simply trashing the accumulated impedimenta of two decades of normal American life is unbelievably traumatic. It grinds against a lifetime of enculturated acquisition. Many people who want to cruise sidestep this by putting their household items in storage, but we could just see ourselves, at anchor somewhere in deepest mañanaland, paying the storage bill unable to remember what we had stored. Selling everything meant having more money now, for cruising. Besides, we wanted no pressure on us to return to LA after cruising. We wanted to be able to choose, free and clear, where to live next.
	We moved the cruising essentials onto the boat, put price tags on everything else, opened up our house to the hordes, and in the insane first ninety minutes took in $2500. My pockets were bulging with cash — but we'd paid ten or twenty times that much in the first place. How we wished we'd never bought some of it! TV, VCR, stereo, video camera, washer, dryer, beds, tables, pots, pans, utensils, chairs, sofas, tools, bicycles, toys, clothes, our family van — everything gone in three weekends. The people who bought it all were frantically loading it into their cars like street bandits at a looting, as if convinced of our insanity, afraid we'd come to our senses if they didn't literally run with the goods. Or maybe they were just in a hurry to get to the next yard sale. Into the hands of these manic bargain-basement consumers much of what we owned vanished in exchange for what barely amounted to pocket change in light of what cruising was going to cost. Items we couldn't sell we carted off to charity, three truckloads of it. What we couldn't give away, we trashed. We filled a twenty-foot dumpster with stuff we had previously considered so valuable we had paid to have it moved from residence to residence. But keeping it now would only lock us to land. In the aftermath we sat in the empty space where our lives had been, and felt empty ourselves. Yet where there is emptiness, there is space for something new. We were poor, but we were undeniably free.
	In our culture, our possessions comprise a great deal of our identity. When they vanish our world seems to dissolve beneath our feet. There's a dizziness like vertigo. Uncertainty. Nausea. A thin thready throbbing in the chest like from too much caffeine, or too much adrenalin. Fear. We felt physically ill with a visceral sense of dislocation. If you think this sounds silly, go try it. Roxanne and Tania had their own yard-sale table for their clothes and toys, and kept the money they took in, but they had less sense of the purpose of it. Such trust. They didn't know enough to be scared.
	Paradoxically, we had felt big, yet powerless and trapped, while surrounded by possessions. Without them we felt small, yet powerful and free. We have since come to recognize feeling "small" as a hallmark of freedom. When one has freedom, we began to see, one doesn't have anything else — and every thing one does have reduces one’s freedom. Bluntly, if one wants to live an unencumbered life, one must first get rid of one's encumbrances. It would later become clear to us that freedom is neither comfort nor security. Quite the contrary: it is uncomfortable and insecure. One can choose to be alive . . . or comfortable. They're mutually exclusive. Comfort and security are anathema to freedom. Each of us, in a thousand lifestyle choices every day, chooses how free, and how alive, to be. In this bright land of ours, where our freedom to choose is greater than anywhere else on Earth, so too is our comfort, and our security. How free, then, do we seem interested in being?
	Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.
	When we no longer had beds to sleep in, chairs to sit on, or a table to eat at, we moved aboard Daybreak. We paid off the loan, canceled the insurance. I worked feverishly on the boat while Lynn completed her final job commitments. We wanted to leave November first, and it was already September. Given our fiscal uncertainties, we had not been spending much money on Daybreak. She was not ready to go.
	I purchased and installed equipment as fast as I could: watermaker, SSB radio, high-output alternator, three-stage voltage regulator, spare engine parts, new batteries, new liferaft, deck chocks for the raft and the dinghy, higher reef points on the sails, new halyards and sheets — you name it. Some of it would prove unnecessary. Some proved necessary but insufficient. What did I know? We were frantic. November 1st came and went. We had our bon voyage party. November 10th slid by. Then November 15th. The Mexico cruising season was underway, but we weren't. On top of everything else, like a five thousand pound anchor, we still had a car to sell.
	Everyone who's cruised has said it a hundred times: the hardest part is leaving the dock. When all of one's sailing has been harbor-to-harbor, and tying up dockside is one's invariable habit at the end of the day, relinquishing one's slip is the ultimate displacement — knowing that, for the indefinite future, there will be no truly safe harbors, only anchorages. Safety when cruising is a comparative thing. Safer here than there, perhaps, safer now than then, but never SAFE. On a cruising boat that is cruising, uninterrupted sleep is a forgotten luxury from a forgotten life. We began to see how it would have to be: at some point we would leave, and we would not be ready. We had to pick a day and "just do it". First you say you are going to go. Then you go.
	Utterly exasperated, I gave the dockmaster notice for the coming Friday and settled our bill. I called a friend, begged him to take our remaining car and sell it for us. We spent the week installing the final items, putting fiddles on the shelves, and stowing provisions. We spent Thursday morning running last-minute errands, made a final grocery run, and waved goodbye to the car at noon. Friday it rained and blew a gale, and not being idiots, we stayed put. Saturday, November 21st, on a gray, wintry morning none of us shall ever forget, we pulled Daybreak’s power cord and dock lines aboard, and floated free. As she turned her nose down the channel to the thrum of the Perkins diesel, we gazed astern.
	Los Angeles. Lynn and the girls had lived there all their lives. I had lived there nineteen years. If things went as planned, none of us would return. Seldom in life are moments of great transition so clear. Our old life was gone, and a new one had taken its place.

Chapter 3
Blown Away In Baja California

	Frankly we were scared, so we just motored to Catalina Island. We'd been there so often, we could get there in our sleep. After an overnight stay among sailing friends and breakfast together Sunday morning, we sailed with them out to Ship Rock and parted company. We turned right for San Diego while they sailed on "home" — a home we no longer shared. All the home we had now was Daybreak, and she belonged no particular place, except beneath us. We were feeling exposed, "out in the cold".
	Lynn and I sailed on into evening, neither of us able to sleep. Roxanne and Tania had no such problem. In the wee hours after midnight, in a dying breeze, we sailed buoy-to-buoy around the kelp beds off Point Loma and ghosted into San Diego Bay. Dropping the hook in La Playa Cove behind Shelter Island, we catnapped until dawn, then rose to face a new day in a new place — on foot in a city for the first time.
	But not for long. A nearby friend took pity on us and squired us around all morning in her van, postponing our inevitable pedestrianism. We got our Mexican visas and fishing licenses, bought a few more last minute items, topped off the tanks, and tried to get used to an unfamiliar existence. We wondered how long it would take to feel remotely competent. I thought perhaps a month or two might do it. I was off by about a year.
	We left San Diego Bay on Thanksgiving night after the kids were in bed. Worried about entering our first foreign country, we wanted to be at the government offices in Ensenada bright and early. Stories of Mexican red tape abounded. Our fears, however, were unfounded. Check-in was a cinch. Phone calls, by contrast, were not, which introduced us to our first Mexican fact of life: naive assumptions regarding the operability of anything are seldom warranted. A phone that works today may well be dead tomorrow.
	Two days in Ensenada was plenty. It's no garden spot. We headed south to Punta Colnett under an oppressive sky in unsettled winds, followed by a greasy calm and a long swell. What with the children and our abject inexperience, we were hoping to avoid multi-day passages. Our plan was to sail in daylight, anchoring and sleeping at night, and this had worked so far. It would work only once more. While the "prevailing" wind along the outside of Baja is northwest, we had failed to apprehend that in winter this is interrupted by frequent southerly gales.
	In thickening cirrus and little wind, we motored to Bahia San Quintín, a sweeping, beach-rimmed bay with a huge lagoon behind it and extensive surf-covered sandbars — a wild and woolly place. I unlashed my surfboard and jumped into the water. As I was not fully recovered from spinal surgery, and lacked medical insurance, you are entitled to wonder what I thought I was doing. But what the hell, I figured, if it were going to be a problem, might as well find out.
	It wasn't, but my pathetic physical condition was. I had misjudged the break. After getting viciously rolled beneath two large combers, I struggled back outside between sets and tried a revised approach — more circumspection and less testosterone — and succeeded in riding two long waves. Exhausted, I headed home. I'd have drowned if I'd tried another ride.
	After two quiet nights, which we did not adequately appreciate at the time, we made the short jump to Punta Baja, where, in a bumpy, rock-rimmed bay wide open to the south, the weather finally came home to roost. Shortly after anchoring, the fitful westerly gave way to an insistent twenty knot southerly, quickly generating three-foot wind waves and pressing us back toward the rocks. The anchor chain surge loads began to get scary. A gale was clearly on the way — the wind direction told us that — and staying put was out of the question. With the next decent harbor, Turtle Bay, 166 miles to the south straight into the new wind, we took to sea, abruptly and without preparation, for our first multi-day passage ever — into heavy weather. This was it. Time to ante up.
	Sundown found us closehauled on the offshore tack under storm canvas, laying a course to avoid the islet of San Jeronimo and the fatally dangerous Arrecife San Francisco, a legendary rock reef where countless ships have run out of luck over the centuries. By mid-evening, in pitch darkness under low, black storm clouds and slashing rain, we were hard on the wind, rail awash, spray flying, grunting slowly forward.
	When the wind is on the rise and there's no knowing how strong it'll get, there's a sense of helplessness as one ties in one's last available reef. Daybreak won't sail to weather without both sails, so further sail reduction would mean reaching off toward Hawaii — but in that direction lay the storm center, toward which I had no desire to sail. Luckily the wind steadied at thirty to thirty five knots and the waves didn't exceed six or seven feet, but even so our heel angle exceeded thirty degrees. The person on watch sat reclined against the leeward cockpit coaming, huddled underneath the dodger (for which ardent love and respect began to bloom), watching the bow climb and fall while the lee rail got sluiced in the gusts. We could have reached out and touched the sea from this position — a bit unsettling. Ten more knots of wind and we'd have been in real trouble, but as the center of the system passed us to seaward going north, the wind slowly veered, and by midnight we tacked for the slot between Cedros Island and the San Benitos group. At dawn we were beam-reaching south on a hissing quarterwave, aiming for Turtle Bay.
	In fifteen rugged hours we had learned some unsettling lessons. Daybreak hated going to weather. It's common knowledge, of course, that cat ketches are uninspiring to windward, but we had bought Daybreak thinking hey, how bad could it really be? The answer: pathetic. Her maximum upwind speed would prove to be just over five knots at 40º apparent wind, tacking through 100º and making good 110º with leeway — in flat water. Worse, she was horribly tender. Going to weather with five reefs tied in, two huge ones in the main and three in the mizzen, we sailed with one degree of heel per knot of apparent wind. We'd take the first reef at fifteen knots apparent (about ten knots true) and thirty degrees of heel. In any headwind over twenty knots we were clearly going to be miserable. We began to wonder how we would ever manage in a real storm. We were going to have our hands full with Daybreak, and avoidance of bad weather was going to become a religion. (Yacht design note: Look, it's basic: sailboats have to be either WIDE or DEEP. Daybreak is narrow and shoal. In fairness, Garry Hoyt, her designer, did learn his lesson: he corrected the problem when he designed the Freedom 44. After which he abandoned yacht design to the professionals.)
	When we reached the Turtle Bay entrance, at 2200 hours in seven foot seas and a solid onshore breeze, the radar informed us that our GPS (satellite navigation system) course had us sailing straight onto the rocks north of the entrance. Since the GPS, which is accurate to 300 feet, was programmed from the chart, the chart had to be in error, by over half a mile. Such chart errors, we would find, are normal "south of the border". Since the mouth of Turtle Bay is only half a mile wide, we had a real problem. Only with inside help, we figured, could we consider making the entrance that night, so we radioed inside to see who was awake. Mercifully, John and Susie Gerber aboard Chardonnay responded. They already had our lights in view, two miles away. With their guidance we got in safely and anchored under their stern, thinking: is this how you meet other cruising folks? Some social life!
	We ventured into the tiny, muddy town of San Bartolome, also known as Turtle Bay Village, to buy milk and bread, and received our next lesson in cruising life. In El Segundo this errand would have taken fifteen minutes. In San Bartolome it took two hours. In the process, though, we discovered the joys of the tortilleria, where a kilogram of fresh, warm corn tortillas cost 83¢. Government subsidy, we guessed. We spent the next two days resting, exploring the beaches, and dodging weather. Another gale forced us to shift anchorage three times. Depending on the wind, that "all weather harbor" could be a real snakepit, and you'd take your life in your hands to get out of it at night. Two cruising boats were lost on the rocks in there later that season. To be fair, the year was a bad one. An El Niño condition had stretched into an unprecedented third year, and we were the recipients of its ill favor. Among cruisers there was a widespread desire to quit harbor-hopping and simply get south. To this end, after a terrible night, we raised anchor in the shallow southeast corner of the bay and headed straight for Bahia Santa Maria, two days and nights away.
	We spent the first day and night under double-reefed main, the least sail we could carry short of bare poles, going dead downwind at seven knots in ten foot swells topped with four foot breaking seas. During the night, after I stupidly shook out a reef during a brief lull, the wind restrengthened, pushing us into the eight knot range and rolling us badly. On Lynn's watch a larger wave surged us to nine knots and rolled us down to starboard, dipping the main boom in the water, whereupon a forged stainless steel pin in the vang tackle, with a tensile strength of 10,000 pounds, broke with a sound like a shotgun. This forced me into my foulies and harness so I could crawl forward and spend some lovely "scuba" time on the foredeck, with my legs wrapped around the main mast, lashing up a fix. So much for sleep.
	The next day and night were milder. In a dead calm we motored the last few miles into Santa Maria Bay, and were grateful to do so. We started trying to relax and enjoy life, which was surprisingly difficult to do. The frantic energy which had inhabited our bodies for nearly two decades would not readily relinquish its grip, and the absurdity of annual two-week vacations was beginning to become apparent. Still, Roxanne and I had a wonderful time for two days, surfing the tiny waves inside the bay, and all of us dinghied up into the lagoon to walk over the dunes. But we didn't linger. We hadn't yet learned how. Being away from Daybreak made me nervous, and we were anxious to move on to Magdalena Bay.
	For years I had been wanting to see Mag Bay, a huge, magnificent place. A person could spend weeks there and not see any part of it twice. We hissed in around Punta Entrada in a twenty knot northerly and starting beating our way up to the first anchorage. As the lee rail once again started kissing the water, Lynn begged for us to drop sail and just motor the last three miles upwind. As I complied, the water intake ate something and the engine temperature skyrocketed, forcing us to shut it down to clear the blockage. An hour later we got the anchor down under a mountain ridge which offered, according to the cruising guide, "some northwesterly protection". Perhaps. For us the wind was northerly, and the ridge afforded no protection at all.
	By late evening the wind had strengthened and veered northeast, a direction to which the cove was totally exposed. With fifteen miles of fetch across the bay, the anchorage quickly became untenable. This is nautical parlance for "a death trap". At midnight we rousted ourselves from bed, and while desperate anchor drills occupied the crews of every other boat in the anchorage, we bailed out and headed northeast across Mag Bay, feeling our way through the shoals, seeking calmer water. After eight miles of seat-of-the-pants navigation in pitch darkness, in a whistling wind, into an area for which we had no chart, we picked our way into a thirty-foot-deep hole between two sandbars, four miles from the nearest land, laid out 250 feet of chain, and slept like the dead.
	No one else had left the anchorage, though upon listening to the radio chatter in the morning it was hard to understand why. There had been mayhem and terror all night, with broken and ripped-out anchor windlasses, chain damage to rails and anchor platforms, foredecks plunging under steep short seas, transoms flirting with the line of breakers against the shore . . . why?
	By morning a dry northeasterly gale had settled in, the type Southern Californians call a "Santa Ana", and it had no obvious intention of departing. A strong high had developed over the deserts of northwestern Mexico, the kind that adrenalizes every windsurfer within a day's drive of the upper Sea of Cortez but which cruising sailors loathe. We motored the remaining four miles to the north side of the bay, still with no chart, and anchored in ten feet of water a hundred yards off a low beach backed by rolling desert. It was a beautiful spot, wild and clean, with excellent protection from the entire northerly quadrant, but unmentioned in any cruising guide. Which is why no one else was there. We stayed four days, relaxing, exploring the beach, and puttering around a nearby mangrove lagoon in the dinghy, still trying to slow down. We ultimately managed to lure fourteen other boats over to join us, and linked up with a family with two boys, aged nine and three. Roxanne and Tania promptly declared that staying together with them would be a priority.
	After a delightful respite in these quiet shallows, we headed out to sea and sailed 170 miles to Cabo San Lucas in shifty, unsettled weather. See if you can follow this. We started out in a light northeast wind, which veered to southeast (right where we wanted to go), then died, then blew a comfy ten to fifteen knots from the northwest all afternoon, then veered back to northeast just after nightfall, completing a full circle — and began strengthening. After a day under full sail for the first time in a month, once again we were grabbing for the winch handles and reef lines. The wind continued to haul around to east, blew 25 knots while we beat into it under triple reefs, then backed once more to northeast with unabated strength but freeing our point of sail. In the predawn hours we averaged over seven knots, great speed for Daybreak but rail-down, lurching every which way. No one slept. We had to move the girls to the main cabin sole — they'd been getting airborne in their berths up forward. By noon we were motoring around Cabo Falso in a dead glassy calm, which we'd happily have done all the way to Cabo San Lucas, but no such luck. A maddening afternoon breeze blows from the east around the tip of Baja, setting up a steep chop which makes both sailing and motoring nearly impossible. The last five miles took two hours, and we began to wonder seriously if we would make it before dark.
	Finally inside the Cape, which had been our goal for a solid month and seven hundred nautical miles of sailing, we found the whole bay — the fabled playground of Cabo San Lucas and the subject of hundreds of travel brochure photographs while placid as a lake — filled with swells and whitecaps, unattractive for either anchoring or mooring (though dozens of vessels clearly thought otherwise). In despair and resignation we headed into the expensive marina and paid through the nose for some good old-fashioned sleep. Our bodies could scarcely believe the peace. Daybreak had not laid motionless for thirty days. It was worth the price.
	Staying in the marina meant we could handle our check-in through the marina office, as well as get diesel fuel without the Customs permit that non-marina-tenants had to have (yet which was required nowhere else in Mexico). How this works, I couldn't say. Politics in Mexico makes U.S. politics look like nursery school. What we would call a "position of public trust" often seems in Mexico to be little more than a license to steal. Particularly in Baja, "government" consists of a few scattered officials who run their patch pretty much however it suits them, and if you can ease their lives in some way, they'll run it however it suits you. The encyclopedia calls Mexico a democracy, but its political parties are more like crime families, and elections are the turf wars. Killings do occur. Since 1929 one political party has dominated Mexican politics, and prior to 1988 it did so unopposed. Virtually every government official depends on the national president for his job, and there was an election coming up. We trod carefully.
	During two blissful days in the marina we enjoyed real showers, did ten loads of laundry, swam in the tiny pool, checked in at the local yachtie hangout, ate a real restaurant dinner, washed the boat with fresh water, performed some repairs, bought Christmas gifts for the girls, and reprovisioned. Whew! Then we moved out to the bay, where fifty bucks got us a mooring for a week plus the use of the Hacienda Hotel's pool, beach, and beach towels. Not bad, except that Tania, after swimming in the pool, went exploring and managed to fall into a nearby cactus garden (in her swimsuit). What a mess! We spent the evening pulling tiny hair-like needles out of her skin with surgical tweezers.
	In Cabo we began to learn that there are two kinds of cruisers: those who seek out bars, restaurants, and tourist spots, and those who prefer wilderness anchorages, visiting towns only for supplies. We were definitely the latter, and Cabo, being nothing but a tourist town, set our teeth on edge. Once a dusty, sleepy desert village, now, unbelievably, it's a "destination" — and yet, except for the heavily developed shoreside area, Cabo is dirt streets, nonexistent planning, ramshackle buildings, tiny shops, and grocery stores we'd have crossed the street to avoid in Los Angeles. Megayachts exceeding a hundred feet in length costing several million dollars each repose in the harbor while squalor abides two blocks away. Frankly, it was embarrassing. But with single-sideband (SSB) radio reports from other cruisers telling us that the winter northerlies in the Sea of Cortez were howling, and with La Paz 150 miles to windward around the tip of Baja, Cabo, such as it was, would be our home for the holidays.

	With a month of cruising behind us — the longest month of our lives — we were starting to get a feel for it. An ex-cruiser we knew had described it as "definitely not child's play", and she should know, having spent six years sailing with her husband in Central America. We had to agree. Cruising was scary and not for the faint of heart. It was hardly like running off to be a kid again. When weather and sea started cranking up in the middle of the night, there was no "off" switch and no place to hide. Someone said that when one is away from civilization and all its trappings, there's no such thing as "ugly" weather, but often we failed to appreciate its intense beauty out of sheer fear and foreboding.
	It was also turning out to be a lot of work. The logistics of water, food, electricity, clothes, and sailing demanded unbelievable time and energy. It had not been a "vacation". In over a month we had spent only four or five afternoons relaxing, exploring, and doing what we "came there for" — but it still beat working. In fact, we were finding it very satisfying. Lynn and I had lost weight steadily. Our bodies were thriving, and the stresses we experienced were of a different sort than the stress of business life with which we are all so familiar.
	Consider this. When we as children fell down and skinned our hands and knees, we may have felt pain, we may have bled, and we may have bawled for our mothers, but we never, ever blamed gravity. We simply learned not to fall down. Gravity is not vicious, vindictive, or capricious, not some off-and-on thing that decides to hurt us sometimes and not others. It is utterly reliable. It does not have moods. Yet when our parents punished us for something we'd done, it didn't take long before we figured out that they were deciding to punish us, and that they could have decided not to. Therefore, our punishment was their fault. Not at all like gravity. So rather than learning not to misbehave, we instead learned not to get caught — and began to become a little bit psychotic. No one tries "not to get caught" by gravity.
	As our species has learned to protect itself more and more from what nature can do, we have slowly learned to blame people for whatever residual suffering we do experience. Because really, that's about all that's left. Tort law, insurance fraud, legal concepts such as "attractive nuisance" — that's the one where, if my kid sneaks into your back yard, through your latched but not locked gate, and breaks his arm skateboarding in your empty swimming pool, you are liable because you didn't take adequate measures to control access — these practices haven't arisen out of our profound attachment to the exercise of personal responsibility. No. They've arisen out of our profound attachment to the exercise of blame. As children we learned that much of what happens to us is someone else's fault.
	Cruising is quite a reality check. At sea there's no one else around to blame. Responsibility is not only essential at sea, it's inevitable. In this environment I began to see that my initial instincts and impressions, so often "wrong" in civilized life, were serving me fine. My "left brain", trained and honed by eighteen years of school and nineteen of professional life, seemed far less powerful than the right, which, over that same period, had been silently, painlessly, and effortlessly training and honing itself to perfection in ways I had never noticed. Left brains, I began to see, are almost superfluous by themselves. We may use them to accomplish our grand designs, but it's our right brains that really take care of us — every second, night and day. Looking back over a career characterized by a level of continuous emotional pain I still shudder to recall, I realized it was simply the result of consistently ignoring my right brain's warning shrieks. I'd hung on for years in jobs where political and corporate circumstance prevented or punished what I considered appropriate action. In any large company, you can't so much as part your hair without first justifying the move and getting ten other people to agree. Unilateral action is forbidden. No wonder I hated working. 
	Sitting at peace in the Mexican sun, I saw that I should have had the guts to leave seventeen years earlier. What had happened, I wondered, to my promise to myself in 1973, upon accepting my first job in the defense industry, that I would stay no longer than two years? Certainly I needed the money, but what about the equal certainty that it was not a good place for me? What had happened to my notion that I should just stash away as much money as I could for a couple of years, and then split?
	I must have been asleep. If not, I'd simply been a fool. If I'd seen the "golden handcuffs" clicking shut around my wrists, surely I would have shaken them off — wouldn't I? Many large companies describe their regular full-time staff as "captive employees". Really. It's not considered a pejorative term, which fact is instructive in itself. It's used because it fits. In such an organization — in such a culture — this is simply what you are.
	Well, no more. I was out, and I had no desire to return. If nothing else came of cruising, I thought, if I could plot a different professional course afterward, it would all have been worthwhile.

Chapter 4
La Paz or Bust

	Having failed to reach La Paz by Christmas, we adopted the obvious fallback position: La Paz by New Year's Eve. We didn't make that one either.
	Three days after Christmas the northerlies died down, so we left for Los Frailes, 45 miles up around the tip of Baja, arriving eleven hours later in a dead calm — in the dark, again. We quickly discovered that lulls in the winter northerlies are shortlived. This one would last about eighteen hours.
	By morning the wind was back to twenty five knots, gusting over thirty, inside the harbor. Every boat heading north that day returned many hours later, at night, with tales of fifty knot headwinds and big, vicious seas against which no progress could be made. Los Frailes afforded excellent protection from these seas, but the wind wore us down. Half a mile east, outside the point, the rolling, breaking waves that had beaten back eight vessels in two days could be seen marching southward, as unstoppable as anything on earth.
	This wouldn't have been so bothersome, except there were problems with Daybreak that were unsettling. Something was draining the batteries. The zincs were being eaten up by a stray current, and debris from the ruined engine zinc was clogging the heat exchanger, causing engine overheating. The prop shaft zinc was nearly gone, with no replacement possible until La Paz. Which, of course, lay upwind.
	We removed and rodded out the heat exchanger for the second time in two weeks, to no avail. This time the clog was elsewhere. Unless we found it, we wouldn't be able to use the motor against headwinds, and unless we found better protection, further work was inadvisable. One doesn't blithely disassemble one's engine in threatening conditions, because a wind shift can quickly create a new lee shore. I'd sailed off enough anchors to know that doing so in a gale, in a crowd of boats, starting with my transom fifty yards from the beach, could well be disastrous.
	To add aggravation, our new laptop computer wouldn't listen to our weatherfax demodulator. The old computer had pulled weatherfaxes just fine, but it had smoked (literally) just before we left LA. Oh well. We'd already sailed a thousand nautical miles during a year of particularly bad weather with next to no advance weather information, so what did it matter?
	On the other hand we were in a beautiful place, complete with a tiny hotel which had just been built out there in the boonies by a retired California couple. They didn't have many guests yet, so they were catering to cruisers. They were busy arranging a New Year's Eve party for the harbor-bound fleet of over a dozen boats, advertising hors d'oeuvres and tortilla soup for five bucks a head, liquor extra, children half price. No champagne (they simply couldn't get any out there on three days' notice) but we could bring our own. A large bonfire in their patio fire pit allowed us to bake our frontsides while our backsides faced the chill wind. Cocktails were served by Cano, their extraordinarily gracious Mexican bartender, and a delightful evening ensued under the stars in the Baja outback. We liked these folks. Their hotel was spotlessly clean, and the location was dramatic, but it was only meant for people whose aim was to do absolutely nothing — because unless you were into nuclear windsurfing, nothing was all there was.
	Next day, the wind having abated somewhat, we poked our nose hesitantly outside the point and headed for Ensenada de los Muertos, 46 miles north. And yes, the name means Bay of the Dead. We motorsailed to windward with a badly overheating engine, reefing and unreefing three times in an indecisive breeze. By evening it died off and the seas lay down, allowing us to limp pitifully into Muertos with the engine coolant nearly boiling. It had taken fourteen hours, average speed three knots. This could not go on.
	In the morning we took apart the entire raw water cooling system, fitting by fitting and hose by hose, looking for a massive blockage, and naturally found it in the last place we looked: the anti-siphon loop. For reasons that passeth all understanding, the inside diameter of this fixture was three eighths of an inch while the rest of the system was one inch, and the bends were sharp, not smooth. Stupid design. We found a piece of zinc anode from the heat exchanger jammed in there, unable to make the turn. Hallelujah! Out it came, we buttoned it up, and off we went, because there was no wind, no sea, not even ripples, and lovely blue skies! We cranked the throttle and powered ecstatically north at over seven knots, all the way to Pichilingue, a bulletproof little cove an hour's sail from La Paz. It being Saturday, and Pichilingue not being a Port Of Entry . . . You see, in La Paz we'd have to pay the officials overtime the next day in order to check in. We arrived at night, of course.
	Next morning we learned by VHF that the La Paz authorities weren't all that picky about weekend arrivals, so we hurried on down the last seven miles and dropped the hook. Jumping into the dinghy, we putt-putted over to Marina de La Paz, where we were stunned to find, in their cafe, a big-screen TV showing an NFL playoff game, complete with John Madden — a voice from another planet! After lunch, beer, new friends, and football, our engine troubles seemed far, far away. 

	The first week of January brought storms and cold fronts in abundance. Though scarcely a stone's throw from the Tropic of Cancer, during that week you could have experienced all the joys of sailing in a Puget Sound winter. Torrential rain slashed the length and breadth of Baja. The La Paz police issued a travel warning due to flash flooding and washouts: Don't drive, they said. In Baja California, a flash flood can kill you.
	It rained hard. We sat it out belowdecks with every hatch and port closed and dogged. La Paz had raging torrents two feet deep sluicing down every street that sloped toward the water, which is half of them. The unpaved alley leading to Marina de La Paz looked like the Amazon at full flood: fast and filthy. In Mexico, it seems that civil engineering is practiced with a minimum of forethought. It can get scary.
	In time the rain departed and perfect weather returned. The only blot on the scene was the southeast breeze, from the direction of the town. You could tell by the smell. (All Mexican towns smell of burning garbage. It's the national smell. It's how you know you're in Mexico.) But it hardly mattered, because when the wind was from the northwest, across the mangrove marshes, you could smell the rotting vegetation. And if it was northeasterly, you could smell the Pemex refinery. From four miles away. Southwest was pretty good . . .
	Donning mask and snorkel, I went overboard and changed the emaciated prop shaft zinc. Since the heat exchanger had also gotten a new zinc, we thought we were set for awhile. In the process I proved that the amount of work one can do in murky water under an anchored boat in two knots of current while holding one's breath is *gasp*  limited.

	La Paz was like all cities we would visit in Mexico. First we'd work hard to get there, then, after maybe one day of rest, we'd be working hard to leave. Each city was different, but to a cruiser they have a certain sameness. In the beginning Lynn had wanted to visit cities and towns (though I didn't), but by La Paz she'd changed her mind. After a week or two of trudging, busing, or taxiing around town with a couple tons of groceries while the locals looked at us like we were from Mars, we noticed we'd begun to look at them the same way, and the image of a quiet anchorage, a warm beach, some clear water, and no people started looking pretty good. Our conclusion in Cabo still applied: cities were for provisions and for receiving mail and boat parts from the States. Besides, Daybreak appeared to be holding together, more or less. A friend from Catalina had quipped: "Well, that's yachting. The water's still on the outside, isn't it?" Well, yes . . . but we still worried constantly.
	Unable to decide whether to head north or south next, we opted to spend a couple weeks at the nearby islands, see what the weather did, see what else broke, and then decide.
	Roxanne and Tania were adapting well. They loved beachcombing, swimming, and being around water. They met very few other children, but took full advantage when they did. In La Paz there were kids aplenty. Both girls were doing well in their schoolwork, and even enjoyed it. Their main problem was us: Lynn and I hadn't developed much discipline about it. Still, Roxanne's reading ability was growing by leaps and bounds, and Tania was doing great considering she wasn't even supposed to be in kindergarten yet. We'd only bought the course so she'd be able to have school like her sister.
	Dozens of friends back home had been asking what Lynn thought of cruising "from the woman's point of view" — an ever-popular if controversial subject among non-cruisers. She wrote home in response:

	"Being in Mexico is so different, yet in ways it's so similar to the U.S. one barely needs to acculturate. Traveling with other cruisers means our primary contacts are with Americans. The VHF radio allows us to chat readily, almost like a phone back home, which means we really have very little daily contact with the locals. We've gotten by just fine with a little pidgin Spanish. You can use pesos, dollars, or traveler's checks with equal ease. The exchange rate varies, but not much, and we haven't found anyone who won't accept dollars gladly. Stores abound with American products, and you can buy a Pepsi on any street corner for about thirty cents.
	"On the other hand, much that we take for granted in the States is either unavailable here or in astonishingly poor repair. A phone call can be a major undertaking. In Cabo I walked to a pay phone outside the phone company building (the only reliable international phone in the whole city), only to find it monopolized by some American college kids who had run out of money. They said the phone at the plaza was working, so I walked the half mile there to find it broken, as usual. It never worked while we were in Cabo. I tried one of the private telephone outlets that will place a call for you for about a dollar, but they couldn't get through to the international operator and apparently hadn't been able to for several days. So I hiked back to the phone company building, found the phone free, and finally heard the blessed words 'AT&T USA Direct' — only to have two of the parties I was trying to reach not be at home!
	"Roads are primitive. After Ensenada, we didn't see pavement until Cabo San Lucas, seven hundred miles later, and even there all the streets away from the waterfront are dirt. Sidewalks, when they exist, are built and maintained by each individual property owner — a real hodge-podge. And here's something truly strange: in every bathroom stall in Baja, there is a waste basket for used toilet paper, frequently with signs explaining its purpose for the benefit of stupid gringos who persist in trying to flush TP down the toilet. An American restaurant owner in Cabo says toilet paper flushed down the toilet will clog it up. Something's clearly amiss in the plumbing department. The one exception was Marina de La Paz — built, owned, and run by Americans — where no such receptacles existed, and where large signs are posted in Spanish requesting that TP be put in the toilet, and not on the floor.
	"But you haven't really had a corn tortilla until you buy a kilo of them fresh from the tortilleria for less than a dollar. They are warm and soft, and taste great just by themselves. By the lines that form, it is clear that the locals buy only what they will use each day, sometimes each meal. They just aren't the same the next day, when they taste like the ones you buy in U.S. supermarkets.
	"Perhaps the most astonishing realization for me is that life goes on. Cruising is definitely NOT vacationing. When you're on vacation, you temporarily abandon the responsibilities and concerns that consume you at home, and take a "time out" from day-to-day life. When you're cruising, the boat and its passages are your day-to-day life. Its problems are your responsibility and concern. You still have a spouse, and in our case two children, who still quarrel and compete and want your attention. How can I say it — the circumstances are so very different, and yet "wherever you go, there you are!" — an adage I used to quote with some righteousness, but I must say that cruising puts it in a new light.
	"Bottom line?  I wouldn't miss this for the world. And it hasn't been the paradise that was advertised. Well, let me modify that, because Lane was very careful to keep us both reminded that reality rarely bears any resemblance to prior dreams. He pointedly did not advertise "paradise", and I entered this endeavor with a much greater proportion of nightmares than dreams. All of the women I have spoken to, though, who suffered through the trip down the outside of Baja, were told by their mates, 'Don't worry, once we get into the Sea of Cortez, everything will be wonderful.' Which, frankly, hasn't panned out. Nonetheless, here we are, the weather is the weather, the kids are the kids, Lane is Lane, and life is pretty damn good."

	And with that, we headed for the islands.

Chapter 5
A Sea Of Problems

	Caleta Partida (Partida Cove) lies twenty two miles north of La Paz and separates Partida and Espiritu Santo Islands from each other. The cove shallows out to white sand and narrows to a shallow tidal channel barely 20 yards wide, which cuts between the islands to deep water on the east side. You can wade from one island to the other without getting your T-shirt wet.
	The cove, a volcanic crater formed in some ancient age and later filled by the rising sea, has superlative protection. It was the calmest, most peaceful anchorage we had ever seen, the kind of place we'd been imagining for seven years. The days were warm, almost hot, and at night we slept blissfully under a light quilt with all the hatches open. The wind never exceeded ten knots and died each evening. We swam, snorkeled, sailed the dinghy, fished, beach combed, and explored. Conditions were heavenly.
	Daybreak, however, seemed oblivious to paradise. She had determined that my education as a cruising yachtsman was far from complete, and had prepared a little home study course for me. She had decided I was going to attend "battery college". And so, to please her, I emptied everything out of the port cockpit locker, crawled inside, opened up the side wall of the engine compartment, and began to develop a deep, meaningful relationship with our storage batteries.
	The #1 bank wouldn't even hold a charge overnight, and bank #2 (the "house" bank) appeared to have about a third of its rated capacity. Ransacking our tiny reference library for related information, I read Nigel Calder on deep cycle batteries and began to suspect we might have caused the situation ourselves back in LA. Now we would pay. I would spend the day "equalizing" them. This innocuous euphemism means mercilessly force-feeding electrical current into them until their temperature gets up around 120 degrees and all the sulfation cooks off the plates. If we were lucky, this procedure would spare us having to sail back to La Paz to spend five hundred bucks on new batteries.
	By noon it was a beautiful day, gorgeously blue, bright sun, balmy breeze across the isthmus, sparkling water . . .  Too bad for me, though. I was hunkered in the bowels of the boat for five solid hours measuring voltages and electrolyte densities every half hour in thirty individual battery cells, most of them nearly impossible to reach, while the motor rumbled on warmly at 1200 rpm two feet from my ears. Lynn and the girls had determined that this would be a wonderful time not to be aboard, and were off enjoying paradise without me.
	The verdict afterward? The anchor windlass battery was shorted out, and since it was connected to the engine battery, it was killing that one too. This explained the weak windlass operation. Sigh. So I yanked a battery out of the #2 bank, used it to replace the dead windlass battery, and proceeded to equalize again.
	It seemed to help. The batteries still had only half their proper capacity, but they held charge, and the anchor chain came whizzing up when I hit the switch. Next morning we started the motor to check the charge rate, recharge the house bank, and incidentally run the refrigeration, and . . . AAAUGGHH!!! The refrigeration had died.
	This we did not need. Not only had we just bought a small truckload (literally) of fresh food, we also had $400 worth of hepatitis vaccine that had to stay cold for another two months. The problem was caused by the failure of a crummy plastic water pump which was unrepairable (cracked case), for which we had no spare, and the absence of which left a gaping hole in the cooling system for which we had no pipe plug, so the motor was disabled! If we could get to La Paz, maybe we could find a replacement, maybe we could get it to fit, and maybe it would work — but with low batteries we needed to conserve electricity, which meant no windlass. That in turn meant manhandling two hundred pounds of anchor gear aboard (with a bad back), then trying to sail a 47 foot long, 22,000 pound boat out of a pack of fourteen other vessels, in a tiny cove bound by rocks and surrounded by mountains which blocked and swirled the wind. It would also mean sailing in fickle breezes down the four-mile La Paz entrance channel, which is 200 feet wide, with rocks on one side, a sandbar shoal on the other, and two knots of tidal current, then anchoring under sail amid a hundred other boats in a cul-de-sac of marginally navigable water between another sandbar and a mangrove swamp, having an unmarked entrance channel two boatlengths wide, all in the same two knots of current — and with our luck, probably at night.
	This picture was sufficient cause for panic. Purists of the "go small, go simple, go now" school of motorless cruising might scoff at our motor dependence, but they didn't have a forty foot cat ketch. Or children. We HAD to plug that hole in the engine.
	Feeling embarrassed and stupid, I got on the radio and begged the other boats in the cove for a half inch pipe plug, and mercifully somebody had one. We got the engine running and started charging batteries. Then more good news: Don and Eileen aboard Moonrise (whom we had met in Bahia San Quintín, and with whom, to our great surprise, we would spend, off and on, the next nine months and 3400 nautical miles) offered to take our hepatitis vaccine aboard and keep it cool for us. Don also mentioned that he had a little bait tank pump he used in his shower sump, and did I want to try it? Hell yes, I said, and wonder of wonders, the damn thing was the perfect size and type — except the inlet fitting was the wrong. But wait. Didn't ours have a reducer fitting on it? Yes! And if we removed that fitting, wouldn't the pump fit perfectly? Yes again! So Don, bless his cruiser heart, grabbed a pair of dikes, reached down, snipped the wires, lifted the pump out, and handed it to me, leaving Moonrise shower-sump-pump-less. But hey, no biggie, he said, they took their showers in the cockpit anyway. He'd used the pump only once in two years. Seems they'd had a guest aboard who wasn't partial to showering in public.
	We installed it, it fit, it didn't leak, we fired up the motor, flipped the switch and . . . it didn't work. AAAAAAAAUUUUGGGGHH! And other epithets. Roxanne and Tania were getting quite a verbal education.
	Suffice to say, it was a priming problem. After I spent four more hours on my hands and knees in the engine compartment completely replumbing the water hoses, in the process being forced to disconnect the watermaker (which took its salt water from the same line), it finally worked. After chilling the cold plates, I went to bed early. I'd been working on the damn thing for twelve hours.
	Two weeks later I learned that this last problem would not have occurred had I not been so clever as to install the new pump right side up, rather than upside down like the old one. I couldn't understand why this should have mattered, but I was beginning to learn not to ask.
	OK. Enough. Back to La Paz to fix all this. But lest you think I did nothing in Caleta Partida except work and swear, I did manage to snorkel some, swim in the sandy shallows with the kids, investigate marine animals in the sandbanks, sail the dinghy, take a walk, read two books, do school with the girls, host a potluck dinner for fourteen aboard our boat one night, and attend a beer party for eight aboard another boat another night. This latter was a real cruising occasion. Not having refrigeration, the hosts' remaining ice was only going to last one more night, and all the beer was going to get warm, and after all, what good is warm beer? So, a case of cold Pacifico, a few limes, some crackers and cheese . . .
	It's hard to keep any perspective sometimes. For all our problems, Caleta Partida was absolutely lovely, a beautiful, quiet, relaxing place. Of all the things we wanted to do there, there are only two we didn't achieve. I didn't get to try our windsurfer (a parting gift from a friend), and we hadn't achieved boredom (a challenge set for us by the same friend). Boredom would indeed have been an achievement. But in a few days, we would return. And try again.
	Back in La Paz, anchored by El Mogote across from town, more had gone wrong.
	We were being tested. That had to be it. We might not have been bored, but we were certainly disgusted. Lynn and I again worked all day on the boat, fixing two new problems but discovering two others that were worse, one disabling the refrigeration (again), and the other the motor (again). And to crown the day, we received a shipment from a marine store in San Diego and found we'd been charged six times what we had expected to pay for one of the items. We'd about had it.
	It felt like some sort of crossroads. The gods were pointing and laughing: "Ha ha, just look at those folks. They say they want to be cruisers! Let's find out just how much fun they wanna have." There we were and there we'd remain, for some unknown number of days. La Paz was still not our favorite place, but it beat being stranded in the boonies.
	(That quote needs a bit of background. Around February of 1975, in an issue of Surfer magazine, there appeared a heartstopping picture of a 25 foot wave at a place called The Wedge in Newport Beach, CA. The wave occurred during the infamous "New Zealand Swell" of September 1974, generated by a hurricane near those islands and legendary among SoCal surfers who were alive at the time. Enmeshed in the pitching lip of the wave, his pathetic little wake barely rippling the face of that monolith, one lone kneeboarder, his life in the balance, scratches desperately seaward to avoid being body-slammed backwards into the sand. This caption appeared under the photo: "The Wedge at 25'. How much fun did you wanna have?" I’ve found that this question has wide applicability in life.)
	I'd come up with a three-word summary of La Paz: "There are services." Period. Because if there weren't, no yacht would stop. The anchorage was bumpy, the currents were nasty, and the dinghy ride to shore was precarious. We normally took along a handheld radio in a waterproof pouch in case we got swamped, and we carried an anchor with a one hundred foot rode in case the motor failed at full ebb. In two-foot chop and a two-knot current, in an eight-foot dinghy carrying six hundred pounds, oars wouldn't have helped much.
 	But there were services. You could get most (not all) of what you needed (not wanted), if you looked hard enough and had sturdy shoes. We managed to find a store specializing in hydraulics, brass fittings, gaskets, nuts, bolts, and O-rings, where we bought the little brass ferrules for the 1/4" copper tube crimp fittings on the diesel fuel lines. This allowed us to get the engine running again after having found the fuel overflow return line broken off right at the fuel pump — and after having, incidentally, pumped a bunch of diesel fuel into the bilge. You haven't lived until you've seen the rank, stinking mess this creates.
	Before obtaining this silly ferrule, we had spent the evening without lights in order to save the batteries for starting the engine. Having replaced this fitting, I was left to discover why the new refrigeration water pump, installed in Caleta Partida a few paragraphs ago, no longer worked. We also needed to find a new gas cap for our tiny 2-hp Honda outboard, because Lynn had dropped the original overboard in mid-channel while refueling in the afore mentioned two foot waves. When your dinghy has eight inches of freeboard, those are big waves. In the interim, we plugged the tank with one of those conical wood plugs you're supposed to keep around in case one of your thru-hull fittings snaps off. See? They do come in handy.
	One of two things would happen, we figured. Either all our mechanical problems would get magically fixed, in which case we wouldn't have to worry about them anymore, or we would come to realize that such problems are normal in cruising life, in which case we wouldn't worry about them anymore. Folks back home, reading our newsletters, probably wanted to hear about tropical paradise, not mechanical troubles. Though we weren't actually in the tropics yet. One of Lynn's sisters had written, "Send pictures of palm trees." Right. If we saw any, she'd be the first to know. How about cacti?
	Six months later we did find palm trees. On a beach in Costa Rica. Where they are not native. They'd been planted there for the tourists. To take pictures of. Being tourists, we took pictures.

	Things started looking up. It began to look like we could leave La Paz for good in a few more days. Our "last" shipment of parts from San Diego had arrived, we'd gotten the engine running more or less correctly, and we'd solved the mysteries of the refrigeration pump (and had bought two spares plus one more for Don — at thirty five bucks a whack. Hey, if I mention money a lot, it's because we didn't have much!). We'd also rebuilt two of our three bilge pumps, cleaned the bilges to get rid of the diesel fuel there, cleaned the engine drip pan, obtained a new battery, installed it, and gotten our battery charging under control. We thought.
	After much vacillation, we had decided to go north, up into the Sea of Cortez, rather than south, down the mainland. For a month, anyway. We gave up on getting all the way to San Felipe at the extreme north end of the Sea. We decided this over a liter of Pacifico beer with tortilla chips and fresh guacamole one afternoon. Beer helps, especially Pacifico, with a fresh Mexican lime squeezed into the bottle and the rind crammed down inside. "The fahnest bottle o' beer you evah th'owed a lip ovah." (OK, quick quiz: Out of what landmark Western movie is that line paraphrased?)
	Boy did we feel better! We'd been in and around La Paz for twenty seven days. Without further ado, we prepared to head north.

(Answer: Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, of course.)

Chapter 6
The Sea Of Cortez

	The morning we left La Paz, a small thing happened that would change our lives as cruisers. Just before we raised anchor, a Seattle couple, Rick and Hele from the Alberg 35 Manaña, rowed over in their pretty little lapstrake dinghy to hand us a three inch square red Post-It Note. On it was a crude hand-written itinerary that took them as far as the Panama Canal, by September. At the time it was January 30th.
	Rick and Hele had decided to head south immediately, bypassing the Sea of Cortez, and in the hope that we'd catch up, they wanted us to know where they'd be. Touched as we were by their thoughtfulness, I looked at that little note like it was an alien artifact, and allowed to Rick as how, if he kept up this sort of thing, he was going to give carefree cruising a bad name. We all laughed, I took a Polaroid picture of them, stuck the Post-It Note to the back of it, and threw it up at the head of the nav desk on top of a pile of other junk. I figured we'd never see them again. A few days later I pulled the note off the photo and stuck it to the bulkhead below the barometer.
	We still have the photo. The note, to my chagrin, has long since disappeared, but during its tenure on the bulkhead it stared at me every day, and after two months it convinced me that having an itinerary might not be such a bad idea after all. Still I left it there . . . until long after, in fact, we'd caught up with Manaña, 1200 miles later.
	Frankly, having reached La Paz, our plans were at an end. We didn't know where to go, what to do, or even how to decide. Having gotten over the immediate hurdle of starting out cruising in the first place, we realized we hadn't thought beyond La Paz, and pretty soon hurricane season was going to do our thinking for us. The trip up the Sea of Cortez to San Felipe and back would be over a thousand nautical miles, and the northerlies had disabused us of the notion that the journey could be swift. After all, we were over a month out of Cabo and hadn't even got past La Paz yet! A full tour of the Sea of Cortez could easily take a year. If we chose to do it, we had lots of time in front of us.
	On the other hand, if we chose not to, we also had lots of time. Suddenly, nothing was pushing us. It was an unusual sensation.
	For twenty years we had constantly done both short and long range planning, but hardly ever anything in the mid-range. We planned our days carefully, task by task, about a week ahead. We had lists, things to accomplish. We also made long range plans, months and years ahead — getting married, having children, buying a house, quitting one job for another, taking vacations . . . cruising. Almost never did we plan a few weeks at a time.
	I saw why for the first time. It was because, in our workaday lives, we already knew exactly where we'd be and exactly what we'd be doing a few weeks into the future: we'd be exactly where we already were, doing exactly what we were already doing. Virtually no mid-range planning had been necessary. This discovery amazed me.
	Now the opposite was true. Only my wristwatch knew what day of the week it was, and it rarely mattered. Our day-to-day planning was limited to handling emergencies — which implied that our urban working lives must have been constantly in emergency (and of course, they had been). Our long-range requirements were simply to be either north of Guaymas, Mexico or south of Nicaragua during hurricane season (June through October), and to get ourselves and Daybreak to the East Coast within three years (before we ran out of money). That was it. The whole shape of our lives in one sentence.
	We simply had no idea what to do next. On the basis of nothing more than an unwillingness to completely miss the Sea of Cortez, we decided to sail north, at least for a little while, and to put off further decisions until then. We raised anchor.
	Three days later, we found paradise. Again.

	It seems that the trick to being in paradise is knowing when you're there. To do that, you have to be able to ask this question: "What would things have to look like for me to know I'm in paradise?" and come up with this answer: "Like this, right here, right now." However, judging by the way most people behave, the answer they come up with must invariably be: "Like nothing on God's green earth."
	Is Hawaii paradise? Tahiti? Bora Bora? Maybe. To find out, go there and see what the tourists are doing. You'll find that most of them are complaining. Why do they spend all that money to get to paradise, and then complain? I'll tell you why. It's because, for most people, paradise doesn’t measure up.
	A lot of people think that paradise ought to have a beach. Fine. But guess what? If you go to the finest beaches on this planet, whatever else you find there, you'll find sand fleas. I speak from experience here. The fleas were there before you showed up, they’re there after you leave, and they'll be there if you ever go back. Paradise always has sand fleas — or worse. Accepting this fact makes being in paradise a great deal easier. Actually, paradise is relative.
	At Isla San Francisco we found paradise — unless you think it can't be paradise if there's not a hotel with a restaurant and swimming pool, and who but a fool would think such a thing? (I recently met a woman who said she would never intentionally go anywhere that didn’t have a hotel with TV in the rooms — and that if she ever found herself in such a place, she’d never go back. Really.) It wasn't easy getting there, and we didn't expect to find much, because honestly, there isn't much there. So we were surprised.
	Isla San Francisco is a small crag about 42 miles north of La Paz. It's sort of square, three quarters of a mile on a side, and it has a funny little cove in its southern end where a sandspit connects the main island to a separate rocky ridge just to the south. This spit is mostly saltpan with sandy berms on both shores. The cove thus formed is almost perfectly "C" shaped, open to the west. In northerly weather it receives gusts of breeze down from the bluffs, but no swell or chop at all. The bottom was the cleanest, whitest sand we'd seen, and fish everywhere! Light blue fish two feet long with a longitudinal yellow stripe, a sort of large black angelfish with orange and yellow vertical stripes, plus needlefish, garden eels, blue and pale green starfish, and wonder of wonders, NO PUFFER FISH! The kids were in heaven: nothing to worry about under foot.
	We walked across the spit to the other side and stared at Isla San Jose in the distance. The surrounding hills were climbable, with lots of room for the kids to explore without supervision, and the beach was easy to land a dinghy on. No surge. I got up the first morning to find the wind somewhat abated (only twenty knots) and after fixing the outboard again (clogged main jet), I took a jaunt up the coast while the kids were having school with Lynn. I came back with three different half-day expeditions already in mind. Roxanne and I did one of them that afternoon: snorkeling over the rocks at the head of the cove. Tania contented herself with sand toys on the beach, and Lynn stayed aboard to assist another cruiser who was suffering from dehydration.
	Meantime, Manaña 's little red sticky-note kept staring at me every day, slowly shaking some of the cobwebs out of my brain. We were only four days into our "trial month", but suddenly I felt it was time to get a grip.
	Taking a look at what lay between us and the Atlantic seaboard, I realized it would take a good two years to do any justice at all to the intervening expanse of planet. If we really had three years of cruising funds, that meant we had an "extra year" to dawdle around. We could spend it up in the Sea of Cortez, or we could spend it later, somewhere else. But wait. Could I even say for sure that it existed? Our expense records, dutifully recorded on the laptop computer, showed that we were spending money exactly fifty percent faster than planned. Unless that hemorrhage could be stopped, we had no "extra year" — and the prospect of running out of money somewhere in Central America did not bear contemplating. We therefore simply had to get to the East coast within two years.
	Which meant we had to sail south. If there was extra money in the end, fine. Hardly an unwelcome sort of problem. Meantime, we had to be in Costa Rica by June 1st. We gave up on San Felipe. We would spend our month going as far north as we could, then turn around. Our new goal: San Carlos, three hundred miles away. By this route, Costa Rica was 2100 nautical miles away.
	Had I been paying attention, I might have noticed that we'd already covered 1217 nautical miles in 75 days, an average of sixteen miles per day, a pace we would later conclude was "way too fast". I might also have noticed that the pace necessary to reach Costa Rica by June was twenty miles per day. At the time, none of this reached consciousness. Oblivious, we moved on to Puerto Los Gatos.

	What a place! Yes, we'd said the same thing about Isla San Francisco, but Los Gatos was spectacular. Don't look for this place on any map or chart. It just isn't there (like much of Baja, actually). The cruising guides mention it, but one of them shows no latitude, and another has it wrong. (For the record, you approach on 25º 18.05' N.) The anchorage is small, and marginal. We anchored fore-and-aft in clean hard sand with our stern to shore, just off a rock outcropping. In chest deep water I held my breath and dug the stern anchor in by hand.
	Behind the cove was a desert valley extending for miles back toward the mountains, filled with cacti and scrub. Bordering the cove were brilliant red lava flows that twisted and bulged in wild voluptuous shapes. We climbed all over them. The kids were in heaven. I climbed a hill and got some spectacular photographic overviews — all of which, along with every photograph we took during our first three months, got lost in the mail.
	We met a pair of panga fishermen who'd come out of Timbabichi, a few miles south. These brothers, in their early twenties, after hearing our tale of fishing woe (we'd caught nothing since San Diego), offered to take us out and show us how. Our hopes erupted: maybe we'd finally catch something! Better yet, maybe we'd learn something! After all, these guys actually made a living at it. More or less.
	Arranging the trip for the next morning, we spent the rest of the day hiking, beach combing, climbing on the rocks, swimming, and sunbathing on the beach. The sun was hot, the breeze was cool, the sky was azure blue, the desert was green and brown, the rocks and cliffs were red and bronze, the water was deep blue offshore and green in the sandy shallows, and the awesome mountains of the Sierra Giganta loomed behind the valley in fantastic pinnacles, razorback ridges, buttes, high mesas, and arêtes, like Tolkien's Mountains of Mordor. We were alone, the way we like it. Who would not say it was heaven?
	And the fishing? Ah, success at last!
	The deal was 50,000 pesos (about $17) for two hours. One thing we learned to do in Mexico was handle large numbers in our heads. The younger brother, Epifanio, came equipped with nothing but his panga, a bailing bucket, and a forty gallon plastic barrel full of gasoline connected straight to the motor by siphon. Given our meager assortment of lures (three) and our meager level of experience (none), we were glad to hear Epifanio say our tackle looked fine. Of course, we'd have believed anything he said.
	For ninety minutes we caught nothing. We trolled north for five miles in calm water with a blue and green plastic lure we'd bought in San Diego. Then Epifanio inquired,  "¿Plumas? ¿Plumas?" So we switched to a bright yellow lure with white feathers. Still nothing. We zoomed back and tried trolling south from the anchorage. No luck. Heading out to Roca Negra, a mile offshore, we trolled all around it. Nada. At this point Epifanio was starting to look sheepish. He'd sworn we'd catch fish with that lure, no problemo, no bait required.
	Fifteen minutes before we had to either quit or pay more money, a strike! (Maybe he planned this, who knows?) I ground in the line, and he lifted a two foot long fish into the boat, something he called a sierra, a yellow-spotted mackerel. He unhooked it and I threw the lure back in. Five minutes later we snagged a bonita (a small, dark-meat tuna) about eighteen inches long. After that something hit the lure so hard it broke itself right off the hook and fled. Poor thing was probably so injured it would die anyway. We felt badly, but went ahead to try for a third fish before quitting. Not three minutes later we caught a larger sierra, an inch or two longer than the first but thicker and stronger. What a handful! When Epifanio went to grab the line, it pulled him all the way up around the bow and down the other side before he could get his feet planted and heave it in. Boy was that fish mad, and it was easy to see why. It had hit the lure so hard, one of the hooks had gone right through the side of his head and the other had come out through his eyeball. Gruesome. Fishing was turning out to be a pretty brutal business. We hoped he couldn't feel much, because if he could — bleah! He flopped around in the bottom of the boat a lot longer than the others, and there being a fair amount of blood down there already, he managed to splatter some across my sparkling white Daybreak polo shirt, as if protesting my insensitivity with his dying gasp.
	Epifanio offered to do the fileting for us, part of the service, he said, and he didn't have to offer twice. He did it right in the panga, using the razor sharp filet knife we'd bought in San Diego. I watched to see how it was done. The answer: very carefully. It got real clear that slimy, bloody fish flesh and sharp knives make a dangerous combination, especially in a little panga bobbing around in the chop. It was easy to see why sushi chefs sharpen their knives every few minutes: it helps if the cuts take little force. Fish are hard to get a grip on.
	We tipped big: another 30,000 pesos ($10). Can you imagine being able to charter a skiff with an experienced guide for less than ten dollars an hour? The scenery alone was worth that. Maybe we'd feel differently in mid-summer when it's 115º in the shade with not a whisper of wind, but for us it was 75º with a fresh breeze coming over the headland. We saw colorful, cactus-filled valleys like something out of an old western movie. Two of them boasted honest-to-god desert oases, complete with palm trees around a natural spring. A fish camp lay languidly under the shade of the palms within fifty feet of shore. We saw sweeping alluvial fans sloping down from soaring mountain pinnacles to magnificent desert plains. We saw sheer cliffs topped by rain-carved sandstone spires hundreds of feet high, falling straight into the sea. We saw tiny sparkling coves of crystal clear water, bright sand bottoms, rocky reefs, and zillions of brilliant tropical fish. A magical area.
	It was becoming clear, though, that better Spanish would have been worth a lot. We were interested to find out how these people made their living, what their lives were like, but we could only learn the tiniest bits. We tend to judge a person's intelligence by the quality of his language and the ideas he expresses. We had not previously apprehended the fact that a person who cannot speak English cannot appear any more intelligent to us than the level of conversation we are capable of having in his language. That probably seems pretty obvious, but in Puerto Los Gatos we caught on to this for the first time.
	We moved on to the bay at Agua Verde, nineteen miles north of Los Gatos, which lay in a spectacular surround of high ridges and peaks covered with green winter vegetation and even some trees. Unusual for desert. From offshore it looked like one of those postcard views of the Shark's Tooth on Moorea, though up close it was clear that the green on the mountains was not jungle. There were three attractive anchorages, the smallest, naturally, being the one with the northerly protection we needed. Four boats on single hooks filled the place to capacity. We were the fifth.
	We took a chance and anchored inside them all, figuring that with our shoal draft we'd have just enough room to swing clear of the beach. By evening we discovered that at Agua Verde, unlike anywhere else we'd been in Baja, the fishing pangas lie to moorings at night rather than being dragged up on the beach. If the wind shifted, we'd be playing bumper-boats with them, and the rule in anchorages is "last in, first out" if problems arise. That meant us.
	Oh well. Pretty as it was, we had other reservations as well. We'd heard that the village was characterized by hordes of pushy kids begging for candy and sodas from visitors. If you didn't have any, they'd show you right where to buy some. We'd already had a few kids come by Daybreak asking for handouts, hanging onto the rail, staring at me, and peering in the hull ports while Lynn was trying to emerge from a shower. That did it. I told them to shove off, and after much dawdling they did. We'd only been out of La Paz a week. We wanted solitude.
	Toward dusk the northerly wind waned, and veered . . . and waned . . . and veered . . . and Daybreak swung around to the evening zephyrs from the canyon until, by nine p.m., she was within two feet of the first panga. Though we were aching to go to bed, we decided not just to reanchor, but to leave. We would motor 21 miles north to Isla Danzante, a tricky, intricate passage, and use the full moon to advantage.
	The trip was lovely and uneventful, which is to say the wind was calm, the seas were mild, and we didn't hit anything. Even so, this short run was our most rock- and reef-strewn yet, and Lynn and I sat literally on the edge of our seats the whole time. Traveling at night near land is nerve-wracking. We spent four hours in strict eyeball navigation with binoculars, in blazing moonlight, while maintaining vigilant watch on the depth sounder and radar. We thought of our friends in the Full Moon Cruising Club, sleeping blissfully, at that moment, on bulletproof moorings back in Isthmus Cove at Catalina, while we were picking our way through treacherous foreign waters heading for a night landfall in a tiny, cliff-bound cove we had never seen before.
	In the entrance to the sound which lies between Isla Danzante and the mainland lie several rocky islets. One has three choices. The northern entrance is strewn with dangers, and the chart says "no passage" in big, bold letters. Forget that one. The central entrance is clean, but devoid of decent nearby landmarks and radar targets, making night entrance unattractive. One simply can't trust GPS alone outside the United States. There must be visual confirmation. The southern entrance, only 100 yards wide, lay between high, rocky Punta Candeleros and an off-lying pinnacle a hundred feet high. It had a charted least depth of twelve fathoms, but right next to it were the same words  "no passage" — but in smaller letters. We chose it. The chart guide author said he'd been through there in calm conditions and experienced "no problem". In daylight, of course.
	When one's depth sounder goes from over three hundred feet to seventy feet in about ten seconds, and you know the bottom is rock, it's pretty scary. I slammed the transmission into reverse, and we crept ahead at about one knot with black cliffs towering on both sides. Slowly the depth increased, and we began to breathe again. We ran on next to a string of rocky islets toward the anchorage at Honeymoon Cove, near the north end of the island. This tiny cove, once we found it, was steep-to and rock-bound, and already had three boats in it, in the only decent spots. We dropped the hook in forty-two feet, watched things for half an hour, crossed our fingers, and slept. It was two a.m., and fortunately there wasn't a breath of wind.
	Three miles across the sound from us lay the legendary "hurricane hole" of Puerto Escondido, which was reported to have "everything a cruiser wants" (groceries, beer, water, and laundry) but we were not ready to go there. Another day? Maybe two? The weather was spectacular. If I had been inclined, I could have sailed our dinghy over there and suffered nothing worse than sunburn. Bright sun, blue sky, five knots of breeze, zero swell, and one inch of chop . . . heaven. Have I said that before?
	Ah well. We were flushed out by a windshift. A front was beginning to encroach from the south, and we had to think about finding some real protection. We took the high tide just before sunset and moved across. Tide is important at Puerto Escondido because the entire harbor, a square mile in area, empties and fills through a slot sixty five feet wide and eight feet deep. Currents there run four knots. We slithered in just before high slack.
	The name means "hidden harbor", and it is a strange and fantastic place, the best storm anchorage in the whole Sea of Cortez. Roughly a mile by a half mile, plus side coves, it is totally landlocked. The entrance is protected by a natural hook of high, mountainous land, so that no swell can penetrate. The harbor is formed by a half-ring of steep hills jutting out from the land, forming a natural breakwater. The holding ground is phenomenal. But what grabs one's attention is the fantastic mountainous backdrop. The Sierra Giganta rises abruptly to a crest six thousand feet above the bay, layered and eroded like the Grand Canyon. Mountains dominate the scene.
	"Services" there consist of a trailer park at nearby Tripui (which is all there is to Tripui), where retired Americans rent spaces for their RVs or travel trailers under palapa roofs and live there on premises that boast a grocery store, restaurant, laundry, and swimming pool, all landscaped and manicured to appeal to SoCal gringos. A sort of Mexican mini-Leisure World for people who, I suppose, can't afford the "real thing" in Orange County, CA. We availed ourselves of the laundry service, leaving four loads to be done overnight, restocked on milk, beer, bread, and eggs, and carried our seventy-odd pounds of groceries a mile back to the harbor in canvas tote bags, thinking: there's got to be a better way to do this! During our stay we made that walk at least once a day.
	Craving still more exercise (?), we took a hike up a canyon into the mountains, hoping to find a rumored series of cacades and water falls. We walked three miles west, up the alluvial plain to the base of the Sierra Giganta escarpment, then half a mile of rough scrambling and bouldering into an imposing steep-walled watercourse, full of rocks as big as houses. We kept climbing until we found running water in the creek, with pools to wade and soak in. We were struck by the beauty of the canyon and by clear evidence of the tremendous power of the creek water when swollen by a heavy rain. We climbed through swirl basins, cut into the rock walls by flood water and stones, that could have swallowed a good-sized ranch house. We could see the high water mark thirty feet up the walls.
	Access to this area is controlled by a gate next to a small electrical substation. It isn't locked, but there's an elderly Yaqui indian guard who works for the local power company. You bring him a cold Coke, which you remember to buy at Tripui on your way up there, and after some polite small talk you ask him if he thinks it's a good day to hike up the canyon. After some further exchange (all in Spanish), he nods toward the gate but offers a warning: If you see clouds building up, get out of the canyon.

	In Puerto Escondido, as in La Paz, many cruisers seemed to have gotten "stuck". A few hang out on their boats, but most have abandoned them to rot in the desert sun while they return to the States for a few weeks, or months, or longer. Of the hundred-odd yachts anchored there, perhaps ten were occupied, and most of their owners had brought vehicles down from the States to make life more comfortable. They were not planning to sail away any time soon.
	Puerto Escondido is remote, gorgeous, and wild, whereas La Paz is urban, junky, and comparatively unattractive. This all made for a different "clientele" up north, consisting of cruisers who were looking for a quieter, more laid-back environment. They had certainly found it, and many of them split their time between the States and Baja, sometimes for years on end. The place was positively eerie with what one liveaboard named Jerry called "the ghost boats".
	Jerry and his ten year old son Eli had trailered their NorSea 27 Bre Anne Marie down from Puget Sound, launched her at San Carlos, sailed her the one hundred miles to Puerto Escondido, and then stopped. They'd been there for two years. There was a wife aboard too, but she left. Seems she actually did want to cruise, but Jerry was clearly going nowhere, so she hopped aboard another boat headed for Costa Rica. Eighteen months and seven thousand miles later as we were making our way up the Intracoastal Waterway toward the Chesapeake Bay, we made radio contact one evening with a vessel back in Puerto Escondido. We asked if Jerry, Eli, and Bre Anne Marie were still there. The answer was yes.
	Before we had left Los Angeles, we had wondered, "What will we do with all the time we'll have?" Jerry shared something he'd heard from an old Yaqui he'd met in Guaymas, who said, "When I woke up yesterday morning, I had nothing to do, and by nightfall I'd only gotten half of it done." That seemed about right. Some people think that if there's nothing pressing, like schedules and lists and "responsibilities", a person will just go to waste. It isn't true in general (though some do), but it took us a while to figure that out.
	Sometimes, during those first months in Mexico, I'd hear an insistent internal voice, pretending not to be mine, nattering at me that I should be working, getting something done, being productive. Probably the voice of my mother, dead several years by that time but still alive in my head. I squelched this voice mercilessly (as I had her, in life, now that I think about it), considering it a symptom of a cultural sickness I'd spent my whole life trying not to catch. Still it was gnawing at me, some obligation I could not fathom.
	This was annoying. Lynn and I had worked hard to be there. We'd saved our money, we'd paid our way, and we were doing with our lives exactly what we wanted to be doing. We owed nothing to anybody. We had the right. So why wouldn’t my mind shut up?
	America's founders were correct: we have a right to be free, but that does not make us free. We make ourselves free — or not. Being free was new for us. I had spent years wanting freedom, little knowing it could have been mine at any time had I simply become responsible for myself and my life. My father could have told me that — probably did — but easier said than done. Freedom is an uncommon condition for most people in the world, including Americans. We aren't necessarily free just because we live in this country. We just have the option. Look at it the other way around: if you're truly free, you have the option not to be. Being "not free" by choice is the way many of us normally live. Most of us.
	Something began to dawn on us slowly. Once you are free, there is a single question that looms out of the mist to dominate the mental landscape, and that question is: Now what? Because if no one else is running the show, whatever happens from one minute to the next happens because we choose it. That was what was gnawing at me.
	I saw then why I was aggravated. We'd not been gone three months, and already we were sidling up to the question of what comes after cruising. I wanted to protest that it was too soon, that I deserved more vacation, that I still had eighteen months and half a world yet to explore before facing it. But thoughts arise when their time comes. Besides, we'd gone cruising in the first place to confront this question.
	But there has to be a basis for the answer . . . like, what's the point of living? Not that we were the first to ask. Every philosopher in history has seen that if you knew the answer to that question, the rest would be easy. And like them, we had no clue. We could at least see that, short of being out there, being alone, being at peace, and being free even for the brief three months we had been, we would not have been in any state to address the question at all. When you're always busy running around in life, there's no time left to run your life.
	What time we had! The intensity of our cruising experiences put vacations and corporate retreats to shame. What a joke. If you ask the Director of Human Resources at any major corporation what the purpose of vacations is, you'll hear some malarkey about how they're meant to "refresh" employees, let them get away from the daily concerns of work for awhile so they can come back with renewed vigor — as if an employee's sole purpose in living were to work. Vacations are so you can work better? Spare me. Employers offer vacations for one reason and one reason only: because if they didn't, their employees would quit and go work for someone who did.
	Similarly, the ostensible purpose of retreats, such as Lynn used to conduct up in the SoCal mountains for corporate managers, is "to break up the cognitive reality in which a person may be 'stuck', and facilitate the re-emergence of enhanced creativity and originality". Sure, but only with respect to their work at that company. God forbid they should choose to get a different employer — or a different life. God forbid they should be enabled to rechoose to participate — or not. God forbid they should see their whole life, with all that re-emerging creativity, and maybe create their way the hell out of working at all. No. This is not what corporate retreats are for. Corporate retreats are only for employees who have already bought in totally, who have completely given up on having a "real" life, a life that does not involve work or professional "achievement".
	Aboard Daybreak we had a rare opportunity to see our lives from the bottom up. We felt privileged to be there, and to know that when we returned, whatever we chose would have been clearly our choice, ours alone, and would have been chosen from the widest perspective we could muster: a place where we were nothing but ourselves.
	The distinction between being out there vs. being back in a house, in a city, with a job and bills and debts and school for the kids, and cars and insurance and driver's licenses and property taxes and keys, and all the rest, could not have been more . . . well, distinct. It was going to be pretty hard to come up with something worth putting up with all that again. We'd have to, of course. There are a few aspects of civilization we're not willing to forego, such as antibiotics. Money is required. Pioneers or bush people we are not. But we started wanting to diminish our involvement in conventional civilization. We wanted to own less, spend less, and have our lives be about living, not about paying for it. We wanted to live a smaller, quieter life in a smaller, quieter place.
	I sat at the nav desk, alone aboard Daybreak, in a flat calm in Puerto Escondido, writing a letter. Lynn had taken the girls ashore. Stopping to listen, I heard only two sounds. One was the sound of the mouths of shrimp, feeding on the bay floor beneath the boat, a sort of crackling sound like pebbles knocking together in a stream, a sound that comes up through the bottom of one's hull almost everywhere one anchors. The other was the sound of a dinghy motor puttering across the bay half a mile away.
	A few moments later the dinghy motor was gone, and there arose the sound of a distant truck, out on the highway two miles away. One truck. It passed. A few moments later, I just barely heard a voice on shore a quarter mile away. Very brief, one or two words. I sat very still for a quarter of an hour, listening, incredulous. I was hearing sounds one at a time. In such an environment, it was so wonderful to be a human being!
	 Cruising, for us, was turning into an object lesson in how little one can have, and spend, and still have a fine life. Just a fine life.

	Even a fine life, of course, has its problems. Reality broke our bubble again. The engine cooling problems had returned with a vengeance.
	The symptoms were these. The engine would overheat, getting worse and worse until we had to remove and clean out the heat exchanger — not a fun task, since this involved removing the oil filter. What a mess. Bad design. This task became necessary about every three or four weeks. During this time the zinc anode inside the heat exchanger would dissolve to nothing and need to be replaced. The prop shaft zinc was also eroding too quickly. In addition, the starter solenoid seemed to be failing. It worked about half the time. When the solenoid worked, the starter was slow, even with all five batteries on line. And finally, the batteries appeared to have less than half their rated capacity, requiring a daily recharge when they should have been lasting three days.
	So, amateur sleuths, what do you suppose was the cause of ALL these maladies, about which severally we had been worried for weeks? One goddamned electrical connection! What kind of world is this? I mean, what reasonable person would look in the electrical system for a cooling problem?
	The bad contact was the main battery ground cable where it attached to the motor at a rear engine mount bracket, invisible and inaccessible, "out of sight, out of mind". This corroded connection presented an electrical resistance, so whenever current tried to flow in or out of the batteries, it saw a difficult path and went looking for an easier one, which it found: out through the bronze through-hull fittings via the bonding system, through the sea water to the prop shaft as well as up the raw water intake to the heat exchanger, thence to the engine block. Some fraction of all the electrical current in the boat, charging and discharging, was traveling right through those two zincs. How much current? Something like forty amp-hours per day, most of it through a puny engine zinc a third of an inch in diameter and one inch long, causing massive disintegration. Chunks of zinc were coming adrift and migrating through the cooling system. Worse, a sort of "sludge" of electrolyzed zinc and salt water was forming in the heat exchanger, so that even if a catastrophic blockage did not occur, the heat exchanger passages slowly gunked up, causing the rise in engine temperature. On top of all this, lights were dim, pumps ran slow, and the starter motor could barely turn the engine — which is a pretty bad on a diesel because, unlike with gasoline motors, the speed at which the starter motor turns the main motor is directly related to the likelihood of it starting. Since starting was taking longer, the batteries worked harder each time and had to be charged more often, so the engine had to be started more often, and so the batteries . . . you get the picture. All this from one rusty connection. The same cruising friend who had once said "Cruising is not child's play" had also said "It gets tiring sometimes running your own city."
	Had we not solved this problem, the stray current (after annihilating the zincs) would have eaten through the heat exchanger itself, and we weren't carrying a spare because they cost $400. Perhaps, we mused, we should reconsider.
	So when does the cruising start, we wondered? You know, the lazy carefree days, lying around in the sun, dangling our toes in the surf, gazing up at cloud shapes . . .
	Maybe it's like getting married. The first few months are hell on wheels, but after that you sort of get used to each other, accommodate each other's quirks, settle down, stop doing the things that cause trouble . . . something like that. We hoped so. We had two choices: we could say "Hey, wait a minute! This is not what we had in mind when we said we wanted to go cruising!" Which is how fledgling cruisers give up, go back home disappointed, and leave their boats in la-la land to rot. Or we could say "Oh I see. This is what we had in mind when we said we wanted to go cruising." Which is how fledgling cruisers turn into bronzed, capable, experienced cruisers. Take your pick.
	Breathing a sigh of relief that the starter did not need replacement, we fixed the bad ground connection, cleaned out the cooling system again, and figured we finally had the cooling problems solved. In time we would learn that this was not true. Half-solved, more like. Meantime, we moved on to Puerto Ballandra and then Caleta Santispac, inside Bahia Concepción, a skinny twenty three mile long slash into the Baja coastline halfway up the Sea of Cortez. To escape the engine work we dinghied over to a small island outside the cove where I snorkeled for butter clams at a place we'd been told about by a friend. In three feet of water, I could reach down and fan away a layer of sand with my hand, and there they were, stacked in tidy rows like cookies in a package. Just pick 'em up and toss 'em in a bucket. In half an hour I got thirty clams about two inches across, which we took home, steamed, and ate with melted butter. Mmm. Not bad. The kids weren't having any. More for the rest of us.

	We got no further up the Sea of Cortez. We'd been intending to haul the boat at San Carlos and paint the bottom, but then we heard that the yard there had a one month waiting list. We didn't have a month. (Heh heh. I know, that sounds silly.) We also had to meet our new windlass battery, ordered via SSB radio from San Diego, which was due in La Paz in a week. That place seemed to have a grip on us. We turned disappointedly southward.
	Heading out early in a mild northerly wind, perfect for us, we sailed until just shy of Isla Coronado, twenty miles from Puerto Escondido. Dropping sail, we motored close by the east side of the island, right at sunset, halfheartedly trolling a medium sized lure we'd been dragging around ever since San Diego without success — when WHIIIIIIZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!! went the reel and I lunged to kill the throttle and grab the pole. An epic and adrenalized struggle ensued. While the boat idled along, I cranked in two hundred feet of fishing line inch by inch, hoping that neither the rod, the reel, nor the fifty-pound line would break. Something large and strong was struggling mightily for its freedom at the other end. I had the brake engaged as far as I dared, yet that fish was still pulling line out. Most of the time I couldn't crank for fear I'd bend the handle!
	After half an hour of back-straining effort, there next to the boat was a very large fish, all silvery and mean and angry. In the midst of cranking we'd invented a hasty plan for getting the thing aboard. Lynn would get her leather gardening gloves on, and as I brought the fish amidships she would reach down, grab the leader, and "yank the fish aboard". When she tried this, nothing happened. She couldn't lift it! Meanwhile the fish was thrashing to get off that hook and flee. After three tries, Lynn finally used both hands, took a wrap around her glove, gave a mighty heave like a hammer throw in the Olympics, and swung that fish up over the lifelines like a pro. What we had caught, we discovered after consulting our book, was a yellowfin tuna three and a half feet long and weighing a good forty pounds. We shoved it up inside the coaming, tied it down with a length of line, and motored on to Puerto Escondido as night fell.
	Hours later, finally at anchor and with the girls asleep, Lynn and I hunkered down in the evening dew on the starboard sidedeck and fileted that monster under the deck light, using for guidance our Sunset Magazine Fish and Shellfish Cooking Guide. It took an hour, and we ended up with four gallon-sized Ziploc freezer bags crammed with filets and steaks. Easily twenty pounds of meat, worth fifteen bucks a pound in L.A.'s Japanese fish markets. Paid for the rod and reel. Another like it would pay for the fishing license.
	Our fridge being nothing to brag about, we needed help eating all that fish. Next evening, with eight people over for dinner, we barbecued the contents of one of those Ziploc bags to feed them all. Barbecued unseasoned, eaten with fresh lime, never had we experienced fish so pure and delicate. Before turning south again in the morning, we gave away two more bags. It took four days for us to finish the fourth bag. We ate barbecued fish, fried fish in butter with lemon and dill, fried rice with fish, fish tacos, fish and veggie salad, pasta salad with fish, and every bit of it was great. We hoped it would not be three more months until we caught another one.
	Three days later we were back at anchor off El Mogote peninsula in La Paz, in RAIN, RAIN, RAIN! Ah, La Paz, again. We only planned to be there a few days, long enough to check in and out, reprovision, buy a few odds and ends, and find the shipment from San Diego. Then we'd be off to Puerto Vallarta — the mainland at last, and out in the "real ocean" again. It was time to make tracks south. We had sixty one days left in which to go 1850 miles. The rest of Mexico was going to go by in something of a blur.
	We'd been cruising for three months, and it seemed as if we'd gotten over some kind of hurdle. Our routines were becoming second nature, and the boat had truly become home, more like a background than a constant, insistent presence. The kids were happy and at ease. Roxanne especially was showing interest in getting involved in more "boat stuff" on her own, like rowing the dinghy and using the VHF radio. She and Tania had taken several dinghy expeditions ashore without us, with Roxanne responsible for rowing, beaching, setting out the anchor, taking care of both her own and Tania's life jackets, and using the handheld radio to keep us informed. She was not yet seven. We watched with pride and satisfaction. It really is wonderful watching your children grow up.
	Banderas Bay, wherein lies Puerto Vallarta, is 378 sea miles from La Paz, and in leaving Baja the jump is more than just distance. In Baja, the U.S. is still close. You can get back by plane, by car, by bus, or even by thumb. Had Daybreak suffered anything dire, she could have been trucked back to California from San Carlos, and we could have repaired her and started again. While we hadn't yet thought much about these things, they began to become clear as we contemplated the jump to the mainland.
	Everything would get harder there except the sailing. Fewer people would speak English. Anchorages would be farther apart and less protected. Provisioning, already a chore, would become more difficult and more expensive. The people were rumored to be less friendly. Getting a boat fixed there would be more of a problem, and getting one back to the States would a long, long trip. But we were as ready as we were going to get, and if nothing else, we'd learned that we could fix things, when we had to, as long as we could somehow get parts. We were comfortable with each other and with Daybreak, in spite of her faults, and for that matter, our own. We knew we could deal with at least moderately bad weather, which there wouldn't be much of in spring on the mainland.
	The Gold Coast. The Mexican Riviera. Where, legend had it, the climate was warm and life was sweet. We dearly hoped so, because for us it was going to be a one-way trip.

Chapter 7
The Mexican Gold Coast

	We left La Paz as planned, a victory of sorts in itself, and made two day hops down to Los Frailes before jumping off for Puerto Vallarta. The northerlies were in full cry again, and we screamed downwind to Ensenada de los Muertos the first day, rocking and rolling rail to rail in the short, steep, quartering seas, side by side with Don and Eileen on Moonrise who were planning to go to Mazatlan. Moonrise took a lay day prior to their crossing while we bustled on down to Los Frailes in seven foot swells topped with three foot breaking seas. We spent a lay day of our own at Frailes, getting some rest and relaxation before the jump-off. Having collected our wits and cooked up some grab-and-eat "passage food", we set off in the morning for Banderas Bay, 275 miles southeast across the mouth of the Sea of Cortez.
	The moon was full that night. The sky was clear. The Sea of Cortez northerly wind, common in winter and spring, presses hard up against the mountains of Baja California in those parts but moderates, fifty miles east, to a balmy, delightful breeze and stays that way nearly to the Mexican mainland. Or at least, so it did for us.
	A fluky atmospheric phenomenon called a "skip" settled in which enabled VHF radio communication, normally limited to twenty or thirty miles, to propagate clear as a bell for over two hundred miles. We were in perfect communication with vessels all over the lower Sea of Cortez as well as in Mazatlan. Moonrise, enroute to Mazatlan, stayed in contact all night over distances ranging from seventy to one hundred and fifty miles. Cruisers at anchor in Mazatlan harbor, two hundred miles away, chimed in to chat and pass the time in the late afternoon. As the sun settled slowly into the dusty ocher haze on the western horizon behind us, to the east a swollen, burning, supernatural moon materialized above the pastel sea, sending its glittering light across the miles of empty, placid water. Lynn and I looked at each other. Moonrise in paradise.
	I had to say it. Picking up the microphone, I called:
	"Moonrise, Moonrise, this is Daybreak, how copy?"
	"Loud and clear," replied Don.
	"Have you taken a look at what's up in front of your bow?"
	Remaining true to his habitual persona of inveterate, unemotional detachment which, as for many men, is far from the truth for him, Don made the reply I had heard a thousand times:
	"Affirmative on that."
	Almost afraid to breathe for fear of shattering the moment, under full sail we glided effortlessly over soft, quiet, pinkish-orange seas, the light from the effulgent moon raining down on us like a benediction, the sun behind us acquiescing to the familiar evening tug of the western horizon. It was so beautiful either way, we didn't know which way to turn.
	It was T-shirt and shorts weather, sandals, no socks, not the slightest chill. Daybreak was tracking along on autopilot as if she were on rails. The ocean swell was slow and easy, the breeze was warm and balmy, the bow wave swished and swushed, the quarter wave gurgled. Dinner was consumed sedately while sitting down below at the main salon table, as if we were on a cruise ship — unheard of on a small sailboat at sea. Roxanne and Tania slipped into their accustomed berths forward, it being unnecessary in such benign conditions to relegate them to the cabin floor. As Lynn came on deck for the first watch of the night, I went off watch reluctantly to find some sleep — and it was so beautiful.
	What, we found ourselves wondering, is there to do with all that beauty?
	Nothing.
	Of all things, nothing. It goes against every expectation we have that nothing feels different when the world is so beautiful, life so perfect. Our bodies still sat on the cockpit rail, the wood pressing against our bottoms as always. Our lungs still breathed, in and out, in and out, just the same. Our voices did not sound different. We did not become suddenly thinner, or stronger, or prettier. Our warts and wrinkles did not dissolve or even briefly fade. The boat did not sparkle, or glow, or rise up and glide above the water. We were not transfixed, or transported, or filled with a different spirit. God did not speak. We were not fluttery of heart. Minor ailments did not magically disappear. We were palpably human in a palpably physical world, just like you, right now, sitting wherever you're sitting as you read this, and yet life that night was as good as life ever gets.
	As good as it ever gets.
	It seemed to us there should be a message in that. Wanting, like most humans, to become masters of our living, we always look for whatever there might be to discover. Maybe, we conjectured, life is always that good, and we're just too stupid, or paying too little attention, to notice. Maybe perfect beauty and bliss just don't grab us by the throat and shake us into consciousness the way we think they ought to. Maybe paradise is not prone to dramatic entrances. Maybe we have to already be awake or we miss it. Who knows? What got clear to us that night is that when paradise shows up, life doesn't feel any different. So if life doesn't feel any different in paradise, what is paradise?
	Hmm. Good question.
	Paradise, it seems, is not a place. It has something to do with being human.
	At daybreak, naturally, Don and Eileen had to offer a reciprocal comment. The atmospheric skip, which would fade like a dream after sunrise, was still working. Don’s voice, having traveled over a hundred miles across the Sea of Cortez, rang clearly from the radio.
	"Daybreak, Daybreak, this is Moonrise. Do you see what's coming up off your port bow?"
	Affirmative on that.

	Paradise comes and goes. We weren't able to sail the whole way. Had to motor some. Not too fast, though. The motor was overheating again, and badly. Sigh. We were going to have to find a marina, because we hated to tear the motor apart while at anchor. Too exposed.
	We came down past the Tres Marias Islands (a Mexican penal colony) during the second night out, and in the morning whatever paradise remained dissolved abruptly as an insistent little northeasterly blew down off the mainland. After hardening up little by little all morning and grinding in three reefs, we screamed in past Punta de Mita, at the mouth of Banderas Bay, on a close reach with spray raking the decks. The whole area off the point was crawling with surf, eight to ten foot steaming, hissing peaks in a twenty knot offshore wind. Real surf. We took this insanity to port and entered literally between a rock and a hard place, at which point the wind died as if we'd sailed behind a wall. Reluctantly we dropped sail and motored — slowly, with the engine temperature above two hundred degrees — to the roadstead off La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. (Yeah, right. La Cruz for short.) But hark, what's this? Not 200 yards from where we anchored was a tiny one-person point break of waves that had refracted around Punta de Mita. What a way to end a passage. It was one p.m. and hot. So naturally, I went surfing.
	No more talk of options. We were southbound for sure, to Costa Rica and then Panama, through the Canal, and into the Caribbean. No turning back. With hurricane season just around the corner, coming to Puerto Vallarta meant we had locked out the option of spending the summer north of the hurricane belt. The next big jump-off point would be the infamous, gale-ridden Gulf of Tehuantepec, followed immediately by the long passage around Guatemala,  El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The banana republics. The "bad countries".
	We'd pretty much learned to deal with Daybreak. Her strong point was certainly light air off the wind, but her weak point was heavy air anything, especially beating. As strong and weak points go, these were very pronounced. She's a one-trick pony. Off the wind, we would pass everybody. On the wind, everybody passed us. So we did the obvious: we dealt with her weaknesses and flaunted her strengths. You gotta take what satisfaction there is in life.
	To the extent that we could follow their progress secondhand through SSB radio reports, Rick and Hele on Mañana, the ones with the itinerary, appeared to be actually sticking to it, something of a foreign concept for us. We'd aimed for Christmas in La Paz, and missed it. Then we tried New Year's in La Paz. Missed that. We wanted to go north to San Felipe. Gave it up. We finally said we'd settle for San Carlos before heading south. Didn't make that one either.
	Ah, but now we had an itinerary too. I’d sat down that day and written one on the computer. We figured we'd catch Mañana in Manzanillo, 150 miles to the south. If we could get our motor fixed. To that end, we moved to the marina at Nuevo Vallarta.

	Picture this. We're tied up in a small, placid, utterly protected marina three degrees south of the Tropic of Cancer. We're drinking ice-cold margaritas in tall, long-stemmed glasses in the shade of our new cockpit awning. It is 90º with a mild breeze to cool us off. We just got back from the swimming pool at a nearby hotel, adjacent to the marina, complete with one of those swim-up bars and a row of tiled, contoured lounging niches lying in about six inches of water on a shelf at the pool's edge. Earlier Roxanne and I had gone surfing at the beach outside the marina. And to top it all off, another California cruising family lay three slips away for our girls to play with. Everyone was in heaven!
	Four days later: so much for plans and itineraries.
	Nuevo Vallarta is actually kind of a mudhole dug out of a swamp. Its entrance channel has a sandbar across it, creating breaking waves that make life really interesting. Don't try it at low tide. The marina, several miles north of Puerto Vallarta, was the focal point of a new commercial development, still under construction when we were there, and therefore cheap: eight bucks a day including water, electricity, and showers.
	Behind the marina was a residential development on man-made canals, which we explored by dinghy. The homes ranged in size from modest bungalows to "Miami Vice" palaces, all with private docks. The spring climate there was pretty hard to beat! Some of the larger homes had huge outdoor living areas, complete with couches, arm chairs, coffee tables, and so on, with a palm-thatched roof for shade and rain protection, but no walls. In that climate, it made perfect sense. With afternoon temperatures around ninety, in the shade with the sea breeze blowing it was just lovely.
	We had planned to be there two days, then move to Marina Vallarta (the "high rent district", $16 a day, but where it was possible to get a bus to downtown), and then head south two days after that. But in the heat of the day, boat work takes longer than anticipated, and we tended to take refuge over at the pool or in some other cool pursuit. Crawling back into the engine compartment and pulling off the heat exchanger didn't fall in that category.
	We did finally get to it, though, and to our great surprise there was nothing inside except some greenish goo. On the coolant side. Strange, I thought. Probably just some residual antifreeze, though why it should have been slimy and glutinous, like warm jello, I certainly had no idea. Nothing on the raw water side, no zinc chunks, no cruddy gray deposits, nothing. Not that there should have been. We'd theoretically fixed that problem, and the zinc was fine. So why was the engine still overheating?
	We would not discover the cause for another five months (at which time the green goo would at last be explained), and when we did, we would be dumbstruck by its absurdity. We had a truly pathological cooling problem. A demon lived deep in Daybreak's bowels.
	Ignoring the demon temporarily, we attended to other business, which that day meant laundry, at a modern, utterly deserted laundromat in a small, nearly empty mini-mall just across from our dock. How convenient. The next day we moved to Marina Vallarta to do our shopping. We had considered hauling the boat there (at the Opequimar boatyard — boy, some of the names around there. It’s pronounced Oh-PECK-ee-mar), but to save time and money we decided to skip it and keep scrubbing the bottom ourselves until Costa Rica. We'd be holed up there for two or three months anyway. Besides, now that we were in warm water, scrubbing wouldn't be as big a problem. We thought.
	This much was getting pretty clear: the world is BIG. We were a long ways away from where we had started, but on the globe we'd barely left the U.S. In fact, culturally there was still a lot of the U.S. lying around. It was also clear that, global distances being what they are, one can't expect to get very far "harbor-hopping" without taking a very long time doing it. Multi-day passages were going to be necessary, and every one we took moved us so much farther along, it was a shock. Puerto Vallarta and La Paz are as different as night and day, even though they're in the same country. We couldn't possibly know what to expect in Costa Rica.

	Heading south on a gorgeous day, our hearts (and wallets) were light because we had finally mailed off our income taxes. Capital gains on the house sale, penalties on the early IRA withdrawals — it was like getting gut-punched. The IRS took over a year's worth of cruising. But now it was over. Taxwise, we'd be poverty cases from there on out. Smug in that thought, we motored around Cabo Corrientes to pick up the afternoon sea breeze, which sent us broad-reaching on down to Punta Ipala. The motor worked fine, thanks to our repairs, though for how long was anyone's guess.
 	With hurricane season pressing, cruisers were starting to move with real purpose. We began to realize that in cruising anything can happen, and when it does, you can lose two or three weeks. We'd spent a month in and around La Paz dealing with all the problems that percolated to the surface. But hurricane season was like a ticking bomb: it would go off. The question was where we'd be when it did. We needed to build some slack into our schedule.
	This led us to shoot for Costa Rica by May 22nd, ten days prior to the season, and we included a two-week waiting period at Bahia Huatulco in case of gales in the Gulf of Tehuantepec. The Gulf experiences gale force winds, in excess of thirty knots, something like three hundred days a year. We had 64 more days to travel 1400 nautical miles and attempt to see some sights along the way, plenty of time if no glitches occurred.
	The utter non-negotiability of this deadline had me concerned enough that I broke down and upgraded my new computer itinerary to a day-by-day schedule — with daily updates. That little red sticky-note of Mañana's finally convinced me to stop playing "que sera, sera" and start managing things. It was time we really knew where we stood. I was tired of flying blind. It wouldn't be "laid back cruising", but cruising wasn't turning out to be all that laid back anyway, and we'd discovered that if we didn't keep on pushing, everything would just grind to a halt. We had to start keeping score somehow. This computerized daily itinerary would become a habit that would serve us extraordinarily well for the rest of our voyage. We were already doing the same thing with money, another cruising reality of which one must remain diligently aware. Time and money. Sigh. Free as we were, cruising had not made us exempt.
	We had a glorious sail from Ipala south to Chamela, motorsailing through the windless morning that is normal on that coast, reminiscent of southern California, then sailing the last 25 miles on a broad reach in a building afternoon sea breeze. We made our approach wing-and-wing in eighteen knots of wind, and then gybed the mizzen over and beam-reached through the entrance at eight and a half knots with both sails flagging, all on a beautifully sunny, blue-sky day, with sparkling blue water, fish everywhere, and Daybreak the only boat in sight. Spectacular.
	That night, in water filled with brilliant phosphorescence, there were thousands of small fish all around us. If we stamped our foot on the deck, they'd stampede in all directions, and the ocean beneath the boat would explode in a bright green glow! The little critters had limited brain power, but they knew enough to flee when something large was nearby, and since large creatures make large glows, they ran from any glow. They jumped clear out of the water for a hundred feet on all sides of us when I shined a flashlight out on the water. Late in the evening some dolphins came through to feed, and the entire drama was illuminated in a black sea by bright streaking green tracks. Life and death happened fast down there.
	We moved on after spending a lay day exploring the beach — nice, but too developed. We were a few days' sailing away from the fabled Las Hadas resort, where the movie "10" was filmed, if you remember that one — Bo Derek's first and last hurrah. Every West Coast cruiser knew about the place and it drew them like a magnet. That alone was enough to motivate me to avoid it, but Lynn wanted to go there and pretend to be rich and pampered.
	Most of our decisions on where to go got made on the basis of hearsay, because that's about all we had: the opinions of people who had personally been to a place, or something someone had heard from someone else, or short write-ups in cruising guides, which either bore little resemblance to what was actually there or were written by someone with tastes unlike ours. It was a crap shoot every time. We'd almost have been better off with no information at all.
	Here is the sort of detailed information we were generally able to pick up before actually arriving someplace. Las Hadas, we had heard, started out as an exclusive private fantasy resort but had gone public because it was losing money. It was reported to have a 10% occupancy rate, which is actually about normal for Mexico. As a result, the management had become less discriminating about who used the swimming pool in the hope of selling a few drinks to the interlopers. The pool itself was said to rank as the eighth wonder of the world, sprawling all over the place, with waterfalls, and bridges, and islands that were home to live iguanas. (What?) Word had it that cruisers could enjoy the pool if they weren't too obvious about it, which meant (Rule #1) buy a drink or two and, believe it or not, (Rule #2) don't bring a colored towel. The paying guests, you see, would have pure white towels supplied by the resort, and if you had something else, it would be pretty obvious you hadn't paid to be there, which would annoy everyone. On the other hand, if you stayed in their marina for twenty bucks (for a med-moor), you could use the pool "legally" and have your very own white towel as part of the deal. If you violated this unwritten, unspoken no-colored-towel rule, they'd simply charge you nine bucks a night to be anchored where you were anchored, and then give you white towels! This fee was illegal, of course — Las Hadas didn't own the anchorage — but the Manzanillo Port Captain, who had jurisdiction, liked the idea, so the point was moot. The establishment line was that, since anchored yachts enjoyed the bit of lee created by the marina's breakwater, they should pay to be there — but only if your towels offended someone. This is the most basic Mexican behavioral rule: if you keep a low profile, which includes not asking what the rules are, no problem. If you ask if there is a fee for anchoring, then there is. Otherwise, not. Really. With the exceptions of drugs and murder, no one cares what you do in Mexico as long as, well, no one cares. In other words, as long as you do it unobtrusively.
	Two events that had taken place in La Paz illustrate this. In the first, some thefts had occurred during Carnival. The police there like to say that theft almost never occurs in La Paz, but when it does, it's either gringos or mainland Mexicans. In this case, they did nothing until they received complaints about the thefts, even though they already knew what had happened, knew who'd done it, and knew where the loot was. Turned out it actually was Mexicans from the mainland, whom the police had been watching since the moment they'd walked off the Topolobampo ferry.
	In the second episode, several La Paz businesses were making a practice of advertising their services over VHF marine radio, and had even been invited by the cruiser radio net controllers to make short announcements during the morning net. Many businesses did this — taxis, restaurants, local marine services — all of which was illegal, because shore-based marine radios are only legal in Mexico when connected with ocean-based operations, like fishing boats, ferries, cargo ships, and the like. Even so, not until a local pizza joint began taking pizza orders over the radio for delivery to foreign boats in Marina de La Paz did anyone complain, at which point the Mexican Board of Tourism stepped in, suspended the pizza joint's radio license, and confiscated their radio . . . but no one else's. Everyone laid low for awhile, and next morning the net controller made placatory noises about the non-commercial nature of the net and how it was for cruiser "health and welfare"  traffic only. A week later everything was back to normal — except for the poor pizza joint.
	In both cases, action was taken only in response to a complaint, and then only against the named offender, even though all the other offenders' identities were perfectly well known. This is because in Mexico the police keep the peace, while in the U.S. they enforce the law. BIG distinction. In Mexico, enforcement is discretionary. You're not an offender unless someone is offended, you see. It's almost as if it's the complaint that disturbs the peace, not the offense. Peace, to a Mexican cop, seems to mean sitting at his desk sipping a nice cup of coffee without having the phone ring, an unjust but actually rather pragmatic definition.
	Relationship and manners count for everything in Mexico. Cordiality is expected, and almost no one is ever overtly surly. Contrast that with any large U.S. city. The bonds and obligations of friendship are valued and honored, and they thread through all business and commercial relationships. In the U.S., some antagonism between salesperson and customer is considered natural and inevitable. After all, they're trying to get your money, so you have to guard it and be shrewd, because money is what life's about, right? Mexicans want your money too, but the interchange tends to be based on friendliness, not distrust. Politeness and concern for honor in the transaction are important. Of course, some of that is changing as more gringos visit. After all, gringos want gringo-style value and service for their gringo dollars, so naturally the places they frequent take on a gringo flavor.
	This left us feeling sad and embarrassed. After all, we are the intruders. In Mexican waters, foreign vessels vastly outnumber Mexican. We dominate their airwaves. We jam their harbors and anchorages, which, until we came, were empty and blissful and serene and perfect, just right for a panga or two and some simple fishing (any fishing from a panga is simple). Americans don't own the place, and the culture we bring with us and share among ourselves is not Mexican culture. Cruisers are like a floating civilization, an armada on their shores, and as such we have more control over how the relationship goes than most of us will admit. This being so, every cruiser counts, and everything he does counts. After all, unlike the Mexicans, we choose to go there and have that relationship. The Mexicans are simply stuck with it. Given this fact, the Mexicans we met were amazingly outgoing.

	At Bahia Tenacatita, 28 miles down the coast from Chamela, we began to catch on to the "Mexican Riviera" weather pattern. As sunset would inflame the western sky each evening, we would find ourselves saying "Today has been lovely. Just like yesterday." It’s the mantra of the Gold Coast. We hadn't reefed the sails since the morning we entered Banderas Bay, and on Daybreak that's saying something. Nor had the wind been forward of the beam. We sailed wing-and-wing again coming down the coast, then came up to a bustling eight-knot beam reach entering the bay. We dropped the hook in 14 feet, sand, right next to a creek that reportedly meandered through a mangrove swamp to a village with some excellent waterfront restaurants. We left ourselves just enough swinging room to stay clear of the beach. 
	That night on the SSB radio we found God . . . or, at least, someone performing such a valuable service for cruisers, he might as well been. His name was Herb Hilgenberg and he lived in Bermuda, where he had a boat called Southbound II. Every night for three hours he forecast the weather for individual vessels anywhere from 100 degrees west longitude all the way to the Mediterranean. That included the Gulf of Tehuantepec, so suddenly we were interested. All you had to do was make contact, give your location and destination, report your present conditions, and he'd give you a tailored prognosis.
	He'd been doing this for years. We listened as he gave a detailed forecast to a vessel headed across the Tehuantepec, another to a vessel wishing to travel east from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, a third to a boat traveling north from Panama to the Yucatan, and so on for three solid hours. In several cases, he preempted their report of on-site conditions by predicting what they would say: wind speed and direction vs. time throughout the day, wave heights, swell directions, and barometric pressure to within one millibar. This guy was GOOD! One vessel called in to report having just crossed to Bequia from the Pitons, to which Herb replied immediately,
	"Windy day, wasn't it? About 25 knots, broad reach, full cloud cover, eight foot seas on the port quarter?"
	"Um, yeah Herb, that's exactly right."
	We would definitely be making use of this guy.
	[Herb, a Canadian citizen, was transferred by his company in 1995 to the Toronto area, where he continues to provide this valuable service free of charge.]

	Paradise did not last. We never did get to visit those creekside restaurants, and our quiet spot in the corner of the cove quickly became a deathtrap. At 3:30 a.m. a set of large "sneaker" waves came into the bay, one of which literally threw Daybreak like a softball, a hundred feet toward shore to a point right over her anchor. If we did not act instantly, another such wave would throw us shoreward of the anchor and smack into the impact zone of breakers such as we had not seen in months. We bolted out of bed, had the motor started in seconds, and got that anchor up as fast as we could in the pitch black of a moonless night in a crowd of other boats. Thank God for radar and big flashlights stashed within easy reach. We reanchored in thirty five feet and returned to a fitful sleep, after waiting an hour for the adrenalin to ebb. 
	The remaining morning hours were calm and placid until 9:00 a.m., when megalithic swells started sweeping through the anchorage, instantly imperiling every boat in the bay. The effect was electric. Within two minutes everyone had raised anchor and was milling around outside the cove in fifty feet of depth, wondering what to do. Most reanchored in the deeper water, while we and another vessel headed to the other side of the bay in search of shelter. We found some, briefly, but the afternoon westerly soon reached twenty knots and quickly generated three feet of wind chop — not dangerous, but bumpy as hell and no fun for the anchor tackle. So back we went, trading bumpiness for swell, reanchored in fifty feet of depth in ten foot swells, and spent a mostly sleepless night.
	Why did we do this? Because Tenacatita was reputed to be the most beautiful place on the entire Mexican mainland, and we didn't want to miss it. Here is an example of the occasional uselessness of local information. Unable to leave the boat, unable to land a dinghy on the beach, and uncomfortable besides, yet hoping that the swell would pass, we spent a long, vertiginous day watching rollers literally the size of entire freight trains hiss and thunder around the point less than half a mile away, then surge through the anchorage like prehistoric predators, looking for something to kill. After 24 hours of fear and discomfort, we finally gave it up. We'd heard of a lagoon twelve miles further south which would afford complete protection, if we could get inside through the breakers. We’d also heard that a vessel in there had a four year old boy aboard, and with Roxanne about to have a birthday, we decided to forego the rumored pleasures of Tenacatita and head for Barra de Navidad.
	Barra means "bar", as in sandbar, and at the lagoon entrance that's exactly what we found. We had timed it for high tide, but nonetheless it was an impressive and daunting sight. A pair of submerged rocks lay to starboard in the entrance, with waves breaking on them. Further inside to port lay a very shallow sandbar, also with breaking waves. Carl, a friendly cruiser and father of the rumored four-year-old, came out to assist us by taking soundings in his dinghy, and found there was seven feet of water in a forty-foot-wide channel between the tip of the inner sandbar and the rocks opposite. Daybreak draws four and a half feet. The channel was a maelstrom during the larger sets, utterly impossible, in fact fatal. In those waves the outer sandbar was breaking hollow, top-to-bottom, six feet or more.
	Then a lull occurred between sets, so we quickly asked Carl by VHF to park his dinghy in the middle of the inner channel so we could aim for him after passing the outer rocks — and off we went! Throttle up to the stop, we picked up a five foot wave and surfed it over the first bar and past the rocks at nine knots, followed by a hard turn to starboard to miss the inner sandbar, then hard to port around its tip to miss the rock wall opposite as we fell off the back of the wave — and we were through! Carl had just managed to dodge us as we barreled by. Must have been quite a sight from his vantage point. Thank heaven for shoal draft and helpful cruisers! Suddenly we were in quiet water. After Tenacatita, what a blessed relief it was.
	We Med-moored to the rocky breakwater between two other boats in an unfinished marina basin (no docks), with a wide Amazon-looking river astern and a large condo project under construction in front of our bow. Dusty and noisy, but . . . calm. A quarter mile away across the lagoon was a sleepy farm town with a tired little hotel at the water's edge, complete with an aging swimming pool sporting the classic swim-up bar, and they welcomed anyone who would order a drink or two. It was 1:00 p.m. Happy "hour" was 2:00 to 6:00 every day.
	We wasted no time slipping into our bathing suits and joining the caravan of dinghies over to the hotel, and tied up a few feet from the edge of the pool. Rather strange margaritas and excellent piña coladas were two for 8,000 pesos ($2.60). Mexican happy hours are invariably "two-for-one", which does not mean half price. It means you get two. The first is for thirst, the second is for flavor. You drink 'em fast before the ice melts, and the alcohol hits hard in the heat. After five or six, the day's worries tend to fade in the haze. Lynn and I started looking at each other like newlyweds.
	We lazed the afternoon away in this fashion. A ladder leaned up against one of the nearby coconut palms. If you wanted a coconut, you climbed up and got one. If that tree ran out, you moved the ladder to the next tree. The girls were using them in the pool like beachballs. What a life! This hotel may have been seedy by California standards, but in the sleepy Mexican town of Barra de Navidad it ranked three stars at least. We ate the place up.
	If it weren't for word-of-mouth, we'd never have known there was anything to miss at Tenacatita. Its river mouth was so well hidden behind a rocky outcrop, we'd never have seen it short of literally stumbling into it. We'd not have known there was a restaurant up that river, with blue pillars, facing the water, where they'd serve you a fish "rollo" with shrimp inside, wrapped in bacon, for $8.00. We'd simply have said "yuchh" because of the swell and bailed out immediately. Instead we spent an uncomfortable, dangerous 24 hours hoping the swell would die, and when it didn't, we ended up leaving anyway. After all that, Barra was flat-out paradise, even if prevailing wisdom deemed it only so-so. We were discovering that it was wise to tune out much of what we heard, and make our own judgments with our own eyes. We hadn't the time to wait out bad conditions. Passing through is not like living there. Short of spending three or four months in that single one hundred-mile stretch of the Gold Coast, a more balanced perspective was simply not available.
	We soaked up all of Barra de Navidad that we could in three days, and left for Las Hadas.

	Las Hadas was huge, and as fancy-schmancy as things get in Mexico. Clinging to the side of a steep, rocky peninsula jutting into Manzanillo Bay, it stretches half a mile along the shore, and a quarter mile up from the sea to the ridgetop entrance. Las Hadas is a "hotel" that covers eighty acres. This Mexican version of "Fantasy Island" is modeled on a Moorish village, with brilliant whitewashed adobe walls (well, cement), arched windows and porches, cobbled footpaths, towers and turrets, shaded walkways and sun-baked plazas, with its toes dangling in the water. And expensive! Prices started at $240 a night and reached $800 for the summit penthouse. Only a few upper crust Mexicans from inland cities were there. Business was less than brisk.
	All the rumors were true. No fee for anchoring. The harbormaster had an office on the sea wall inside the harbor about two hundred feet from the dinghy dock, where he could see every dinghy come and go, but we didn't seek him out, and neither did he seek us. In three days we never saw the guy take more than three steps away from his door.
	Also as rumored: the Byzantine swimming pool, the white towels, the tiny jungle-clad islands, the live iguanas . . . the largest was four feet long nose to tail. Those prehistoric relics occasionally swam from the islands to the gardens surrounding the pool, and when they did, they did it fast. But that was the only thing they did fast. There wasn't much going on in those scaly little noggins that you or I would mistake for thinking. Why they were there we couldn't imagine. On Mexico’s west coast they seem to be sort of symbolic of Mexico. Appropriately so, it could be argued.
	Las Hadas stood as a monument to THE classic Mexican construction technique: lots of concrete, a tiny bit of rebar, and paint. Mexicans can and will build anything out of concrete. In Nuevo Vallarta, even the dock cleats had been concrete, painted silver to look galvanized. Most were broken. Lumber in Mexico is scarce or nonexistent. They've discovered that, with enough hand-brushed paint, rough concrete takes on a dappled look like adobe. Rebar is laid, shaped, and placed by hand, so when it comes to, say, load-bearing pillars in a multi-story building, two or three skinny rods lashed together with a bit of baling wire and held vaguely in place with string while the concrete is poured is all you're gonna get, because that's all two guys can lift and set. And only the corner pillars and floors are reinforced. The walls are just bricks or cinder blocks laid with mortar. You needn't wonder why Mexican buildings fall down when the earth shakes.
	Mexican roads come from a similar mold. Only the main highways are conventionally paved, with lanes barely nine feet wide. That's one bus width plus six inches' clearance on each side. No shoulders at all. Twelve to fifteen feet is normal in the U.S. Imagine what happens when one Mexican bus overtakes another. Shudder.
	Most Mexican city streets are dirt, cobblestone, or interlocking concrete tiles, all laid by hand, of course. The cobblestones are irregularly shaped rocks four to six inches across, laid in dirt so they protrude about an inch. Such roads have two salient features: they last forever, and they utterly destroy cars. Since each stone settles a bit differently from its neighbors, these roads are unbelievably rough. Twenty miles per hour can be a bone-jarring experience. No conversation is possible. As if this weren't enough, unpainted and nearly invisible speed bumps crop up everywhere. Gee whiz, we thought, with streets like this, what's the point of speed bumps? The local drivers, of course, know where these are, but woe betide the tourist!
	It took Lynn and the girls three days to get enough of Las Hadas. Lynn enjoyed dressing up a bit to fit in with the up-market clientele. She'd been waiting a long time for the opportunity. The girls had a marvelous time cavorting in the pool, especially after linking up with a few Mexican children. But three days was puh-lenty. Even for Lynn.
	It was a long, dull trip from Manzanillo to Zihuatanejo. The farther south one gets down there, the less wind there is. We motored or motorsailed the entire 185 miles.
	The first person to present himself to us that morning when we hauled our dinghy up the beach was a young man shilling for a timeshare condo sales pitch in nearby Ixtapa. No kidding. The pitch would come complete with a buffet breakfast and a swim in the pool by their private beach. When we said we'd never be interested, his response was, "Go anyway! Enjoy the breakfast! Take your kids! Swim in the pool! You have fun and I get paid!" What the hell. It's Mexico. We went. And he got ten bucks.
	Mexican timeshare condos are interesting, because since no one but a Mexican can own real estate within 50 kilometers of the coast, foreigners don't actually own anything if they buy in. A Mexican real estate developer builds the place and then "sells" it via a 30 year bank trust, sort of like a lease, to an international timeshare corporation, which then "sells" units to individuals on the same basis. At the end of 30 years, by which time the original developer is long gone, the entire property must be sold back to a Mexican buyer, at which time you theoretically get your money back plus half of any appreciation (ha ha) the property has enjoyed. You also get exchange privileges with three thousand similar setups worldwide, all run by the same timeshare company. By the company's calculation, it all comes to about $100 per night if you don't get your principal back, $50 if you do. Doing the calculation later myself and including lost investment proceeds, I came up with two hundred dollars per day. Not so swift.
	If Las Hadas is the resort where rich Mexicans go, "Z-wat" is where the rest go, and over Easter Week, go they did. It's a picturesque little town on a moderately protected bay, clean and well-kept by Mexican standards, and it depends utterly on tourism. However, right next to the city pier were two small military garrisons, one for Federales (national police) and one for marineros (navy), each with about thirty troops. Their primary activity was actively, conspicuously, and with premeditated display patrolling the town and the beach — with loaded, fully automatic weapons held at port arms, hand on the stock, barrel high, finger on the trigger, and for all we knew, the safety off. We inquired regarding this practice and received various explanations, none satisfactory. First we heard it was because the tourists needed protection. Then one taxi driver said it was because elections for state governor had just happened. When we asked how long after elections they continued to patrol (and why), the story changed: well, really it was all to deter marijuana traffickers. Huh? Drug runners are gonna try and land drugs in broad daylight at a city beach studded with military compounds? Whatever the case, we didn't feel protected. By the looks we received from the commanding officers as we walked by the barracks, they'd as soon have shot us as peed in the dirt.
	What would be funny, if it weren't so scary, is that there was nothing to protect us from. It had been our uniform experience, to that point, that the Mexican people were about the least dangerous people imaginable, and certainly no one was planning to invade their beaches. It was a visual absurdity to watch Mexican families playing in the surf and building sand castles during Easter Week while combat-ready soldiers in spit-polished boots marched three abreast along the strand. What could have been the point? There wasn't a good answer, and the not-so-good answers were making us pretty nervous. We saw more firearms in our first five minutes in Zihuatanejo than in the previous four months combined.
	While sitting at anchor in the bay at Z-Wat one evening, one of those odd little cruising quirks of fate occurred which would reverberate through our lives for months to come. I had just finished talking on the SSB with Herb Hilgenberg on Southbound II, trying to understand the weather patterns in the Gulf of Tehuantepec, when a voice like a foghorn, with a Southern accent you couldn't cut with a chainsaw, boomed out of the radio's tiny speaker: "Daybreak, Daybreak, this is Inerarity, how do you copy Inerarity, Cap'n?" We had just met Corky Reed, a retired professor of animal behavior from the University of Alabama at Mobile, who was now living in a waterfront home on Soldier Creek about 60 miles east of Mobile, a stone's throw from the Florida border. Having just had some sort of minor marital tiff, he had stalked down to his dock, stepped aboard the Cape Dory 36 on which he had cruised for over a decade, and idly flipped on his SSB. When he heard my voice, he decided there was something in it he really liked. Don't ask me why, I never found out, because he doesn't know either. We chatted for awhile, during which time it came out that he was a touring motorcycle enthusiast who always owned the latest and greatest BMW two-wheeler, and rode them everywhere. He and his wife, Joan, rode to Alaska and back nearly every summer, and one one occasion he'd done a tour of Mexico with a motorcycle club, and had even stopped in Zihuatanejo. He knew exactly where Daybreak was anchored, and proceeded to ask all sorts of questions about where we'd come from and where we were going. He was also an indefatigable proselytizer for Lower Alabama, an area about which we knew nothing and had little desire to learn. I mean, if someone told you that Lower Alabama was paradise, would you believe it? All I knew about Alabama was names like Selma, Birmingham, and Martin Luther King. I'd actually visited Huntsville once, an experience which had pretty much confirmed my prior predjudices.
	Corky, however, was not a man to give up easily. He started coming down to his boat and flipping on the radio . . . every evening. I began to get the feeling his plan was simply to wear me down.

	For a while anyway, the boat seemed to be working. Or maybe we were just getting a grip on it. At least, we were breathing easier, and were beginning to feel settled in to cruising life, to "know the ropes". The routines of weather watching, sailing, navigating, anchoring, maintaining Daybreak, and getting around foreign cities on foot or public transportation were becoming second nature. These circumstances made it possible for us, finally, to slow down enough to ask what we might be trying to accomplish. Sensible person that you are, you might wonder why anyone would just haul off and go cruising without a concrete plan, but sometimes the wisdom one requires lies outside the box within which one has learned to think. It is rather hard, in other words, to plan out what you cannot even imagine. On occasion, though, it can be beneficial to hit yourself over the head with a two-by-four. We wanted a new and different life — not necessarily a cruising life — and by cruising we intended to shake up our lives, like dice in a tumbler, and see what rolled out of the cup. That was the whole plan.
	How had I ever gotten Lynn to agree this escapade? When a married couple says they're leaving to go cruising, no one wonders whose idea it was. If we hadn't been married, Lynn would not have been cruising. That's a fact. I've been challenged now and again by the occasional feminist thinker who asserts that Lynn must have been railroaded into it. I respond by noting that anyone who believes that a married couple's previously distinct individual volitions can remain distinct and individual in a marriage which expects to be bound by its vows wouldn't understand anyway. In marriage, volition becomes collective. Otherwise, it's not marriage. It's just a liaison.
	Which is hardly to say that no persuading took place, but I don't recall it very clearly. It was one of those stream-of-consciousness, make-it-up-as-you-go-along things that happens between spouses. You tend to forget the details. I'm sure I tried to make the idea sound grand and worthwhile, and so far, taken as a whole, it had been. It's just that if there were some purpose in it, neither of us yet knew what it was. Which made it sorta hard to be purposeful. A glorious plan would have been nice, but the reality was turning out to be that if glory was to be had, we'd have to manufacture it. Up to then it hadn't been exactly dripping off the trees. Most of cruising is pretty mundane.
	WHAAT?? you exclaim. Cruising is supposed to be WONDERFUL. Right. Listen. Take a look around. Do you see anyone, anywhere, living any type of life you care to pick, whose says his or her life is consistently glorious, thrilling, and ecstatic? Show me that person, and I will show you a liar. When life is wonderful, someone is working pretty damned hard to make it so. Cruising or not, that's what we had to do too. Granted, we had some excellent material to work with. But we had to come up with a plan.
	OK. We wanted our cruise to have a beginning, a middle, an end, and a purpose. It felt as if the beginning had either just been completed or would be completed once we reached Costa Rica. We wanted it to end somewhere on the U.S. East Coast, and to have reached as far north as the Chesapeake Bay. In the middle, we wanted to sail to Panama, Belize, the Yucatan, Florida, the Bahamas, and the Intracoastal Waterway. But purpose? Upon comparing notes one day, it turned out that both of us were thinking the purpose of it was to prepare me for another line of work. Whatever that might be. Lynn liked her own line of work, and expected to return to it.
	OK. So. What line of work? To what end? This was like starting over in high school. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Why is it that we first have to answer this question when we are so woefully ill-equipped to do so? And was I any better equipped now?
	We'd find out.
	
	Start at the beginning. What did I want out of working?
	Answer: to serve a worthwhile purpose, and to be satisfied doing it.
	Fine. Next question. What did I need?
	Answer: to pay the bills, and provide for old age.
	All my adult life I'd been focused only on paying the bills and having fun. I'd been too young to get terribly worried about old age, and too cynical to think that worthwhile, satisfying work was even possible. If it weren't, then the discussion was over and I'd been right in the first place: in engineering, at least the money was good. But if I'd been wrong . . . well. That would get my attention.
	Lynn and I began to think about all this, and I promptly went right off the deep end. Cruising will do that to you. Out there, the "real" world isn't around any more to beat you up for having "improper" thoughts. So I went ahead and had a few.
	What would "worthwhile work" focus on? Well, obviously, saving the world.
	My father had recently pointed out that not only is the world plainly in a mess, but the symptoms comprise a litany familiar to everyone. In our own country, it’s drugs, crime, wife beating, child beating and child molestation, all kinds of domestic violence, adultery, divorce, broken homes, dysfunctional adults, dysfunctional families, dysfunctional children, failed educational systems, pathetic "correctional" institutions, politics and politicians, big government and big business, irresponsibility and amorality . . .  You know exactly what I mean. You could go on with this litany without any help from me.
	Less obvious (he said), but still familiar, is that all of it seems inevitable. We don't expect we can do anything about it, but we think someone should. But who? The fact is, life does not tend to give us the sense that who we are, or what we do, matters. All this nastiness is perpetrated by people who don't think what they do, or who they're being when they do it, counts. They "cheat". They think they can "get away" with stuff, though it looks to me, to phrase it cutely, as if whatever we "get away with" stays with us, the inevitable result of simple, ubiquitous human integrity. (Some call it karma.) However, that's a minority view. The majority view appears to be that you should get away with whatever you can. Such an approach, while unconscionable in a world where what we do matters, is consistent with a world in which no one and nothing means much in the end. We live our lives with this outlook as our flashlight into the future, which makes the future look pretty goddamn bleak. While most of us lead moral, virtuous lives, we don't seriously expect to accomplish much by it. We try to make a good home, set the best example we can for our children, love them and our spouses, remain monogamous (some of us), try to be caring parents, good employees, responsible neighbors, and so on, yet not for one moment do we believe any of this will impact anything outside the immediate arena of our private lives. We believe that life can work for us while it clearly does not work for many others elsewhere. We behave as if there must be haves and have-nots, winners and losers, and we strive to be among the winners. Of course, where there are winners there must be losers, notwithstanding the currently popular notion of "win-win". I contend there is no such thing as a win-win situation. It's a logical absurdity made to appear plausible through the use of sufficiently tight framing. Don’t back up far enough to see the structure. "Win-win" situations create allies — inside the frame. But where there are allies, there must be enemies — outside the frame.
	We like to think that the "rest of the world" — that is, everything outside our frame — is someone else's responsibility. What is outside our frame is everyone else's lives, right? And if those lives aren't working, then why the hell don't they fix them? I mean, their lives would work if they'd just behave like us, right? Our lives work — right?
	We fail to see that problems in the lives of others affect us directly. We can't see this because the part of our lives that is affected is invisible to most of us. What is affected is our possibility. In other words, because we live in a world where we think life can work for some people while not for others, many options which would otherwise be open to us are not possible, and in fact are invisible. One of these is to have the world work. Our cognition is affected.
	There are two possibilities. If I think the world is such that life works out for some people but not others, and that's just "the way life is", then the appropriate response is to make sure I'm among those it works out for, and too bad for the rest. On the other hand, if I think that life can work for everyone, but it just isn't (yet) — or worse, that perhaps something we "winners" are doing is making the world be this way — then the appropriate response is to do what I can to fix it.
	In Zihuatanejo, in the heat, in the hubbub and furor of Easter week in Mexico, I realized for the first time — don't ask me why — that no one can say which way it really is. It is a matter of pure choice. Either way, living in accord with the view we choose would tend to make the world turn out that way — a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. We take our pick. In this society we've picked the option where some of us get to have lives that work while others don't. For the first time, I began to consider whether it might be possible for an individual to pick the other alternative, and what the personal consequences of doing so might be.
	It boiled down to this: If the kind of life that is available to us is limited by conditions in the world well outside of what we normally consider the "boundaries" of our personal lives, and if, when we consider our personal possibilities, what we can imagine is likewise limited, and if these conditions are not inevitable, then the "rules" within which we have lived, and around which we have structured our lives, are meaningless. They simply don't exist.
	
	After two months and over a thousand miles of sailing since we had parted ways, we had finally managed to catch up with Manaña. Easter week being complete madness everywhere in Mexico, but especially "at the beach", we got out of Z-wat Bay and moved to the new Marina Ixtapa, still under construction, which was quiet and delightful in spite of the holidays. After three days, ready to leave for Acapulco but not content with the prospect of spending Lynn's 40th birthday on passage, we were persuaded by Rick and Hele on Manaña to join them three miles away in the shelter of a small island to celebrate. This sounded like a splendid idea. When we arrived, Rick pointed at our windsurfer, which had not been unlashed since we left LA (and which neither of us had yet sailed successfully), and said the time had come for us to learn. He and Hele already knew how. We spent the next two days falling off the thing in very light air and jumbled jet-ski wakes. Regarding her "Big Four-O" birthday, Lynn wrote:

	"I'd much rather be out here falling off a windsurfer than sitting in the same office I'd been in for years, getting a sheet cake in the afternoon. All in all, it was a darn nice birthday."

Chapter 8
The Region Of Fear:
Acapulco, Tehuantepec and the "Banana Republics"

	Acapulco, the largest city between San Diego and the Panama Canal and the preparation point for the Gulf of Tehuantepec, lay 112 nautical miles ESE from our anchorage at Isla Grande. With a west wind building to twenty knots by midnight and six foot swells, we had quite a ride. We didn't shorten sail until nearly midnight, on my watch, as Daybreak surged to more than seven knots. Six knots is Lynn's "comfort cut-off" point, seven knots is mine. In the past, whenever we'd let it go beyond that at night (on autopilot), either something would break or no one would get any sleep, or both. After dropping the mizzen and taking a reef in the main, Daybreak was still doing six knots — but only five over the ground. In Acapulco the log would show 134 miles through the water, 20% more than we'd actually traveled over the ground. We'd encountered the northwestward-curving tail of the great Equatorial Countercurrent, which would plague us all the way to the Panama Canal.
	In the morning, conditions having calmed, we slipped through the narrow slot between Isla Roqueta and the mainland while marveling at the homes and resorts clinging to the cliffs above the surging surf, and tacked our way around Punta Grifo into the west end of Acapulco Bay in a dying breeze. Our plan was to stay two or three days, just long enough to reprovision and fuel up, but the refrigeration was acting up again. In the process of repairs, Acapulco would claim ten days of our time and gallons of our sweat. 
	Lynn had just finished reading Women of the Four Winds, a gift from a friend, and had this to say.

	"This book tells the stories of four women who engaged in major expeditions in the early part of this century. They climbed mountains in Peru, explored the regions around the North Pole, probed into deepest Africa, trekked across Asia — they were adventurers. It certainly put a bit of perspective on our trip, during which we've had constant radio contact with the States and with other cruisers, availability of parts and labor, extensive information about weather, anchorages, and other local knowledge, availability of U.S. products, fresh food, laundromats, hotels, you name it. Yet at the time of our departure, all I could imagine was storms and sharks. This is not to say cruising has been an easy life, but it is not the daring adventure I thought it would be. The greatest adventure was making the initial break, leaving a way of life that was so familiar and secure — and so locked in, by forces from every direction. Now that we're out here, it's like any major change. After a while, you adjust. It's just life.
	"Part of the adventure for me has been to watch my sense of self shift and change. In Los Angeles I was a successful professional woman, competent, intelligent, well-presented, and independent, in addition to being a wife and mother. Once we left, those qualities, which were important to my sense of identity and self-esteem, disappeared overnight. For two months, during the steepest learning curve, I felt incompetent, dependent, and decidedly dowdy. At bottom, I was still operating as if I was the victim of this cruising business: it was Lane's idea after all, and if my job was to go along even if it meant I'd turn into a drab, elderly, leather-skinned prune, then so be it (*snif*). Being in Las Hadas reminded me that I craft my self-image. I can still look like I belong in the snottiest resort in Mexico. Those qualities I thought I'd lost were simply no longer being triggered by my circumstances. It became clear that I've been living in a profoundly reactive mode, and feeling sorry for myself. I'd forgotten I could still live creatively, that I could choose who I wanted to be, how I wanted to present myself, how I held myself. And that I could choose what I wanted to get out of this experience of cruising.
	"It is appropriate that I should be going through this, since one of our initial intentions in cruising was to see what life would be like when we consciously choose its content — when we take the steering wheel into our own hands and making choices that would not normally have emerged from the progression of day-to-day life. Even having done so, it is so easy to regress into reactive and irresponsible behavior. Staying awake and choiceful is so difficult. It's like physical exercise. I feel powerful and strong as long as I'm doing it, but when I'm not — I'd rather just sit and sog!"

	We did both in Acapulco. The heat was intense, and doing anything besides sitting and sogging took a real effort of will. But if we did nothing, we'd never leave, a fate that didn't bear contemplating.
	Acapulco is large. Maybe not by L.A. standards, but a million people live there, most of them in semi-squalor. It's a full-on, take-no-prisoners beach resort city, though how it got that way is hard to fathom. Geographically it hasn't got all that much to offer, but what it has got has been heavily exploited. It's very Mexican, and though we were used to that, we wondered why anyone would spend thousands of dollars to vacation there. On the other hand, maybe no one does anymore. Like Las Hadas, Acapulco had lots of vacationing Mexicans but very few norteamericanos. Maybe the U.S. recession had been cutting into the gringo tourist trade. Either that, or Acapulco had simply passed its prime, become passé. Looked pretty passé to us.
	I was sweating bullets over the refrigeration. It was very low on Freon, but I couldn't find the leak. We were clinging to the hope that it wasn't buried someplace horrid like inside a cold plate, where it just about could not be fixed. In the process of testing, one of the hoses on my gauge set blew off, resulting in the release of half the gas in the system before I could get it capped, thus making another grotesque contribution to the ozone hole and increasing my already colossal debt of environmental bad karma. I then had to use up most of my remaining reserve Freon to recharge the system just to find the stupid leak, leaving barely enough for the recharge after repairs. Given the flakiness of the whole system, we couldn't go on without reserve Freon.
	Five days later we were still in Acapulco, we were still HOT, we were much poorer, and we desperately wanted to get moving again, but we couldn't reprovision until the refrigerator worked. I'd at least found the problem: a bad hose connection that leaked only intermittently. Peachy. I just love intermittent problems. Fixed it OK, but then a new thirty-pound bottle of refrigerant set us back ten days' worth of budget (triple the U.S. price). Ouch! On top of which, the supplier put the wrong stuff in the can (R-22 refrigerant instead of R-12), so I had to go back and exchange it. Since each such trip took almost three hours, the simple process of buying more refrigerant occupied my efforts for most of a day.
	Money or no money, we needed a break. We'd done nothing but work and chase parts and supplies since arriving. We wanted to see the city, but we'd had enough of taxis and buses. We decided to *ahem* rent a car.
	And so, a very basic Mexican-made VW bug showed us Acapulco's vast areas of squalor. We drove it everywhere, including up into the "residential areas" in the hills above the city. Well, actually, they are the city. Area-wise, the narrow strip of resort hotels along the beach hardly counted. The dwellings up there hung precariously on steep, arid hillsides (it was the dry season), where there appeared to be no running water or sewer service. Pigs, chickens, and dogs wandered loose everywhere, kept apparently for their food value. Laundry was done by hand in tiny trickles of creek coming down the canyons toward town, and drinking water was delivered in five gallon bottles by vendors in tiny Japanese trucks or three-wheeled motorbikes. The creeks, muddy, scummy, and barely moving to begin with, ran white with laundry soap.
	The streets into this area went straight up, right smack on the ridge lines between creeks, no switchbacks or anything, but at least they were paved. Otherwise, no normal vehicle could have made it up there. We went up there in first gear with the gas pedal to the floor, praying that a place to turn around would materialize. The streets were primitive as usual: hand-poured concrete right on top of the dirt, no grading, no curbs, no road bed, with traction grooves hand-chiseled across them. This was one occasion when we were glad for rough, coarse Mexican concrete! The cross streets were dirt, barely more than Jeep trails.
	Though the area looked like a slum, most of the residents were well dressed and would not have been out of place in any U.S. city. They clearly had jobs down the hill "in town", probably involving tourism, so they needed to be presentable. Many had cars. There wasn't much smoke, so cooking was probably being done with propane, which is dirt cheap in Mexico (about a nickel a pound, 20¢ a gallon). Imagine those roads in the rain! And it rains there all summer. What must happen to those folks? Most of those casitas weren't particularly well-attached to terra firma, no pilings, footings, or foundations at all. Just like the roads. In a tropical downpour, the entire hillside would turn into a muddy torrent.
	
	I had finally gotten the refrigeration fixed, and our new 30 lb. canister of Freon, nearly the size of a propane tank, somehow got stowed. We spent two days provisioning, fueled up over at Acapulco Yacht Club, and got back on the mooring. It was 1 p.m. Lynn and I looked at each other, considered our plan to leave that night, considered the heat plus all that remained to do, and decided to can it for another day, do nothing, and take a nap! There's always mañana, right? And besides, hurricane season was still a month away. Lynn was still trying to figure out where to stow the all food we'd bought. In fact, we still have some of it. The Spam, for example. And really, it's just as good as the day we bought it . . .
	Being a cruiser in a city, any city, has all the unpleasant parts of urban life without the compensating virtues. Since we had neither the money nor transportation to interact with cities the way they expect us to, we didn't fit in at all.
	In Mexico all yacht owners are assumed to be very rich, though in fact most cruisers have modest means by U.S. standards. Mexicans generally had little comprehension of how cruisers’ finances worked. The notion of taking a chunk of time out from work and living on money one had saved appeared to be unthinkable in Mexico, perhaps because so few Mexicans live above bare subsistence. The idea of planning and managing finances over the period necessary to complete a two-year cruise (not to mention saving up beforehand) is so incomprehensible among Mexicans that they figure we must have unlimited money and time, which makes a cruiser's parsimony look like just plain stinginess. We felt more at home and at peace in isolated wilderness anchorages than in any city or town we'd seen. In hindsight, strange to say, La Paz had probably been the nicest city for cruisers we would see in Mexico.
	Beyond Acapulco we would be facing a thousand miles of inhospitable coastline. Puerto Huatulco, the last harbor of refuge before the Gulf of Tehuantepec, lay 250 miles away along a coastline devoid of shelter. Beyond that lay the Gulf itself, which one cruiser was calling "the Mexican 250 yacht race", ending at Puerto Madero, the last port in Mexico. Then 500 miles of politically unstable banana republics we had no desire to visit. And finally, Costa Rica.
	The Tehuantepec loomed in our imaginations like a fearful specter, waiting to batter us, beat us, steal our boat, and maybe our lives. We couldn't know what to expect. At the head of that Gulf, offshore winds of gale force or higher blow three hundred days a year. We'd heard so many stories, some from people who had transited a hundred miles offshore and didn't have a breath of wind, some who transited near the beach in fifty knots . . . what could we do? We were planning to take the "one-foot-on-the-beach" approach, because that's what people who'd been through there a lot did. People with decades of Tehuantepec experience said that the guy who'd had no wind a hundred miles offshore was lucky to be alive, let alone still have a boat.
	The passage to Huatulco was long and uneventful: dead downwind for four hours each afternoon in light air, then motoring the rest of the time. One slight blemish: the refrigeration was screwing up again. PHOOEY! But there was no time to think about that.
	As far as we were concerned, we were facing the final exam. The Tehuantepec began thirty miles east of Huatulco and stretched for 215 more miles after that. To cross it, we needed two days of benign weather. At that moment, the wind at the head of the Gulf was forty knots from the north. Impossible. Huatulco, by contrast, was a flat calm.
	It was a lovely little bay in which to prepare ourselves, and a wonderful change from Acapulco. It was small, cliff-bound, and cozy, reminiscent of some of our old haunts on Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands of southern California, except that the daytime temperatures were in the nineties and the water was over eighty. Whoops, that's the cyclogenesis threshold! Hurricanes. Time to boogie. As we waited for the evening radio weather check with Herb Hilgenberg aboard Southbound II in Bermuda, Lynn was busy doing laundry, by hand for the first time, while I spent hours hunkered over the computer collecting weather data. Though Lynn had no idea how to do hand laundry, the directions were right on the box of laundry soap. No kidding. In Spanish, of course. Over the next six months we would have access to a washing machine only once.
	Still, this was modern cruising. While Lynn gooshed the clothes around in a big stainless steel bucket and re-discovered "dishpan hands", I collected weather faxes out of Pt. Reyes (CA), Mobile (AL), and Norfolk (VA), plus voice broadcasts four times daily from Pt. Reyes (which sometimes reported Tehuantepec gales after they started) and Portsmouth (VA), plus of course the infamous Herb Hilgenberg, whose amateur weather info on SSB radio had become gospel to us. It felt pretty strange asking a guy two thousand miles away what the weather would be like the next day a few miles east of us, but in fact the patterns that determine the Tehuantepec weather start in the Gulf of Alaska and come down across the western United States. Herb, being only 600 miles from the powerhouse National Weather Service radio station in Norfolk, could get all the weather faxes as clear as a bell. Nowadays, he probably just downloads them from the Web.
	That night he told us (via SSB) that in this day and age, if you can't get across the Tehuantepec unscathed, God must truly dislike you, because the weather patterns that cause those gales are as plain as day. As are the ones that stop the gales. You just wait for a cold front to come down into the Gulf of Mexico out of Texas. As it approaches the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the wind swings southerly until the front arrives, behind which is the next northerly gale. The idea is to zip across just before the front gets there. On the other hand, he warned, the Papagayo region, stretching 120 miles from Corinto, Nicaragua to Playa del Coco, Costa Rica, an area we'd be transiting in another week or two, was another story. We pulled out our world atlas to take a look at the area, and noticed how little topography there was, around Lake Nicaragua, to stop the tradewinds from coming straight across from the western Caribbean. And tradewinds don't come and go. They just blow, all the time.
	Herb was predicting a weather window of 36 - 48 hours' duration starting "probably" the following evening. Since our transit was going to take close to fifty hours, we planned on leaving around midnight the next night, which would get us past the head of the Gulf by about 1800 the evening after. We wanted to do that part in daylight. The night was going to be hairy enough, running along the beach in thirty to sixty feet of water less than a half mile outside a line of six foot breakers, then trying to dodge the shoals that stick out into the ocean three or four miles offshore of the inlets to three huge lagoons. At least we'd have a full moon.
	I was seriously perturbed to find another refrigerant leak. It was a hose clamp. Hmm, I thought, I'm really going to have to replace that hose someday. There were three hose clamps on the fitting already, and since there weren't any proper hose fitting swaging machines in the neighborhood, I did what any self-respecting Mexican mechanic would have done: I applied a fourth hose clamp. Changed out the refrigeration raw water pump too. Its case was cracked. Remember those spare pumps we'd bought back in La Paz? We were congratulating ourselves for our foresight.
	But enough! (We kept saying that.) The water was delightful. We swam for hours. The wind scoop pulled what breeze there was down the main hatch, the forward hatch did likewise in the kids' cabin, and thus we tried to beat the heat, which was prodigious. The cockpit awning, sewn from an old staysail, was up day and night. Lynn pulled everything off the berths except the bottom sheets and stowed it all. We hadn't used covers for two weeks. The girls slept in their underwear only, and Lynn and I slept in less. Sweat rolled off us all night. It was a condition to which we were going to become quite accustomed.
	I took faxes all the next day, and talked with three boats that had been waiting eight days for a weather window. Everything looked good, but none of us could receive the continental U.S. fax out of Mobile, the one that would show the front. Herb had no such difficulty, and that evening he confirmed what we could not see. A front was coming which would give us two days, maximum, starting around dawn. We therefore left at midnight in order to be at Salina Cruz, at the head of the Gulf, by 0600.

	Cruising is strange. We had been dreading the Tehuantepec for months, even years. Yet what we actually found there, and were finally able to enjoy once we got past our morbid fear of the place, was absolutely the nicest day of sailing we had ever had anywhere. A lovely southwesterly breeze of ten to fifteen knots, almost no swell, the sea as calm as a summer afternoon in southern California, less than two feet of chop. We hugged the ten fathom contour religiously in fear of a northerly wind shift, until it finally sank in that this just wasn't going to happen. To our utter amazement, we sailed blissfully across the entire Gulf in calm seas, mild winds, sunny warm weather, on the fastest point of sail Daybreak has. It was DELIGHTFUL. But for the first 45 miles, from Huatulco to Salina Cruz, we motored even though we had a twenty knot tail wind, because we were too scared to take the time to set sail, or to lose the sleep we would have lost with the sails up. We were petrified of getting caught in a northerly gale, and petrified of running the beach tired. It took us fifteen hours, in perfect conditions, for the fear subside.

	All we needed in Puerto Madero was fuel, but getting it wasn't easy. First we were told that the only way to do it was in a taxi using jerry cans, of which we had exactly one. We'd have needed nine taxi trips. On the other hand, the idea of setting off on the 485 mile passage to Costa Rica (with the possibility of vicious Papagayo winds) with only half a tank of fuel did not appeal. There had to be another way, and it turned out there was: a guy named Israel who, for $1.51 per gallon, would bring fuel barrels down to the commercial shrimper pier, where he'd gravity-feed it to you from the back of his pickup truck.
What an experience! First you get a few cruisers together to make it worth his while. Then you tell him exactly how many gallons you want and pay him in advance, and off he goes with everybody's money. Then you all raft up, three or four abreast, against the ugly, greasy, putrid cement shrimper pier, spend an hour or two hoping he hasn't absconded, and rejoice when finally he returns. He passes you a battered Tygon hose with a crude control valve at the end, and you start siphoning out of his drums. No meter. How do you know how much you're getting? Simple: separate barrels for each boat, filled and paid for separately at the Pemex station eighteen miles away in Tapachula. Israel turned out to be, above all, a very honest man, though we'd never have known if he'd shorted us a few gallons, our fuel gauge being hopelessly crude. He was very thorough and his fuel spotlessly clean. But just out of curiosity, how does a Mexican guy get named Israel?
	There was quite a military presence in Puerto Madero, possibly due to the proximity of the Guatemalan border. Five hundred yards from our anchorage was a "naval base". Well, they had two gunboats, anyway, and a couple of pangas. You haven't lived until you've seen a full-dressed contingent of seven or eight naval personnel, fully armed and standing up, going up some jungle-lined creek at full throttle in an outboard-powered, tiller-steered twenty foot panga that says "ARMADA DE MEXICO" on the side in white letters two feet high. It's like a bad "B" movie. You can't help laughing. This "base" was guarded twenty four hours a day by armed sentries in lofty "lookout towers", rickety thatch-roofed platforms made of jungle saplings lashed together, sitting forty feet above the marshy ground on four long, slender, whippy little tree trunks driven straight into the ground. No diagonal bracing, just the four uprights, and a crude ladder made of sticks and vines like something out of James Bond. But there it was, real. All day long they blew bugle calls and marched around in formation. Even had a marching band, of roughly U.S. junior high school quality. When they weren't marching, strutting, standing guard, or buzzing around in the pangas, they were crawling through the mosquito-infested undergrowth on "maneuvers". We were told that the same thing was going on right across the border in Guatemala, so maybe it made some sort of twisted sense. We didn't plan to stay long enough to make an in-depth study. A garden spot it wasn't.
	Sweat took on new meaning, and we'd heard Costa Rica would be worse. People told us we'd sweat 24 hours a day there. We thought we already were. Any clothing was a burden. Shorts and shirts were reserved for trips to town or for visitors, and were quickly ruined. Aboard Daybreak we wore nothing but underwear. Pulled it off the hook in the morning, hung it up again at night, and toweled ourselves off every couple of hours. Even slept on towels. Actually, sleep was impossible until around three or four a.m., when things got cooler. We prayed in vain for breeze. During the day we got so wet we hated to even sit on our upholstery. Sat on towels most of the time. Working in the engine compartment, especially if the engine had to be running, was like taking a steambath. Sweat would drip off us and puddle on the floorboards. We drank gallons of water, half a liter at a pop without coming up for air. No one cared what the actual temperature was, it was HOT!! And it was only May, not even summer yet. If you've ever wondered why Latinos have a reputation for slowness, laziness, and lack of initiative, just go on down to Puerto Madero and spend a week without air conditioning. Then you'll know. The siesta made all kinds of sense down there, three or four hours of it a day. At times, very little seemed to be of sufficient moment to get us off our butts. Yet somehow we found the energy, finally, to raise anchor and go.

	Puerto Madero lies at the northern edge of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where, in summer, steamy air rises from the tepid ocean each day to form thunderheads, which then drop their load in cloudbursts after sundown. Off Guatemala we were surrounded by evening thunderstorms, spectacular and scary. The birthplace of hurricanes. We watched the storm cells on radar and tried to dodge them, but it was impossible. They traveled faster than we did. Just after twilight, before the moon came up, we got a big one right on top of us. Dark. 
	Except for these brief storms, wind was nonexistent, and the Equatorial Countercurrent at times reached two knots. Propelled by the trade winds, it never, ever stops. Still 114 miles from the Gulf of Fonseca, we were thinking about stopping there to rest. The motor had been on for 24 of 43 hours thus far, but without it we'd have been going backwards. Offshore we might have done better, but out there the effects of a Papagayo could be disastrous. We'd stay inshore, battle the current, hope the fuel held out, and pray to avoid political complications. A Hobson's choice. Those Central American countries claim a 25-mile territorial limit, much more than is allowed under international law, but that doesn't make much difference when the gunboat shows up.
	In Puerto Madero we'd spent an afternoon with a pair of guys who were on their way to San Diego after an eleven-year circumnavigation. We had been wondering if we were doing something wrong, or if cruising was this hard for everybody. Kleon confirmed it: it's just hard. He said he and Bob had two mottoes they kept in mind. The first was "this too shall pass." The second was something they'd heard from a veteran cruiser in the South Pacific: "Never look at the distance still ahead. Look only at the miles you've already covered." This was after they'd suffered through two hurricanes and a direct lightning strike, the latter destroying their rig and all their electronics during the El Niño of 1983. Kleon said that he and Bob hadn't really "settled in" to cruising for over a year. What did he mean, "settle in"? He meant stop complaining. Though they'd gotten all the way to Australia, the litany of breakdowns, storms, and threats to continued existence were nearly crippling, and they were both complaining constantly. Finally Kleon said, "Look. Either we sell the boat right here and fly home, or we stop complaining. We've got to do one or the other."
	It was the same for us. Something was always wrong. The engine was overheating, the refrigeration was broken or nearly so, and the weather was either blazing hot or stormy. We spent most of our time fixing things, and the kids took up the rest. These demands were constant, continuous, and often simultaneous. Yet on the bright side, we had not yet failed to have at least some motive engine power when we needed it, no food had ever actually spoiled, and the sailing hardware had always worked. Which was more than some could say: frayed rigging, broken tangs, cracked fittings — hooray for Daybreak's freestanding masts! Failed autopilots were legion. Ours was weak — probably needed new brushes (another job for Costa Rica) — but with careful sail trim and early reefing we hadn't yet had to hand-steer a passage. Which was good, because Daybreak is a bear to hand-steer. So all in all, there really was nothing to complain about. Right?

	Our arrival at the Gulf of Fonseca, just before dawn on our fourth day out, was not without mishap. To start with, we had no chart of the place, bad news because many of the people whose explorations resulted in those charts had wrecked their ships in the process, and I had no wish to follow suit. We planned to make our entrance cautiously and in broad daylight. Then at 0300, powering into head wind, head sea, and current just shy of Punta Ampala, suddenly engine cooling water stopped coming out the exhaust pipe. Being in the cockpit at the time I managed to hear the change in exhaust note over the rest of the din and glanced quickly at the temperature gauge. It was pegged. I shut down the motor, raised sail and started tacking slowly toward the Gulf against a strong ebbing tide, not wishing to rouse Lynn. Later, when she woke up, we dropped the hook in sixty feet of completely unprotected ocean three miles outside the Gulf, and went below to attack the problem.
	Investigation revealed that a hose clamp had broken, allowing sea water to gush into the bilge rather than cooling the engine. The clamp was rusted clear through. We put on a new one. Lynn as usual got to crawl in there next to the hot motor, she being the only one of us who fit, and off we went again. Upon flipping the refrigeration on for its morning run, it promptly turned itself off. And then on, and off, and on, and off . . . shit. Refrigerant gone again. Leaked out of that god-damned Mickey Mouse hose fitting on the high pressure line, even after we'd cut off the offending hose end and reclamped the whole thing 'way back in, oh hell, who knew where anymore. Refrigeration failures were just sorta blending into one another. After navigating our chartless way across the mouth of the Gulf and getting the anchor down behind Isla Meanguera, I forged once more into the breach, this time readjusting the temperature set points for the tropical environment on the way back out. Our refrigeration system, it seemed, was coming apart at the seams, and we were using up refrigerant almost like a consumable fuel. At least it was cold for one more day.
	We anchored just off the small fishing village of "Meanguera de el Golfo". It said so right on the seawall next to the tiny gravel beach where all the pangas were pulled up, right below the word BIENVENIDOS (Welcome). Perhaps they were expecting folks like us to show up. Who else, we thought, could the sign have been for?
	The village clung to a rocky hillside beneath dense jungle canopy on the southeast corner of Isla Meanguera, in the El Salvadoran portion of the Gulf of Fonseca. El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua all have shoreline on the Gulf, and since their borders are reasonably stable, everyone knows whose beach is whose. The Gulf islands are a different story. All three countries had claimed Meanguera at one time or another. Not long before our arrival the World Court had ruled in El Salvador's favor.
	Everything there was SO GREEN. Mexico had not been, at least not when we were there. Meanguera's steep rocky island hillsides were thick with trees that appeared never to have shed a leaf in drought or cold. The place couldn't have looked more un-Mexican. The panga beach was bordered by hand-laid rock sea walls, everything looked neat and orderly, the houses were cinderblock with tile or shingle roofs, no thatch anywhere, and amazingly, every one of them was level, square, plumb, and thoughtfully placed on hand-graded, rock-laid pads terraced into the hillside. Very picturesque. In Mexico, plumb walls and right angles were utterly accidental where they occurred at all.
	The "Welcome" sign notwithstanding, they had not been expecting us, or anyone else, and we were treated like visiting dignitaries from Alpha Centauri. After a polite, respectful waiting period measured in minutes, we were visited by every village boy who could lay hold of a leaky dugout. They asked for nothing and wanted nothing (that was new!), except to gawk and chatter. Daybreak must have looked like a spaceship to them. We held a sort of floating "kaffee klatch", next to our boat, of some seven or eight canoes and a dozen boys. They knew zero English, and with the speed of our Spanish limited by constant dictionary consultations, it was slow going, but at least we got their names and ages. The first and most forthcoming of the boys, Carlo, asked if we were going to come ashore, as if this were up to us. We asked if a visit would be acceptable, mañana, and he said yes, of course. He informed us that there were no fewer than four villages on the island, which was four more than we'd have guessed, and they were connected by footpath only. The island being quite rugged, there was no wheeled transport, but amazingly there was electricity, via underwater cable from La Unión, thirty miles away.
	That night we found out why Meanguera was so green. RAIN. That should have been obvious, but we hadn't given it much thought. We got a major drenching in 25 knots of wind, launching us out of bed for a frantic hatch and port closing drill, and I got an unexpected free bath on deck trying to zip the dodger closed. So much for a quiet night's sleep. An hour later the rain departed, leaving us bobbing around in the remaining breeze and left-over chop. It had even gotten cool. Must have gotten two inches of rain in that hour. If we could rig some kind of rain catchment system, the watermaker might never have to work again.
	The following afternoon, as we headed ashore to visit the village, a dugout containing two boys and two girls approached, one of whom spoke English. Turned out she'd spent five years in New York, of all places, and she assured us that our visit was perfectly permissible. Failure to have checked in at La Unión was no problem at all. Once ashore, a very old man with one eye appointed himself tour guide and promptly took us to two stores in succession, as if shopping were the only reason any yachtie would visit. It wasn't true for us, so he continued the tour. We saw the Juzgado (courthouse — must be where the old cowboy term hoosegow comes from), followed by the village recreation center, which contained two pool tables and a crowded craps table where young men tossed tiny little dice no larger than an eighth of an inch square. We were taken to see both village churches, after which we stumbled finally upon Carlo's home and met his entire family: his parents, Romero and Otilio, his two brothers, his one sister, and his aunt and her three children. Handmade cane rocking chairs were brought to the hand-laid rock porch for us, and we shared our drinking water, explaining that it had been made from sea water. This met with stunned incredulity, and everyone had to taste it. When it was gone we were served tamarindo, a pleasant drink tasting like a sweetened mix of weak tea and weak prune juice, made from the pulp of tamarind pods from a tree by the porch. But there was nothing mild about the effect. As Lynn politely finished off what the girls did not drink, Otilio kept admonishing "muy acido, muy acido" — very acidic. Acidic? So what? Turned out "acido" meant laxative, as Lynn discovered later. As conversation meandered (er, stumbled) on, we were invited to come to the evening church service with them in observance of El Noche de Madres, the Night Of The Mothers (Central America's Mother's Day). We accepted, and returned to Daybreak to get ready.
	Earlier we had been visited by two young men who, noticing all the rope lying around our decks, asked for some. Asked for ten meters of it, in fact. Having no such lengths lying around, and unwilling to cut a fresh one from our reserve spool of premium Dacron doublebraid, I gave them a couple spare pieces that would add up to fill their need. When they still said they needed more, I should have been more suspicious.
	Upon returning from the village we found that they had helped themselves. Reaching up over the stern, they'd cut a large bight right out of the middle of one of the mizzen reef lines. They'd also cut off the tail of the starboard running backstay tackle, and even tried to cut off our Kevlar jacklines, though they couldn't hack through them. Thank heaven we discovered that damage before our next night passage!
	In fairness, they could have stolen anything in the boat. While the companionway had been locked (mostly for appearance), we'd left the deck hatches open for air. But they took nothing else. In fact, they hadn't even set foot on board. They'd wanted rope and had taken what they could reach from their canoe. Most likely they had no idea of its use or importance to us, and probably couldn't understand why I'd said I couldn't spare more when so much was just "lying around" on deck. I doubt they even thought of themselves as thieves. They probably thought of it more like picking fruit off a tree.
	Leaving Lynn and the girls aboard, I returned sadly ashore, walked up to the house, and let Roberto and Otilio know that we could not leave the boat unattended that evening in order to attend church. They were very sorry to hear what had happened and said so. There wasn't much else any of us could say.
	Meanguera was as quiet and safe a town as any you could imagine. We didn't dream there could be any problem. In hindsight it was obvious. I looked out from the shore at Daybreak, a wonder of metallurgical and petrochemical engineering, and marveled at how utterly out of place she looked among the rude pangas and dugouts. We took technological wonders for granted that those people could scarcely imagine, and we had more money tied up in that boat than any dozen of them together would ever see in their lifetimes.
	In El Salvador, a new fiberglass panga with motor costs $3000, which is all that a grown man of sound body can beg or borrow. Several people had asked how much Daybreak cost, and if it were an adult asking, we told them. We also told them that we owned nothing else, literally, that we had sold everything else to buy her. In the U.S. this would have made it clear how un-rich we were (no house, no cars, no bikes, no TV), but what must these people have thought upon learning we had almost forty times the cost of a Salvadoran fishing panga tied up in our floating domicile, not counting money in the bank to support us? Those two boys had probably looked at all that rope and failed utterly to imagine how we could possibly miss a few meters of it.
	We left disappointedly in the morning.

	The passage past Nicaragua to Costa Rica was plagued by fifteen knot headwinds, a knot of adverse current, and violent night thunderstorms. In late evening, just off the port of Corinto, which I had no wish to visit, a malevolent black mass settled low overhead, devoured the feeble remains of twilight, and hit us with thirty seven knots of wind, catching Daybreak wing-and-wing with only a single reef in each sail. Hoping not to wake Lynn, I attempted to hand-steer through the tempest, hitting nine and a quarter knots surfing the short seas. Lynn might have remained asleep had not a wind veer forced us shoreward toward Corinto, forcing me to crash-gybe the mizzen and reach back out to sea. This brought Lynn's head to the companionway, and she said, "Do you want me to help you get some sail down?" Um, yeah, affirmative on that.
	Worried sick over the prospect of Papagayo northeasterlies, we were hugging the ten fathom line the entire length of Nicaragua. Off Corinto I'd been within two miles of the surf when the cloudburst struck. Off Puerto Somoza, at midnight, we slid out to four miles. We passed the picturesque harbor of San Juan del Sur, the southernmost settlement on Nicaragua’s coast, three miles offshore at four in the afternoon, then closed to within spitting distance of Cabo Natah, six miles from the Costa Rican border, as the sun dipped toward the horizon astern. We gazed into one gorgeous sunset-warmed cove after another in which, for political reasons, we would never drop a hook. Wistfully we bore onward, passing finally into Bahia de Salinas as darkness fell, coming safely to rest with the help of the lights and radio assistance of other cruisers already anchored. We had arrived. We had made it. We had sailed without incident through 470 miles of the territorial waters of countries with which any contact would have ill-advised, and had arrived safely in Costa Rica on May 12th, beating even our own aggressive goal by ten days. We were ecstatic.

Chapter 9
Slowing Down In Western Costa Rica

	Arriving in Costa Rica seemed to say, at least to us, that we'd really become cruisers. We'd been underway nearly six months and had sailed 3460 nautical miles, averaging twenty miles per day for 173 days. Since Las Hadas we’d averaged thirty miles a day for 43 days even though we'd had an unplanned week’s delay in Acapulco. For us, that was pushing pretty hard. But the bright news was, over the next five months we had only 1100 nautical miles to cover, with umpteen zillion bays, coves, and islands to explore along the way. Boy, were we looking forward to slowing down!
	In Bahia Salinas the Nicaraguan border comes right down to the beach about two miles from where you anchor. There was no swell at all, and while winds blew from every conceivable direction, sometimes hard, the holding was excellent. On our first morning in Costa Rica, the place looked like a lake. Enjoying the absence of any need to get anywhere, we swam for about two hours, bathed, and simply relaxed. The air and water were both about ninety degrees. It looked like a great place for novice windsurfers too, and Roxanne said she might even try learning to sail the dinghy. Time to blow up the inflatable! Time to wash the topsides! Time to scrub the bottom! Time to snorkel, and to explore ashore! Time, time, time! Maybe even time to catch up on our correspondence, waiting since Acapulco.
	We had no idea where the nearest post office was.

	Opposite Daybreak on shore was the rancho of a wealthy Costa Rican businessman known as Rudolfo (last names are of little concern to cruisers). Rudolfo was a patrón, what we in the U.S. would call a small venture capitalist, someone who has the congenial habit of financing business opportunities for others and helping them succeed. He was an interesting man, educated, informed, worldly-wise, and well-connected.
	For this reason, when he warned us to stay away from the fishermen in the bay, we paid heed. He said they occasionally ferried drugs ashore from Colombian drug-running vessels, and were therefore to be avoided. He insisted, however, that we'd have no trouble if we remained anchored near his property. He enjoyed the deference of every local citizen, and said no one would interfere with his "guests".
	Rudolfo had some amazing stories to tell, some of which would interest any politically aware American. He said, for example, it was common knowledge in western Costa Rica that the Iran-Contra affair, involving Oliver North and his band of renown, had a slight twist not reported in the U.S. media. It seems that the weapons Ollie landed for the Nicaraguan Contras (at a bay a few miles to the south) were paid for in illegal drugs, not money. These drugs were then (allegedly) flown back to the States in U.S. military aircraft, off-loaded at U.S. military bases, and converted to U.S. currency by selling them directly to U.S. drug dealers — the proceeds, of course, to be used in Iran for President Reagan’s own clandestine purposes. We would later hear confirmation of this story from every other Costa Rican to whom we spoke who had any knowledge at all of the affair, as well as from a U.S. cruiser who claimed to have personally witnessed arms being landed on the beach at Bahia Potrero Grande.
	Of course, Rudolfo was just one guy, but a pretty well-known and respected guy, a land owner and businessman, a man of scrupulous integrity, and one of the nicest, most open, most generous people we'd ever met anywhere. If he said it, we tended to believe it. But all that notwithstanding, I ask you this: would you be surprised if this story were true?
	Us neither. But there’s more. Local fishermen (said Rudolfo), who helped Ollie get his cargoes on and off the beach, were subsequently rewarded with brand new Toyota Four Runners and other vehicles, flown in on C-130 Hercules U.S. military planes and off-loaded in the wilds of western Costa Rica, thus bypassing Customs, who would presumably have become somewhat exercised. Incredulous, we asked ourselves: could these really have been U.S. military airplanes?
	Here's the final piece. We heard tales that some miles to the south, on the backbone of the high, jutting Nicoya Peninsula, overlooking the sea, there existed an electronic eavesdropping and anti-aircraft radar installation, U.S. DEA-funded, eight stories tall (four above ground and four below), manned by eighty Americans and three hundred Costa Ricans. Its purpose: drug interdiction. Sounded reasonable. I knew the technology existed. But if there were such a facility, was it likely that any airplane, let alone a beast the size of a C-130, could land on an airstrip only forty miles away completely unseen and unmolested?
	Not hardly. So many stories. If true, they meant that our precious DEA, ostensibly chartered to wage a "war on drugs", was instead simply turning the U.S. illicit drug market into a CIA monopoly. Using your money and mine.
	Enough of this.

	Going ashore a few days later we found about twenty residents of the nearby town of La Cruz deployed on Rudolfo's beach. There was nothing he could do about it. In Costa Rica, the shoreline for fifty meters back from the water may not be privately owned, and while private use may be authorized, exclusion of the public is illegal. These folks had invaded Rudolfo’s property unannounced, ensconced themselves, gotten out their soccer balls and boom boxes, and settled in for the afternoon. It seems word had gotten out that there were more yachts in Bahia de Salinas at one time than ever before, and that their crews were coming ashore for the first time in living memory. Several had even visited La Cruz, including us. These people, it seems, had come to see us.
	We had warned Rudolfo that his thirty years of wondering why visiting yachties never came ashore was about to end. There were nine yachts in the bay, with more due shortly. Lynn suggested that he begin to consider the business opportunity this represented. (Rudolfo was a man on whom business ideas were seldom lost.) I relayed to him the short list of what all yachties want: laundry, water, diesel fuel, ice, beer, fresh food, trash disposal, and a way to exchange money. Rudolfo was already providing three of these — laundry, water, and trash disposal — the latter two for free.

	We spoke again via SSB radio with the wild man in Alabama: Corky Reed, in Soldier Creek, "just off Perdido Bay". God only knew where that was: we didn't. According to Corky, God did know, and had in His wisdom selected Lower Alabama ("The Real L.A.") to be his Chosen Land. Corky was trying to convince us to sail there directly from the Yucatan Peninsula, skipping Texas and Louisiana. His exact words were, "There ain't nuthin' west uh Mobile Bay yew need tuh see!" — and he promised to send a cruising guide of the place to our next mail port.
	Of more immediate import to us were his comments on our engine cooling problems. It turned out he had the same motor, a Perkins 4.108, in his Cape Dory 36 Inerarity, and apparently he and everyone he knew who had that motor had the same problem we had. Amazingly, the culprit was the coolant. You know, antifreeze, the secondary purpose of which is rust protection. I’d been using a 50% dilution, just like in a car, but for some reason (said Corky), Perkins motors have a habit of breaking down the coolant, causing the precipitation of a form of silica gel, which is insoluble and forms a mucousy green goo that clogs the heat exchanger. Remember the green goo I had flushed out of there back in Nuevo Vallarta? Finally I understood its source. Corky went on to say that in Lower Alabama they got around this problem by running a mixture of plain water with a rust inhibitor. He added that if we needed it he'd send down a spare heat exchanger he had on hand. What a guy! We just had to visit him somehow. We began to think seriously of inserting Lower Alabama into our itinerary.
	Lacking rust inhibitor, I decided to simply vastly decrease the coolant fraction, keeping just enough in there to lubricate the water pump — but first I had to figure out how to clean out the goo. To the rescue came Don from Moonrise (as usual), who had just arrived in Bahia de Salinas after a marathon run from Puerto Vallarta. (He and Eileen had been delayed while delivering a friend's boat north from Cabo to San Diego.) Don said what I needed was common dishwasher detergent, Cascade or Calgon. But guess what? There are no dishwashers in the Costa Rican hinterlands (which is most of Costa Rica), so there’s no dishwasher soap either. However, Don and Eileen were headed for the capital, San Jose, by bus the next day, and Don promised to pick some up for me.
	True to his word, four days later he dropped a small box of Cascade onto Daybreak's cockpit seat. After thanking him profusely, I dropped a few tablespoonfuls of the stuff into the header tank and ran the motor up to temperature, then drained and flushed the system. I did this three times, and it worked like a charm. All sorts of crap came out of there! For the final fill I used only ten percent coolant.
	Our cooling problems were instantly, utterly, and forever over. It may sound trite, but after six months of constant concern and aggravation, you can't imagine our relief. We had a reliable, working motor again. I was ready to sail straight to Lower Alabama and kiss Corky’s feet. Even in Gatun Lake, in the middle of the Panama Canal, where the water temperature is 95 degrees, we would power through at our maximum sustainable speed of seven knots without incident.
	That same box of Cascade stayed in Daybreak's locker permanently. I used it once a year. Upon finding rust inhibitor a month later in Puntarenas, I bought several cans just in case, never used them. Why screw around with what’s already working?

	Before leaving Bahia Salinas, on a trash run ashore I ran into Rudolfo, who invited me inside to see his antique gun collection, from World War II vintage rifles on back to colonial era flintlocks. There was a story concerning them. The police, it seems, had got wind of the collection and had come to investigate, since there are strict laws regulating gun ownership in Costa Rica. The police saw the guns (none usable) and told Rudolfo it was illegal to keep them. Ah, no, said Rudolfo, that law applies only to automatic weapons. Taken aback, the policemen went away to check this out, and in the meantime Rudolfo mentioned the incident over lunch to one of his friends, who happened to be a federal judge. She promptly said no problema, mi amigo, returned to her office, and typed up a court order confiscating the guns and making them state property. She then typed a second order designating Rudolfo as custodian of said property, and designating his house as a national museum for their display. When the police finally returned, these two court orders were framed and affixed to Rudolfo's wall right next to the guns. What a country!
	By this time thirty cruising boats had congregated in the bay, an unprecedented number, and everyone of them, like us, planned to meander slowly through the fifty nautical miles of western Costa Rica between there and Playa del Coco, the first Port of Entry, thus gaining time beyond the usual 90-day visa period. None of us knew, however, that the Costa Rican Coast Guard takes a swing up through that region once a week to discourage just such a practice.
They arrived that afternoon. They asked the first cruiser they visited how many days it would be before he planned to check in at Playa del Coco. The answer was two weeks (this info was immediately disseminated over the VHF after the officers departed), which was deemed acceptable. Therefore, the second boat to be boarded also said two weeks, but it didn't work. They were given only ten days. Daybreak was third. When we said "ten days" there was a sudden pained expression and sharp intake of breath, prompting me to ask if that were a problem. "Nooo . . . " said the Coast Guard commander, "No problema, Capitan Darnton . . . " followed by silence, and distinct discomfort. My answer was clearly unacceptable, but he wouldn’t say what the right answer was, and it soon became apparent he wasn't leaving until he heard one he liked. Since there were three soldiers on Daybreak’s deck in battle fatigues with automatic weapons, I worked my way down to "five", and suddenly he was all smiles. We shook hands, I signed his vessel inspection report, and they left. Naturally I reported this result by VHF for the benefit of the next victim.
	Three boats later all bonhomie had ended, and the rule was "Be in Playa del Coco tomorrow, or else!" What a strange way to run a country, and all because there was no Immigration office in Costa Rica's northernmost anchorage. Rudolfo, hearing of this later and seeing the opportunity, promptly proposed to the government that Bahia Salinas be designated a Port of Entry and that he act as Customs and Immigration officer — for free. A couple months later this is exactly what happened, thus guaranteeing 1) that all cruisers could now conveniently and legally sample the prodigious delights of northwestern Costa Rica without first detouring to Playa del Coco, 2) that all cruisers visiting Bahia Salinas would of necessity come ashore first at Rudolfo's property, and 3) that since no services yet existed anywhere in the bay, Rudolfo would have a captive market for whatever services he might wish to provide. Muy clever, no?
	We sailed out in the morning with Moonrise and spent two days with them in Bahia Santa Elena, situated in a national park eighteen miles away. While there we explored our first Costa Rican mangrove swamp and witnessed unbelievably intense nightly thunderstorms along the high mountainous spine of Cabo Santa Elena. We then sailed the remaining distance to Playa del Coco, and checked in on the fifth day, as agreed.

	El Coco was a lovely little beach resort of perhaps a few hundred people, to which inland Costa Ricans flocked every weekend. Twenty five miles inland lay Liberia, a farm town of roughly 16,000 with some stores and services available, just a one-hour, 75-cent bus ride away. I mention Liberia so quickly because, for cruisers, it could not be separated from El Coco. This is because El Coco has no stores. We needed to go to Liberia not only for groceries (we'd last provisioned in Acapulco a month earlier) but also to search for a new refrigeration compressor. Yes, the refrigeration had finally died a violent death.
	At this juncture, I'm going to tell you the entire remainder of the Daybreak refrigeration saga. I'm going to do this because at the time I was sick to death of living it, and right now I'm sick to death of writing about it. And if I don't do something about it now, soon you will be sick to death of reading about it. Because you see, this saga went on for the entire two years of our cruise. If you want to know what cruising is really like, don't skip this part. If you have any interest at all in cruising, it would be of service to you if you now become nauseated beyond all endurance at the word "refrigeration." If you already are, I have some bad news for you. Some variant of this story inevitably becomes the deep personal experience of every cruiser who has any mechanical or electrical equipment whatsoever on board.
	1970's transformation guru and est founder Werner Erhard once observed that it is an inescapable fact of human life is that "nothing is ever over." While there are aspects of life for which this observation could probably be debated, boat maintenance and repair is not one of them. One of the ways you know you have a boat is that something is always broken. What breaks may vary from boat to boat, but what does not vary is that something is broken. In Daybreak's case, refrigeration was at the top of the list.
	You might think that if something doesn't work on a boat, you can just fix it, and after that it will work. I used to think that. Now I think that even you live in the United States, have an unending supply of money, your boat lives right next to a boatyard full of marine repair professionals, and you never take your boat out of its slip, this happy state still can never be achieved. The truth is that if you fix it, it will work for awhile.
	In real life, you find out what needs attention on a boat by having it break. You find whatever design flaws may be present by having it break again. If you have a system of some complexity aboard your boat — refrigeration, say — you can’t begin to sort the whole mess out until it breaks again, because sometimes in order to diagnose the root cause you need to see a pattern of breakage. Therefore, nothing that breaks aboard a boat starts to really work right until it has been fixed at least three times. And if you are in Central America, no matter how rich you are, the person who is going to be doing the fixing is you. This is because no matter how little you may know, no Costa Rican knows more than you. I was fortunate: I had a college degree in Physics and twenty years of science and engineering experience, including molecular physics and thermodynamics. This is just about what it takes to understand refrigeration.
	Daybreak has two refrigeration systems in parallel, a 110-volt AC system for use with dock power, and an engine-driven system for "real life", both plumbed into the same cold plates. Everyone who has read even one cruising "how-to" book knows that engine-driven refrigeration is "the best". I am willing to contest this. Our AC system always worked, never failed, never required service, and ran fine after fourteen years of life — even in the tropics, even cooped up as it was inside the hot engine compartment. Our engine-driven system, on the other hand, gave us nothing but trouble.
	Since we ran the engine daily to charge our batteries, engine-driven refrigeration seemed to make a lot of sense, and besides, Daybreak already had it when we bought her. What we didn't know, and found out only after much trauma and expense, was that the system's condenser (that's the little heat exchanger where the heat from the icebox gets transferred to sea water) had been designed for Southern California, where the sea temperature never exceeds 75 degrees and the air rarely gets over 85. In Costa Rica, the numbers were 92 and 105. This may not seem like much difference to something mechanical, but heat is the mortal enemy of refrigeration. If there was going to be a problem, Costa Rica was where it was going to happen, and it did. But the failure mode was odd: the compressor's clutch shorted out. We would go through three more months, two more countries, and three more compressors before I would finally figure out why.
	An engine-driven refrigeration compressor is nothing but an automotive air-conditioning compressor, complete with the little 12-volt clutch on the front. This clutch, which engages and disengages the compressor, is supposed to draw about one amp of electrical current when it is "on". In western Costa Rica, I finally had to disconnect ours when this current got to twenty amps. The clutch's electrical coil had shorted out and was literally melting down.
	At the time, I supposed this was understandable. The clutch had been in the boat for eleven years and two previous owners. Maybe it was tired. The fact that I’d never seen this happen in a car escaped me. Having made our way to Playa del Coco with three bolts jammed into the dead clutch to keep it engaged, we caught the bus to Liberia, walked from the bus station into the center of town, and asked everyone we met if there were someone in town who worked on refrigeration. In this manner we came to the small father/son shop of Manuel and Paul Camacho (pronounced Pah-OOL), situated naturally as far across town from the bus depot as possible. In spite of severe language difficulties, Manuel managed to understand what we needed and agreed to order a new compressor from San Jose ($345), and then to have our old one rebuilt as a spare ($225), also in San Jose, thus saving us the eight hour bus trip each way and two or three days in a hotel. Manuel predicted delivery in a week. 
	Two days passed, and miraculously the new compressor arrived. We went to get it, brought it home, and it fit exactly. It was perfect. It ran in almost total silence, worked great, and we were overjoyed. We took the old compressor back to Liberia to be sent for rebuild.
	That last sentence sounds so simple, like driving down to your local Seven-Eleven. I should describe traveling to Liberia. We'd get up at dawn, have breakfast, pack a traveling bag plus a bag to carry the compressor, take along our foulies and umbrellas, and motor to shore in the dinghy, where we’d land through surf on a black sand beach plagued by a nine foot tide. Once on the beach, wet to the thighs (or higher, if it were raining or we'd taken a wave aboard), we'd lug the loaded dinghy fifty yards up the beach and tie it to a post on the hotel porch. Now sandy as well as wet, we'd use a hose in the hotel garden to rinse our feet off, put them into our sandals wet, and walk to the bus stop on slithery feet. Usually in rain. The bus would be steaming inside, jammed with people, and occasionally animals. This was a family expedition, by the way. We did everything together.
	An hour later we'd arrive at the Liberia bus depot, gather up our things, and walk a mile to the Camachos’ shop, hoping someone would actually be there. We'd hand over the compressor, and everyone would nod a lot about how it would be "like new" when we came back two weeks later. By this point we’d be hot, tired, cranky, and damp, and we'd have a choice: go get a Coke and an early lunch somewhere (yay!) or hurry back to the bus depot to catch the noon bus back to El Coco, thus delaying lunch and sorely needed beverages until about 1:30 (boo!). We'd invariably opt for lunch.
	The next later bus was at 3:00. On foot in a small Costa Rican farm town, in the tropical heat and humidity, we'd have a couple hours to kill, so we’d linger over lunch. Hiking back to the depot, we'd indulge once more in ice cold Cokes — the Real Thing, in case anyone asks, and in the Costa Rican summer it's almost better than sex — then board the bus, return to El Coco, launch the dinghy, and get back to Daybreak. If it hadn't been raining in the morning, it would be by now, hard. Having left the boat at 8:15, it would now be 4:30. A full day to run a five minute errand. This was normal. If any of our friends were in the bar as we walked past, we'd hole up in there with them, down a few beers, and tell "war" stories to unwind.
	Three weeks later (not two), the old compressor was finally repaired. It was the only thing holding us in the area, and with our three-month visas ticking away we wanted to leave, so we repeated the above process to go get it. When we got to the shop and examined the compressor, it didn't look quite right, but it took a minute for me to see the problem. The entire center section of the compressor, where the guts are, had been reassembled backwards.
	I was dumbstruck. Incredulous. Then I was livid. To his credit, Manuel was mortified, and promised to drive it personally to San Jose the following day (a four hour trip for him), get it fixed again, and return the same day. I could have it back the following morning.
	Fat chance. Instead, it took five days. He had to leave it off and later return for it. He had to make that drive twice. Fine with me. I hoped his gasoline bill ate up his profits. When I finally got the thing, I became suspicious because the same age-old wire was coming out of the supposedly new clutch coil, so I checked it by hooking it up to the battery in Manuel’s truck. It worked.
	Two months later, at the small island of Isla Brincanco thirty miles off the jungle-clad coast of Panama, the refrigeration circuit breaker blew again. The clutch on the brand new compressor had shorted out — just like the old one.
	I was beside myself. We were three weeks away from our intended arrival at Panama City. It was now clear that something was killing clutch coils, but I had no idea what. But, not to worry, heh heh, this is why we’d had the old one rebuilt, right? We dug it out of its storage box under the V-berth and I installed it, using $50 worth of precious Freon in the process (and blowing the old Freon into the sky, of course). We started the motor, flipped the switch, and the compressor made a noise like an industrial table saw going through a foot-thick stack of plywood. The incredible truth slowly dawned: the clutch coil had indeed been replaced, but the rest of the compressor was worse off than before.
	I'd like to think we'd been "had", purposely fleeced in the knowledge that we’d never be back, but it wasn't like that. We were simply victims of utter incompetence. After $620, including the wasted Freon (not to mention our horrifying contribution to the ozone hole), we were back to square one. With thirty days of food on hand we were, for the first time, totally and irretrievably without refrigeration.
	We cruised on toward Panama City, eating quite well at first, then resorting to rice, beans, and canned goods. In Panama City we learned that the clutch on our new compressor could not be repaired — it was a peculiar Costa Rican brand — so we bought another brand new compressor, this time for $234. Before installing it, though, I had to figure out why the other two had failed. Pulling out Nigel Calder's wonderful book on marine refrigeration (every cruising boat should carry it), I began a self-taught graduate-level course, in the process of which I calculated all Daybreak’s refrigeration system loads from scratch, in an attempt to find the problem.
	In so doing, I learned that the condenser was one fifth the size it should have been for tropical conditions, and therefore totally incapable of adequately cooling the hot refrigerant coming from the compressor. This inability was resulting in refrigerant pressures double what they should have been, up to 250 pounds per square inch, which in turn was causing the compressor to run 50 or 60 degrees too hot. The excess heat was melting the plastic matrix of the clutch coil, allowing the wires to contact each other, short out, and fuse.
	So. We needed a much larger condenser. But the existing one had been custom-built for the (small) space it occupied. I’d have had to design a new one from scratch and then find someone to build it, a daunting and expensive task in Panama City, where every trip to town involved several eight-dollar taxi rides. I chose a riskier but simpler approach. I resolved simply to never run the engine above idle speed if the compressor were on, hoping by this ruse to keep the system pressure down. I also readjusted the set-points upward. The box would never get as cold again, but at least, I thought, the compressor might live.
	Four months later, in Alabama, as I looked at last into the possibility of installing a correctly-sized condenser (and assuming that any competent technician could build one to my specifications in half a day), I was astounded to find no shop between Mobile and Pensacola that would even look at a job involving — I am not exaggerating — two fifteen-foot lengths of copper tubing, two small copper pipe fittings, and four solder joints. It appeared I was going to be stuck with that undersized condenser for the duration of our voyage. (Indeed, that was the case.) So I needed a way to limit the current draw of the clutch.
	This problem, I suddenly realized, was exactly the same problem automobile designers had had with ignition coils for the eighty years before electronic ignition, and they’d solved it in a brutally simple way. They installed something called a "ballast resistor" in the circuit so that the current could never exceed a predetermined limit.
	I calculated the electrical resistance I needed, drove to the nearest NAPA auto parts store, looked through their catalogs, and bought a ballast resistor for a 1965 Chevy Impala. Paid two dollars for it. I drove back to the boat, and installed it.
	There was no trouble from then on.
	Sure, the system still needed a new condenser, and we could never run the motor faster than 1500 rpm when the refrigeration was on, but it worked. Maybe some day I'd even get around to fixing it right. Probably when I got ready to sell Daybreak.

	With Moonrise we headed south fourteen miles to Marina Flamingo, a tiny place dedicated to sportfishermen, which had the only actual fuel DOCK between Acapulco and the Panama Canal, a distance of 1900 miles. (To put this in perspective, imagine driving east from San Francisco knowing that the next place where you'd actually be able to pull into a gas station and stick a nozzle into your fuel tank would be Missouri.) Anticipating a leisurely cruise back north through the parts of western Costa Rica we’d missed, we fueled up.
	We were enjoying traveling with Don and Eileen, whom we’d originally thought of as rather unlikely cruising companions. It just sort of happened, as things do in cruising. It was turning out fine. Eileen was an Alcoholics Anonymous-affiliated recovering alcoholic (known among themselves as "friends of Bill W", AA's founder). Don had received a medical discharge from the Army in the late 60's after suffering massive injuries in an auto accident. He and the Porsche 911 he was driving, it seems, had left the German autobahn at something like 200 kilometers per hour and hit a tree while soaring forty feet above the ground. Don had left the car at that point, still doing pretty close to 200 kph, and landed face-down on a gravel road. His lower torso looked like a high school anatomy experiment gone terribly awry. He was living on his disability pension plus odd boat work from time to time. He and Eileen had both lived through some harrowing experiences, and we discovered we shared a similar outlook on life. We buddy-boated with them from June through mid-October that year. No narrative of our Costa Rican sojourn would be complete without them.
	The hills were getting greener by the day. The rainy season was in full swing, and rain it did. In a good downpour, which occurred daily, we could collect three or four gallons a minute just by tying a bucket under the starboard deck scupper. We could fill our 200 gallon tanks in an hour. Water would be no problem for the next five months, which was good, because our watermaker was dying. We had more water than we could possibly use. We eschewed showers, preferring instead to bathe in the dinghy, which collected several inches of pure sweet rain water every day.
	Costa Rica is an oasis of peace and sanity in Central American. The Guardia Civil carry only billy clubs in town, sometimes sidearms in the countryside. No rifles or automatic weapons. By law the country has no army, and private gun ownership is illegal (except for Rudolfo). The police carry fewer weapons than in any U.S. town, and they don't have that macho "I'm the law, don't fuck with me" attitude.
	The countryside was more than simply attractive. It was flamboyantly green everywhere, whether farmland or wilderness. Lots of wilderness: dense, impenetrable jungle filled with wild cats, monkeys, iguanas, and literally ten thousand species of insects, mostly non-biting. Snakes too, including the most poisonous species on earth, the fer de lance — but we never saw any. Every bay we saw was calm, attractive, and welcoming. Everyone we'd met had been friendly, open, helpful, and proud of their country. We had yet to encounter a scowl or a dark face.
	Some snapshots of Costa Rican cruising: sitting in a backyard terrace restaurant owned by an American couple who'd lived there for 20 years. After vacationing there for a month, they'd never left, a common story. Sipping Cokes and beers under a ficus tree the size of a California live oak, thirty feet high and fifty across the canopy, which had grown that large after only seven years. Body surfing and sand castle building on a wide shelving white sand beach at low tide, the best sand castle beach we'd ever seen. The ocean just a bit cooler than body temperature. The beach rimmed by lush green foliage, succulents, and grass. Down the beach against a small headland, a small left point break which I would surf the next morning while the family played in the sand.
	Back aboard for dinner in a quiet bay with a mild breeze across the peninsula. Bug screens in place. Stories for the kids before they retired, Tania at 7:30, then Roxanne at 8:00. Reading afterwards, then to sleep fairly early. No daylight savings time: sunset at six pm, dawn at five am. Sleeping in nothing, no sheets or blankets. Warm. Not enough breeze in our cabin.
	We hadn't found anyplace we hadn't liked in Costa Rica. If only, said Eileen on Moonrise, we could string even two days together when we weren't working on the boat or running errands. Two days in a row at the beach, or snorkeling and diving, or exploring ashore, or daysailing between anchorages, that would be a vacation. The typical charterer gets more recreation in a week than we ever got in two months.
	Well, in any case, it still made Mexico look sick.
	So far we'd spent three weeks in the first sixty miles of the country, and we were about to go back to the places we'd missed. By the time we were done with that one stretch of coast, we'd have been there six or seven weeks. This seemed about right at the time. There were three hundred more miles of Costa Rica to see after that. Life was getting slower. It was time for serious loafing. Good grief, had we said we'd be done with Costa Rica by the end of July?
	After fueling up and treating the kids to an afternoon at the huge swimming pool at a nearby hotel, we returned to Playa del Coco to reprovision (at Liberia), and finally came north a few miles into what was reputed to be the largest natural harbor in Costa Rica: Bahia Culebra, four miles long and two miles wide, its mouth situated at right angles to the prevailing westerly swell, so very little surge got in. With Moonrise we anchored as far inside as we could get, off Playa Iguanita, a long empty beach of darkish sand fronting a mangrove lagoon, with endless rain forest behind. Having come at high tide, I had nosed Daybreak up toward the lagoon inlet, but in ten feet of water (which would only be one foot at low tide) I backed away quickly when a sudden surge swept beneath us and rolled up on the sand. Odd, I thought. The bay was as flat as a lake, and we were four miles from its mouth. Where had that swell come from? I moved out to 25 feet of water and dropped the hook.
	In the morning the answer was revealed. Whatever tidbit of ocean swell managed to turn the corner into Bahia Culebra found its way up to the northeastern corner, focusing itself there — and nowhere else — on the sandbar extending out from the mouth of the lagoon. As I sat in the cockpit after breakfast, enjoying the cool serenity under the sun awning and gazing up the forested valley behind the beach, a sound that had no place in that quiet bay occurred off to my right: the crisp, ripping sound of breaking surf. I turned my head in time to see the back of a perfect little wave, eighteen inches high, peeling across that sandbar like a zipper, leaving a ruler-straight path of white foam behind it. I watched in fascination for a moment, then lunged below to consult my tide tables. It was two and a half hours until low. The tide would drop another foot. The waves would get steeper, and maybe taller. Damn. I was going surfing!
	Sometimes life is just so wonderful it can scarcely be described. We all headed for the beach to play, and there, in perfect, tiny, crystalline splendor, was the prettiest little two foot sandbar break you could ever hope to see. Not exactly world class size, but in a ten-knot offshore breeze the shape was heartbreaking. We took my board plus Roxanne’s boogie board, and everyone but Eileen surfed. It was the best beginner break I'd ever seen, with a ride about fifty yards long, and you could wade back out to the top of the break. With some assistance in placement and getting started, Roxanne caught wave after wave. Don caught several on the boogie board, and even Lynn, who had reason to hold surfing against me (I'd taken her surfing on our honeymoon, but that's another story), surfed a few on my board. If the tide had stayed low, I'd have stayed out there all day.
	As the surf fizzled in the rising tide, we noticed that the current through the lagoon inlet was becoming quite strong. Don and I looked at each other, having had the same idea. We ran to the edge of the sandbar and jumped in. Floating on our backs, the current swept us into the lagoon like a magic carpet beneath the overhanging branches of trees reaching down from the hillside opposite. Fifty yards inside the lagoon we swam sideways out of the current until we could touch bottom, waded to the inner shore of the sandspit, and ran to the sandbar to repeat the process. It didn’t take long before everyone had joined the fun.
	The sun was getting hot when clouds that had been building over the land rolled out over the beach to keep us cool. We played and played. When rain began to fall high up in the valley we rushed back to the dinghies and zipped out to the boats, just in time to close them up before the downpour. Twenty five knot gusts blasted across the water, but it didn't last long. An hour later the sun was back. Lunchtime! Ham, cheese, and avocado sandwiches. Then school time for the girls, run the motor, charge the batteries, run the refrigeration . . .
	Five days passed by like this, hours blending into days, days blending into nights, surfing, swimming, the girls practicing their snorkeling in the lagoon, the adults sitting on the sandspit talking, then school, boat chores, Lynn sewing, me writing, Roxanne and Tania reading or playing, dinners together aboard one boat or the other, stories for the kids, talking into the night after they were in bed . . . A truly human pace began to emerge.
	It was so beautiful there, and so safe, so at ease, so peaceful. One night after the girls were asleep Lynn and I sat up on the bow in the delightful evening breeze and watched the nearly full moon rise over the hills behind the inlet, shining its light across the water like Hollywood movie set. It glittered, golden, absolutely magic. Unbelievable. And incredibly romantic.
	But sometimes the rhythms of human mood don't jibe with those of the universe. We should have been lying on the side deck having sex. Instead we were sitting with our backs against the upturned dinghy having an argument — while looking out on the sparkling moonlit water. What a colossal waste.
	There was an even fuller moon the next night. Lynn and I did our best with it, but it wasn’t the same. Things so perfect don’t tend to repeat themselves. 
	Our last day there, the waves were breaking a bit larger and, if possible, more beautifully. I surfed ‘til I could barely move. Roxanne, Tania, Lynn, and Don swam off the beach, snorkeled, took walks, swam some more, and sat in the cool shallows at the edge of the sandbar letting the waves wash over their bodies. We found ourselves incredulous that we were there, and that we had so much time all to ourselves. We'd been gone two hundred and one days. Day by day, one day after another, no jobs, no debts, no appointments, no meetings, no phones, and, for the most part, no deadlines. Yes, we'd been "hurrying" to get to Costa Rica since leaving Las Hadas — thirty miles a day qualified as hurrying for us — but viewed as a whole we'd had 201 days of living just the way we wanted to, with very little interference from anyone. And stretching out in front of us were at least 500 more such days. We’d not experienced such freedom since before kindergarten.
Do you remember what life was like before kindergarten? This was like that, only better: no parents, and a whole world of real estate to explore. Ultimate play. Not like a vacation, where no matter how long it lasts, it doesn't last long enough to truly forget what work was like, and what's more, you know EXACTLY how it's going to end and where you'll be when it does. Vacations are defined by what they aren't more than by what they are. By contrast, we had no idea how, when, where, or even if our cruising days would end. We hadn't made that part up yet.
	The urge to move on finally overtook us, driving us to abandon the dreamlike bliss of Playa Iguanita and move to Bahia Huevos, a grand total of three nautical miles as the crow flies, eight or nine by sea. Big deal. No surf there, but good snorkeling, and it was quiet and peaceful. Melinda Lee was there, and they had kids, friends of Roxanne’s and Tania’s. Their dinghy was alongside Daybreak before our anchor hit the bottom. The kids were inseparable. Lynn, unfortunately, had caught a cold — from Eileen, who said it was a four day deal. Lynn was in her third day, and had been sleeping constantly.

	"The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore." So wrote Douglas Adams in The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, and one seldom encounters a statement of balder truth. Just the Earth by itself is unsettlingly big, and we were right smack in it. One thing was for sure, no one who sets out to go cruising for the first time has any idea what they're getting into. After six months we had barely become what you might call "adjusted", which we had accomplished by learning the hard way what kinds of things we needed to ignore "for the sake of a quiet life". It's amazing what people are capable of if they just don't think about it too much. We'd been through an emotional wringer we’d never expected would be part of "a quiet cruise down the coast of Mexico". We had a new appreciation of the size of the adjustment necessary. People who'd been cruising for a year or more didn't seem to panic and think their life was coming to an end like we did over every little thing. They'd learned, quite simply, that most of what they ran into wasn’t going to bring their lives to an end, and that a list as long as your arm of things to fix didn't mean you shouldn't go snorkelling that day. It did mean you should learn to enjoy fixing things — perhaps as much as snorkeling — and also that no one else really wants to hear about it. The cruisers we admired most were the ones who went at everything as if it were normal, something we had barely begun to do.
	We dreamed of having a boat that always worked like other people dream of winning the lottery: nice dream, but let's be serious. If it happens, it'll happen to someone else. In the real world, the way we get mechanical things to "always" work is to institute an absolutely killer service and maintenance schedule, and follow it religiously. Airplanes are a good example. The FAA tells you everything you have to do, and if you don't do all of it, you don't fly. Period. They check. Two to four hours of maintenance for every flight hour, professionally performed in a fully equipped shop, that's what it takes, and that's in a benign environment (air) rather than salt water. On a cruising boat, that kind of down time just isn't available. In fact, there's no down time, and no professional maintenance crew. The nice thing about boats is that, unlike airplanes, when stuff breaks there's usually time to figure out how to work around it, because unless you are extraordinarily unlucky or stupid, boats do continue to float.
	Of course, there is some stupidity about. While in Costa Rica one cruising couple we knew, who shall remain nameless, had a galley fire which left one of them with fairly severe burns. Turns out he was cleaning a fuel filter in the galley sink, in an open pan containing gasoline, next to the stove where his dinner was cooking on an open burner. These people were lucky to be alive, let alone still have a boat, and given the colossal level of stupidity involved, the surprising thing is that they seemed to know it. All we could think was, don't anchor too close to us, OK? We've got enough thrills in this life already.

	Bahia Potrero Grande, twenty miles away, was reputed to have good surf: four to six feet at the river mouth, perfect shape. I was salivating, but wondered if I'd have the stamina for it. I was slowly getting into better shape, but I was no kid and never would be again. Surfing involves adapting one's available strength and stamina to the power of the break. Six foot surf would be the biggest I'd tried for over ten years. We raised anchor and headed for the bay.
	Three hours later, we had arrived in the land of surf. It was not the best time of day to check it out (afternoon, and blown-out), but Roxanne and I did anyway. Daybreak was anchored at the south end of a west-facing beach in a large open bay, at the north end of which, about a mile away, were the waves, breaking three to four feet. We caught a number of rides before heading back. Roxanne, barely seven years old and on a belly board, was catching them entirely on her own. I'd tell her where to line up and which ones to try for, and she did the rest. Then I'd help her stand up in the shorebreak (she wasn’t very big) to wait for the right moment to start paddling out again. She only got caught inside once, and got pounded and rolled all the way to the beach, but she survived it fine. Four feet may not sound like much, but it was an expansive break with a lot of power. Roxanne was only fifty four inches tall and weighed about sixty pounds. Fortunately there was some breathing space between the sets, or she wouldn't have stood a chance.
	I figured to try it again in the morning if conditions were favorable, but we didn't plan to stay a second night. The anchorage was wide open to the swell, and landing a dinghy on the beach was next to impossible, so there wasn't much for a family to do there. Six miles away was the best snorkelling and diving in western Costa Rica: Islas Murcielagos. We'd go there. But we'd caught a twenty pound yellowfin tuna on the way in, so we had Don and Eileen over for sashimi followed by BBQ'd tuna, while it rained vigorously outside.
	In the morning I went surfing again, in glassy six-foot waves that peeled across the river mouth at low tide with unbelievable precision. First one I caught, I made my turn, trimmed out right under the lip, and then didn't move a muscle for a hundred yards. The wave face was that clean. I surfed, as usual, until I could barely move.
	Back aboard, preparing to get the anchor up as conditions began to deteriorate, I was rewarded by a motor that wouldn't start. Clickety-click-click — dead. I broke out in a full body sweat, and started to tremble and shake, literally. Heart in mouth, real life, no fun. We were in four foot swells in thirty feet of water in a building onshore breeze, with our back to the beach. We had been "equalizing" the batteries for two days, and they looked good on the voltmeter, but . . . phooey!! So I started testing things, like the anchor windlass, which worked fine, and the battery ground-float when loaded, which was . . . HUGE!! The starter motor caused four volts of float. Ooops. That damned ground cable was loose again. This time, rather than just refasten it, I unbundled the damn thing all the way back to the battery and attached it firmly to a big bolt right on top of the engine block, in plain view and accessible. Why it hadn't been put someplace like that in the first place was a mystery. This task, of course, required Lynn's presence back in that hole of an engine compartment which, mercifully this time, was not yet hot.
	We hit the starter again and vroom! it lit up instantly. Checked the ground offsets, which were fine. Hallelujah!! Got that one licked. We still had the voltage regulator problem (oh, haven’t I told you about that? It was dead. I was turning the alternator on and off manually. But you don't wanna hear this, do you?). At least the engine ran. We raised anchor and got the flock outta there —
	— and arrived an hour later at Murcielagos anchorage. Deee-lightful. Clear water, great snorkelling. The cove there is nearly circular, a volcanic-looking haven formed between two of the islands near the east end of the chain, and it had beaches on three sides under green grassy hills. Beautiful as long as the Papagayos didn't blow, which they weren't at that moment. But that place had had fifty knot winds for a week before we showed up. Some of our friends had been anchored there riding it out. Hmm. Come to think of it, it was the same folks who had the gasoline fire in their galley. Do you see a trend here? They were also the only southbound cruisers that year to decide that stopping in Nicaragua might be fun . . .
	After anchoring, Roxanne hit the water with her dive mask on, and promptly bobbed back up to announced that she saw sea snakes on the bottom! Lynn and I both said nawww, that can't be, but she was very insistent, so we suggested that she get out of the water. Whereupon, after suitable surveillance, I plunged in (we were anchored in fifteen feet), took a look, and came up to splutter that she was absolutely correct! Three snakey things about three feet long were grazing on the bottom. I said I thought sea snakes stayed on the surface most of the time, but when Lynn got out the book (Dangerous Marine Animals, by Bruce Halstead), it said they could stay submerged for hours to feed, resurfacing only occasionally to breathe. I dove down for a closer look. They were like no sea snake I knew of, and certainly not the infamous yellow-bellied sea snake for which Costa Rica is known. These were white with dark brown, almost black spots. Lynn countered by reading that the world contains many more species of sea snake than those mentioned in the book. Great. I responded by noting that their heads didn't look like sea snake heads, and that in fact they looked like bottom-feeding eels with very small, pointy, sort of vacuum-cleaner mouths, but the only way to know for sure was to see if they had gills (sea snakes don't). This required getting up close. So down I went again, and got my face mask within about a foot and a half of these puppies, and sure enough, they appeared to have, if not actual gills like a fish, at least a pumping action through their throat areas that seemed to be sending water out some sort of opening behind their heads. Also, they had a fin down their backs like a moray eel, which no sea snake has. All this to find out if we could go swimming. They were eels, we decided, so we swam. Later they left. Didn't seen one on the surface the whole afternoon. Good thing too. Eels graze on the bottom, not the surface.
	We decided to take a day "off". No engine work. No unloading the cockpit locker so we could get in to check the batteries. No installing the spare voltage regulator. No working on any of the three dozen tasks that were languishing on our list. Instead, after school we went snorkelling. That place made all our previous snorkelling look sick by comparison. FISH EVERYWHERE!! Fish of every hue, size, and shape. Pale translucent needle fish four feet long with pale blue markings, small moray eels, angelfish of a dozen different sizes and color schemes, tiny bright electric-blue fish with glowing fluorescent blue spots, plus schools and schools of, well, school fish? And lots of yellow-and-blue-striped "sergeant majors". Diving out of the inflatable dinghy was like falling into someone's tropical fish tank. It was so outlandish it didn't even seem real.
	Afterwards, thanks to Don’s inspiration, Lynn made bread. A few days earlier she and the girls had gone over to Moonrise to watch him prepare a batch and learn some of the finer points. This was Lynn's first solo attempt. She made two lovely golden brown loaves that looked so sweet I took a picture. Gave one loaf to Don and Eileen, and ate the other on the spot, "slathered with butter", as the saying goes. Fresh bread promised to change our whole dietary outlook.
	Lynn seemed to have passed another "emotional waypoint" of sorts, triggered by our slowdown and by her relationship with Eileen. She and Don were the most real-time, "be-here-now", one day at a time, "take what comes as it comes and deal with it in its own time" cruisers we'd met. They seemed to enjoy everything, because, after all, what else was there to do? Lynn had become inspired by their example and had taken a big slide "downward" in her own internal pace, coming to realize that the whole cruising life was so much simpler than she has been thinking it was. Basically, her whole existence boiled down to keeping all of us fed and cared for emotionally. My whole job was to take care of the boat and our safety, and to get the boat from port to port. There wasn't much else to it, and the simplicity of it was radical. That didn't make the hard parts easy, but it did mean that our minds tended to be occupied with only one thing at a time. Of course, sometimes we were oppressed by something we needed face up to and handle. Other times though, we were so free we had to make up things to do. The previous two days had illustrated both sides. Overall though, since leaving Playa del Coco, things were beginning to click. We'd had calm empty anchorages, lovely surroundings, mild comfortable weather, good holding ground, good friends, and good sailing, the way it's "supposed to be". We didn't have to be back in Coco for another week, and we didn't plan to get there early.
	Next day: another laid back day in paradise. More snorkeling in azure water under a bright sun. More reading. Still no boat work. Lynn was rummaging through lockers to see if we had the ingredients to make fudge.
	All this, and a lot of thinking about the future. The previous night Lynn had started talking about going to Europe, of all things. By boat. Good grief! Sure took me by surprise. We spent some time looking at our bank balance to see how much time we had left, to see if we could do it on the money we had or if we'd have to stop and work for awhile first, looking at where we might stop where one or both of us could work and where we could live on the boat as well. Looking at how (or if) we'd carry our masts aboard through the canals and rivers of France and Germany, or leave them in storage. Maybe we'd go all the way from the English Channel, or the Mediterranean coast of France, down the Danube to the Black Sea! You can do that, right through the heart of what used to be the Iron Curtain, from whence it appeared one could sail, if one were of a mind, right up through the Aral Sea, the River Don, through a canal to the Volga River, and thence to the Caspian Sea! We're talking Russia here, not to mention Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Have to kiss the old security clearances goodbye, but maybe that wouldn’t be such a terrible thing, hmm? Or maybe just leave all that area to Tristan Jones — sounded like his cuppa tea when he wrote about it — and instead just go from the Bay of Biscay through France to the Med, back up through Switzerland (I'd heard) and Germany, and come out among the East Frisian Islands above the English Channel — or heck, for that matter, how about the Oder River to the Baltic Sea? Then summer in Sweden, Finland, and the Gulf of Bothnia, where the days are 21 hours long. Boy. We'd have to start being careful. If we didn't watch out, we'd end up circumnavigating, and in the wrong direction! Which wouldn't be bad except for that last, horrendous, two-month passage from Japan to the West Coast, which takes one right up next to the Aleutian Islands . . .
	Yikes! Get a grip. We didn't even know yet if we'd get past Lower Alabama.
	One's thinking certainly could get open-ended in the absence of limitations. Maybe that was the secret. Maybe there really weren't any in the first place. Of course, we were educated, aware, enlightened, perceptive adults, and besides, we came from California, the land of fruits and nuts, birthplace of modern transformation. Supposedly we already "knew" all this. But I guess we had to sail to Costa Rica to find it out.

	Surrounded as we were by mile upon mile of ocean and jungle unmarked by humans, it began to occur to us that perhaps many of the world's problems might be greatly relieved if the world’s population were reduced by about a factor of ten. Look at it this way. The Earth's surface is about 200 million square miles, 80% of which is water. At least half the remainder is covered by ice, mountains, deep desert, or is otherwise unfit for human habitation. Of this, let's leave three quarters for crops and livestock, since we need to eat. Then we need to take away half the remainder for streets, highways, public buildings, businesses, government offices, and other infrastructure, not to mention national parks and wildlife preserves. That leaves 2.5 million square miles. That's it. That's all there is for you, me, and the other six billion people on the planet: one quarter of an acre per person. A family of four, by this arithmetic, is entitled to a piece of land 200 feet square. Does this seem like enough to you?
	If you asked me, in a lucid moment, if I would be willing to settle for that, I'd say no, hell no, not a chance, forget it. And if you told me, like I just told you, that that's all you're going to get, period, no questions, end of story, take it or leave it, I'd probably be inclined to start a small war against anyone who happened to have more than that. And yet, for my entire life I have actually lived on quite a bit less. The lot on which our house in El Segundo sat comprised only 4950 square feet, and we paid dearly even for that. Billions of people live on much less. Yet 130 years ago even ex-slaves got forty acres and a mule. What’s going on here?
	Too many people, that’s what. To make matters worse, rather than living out in the countryside where we might actually be able to find and live on our allotted one acre per family, we crowd into cities because there aren't any jobs out in the countryside — and besides, we don’t know how to farm, and probably wouldn't like it if we did. I wonder what effect this crowding has on our stress levels, our emotions, our equanimity, and our relationships. Since cities are where the jobs are, the value we place on land rises with its proximity to a major urban center (while, incidentally, parcel size decreases), so there is a tendency for people to move farther and farther out into the suburbs. It isn't because they enjoy commuting. They just can't afford anything closer or don’t like the crime in town. But they continue to commute rather than attempt to find work closer to home. Why? Because town is where the money is. I mean, if you were working in an urban area and found out you could make the same money out in the sticks, wouldn't you move today? Hell yes! But you can’t. In Costa Rica we were out in the sticks in a big way, and paying for the privilege. Couldn’t have supported ourselves there, that’s for sure.
	It sure looks to me like fewer people is the answer. But nobody I know is volunteering to be the first to check out.

	A low, streaky cloud began spilling over the spine of the Santa Elena peninsula that looked, to our eye, like the onset of those fifty knot winds that’d had everybody freaked out a week earlier. We were thinking, well, we could be wrong, but wouldn't we rather be wrong and back in Bahia Culebra and than be right and still be here? It was a painful decision, because Melinda Lee had just showed up, and the kids were dying to get together again. Sigh. We began negotiations, and left Murcielagos without reaching an agreement. Melinda Lee was "thinking it over".
	The trip down was spectacular. Not much wind, but the storm cells and rain over the land were something to behold: deep dark clouds with heavy black rain gushing down out of them, obliterating the coast for miles. It was especially thick in Potrero Grande. That valley seemed to breed thunder squalls more than any other place in the area. The entire bay was enshrouded in black clouds and rain for an hour as we cruised by, and then the same storm cell migrated seaward toward the anchorage we'd just vacated.
	It must have been a pretty convincing cloud mass, because an hour after we had the hook down at Playa Iguanita again, Melinda Lee showed up and dropped theirs right next door. Our girls just about went nuclear.
	We were holing up there for one last day before returning to El Coco to reprovision and get our repaired compressor. We were low on or out of just about everything, but we didn't want to go back to town. Not because of the town itself, which was just a tiny place, but because of the "town"-type cruisers there. They’d drop anchor offshore of a beach bar and hang out for weeks on end without budging. While we lay quietly at Iguanita, folks back at Playa del Coco were busy deciding which boats to congregate on to watch the Phoenix Suns - Milwaukee Bucks playoff game on TV — local Channel 7. They'd been talking about it on the radio for hours, figuring out who’d go where, what food and drink they’d bring, and on and on. We finally just turned the radio off. We thought we'd left that kind of thing behind, but some cruisers like to bring it all with them. Parties, sure, but commercial TV? I would have thought that TV would be the first thing a cruiser would want to leave home without.
	I was up at 5:30 a.m. and off to the surf. When I got back it started raining hard and fast, and the bay was blotted out. In ninety minutes we got fifty gallons of rainwater into the tanks, topping them off completely, plus another ten or fifteen gallons in the dinghy for laundry. In the middle of this downpour a disquieting swell started rolling in, and since we were sitting in only eight feet of water (at low tide), just off the beach, we moved out to 25 feet. We'd already had to crank up the centerboard, which had been bumping on the bottom. Lynn, Roxanne, and Tania had one of those cozy days inside the boat, blissfully dry belowdecks while the rain pelted down above. I stayed out in the storm naked, collecting rainwater in our big stainless steel bucket while listening to the howler monkeys roaring in the jungle. Maybe they didn't like getting wet.
	Back in Playa del Coco the next day, we could see it was turning out to be another "shakeout" harbor. A couple on an immaculate Slocum 43 arrived, looked around, and immediately said well, this is it, this is the place, we're done cruising. Within three days of their arrival they had formed a partnership with another yachtie and signed a purchase agreement for twenty acres of bay-view land on the hillside, out of which they planned to carve six ocean view parcels, develop them, sell four, and keep two for themselves. To avoid the 31% import duty on their vessels, mandatory if you stay longer than a year, they would put them up for charter, because anything imported by a Costa Rican business is duty-free. The whole project looked pretty iffy to us. Costa Rica was nice and all, but . . . live there?
	The iconoclastic ex-Seattle crazies John and Susie on Chardonnay had gotten temporary jobs three nights a week tending bar in a funky beachfront establishment. I guess they got stir-crazy or something. They were characters with a capital C, so we pretty much had to go down there and check it out. Susie announced that she had decided we cruisers needed to have a "Christmas in July" party — in June, no less. Queried about this, Susie responded, "Hey! It isn't Christmas either, so who cares?" Um, okay Susie, whatever you say. The bar's owner didn't serve food during the "off" season, and in fact his big electric stove was defunct, so John said, "Look, if I can fix the stove, will you buy a coupla big turkeys if promise to I cook 'em, and the cruisers bring everything else and buy drinks from you?" Figuring the stove was beyond redemption, the owner said yes. When John had the stove working ten minutes later, the owner swallowed and went shopping for turkeys, of which he could find none. He ended up driving all the way to San Jose, but he prevailed, and in the end it was quite an affair. 
	A guy named Ken who had gotten to El Coco as crew suddenly decided he wanted to see Costa Rica in a more leisurely fashion after reading a book about the country's national parks. So he resigned his position, moved ashore, and promptly got two jobs, one doing paint work in a boatyard up the road, and another as a cook in the restaurant at a hotel in town. When I heard the words "got a job" spoken as if this were a good idea, my blood ran cold and my stomach started churning. The notion of work, any work at that point, sorta made my eyes defocus and my brain curdle. I was NOT READY. Not for a long time yet.
	The hurricane season crowd had clearly arrived. There were thirty three boats in the bay and more still trickling in. We needed to leave! All that entrepreneurial spirit erupting suddenly in the cruising community was too much for us. One Canadian couple we knew, cruising south on a 29' trimaran with a motorcycle strapped to the aft deck, had stopped in Guatemala, discovered that the government was funding a hydroelectric power initiative, and gotten a job as an electric turbine engineer. Guatemala? Good grief! It was time to say sayonara.
	After sailing down to Marina Flamingo to get fuel, we were still suffering from some minor mechanical headaches (not counting the refrigeration, which I agreed not to discuss any more). The spare voltage regulator we had just installed turned out to be a "one stage" design (rearrange the letters, and it spells "stone age"), with the result that, when adjusted so as to not cook the batteries, it also wouldn't charge them properly. So manual intervention was still necessary until we got our "good" regulator back. It had been shipped to Seattle for, hopefully, repair. We also discovered that the recurrence of our electrical ground problem back in Potrero Grande had destroyed the engine zinc, so we had to remove and flush out the heat exchanger again. Oh well. We were used to it. This time though, for the first time ever, Lynn found a way to snake it out of there without having to remove the engine oil filter first, and boy did she get points for that! I dinghied over to the marina to hose it out, and upon yanking the outboard starter cord to return to the boat, the damn thing came out in my hand. Grrr! So I rowed back. We reinstalled the heat exchanger, refilled with 10% coolant, and voila! It worked perfectly.
	We were running sweat by this time, but there was a swimming pool nearby at the Hotel Flamingo. We'd been making regular afternoon pilgrimages there. We were all ready to go when I remembered: aauugh, no outboard! The last thing I wanted to do on a steamy summer afternoon in the deep tropics was row six hundred pounds of dead weight half a mile to shore in an inflatable dinghy. We hoisted the motor aboard and I attacked the recoil starter assembly, got it apart, got the new cord reeved in, and just as we were putting it back together: KA-SPROING!! The entire assembly blew up in our faces and flung grease all over us and the cockpit. I screamed cuss words at the sky, because I'd been being very careful not to dislodge that recoil spring. We donned gardening gloves and began the ticklish task of grinding the spring back into place, got it all back together, remounted it, dropped the motor onto the dinghy again, and finally headed ashore to go swimming. Just in time for the afternoon rain.
	A few pricey beers later we were feeling better. After a couple hours lounging in the rain at the swim-up bar, talking in the rain with Eileen, we walked back to the marina in the rain, and dinghied back to Daybreak in the rain, all in bathing suits, T-shirts, and sandals. What a life. Having purchased some ice on the way back, we mixed up a couple of what we called margaritas: tequila, grapefruit soda, and lime, in a tumbler. I'd made a potato salad earlier, which we consumed greedily with fried sausage for dinner. Great salad. I spent the next two years trying to duplicate that dressing, without success. Finally gave it up. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the rain. Who knows?
	We'd been hearing rumors of the rain in Panama averaging 260 inches annually with 80 inches in October alone, so Don decided to look it up in the British Admiralty Coast Pilot. Turned out it was 12 inches per month from June to September, then 20 inches in October, and basically none the rest of the time (4.6 inches per month counts as none in Panama). Annual total 100 inches, which didn’t sound too bad. Costa Rica had about half that. However, rumor also had it that the Panamanian afternoon thunderstorms were exceptionally intense, and that any sane cruiser had the anchor down and the sails furled tightly by midafternoon, because the wind could blow 40 knots from any direction with three boat lengths’ visibility. We'd find out soon enough.
	It continued to amaze us how the simplest commodities on land became cherished luxuries on a boat. Like a drink with ice in it. And shade. On the other hand, many things Lynn and I had cherished on land we didn't miss at all anymore, like babysitters and an evening to ourselves. Our last such evening had been in La Paz, six months earlier. Was there anything we hadn't taken for granted in LA? Cars, money, incredible shopping for every conceivable item just minutes away, air conditioning everywhere, huge comfortable beds, unlimited safe running water, showers every day and sometimes twice, flat smooth pavement on streets without potholes, sewer systems that removed the sewage without poisoning the entire population in the process. (Good grief, our big complaint about sewage disposal in LA had been that it threatened the fish!) We lived in a house that we knew would never blow away and be dashed to bits on the rocks in a storm. And rain? For the five or ten days it might actually rain each winter in LA, it was fifteen feet from the house to the car, a hundred from the car to the office or a store, and we had umbrellas. We never got wet. We could wear nice clothes with impunity. Going ashore in a dinghy, on the other hand, through surf in a rainstorm, well, basically you're lucky if you don't take a wave aboard and get drenched in salt water, let alone capsize. Compared to that, rain hardly counts.
	And then, of course, there's refrigeration. In a house, how often do you actually think about your refrigerator? Maybe every fifteen or twenty years when it gets old and stops working? Maybe you've never had one quit on you. Do you go into the freezer for ice cubes wondering if they will have melted down into a little puddle? Do you ever put an ice tray full of water in there and wonder if it will ever freeze? On land, reliable refrigeration is something we count on and never think about. On Daybreak we thought about it every single day.
	There are three kinds of cruising boats: those without refrigeration, those with refrigeration, and those with ice makers. You could easily tell the difference. Icemaker cruisers got to Costa Rica, parked their boats on a mooring outside Marina Flamingo, and flew back to the states for two months to visit family. They also had air conditioning. You'd see movement through the portholes, but the hatches would all be closed.
	Think about how relative all this is. Take TV, for example. We didn't have one, or a VCR, and we didn't miss either one, yet we knew that upon returning to land we’d buy both, and then rent every video we'd missed while cruising. We'd sit up every night for weeks with big bowls of popcorn in our laps and watch 'em all. We even talked about which ones we’d watch first. The reconciliation of those two facts, and they were totally reconciled for us, says everything there is to say about the "deprivations" of cruising. We lived without a lot of stuff we'd never have foregone on land, yet there was no deprivation.
	Comprehension of this truth, by the way, is helpful in understanding the relationship the U.S. has with less developed countries. Central Americans, whom we call "poor", are not deprived. Nor are they poor. In fact, they're fine. It's only when they find out how we norteamericanos live that they begin to realize there might be something more to be had, and suddenly they are less satisfied with their lives than they were before. Which raises the following question: In America, in a culture where we have more stuff than anywhere else in the world, how do we know that there's more to be had? Simple: it's rammed into us from birth. All Americans beyond the age of five have a tape running in their heads at warp speed, day and night, and it keeps saying  "WAKE UP!!!  THERE'S MORE TO BE HAD!!!  FIND OUT WHAT IT IS AND GET IT!!!" Sound familiar? This is where Rolls Royces and Gucci underwear come from. It's a disease. And it's contagious.
	About 300 yards from Daybreak, a new hotel was nearing completion. Outside it, there was a parked car. One car. It was a bright yellow Ferrari 308 GTS, and we walked past it each day on the way to and from the pool. It was parked on a lumpy dirt street that turned to mud every afternoon, in a dumpy little burg without a speck of pavement in it anywhere. The car itself was not muddy, probably because it couldn't actually be driven anywhere. The nearest paved road was five miles away, and the nearest paved road without gaping potholes in it was 30 miles away. The nearest multi-lane road, where a person might actually have driven such a car at even half the speed it was designed for, lay between Guaymas, Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona, over 2500 miles away. What was it doing there? The last thing, literally, that anyone in Costa Rica needed was that car. And yet someone had bought it, shipped it there, and obviously cherished it. Why? Quite simply, because he had the money, and literally could not think of any better way to spend it. And for no other earthly reason.

	Since we were stuck waiting for our "spare" refrigeration compressor to be fixed, we got out the sail rig for the dinghy. Lynn went sailing and promptly capsized, a first for her, and everybody's gotta have one of those. The wind was gustier than she was used to, and she was feeling pretty adventurous being out in it. When she turned downwind the dinghy took off in a strong puff and got skittish, digging in and leaving a big wake. "Hmmm", she thought, "this is different." The next puff buried the bow. In slow motion she watched the stemhead go under and thought, "Well, here we go!"
	I had just settled down to devour a new issue of Santana (a SoCal sailing rag), and having smelled the wind, I decided that maybe the cockpit was a sensible place to do this, facing out to starboard, where Lynn was. I was buried in the magazine when I heard a SWUSH—KAPHWUMP, and looked up to see in the distance a cream-colored hull sideways in the water and half submerged. As I got in the inflatable I saw Lynn's head bob up as she chased down everything that hadn’t been lashed in, like the oars, the sponge, the bailer . . .
	I picked up the remaining flotsam while Lynn got the boat upright, whereupon she discovered that doing so is pointless unless you get it upright with you in it. Taking the easy way out, she just hoisted herself into the inflatable, bailed the hardshell dry, rerigged it, got back in, and sailed it on home. Getting doused in eighty five degree water, she found, was actually quite pleasant, and that finally experiencing an event she'd dreaded for years was liberating. She was drenched, but triumphant.
	The compressor was taking its time. A week later and we were still parked there. With July 4th a couple days away we invited all the other kid-boats in western Costa Rica, of which there were three, to join us for an Independence Day picnic on the beach. Came the day, twenty people converged on the beach, including seven kids. Don and I were both sick with the flu, but since I didn't want to miss out, I went along. I spent the entire afternoon with a fever, asleep on the sand in the shade of a tree. The food was varied and tasty (I was told later), and all the kids played wildly through the afternoon all over the wide flat sandspit between the shore and a lagoon behind the beach. I know this because I've seen the videos. High tide finally threatened to wash the party away, so we left, and even managed to get back aboard before the afternoon rain.
	Five days later Don and I were still sick, and by then Lynn and Eileen were too. It was tenacious. When both parents are sick on a boat, and the kids aren't, life is not much fun for anyone. Each morning we talked to Don or Eileen on the radio, and it would go like this.
	Eileen: "So how are you guys this morning?"
	Me: "Not so hot. How about you?"
	Eileen: "Not so hot either. Don's still flat. Wanna stay here another day and check in again tomorrow morning?"
	Me: "Yeah, sounds good. We gotta take the kids over to the hotel pool after lunch to let 'em blow off some steam. Wanna come?"
	Eileen: "Sure, why not? Call me before you go."
	It had been like that for four days. The boats were fueled up, watered up, provisioned, and ready to head south, yet there we sat.
	A few days later, ambulatory again and feeling better, we decided it was high time we cleared out of western Costa Rica and headed for the Gulf of Nicoya, around the bottom of the country about a hundred miles away. Over on Moonrise Don was still shaky, so they decided to stay behind. They waved goodbye to us on a crystal clear blue-sky morning as we finally departed a sixty five mile stretch of coastline where we had spent nearly two months. We wondered if we even knew how to manage an overnight sail any more.

Chapter 10
Idling In The Gulf Of Nicoya

	Melinda Lee left with us, and together we headed for Bahia Tamarindo, fifteen miles away, where there was supposed to be surf. Slight understatement. When the GPS brought us to the harbor approach, my eyes beheld the most dangerous entrance and anchorage I'd ever seen. With the wind blowing 25 knots off the land we picked our way in to a tiny deep-water cul-de-sac inside half a square mile of six-foot combers. We were barely protected by a tiny islet nearly awash at high tide, really no more than a piece of exposed reef. The entrance lay between this reef and a breaking shoal. We were wedged between this islet to seaward, a breaking sandbar fifty yards to our right, two breaking reefs to port and another shoreward of us, with an electrifying point break off our starboard quarter. Rolling ranks of six to ten foot steamers stretched for miles down the coast, gigantic spume trails being ripped from their crests by the wind. The bottom was mixed rock and sand, worrisome in itself. We spent a rolly, bumpy, sleepless night and a rough, unpleasant morning. There were surfers everywhere, but I didn't budge.
	The offshore wind was blowing thirty knots by dawn and was taking the tops off the wind waves in the anchorage. Our plan was to make a pair of 40 mile day hops to the Gulf of Nicoya, south and then east, but the only available layover anchorage would have been a maelstrom in that swell, so we decided to sail overnight directly for Bahia Ballena inside the mouth of the Gulf. We left at noon hoping to arrive around dawn, before the ebb tide got rolling. We set the mainsail only and blasted off at hull speed and then some. We figured the wind was local to the valley at Tamarindo, but even so it took two hours to sail out of it, and we took a reef in the main as the wind increased offshore. It did die off for a bit, but then it built up again from dead ahead, so we dropped sail and motored all night into it plus a two-and-a-half-knot adverse current. Since Daybreak can only make six knots under power through flat water (five knots into a 20 knot wind) that current was a pretty debilitating handicap, lengthening the passage, chewing up fuel, and generally making life edgy and worrisome.
	At 0100 I awoke from my first off-watch smelling hot battery acid, which meant that the spare voltage regulator I’d just installed had failed and the batteries were being cooked. Against just such an eventuality I had installed a shutoff switch in the circuit, which I promptly flipped. The batteries were too hot to touch, and that’s pretty bad. At 0700, gratefully at anchor in Bahia Ballena, we added eight ounces of water per cell to thirty cells in five batteries, and they were still bubbling and burping an hour later, but they seemed to have survived. We'd know the next day.
	We’d had a bit of excitement the previous afternoon. While trolling for tuna, we hooked a marlin! My god, the adrenalin. The whole episode might have lasted sixty seconds, but I can remember every moment vividly. We were ambling along trailing a new five-inch lure on fifty pound line when all of a sudden the reel started shrieking while we were below getting a drink of water. I ran topside to see an eight foot swordfish tail-dancing across the water a hundred yards behind us as the pole tried to jump out of its socket. I killed the throttle and gulped hard as I grabbed for the rod, watched line spin off the reel, and dialed in brake. The reel was fast approaching "EMPTY" so I added more brake bit by bit, until finally the reel stopped spinning. I hung on to the pole praying the line would hold — don’t ask me why. I wasn’t thinking very clearly at the time.
	Fortunately for everyone, the line went ting-tick-spick-SPWING, and that was that. Another ten dollar lure down the drain, and those things simply couldn’t be bought in Costa Rica. But just as well. We could never have landed that critter, and if we had, it probably would have killed us before we killed it. And if we'd killed it, we'd never have been able to filet it (though naturally we'd have tried), and if we'd fileted it, it would never have fit in the freezer, and if it had fit, we'd never have been able to eat it before it spoiled. That must have been one hungry fish to have gone after such a small lure. The biggest thing we'd ever caught on such a lure was about 35 or 40 pounds, yet this monster had to be a couple hundred pounds. No wonder the line broke. A fish can typically pull twice its weight. When we thought what its bill could have done to our hull, we could only shudder and be glad it was gone.
	That night the kids traded playmates. Roxanne went to sleep over with Ben on Melinda Lee while Annie came over to Daybreak to sleep with Tania. This didn’t last. Shortly after bedtime, Annie was crying and wanting to go home, so Mike came to retrieve her — which sent Tania into sobbing hysterics, so Mike and Judy offered to take Tania too, leaving Lynn and me alone on a quiet boat. We went to bed at 8:30 p.m. and slept right through dawn and into morning. Wow. While the four kids watched the movie "All Dogs Go To Heaven" aboard Melinda Lee (every kid-boat we met had a TV and VCR aboard), we made ourselves some breakfast while listening to Van Morrison on the stereo, and thought: What peace! What serenity! Just a taste of cruising without children, which is how most people do it. It was too easy! Next time a cruising couple starts telling us about some problem they’ve had, we’re going to laugh. Nothing is all that tough when there are no kids around! Only two sets of wants and needs to be concerned about. Only two bodies to work around. No crying, fighting, mewling, or whining, just two people who love each other and know how to get along. Bliss. Harmony. God in heaven and paradise on earth. HAH!! We'd forgotten how easy life could be. Remember earlier when I said cruising is hard? Scratch that. Cruising with kids is hard. Cruising itself is easy. Piece of cake.
	With Mike and Judy and their kids we visited the Bahia Ballena Yacht Club, a bar and restaurant run by a couple of Americans, and had Cokes and beers and some of the best ceviche we'd ever tasted. We returned by ourselves an hour and a half later for dinner (they graciously held the tab open for us), and I ate Cajun-blackened dorado while Lynn had a thin steak sauteed in onions, peppers, and garlic. Burgers for the girls, of course. It was wonderful. The co-owner/cook had been head chef at a restaurant in New Orleans, so understandably the Cajun food was great, hot like it's supposed to be but almost never is, except in Louisiana. The restaurant sat on old concrete pilings out over the rocks next to a fishing pier, open to the air, with a lovely panoramic view over the empty bay, rain clouds rolling in over jungle-clad mountains — nice place. Five cruising boats lay at anchor in a bay two miles across. We were the only patrons. Had our pick of tables. The kids ran all over the place, rambunctious but well behaved. An amiable American guy (the co-owner) played waiter and bar tender. COLD drinks like they should be: Imperial cervezas, almost frozen, with fresh juicy lime wedges — sooooo good. A little pricey, but it was the best food we'd had in over seven months. Those guys could cook.
	What ever would we do when we got back to the states? If we could have gotten decent groceries, boat parts, and clothes in my size (big), we might have considered staying right there. Certainly nowhere we knew of in the U.S. were we going to find clean, open, empty bays like that one, virtually undeveloped, with solid jungle up every hillside in every direction. We missed the ease, convenience, and familiarity of the good old USA, where a person could get anything, anywhere, anytime, and cheap — much cheaper than Central America, where a roll of slide film cost $16.00. After we settled down again, we'd presumably be glad for all that, but then we'd miss places like Bahia Ballena and wish we could go back. Where in the states could we live in untrammeled nature? Where could we own property with a 360º view of untouched wilderness, without another structure in sight? Where could we moor a boat at our own dock and sail it island to island, cove to cove without a hundred other boats, and huge fuel docks, and crowded waterfront restaurants, and pricey tourist shops, and all the rest? No place. Isthmus Cove at Catalina Island, on the emptiest weekday of the year, in the middle of January in a frigid, blinding rainstorm, is a metropolis compared to Bahia Ballena. Is that the price of convenience? Does it have to be? Maybe so. We'd brought with us all the parts of that life we thought we needed: indoor plumbing, shelter from the rain, fresh water, refrigerator, and stove, and cozy beds, not to mention radios, GPS, autopilot, radar, electric lights, our own little city afloat. But those conveniences tied us irrevocably to the services of civilization — in fact, to the U.S. We were "just passing through" in Costa Rica, watching the scenery, noticing how different everything was. Sooner or later we'd return to the States, if for no other reason than to refit Daybreak and then sell her. (She certainly needed the refit, and she wasn’t going to get it in Central America.) We'd return because we'd never fit in down there. We began to wonder if we’d ever fit in anywhere. More and more we'd been thinking to ourselves, and saying to each other, well, maybe we just don't fit. Hell, we didn't even fit in the cruising community! What ever would we do when cruising was over for us?

	In the morning we sailed five miles up the Gulf of Nicoya to Isla Tortuga, a pretty little spot, but strange, all artificial: a nice white beach backed by several acres of planted coconut palm trees in an area cleared of all indigenous flora, then strewn with picnic tables. It turned out to be THE destination for tourist day-boats out of Puntarenas, a day at a "deserted tropical island". Some food, some beer, some conga drums and singing, a couple of volleyball nets . . . sheesh. Murky water, too. We'd seen the travel posters of the place, carefully cropped to show only the palms and the sand, very Caribbean. The reality was tacky. If some travel agent had tricked me into going down there by showing me the poster, I'd have been livid, and yet we met a woman and her son from Wisconsin who were vacationing there, and she thought it was wonderful. I guess after two hours on a bus from San Jose plus an hour on a cattle boat, it probably looked pretty good. But let’s be clear about one thing. By Southern California standards there wasn't a decent beach in all of Costa Rica. Nice scenery, but no beach worthy of the name. You know, white sand, no pebbles, big expanses for laying out in the sun, some nice surf for body surfing. I guess a person from Wisconsin might have lower standards.
	In any event, the kids enjoyed themselves, with brilliantly colored land crabs and hermit crabs to play with, plenty of running room, and calm water for swimming. Roxanne sought out the one lone palm tree on the beach that was growing at an angle out over the water, and decided to go native and climb it. She got all the way to the top and pulled off a couple of small coconuts, looking just like a Polynesian girl, tanned, agile, and fearless.
	The cattle boats left us alone later that afternoon, just in time for the daily deluge. They knew what they were doing. We got back aboard and hunkered down for the duration.
	You know, truth be told, we were tired of the tropics. Even the kids were. We were in uncommon accord about it. We were doing what sane, experienced cruisers don't ever do: spend summer in the deep tropics. There's no damn wind! Being below trade wind latitude, it was just hot, humid, and still all day every day, and the rain, rather than being hard and brief like we'd been told, was instead pouring down steadily every day from two or three in the afternoon until seven or eight at night. Banana republics!! That's what we were in. You’ve seen the movie The Mosquito Coast? Predator? Rambo III? Just think of every Third World rain-soaked mud-spattered slimeball commando film you've ever seen, that's what it was like. Hot, wet, and sticky, and there's nothing to eat but beans and rice.
	Spam began to figure prominently in our diet. We’d laid in quite a supply in Acapulco. Also eggs, potatoes, and onions, occasionally some sausage if we were lucky, anything that would keep, because that’s all you could get. You should see the celery in a backwoods Costa Rican market. You could retread tires with it. And the meat was not to be believed. In Costa Rica there's no such thing as a "cut" of meat. There's just "bistek" (BEE stake — yeah, that's right, it's a corruption of "beefsteak". They don't even have a real Spanish name for what they sell). It's thin, tough, and unrecognizable. Basically, meat had fallen right out of our diet. We’d left Los Angeles with one of those Magma propane marine barbecues and six propane canisters for it. We still had four left, which was a measure of how much decent meat we'd found in seven months. It would have been an incredible luxury to walk into a market and simply buy food. We realized we hadn't known how good we’d had it in La Paz.
	We were in one of the great seasonal dead ends of the cruising world. We couldn't go north even if we went through the Panama Canal first, because June through October north of ten degrees latitude is hurricane country. The only way out was south, across the Equator, where during those months it’s winter, but we had neither time nor money for that. So there we'd sit until November 1st, sweating. Some people think that when you live on a cruising boat, you can just haul anchor and leave if you get tired of a place. This isn't as true as one might wish, as Acapulco taught us. But what if you get tired of an entire climatic region?
	Cruising. It's up and it's down. It’s hard to maintain perspective.

	But boy, what a difference one day and seven miles can make! After snaking our way through tight, scary channels between rocky reefs and jungle-clad islets we found ourselves in a delightful, flat, empty wilderness anchorage, far enough up the Gulf and behind enough land mass to be completely free of swell, yet open enough to receive what breeze there was. And we were alone. It had been a gorgeous sunny day without a hint of rain.
	Experiencing an uncharacteristic hankering for the future, we pulled out the charts for everything between there and the Panama Canal and realized for the first time that we were actually short on time. We weren’t "trapped in banana land" after all. Back-calculating from a November 1st northbound departure into the Caribbean, we’d want to spend a month in the San Blas Islands, two weeks transiting the Canal and provisioning, at least a week in the Las Perlas Islands, and at least three weeks between our last Costa Rican stop (Golfito) and the Las Perlas. That added up to ten weeks, which meant leaving Golfito by mid-August. Our visas expired August 24th. And we still had to haul the boat and paint the bottom!
	Remember when we said we'd haul out in Ensenada? What a joke. After all that worry, the bottom paint was still good enough, even after two years, that I could keep it clean by scrubbing it every three or four weeks. It was the waterline that was killing me! Loaded as we were, we had bare fiberglass in the ocean at the waterline, the worst possible place. I'd been scrubbing it weekly but it had gotten steadily worse, and there were zillions of tiny crab-like bugs living there in the scum and gutch which got all over my body, including in my beard, chest hair, and ears, whenever I tried to scrub it down. Last time I’d attempted it, I’d come out of the water screaming and Lynn had to pour rubbing alcohol in my ears to get the critters to leave. That was it. Finis. Imagine feeling little crab-things crawling around inside your head. Bleah! They could have the waterline for all I cared, cuz I was done with it. Man. Time to paint the damn thing.
	Somehow it had gotten to be July 14th, and I was seriously worried about the calendar. I got on the computer and set up a new spreadsheet with a trial itinerary through November 1st, 111 days away. I typed in everything that needed or wanted doing in that time, tried putting dates to it, shuffled a little here and there, and . . . it didn’t fit. Good lord, I thought. How could we have 111 days and be short of time? I guess it had to do with the fact that we still had 800 nautical miles of spectacular tropical gunkholing between us and the end of the San Blas Islands, much of it in 20 mile hops or less, with lay days in between, and we didn’t want to miss any of it! Tough life, huh? So we started out that morning with a really heavy schedule: motored four miles after breakfast to Isla Muertos, where we were due to spend seven straight days babysitting Melinda Lee while her crew went to San Jose to meet visiting family. Around there, it is not a good idea to leave your boat untended.
	It’s called Isla Muertos on the chart, but everyone calls it Isla Gitana. Upon arriving, we saw we had found Gilligan's Island, another example of Americans gone batty in la-la land. 25 years earlier an older American couple had come there in their 80 foot steel ketch and, having somehow obtained a lease on the 37 acre island, proceeded to build a sort of Swiss Family Robinson paradise for themselves. They were long since gone, leaving the place (and the boat) in the charge of their aging no-count hippie-esque daughter and her equally no-count husband. With their brains addled and their efforts diluted, in our opinion, by the intensity of the tropical sun over time, not to mention by having no concept of real life (a situation aggravated, we heard, by rampant alcoholism), the two of them were barely managing to keep the place from crumbling while back in the states Daddy patiently awaited a return on his investment.
	There was a cement house with a corrugated, galvanized iron roof, for which the word "ramshackle" would be a compliment. There was a cement swimming pool filled with salt water straight from the dirty bay, for the use of which there was a $2.00 charge. There was an open-air palapa bar with, at least at the time, no ice and a barely functioning refrigerator, but decorated with ancient keepsakes from the many cruising boats which had stopped there. There was a complex and arcane rain catchment and distribution system that probably had things living in it, though no one seemed to be the worse for it. (Actually, that’s a tough call.) And out front, tied to a cement pier, with a gangway permanently bolted to its rail, was the 80 foot steel ketch, the boarding ladder of which served as the dinghy dock. The boat was completely open, and anyone and anything could walk through and explore it at will, as the various lizards, snakes, and other wildlife in there attested. Ashore there were a couple of screened, thatch-roofed shelters containing a few beds each, plus a sink and toilet, which could be rented for $50 per person per night, meals extra. Moreover, these guys insisted on pre-screening their guests so they could decide if they wanted them around or not. These people were not exactly what you would call "in business". They wanted money, of course, but the idea that they might have to provide something of value in exchange for it seemed for them to be a sort of distant, odd-ball notion from another world. They seemed almost to think they deserved your money but you didn't deserve anything in return. Whatever business sense they might once have had seemed apparently to have been either baked or pickled out of them. I mean, after telling us all this, they wondered aloud why business was so poor. We sat in their palapa bar and had some soft drinks, which were cool at best yet cost more than the ice cold ones at a nearby hotel on the mainland. After briefly exploring the island (which at least was free), we went to said hotel.
	What a contrast! Now here were a couple guys with a workable concept. Their names were Patrick and John, and they’d bought the Hotel Bahia Gigante a few months earlier. It was a rustic establishment nestled in a tree-shrouded glade a few hundred yards up from shore. The eight rooms went for $36 per night per couple (plus $10 per additional person in the high season, which it wasn’t). There was a very nice bar and restaurant, a lovely fresh water swimming pool, poolside beverage service, nicely kept grounds, lots of lawn and palm trees. Patrick said they’d finally gotten a real lawn mower. Before that they’d had to hire people to cut the grass with machetes! (We had seen this. It was amazing.)
	They were planning to start a sportfishing service. For years Patrick had run such a business near Yakutat, Alaska, and he’d lived in Anchorage for fifteen years. John had gotten his 1600-ton captain's license at the age of 23, and he’d been running ocean-going tugs up and down the Gulf of Alaska ever since. By the time they met, they’d each decided they'd had enough of winter, so they formed a partnership and moved to Costa Rica. They were starting to provide a few cruiser services as well: fuel jug fills, water (free at their pier), laundry service, groceries (tell them what you wanted and they’d get it for you), taxi service from the Puntarenas ferry, a funky water taxi across the gulf directly to Puntarenas, and so on. We expected to be in the neighborhood a week, but ended up staying 29 days, so we got fairly familiar with the place.
	The deal on land ownership there is that the government owns the first 50 meters up from the shoreline, and no one else can own it, including Costa Ricans. The next 150 meters is a sort of intermediate zone, where you can't own it but you can get a semipermanent lease on it as long as what you do with it passes government approval. Beyond 200 meters, you can own anything and do with it what you want.
	The 50-meter coastal strip is called the Zona Publica, which is just what it says: a public zone. We’d first heard about this from Rudolfo back in Bahia Salinas. The entire coastline of Costa Rica is open to the public. Owners and leaseholders of inland property can obtain rights-of-way to cross it and permits to build on it, and can even operate businesses on it, all subject to strict government approval and control, but the one inviolable rule is that no one can be excluded from it. Whatever got built there, its purpose was to serve the public, and for that reason the public had the right to walk in it, on it, through it, around it, and over it, willy nilly. A fairly intelligent concept, we thought.
	Costa Rica is a small country, roughly 260 miles long and 85 miles across. If it were one of the United States it would rank 42nd in size, right between West Virginia and Maryland. In this area live three million people, of which over half are in or around the capital of San Jose, up in the high central valley. Much of the rest of the country is basically empty, especially the coast. Its Pacific shoreline is riven by two large gulfs. The Gulf of Nicoya is 35 miles wide at its mouth, narrows to 10 miles about half way up, and is about 55 miles long. The Golfo Dulce is about 8 miles wide and 35 miles long, and in it there are really only two or three places to anchor. The main cruising grounds are these two gulfs plus the short stretch of west-facing coastline. The rest is not very hospitable to boats. We were spending three months in an area the size of coastal southern California, by comparison having spent only twice that in the three thousand miles of Mexico.
	The water in the Gulf of Nicoya was filthy, and it only got worse the farther up we went. Three large rivers and the whole western portion of the country drain into it — together with most of its garbage, by all appearances. In addition to logs, trees, branches, leaves, and twigs that washed down every day with the rains, there were zillions of plastic bags, wrappers, boxes, paper, cardboard, bottles, cans, and so on. Even running the motor was risky. We kept an ear open in case the water intake ingested something. By the time we reached Isla Gitana the plankton blooms had made the water unswimmable, bad news in such hot weather. Thank heaven for the hotel!
	As usual we wanted to take care of business and move on, but there seemed to be some perverse cruising demon that constantly forced us to spend more time where we didn't want to be and less time where we did. We needed a whole list of things, of which a bottom job was just one item. The head pump was squirting water all over the place, making flushing a wet and nasty experience, but you can guess what the chances were of finding parts for a Raritan marine head in Puntarenas, Costa Rica.
	The Melinda Lee crew was off to San Jose and we were watching their boat, so with time on our hands and access to fresh water, Lynn decided it was time to catch up on laundry. The last laundromat we’d seen had been in La Paz, and while a willing local could usually be found to do it by hand, it was not cheap. Doing it ourselves was clearly the answer. The technique is not one with which Americans tend to be familiar, but for the culturally deprived the instructions were again right on the back of the box of laundry soap. We did four loads and it took most of two days. Think about that the next time you "just throw a load in the washer".
	But while you’re at it, consider this: We Americans tend to think that the best way to get clothes really clean is a in washing machine, and that if any residual stains remain after such washing, they simply aren’t going to come out and that’s that. Lynn and I certainly thought that way. For months we had watched women doing hand laundry south of the border and thought to ourselves, well, this just goes with the rest of the dirt and lack of sanitary facilities in these parts. But guess what? If you do laundry by hand, it gets much cleaner! Machines may be easier, but they don’t do the job as well.
	Bread baking had also become a regular part of our lives. Time-consuming as it was, time was not in short supply, and the smell of the yeast, the visible aliveness of the rising dough, and the aroma while baking were pleasures Lynn had long since forgotten and truly enjoyed rediscovering. The commercially available bread was scarcely worth buying — it was basically Third World Wonder Bread, which they called pan quadrada, which means "square bread", and it was always stale, so Lynn ended up making bread about twice a week.
	Our time became filled with such simple logistical concerns. The days seemed longer, the weeks seem longer, and a month seemed an eternity. Like summer vacation as a child, three months was forever. A month for us could mean a whole new area of the world, a new country, umpteen different ports, new cultures to get used to, new places to find our way around in, new scenery and surroundings, new climates, new people, a new currency to figure out . . .  These are major changes. If such changes had been happening to us back in the States we'd have been having nervous breakdowns! When cruising, it's just life, and cruising life is inconvenient. While the sense of "slow time" felt good, the emotional challenges were such that Lynn found she still hankered after the daily routines of land-based life. The possibility of sliding along on autopilot looked so safe and reassuring, even if it meant being largely unconscious. It was clear to us that our experience of having time, and of how slowly it was going by, expanded with the fraction of our time that we were alive, awake, aware, and engaged. When you are cruising, that fraction is huge.
	Still, it was painful to admit, we missed the United States. We were beginning to want "home". But honestly, we began to wonder, what is "home"? If we’d been in outer space, "home" would have been Earth, and we'd have been happy to return anywhere on it. As it was, the U.S. was our "home", and anywhere in it would have been fine. But why? What made the U.S. "home"?
	Quite simply, it was the HUGE INFRASTRUCTURE OF SUPPORT for life’s logistics. It’s the English speaking businesses where good service for your dollar is normal. It’s the huge variety of goods and services everywhere, all reasonably priced and many produced domestically. It’s competition among businesses to give you something more attractive than the next store down the road, as if they wanted your business and would work hard to get it. It’s the fact that you can drive into any town in any state in the U.S., walk into any grocery store, and expect to find fresh meat, dairy products, and produce in a clean, sanitary, hygienic environment. And if you don't, it is expected that you will take your business elsewhere. In Central America we shopped in stores we wouldn’t have looked at even once back home. In the U.S., when you buy something, you can assume you’ll be able to get parts and service for it anywhere in the country. There's no town in the U.S. where you can't get a Chevy, Ford, Dodge, or Volkswagen fixed, not to mention half a dozen other imports. If you want to own a Maserati, fine, you’ll just have to live within towing distance of a Maserati repair shop. Which in Los Angeles is no problem.
	Home is being able to mail a letter on Monday and have it arrive three thousand miles away on the other side of the country by Wednesday at the latest, and sometimes Tuesday, for 32 cents. It's phone service that works. Even in Central America, the only phone service that really works is AT&T. It's ATM machines that never, ever, EVER fail to give you your cash after they debit your account. It's the pervasive reality that what you want ought to mean something, and that who you are means something too, something very specific under the law. Every once in awhile in Central America we’d run into an establishment like that, and it was like a deep cool breath of fresh air. And it was also invariably American owned and operated. In America the standards are so much higher. Down in banana-land, you'd best leave your standards behind, because no one there gives a damn about them. You just have to accept what you can find there, pay what is asked, and don't even think about asking for anything you don’t see on the shelf. And if this inconveniences you, too bad, and welcome to Central America! You shouldn't have expected any more.
	It would be of interest, we thought, to see if our appreciation of the wondrous supplies and services available in the States remained with us very long after we returned. Lynn recalled her grandparents' deep, abiding appreciation and love for their retirement home on Lake Pend Oreille, in Idaho. They had experienced such hard lives that, in a real sense, there on the lake they had a daily experience of heaven on earth. We've all heard that travel can provide a similar sense of perspective, and for us it was doing exactly that. We’d acquired a perspective on American life we had not imagined. Would we be able to maintain that point of view, or would we, upon returning, be lulled back into the soporific normalcy of the American status quo?
	Heh heh. That’s rich. Believe me, American life is not normal. What's normal in human life on this planet is not something of which most Americans would want any part.

	A scream, a wail, a cry for help rang out across the anchorage, and everyone was electrified into action. The cry had come from a boat anchored nearby, Tillikum, a Westsail 32 from Juneau, Alaska. The young couple who owned it were standing on their foredeck, yelling for help. Having just returned from five days in San Jose, they found their boat completely stripped by burglars.
	Everyone knew you couldn’t leave your boat sitting at anchor or on a mooring at Puntarenas without a paid boat sitter who slept aboard every night. That’s why we weren’t at Puntarenas. That’s why cruisers had started congregating at Isla Gitana, eight miles away across the Gulf. Even there, it was considered wise to have a friend nearby on another boat, looking after things, but the poor folks on Tillikum were living proof that this view had suddenly become outdated. Sneak thieves had entered their boat, certainly at night, and taken every last item of any value whatsoever. They’d pried the padlock and hasp off with a crowbar and taken the GPS, VHF radio, SSB radio, autopilot, stereo system, Sony Walkman, cameras, all the CDs, guitar, computer, weather fax, tools, rope, cooking and eating utensils — nothing remained. And no one in the anchorage or ashore had seen or heard a thing.
	As the anchored cruisers rallied ‘round Tillikum, I took a look over at Melinda Lee, a hundred yards away. Hmm. She was a bigger, richer target. It was pure luck she had not been the victim. Perhaps the burglars hadn’t discovered yet that she was unoccupied. One of us would have to start sleeping aboard her, or we'd have to raft her up to Daybreak. The latter seemed more certain to discourage prowlers. The winds there were generally light, the holding ground was good deep mud, and our ground tackle was oversized, so . . .  Leaving Lynn to inflate the big rafting fenders and lay out lines, I dinghied over to Melinda Lee while trying to remember Mike’s detailed instructions on how to get underway if necessary. With help from Don we got the anchor up and brought Melinda Lee alongside, tying her 47 feet and 27,000 pounds to Daybreak's 40 feet and 20,000 pounds.
	We reviewed our own plans to go to San Jose later on. Maybe it just wasn't worth it. What we knew about San Jose was that muggings were common and that driving a rental car almost guaranteed a break-in, so you couldn't leave anything in the car. A couple of days before arriving at Gitana, Shearwater, an Amel 48, had lost $15,000 worth of stuff out of the trunk of their rental car in San Jose, including luggage, cameras, and a two-carat diamond wedding ring. Apparently rental cars were burglarized so often that rental agencies kept a supply of cheapie replacement locks on hand, which were rumored to be worse than nothing. Wonderful.
	The next evening, another woman's scream pierced the air, this time from the Mariner 48 Felicity. Frantic radio communication on channel 16 followed. It seems a snake had somehow found its way aboard their boat and nestled itself down among the onions in a storage hammock hanging from the ceiling. How it got there no one knew, but Karen, the shrieking female, was apoplectic. She’d felt it while rummaging in the hammock. At first she thought her 17-year-old son Darren had put a rubber snake in there to scare her, but when she reached in for it it struck at her! That's when she shrieked.
	I went over there armed with a 12 inch crescent wrench and a pair of kitchen tongs. Darren and Karen's husband Jerry had cut down the hammock and dumped it into a large plastic barrel, and sure enough, there in the bottom was a dark brownish snake about an inch in diameter and maybe 30" long. It had a very pronounced head and jaw structure that looked like it was built for biting things. It was not a sea snake. I decided to treat it as poisonous, pinned the head with the jaws of the crescent wrench, grabbed it behind the head with the tongs, and threw the damn thing overboard in the falling gloom . . . upon which it began frantically swimming directly for Felicity’s anchor chain, the only place we could imagine it could have come aboard. However, it turned away before it got there, and instead started swimming straight for Daybreak! I called Lynn on the radio and suggested she spend the next five minutes standing on the anchor platform with a flashlight, watching for it, but it didn't show up. Boy, thrill after thrill. Later investigation indicated it had probably been a python (boa constrictor), quite common in the Costa Rican jungle and non-poisonous.

	The time had finally come to get serious about a bottom job. Taking the Hotel Bahia Gigante water taxi over to Puntarenas one morning with Don and several other interested cruisers, we all strolled the mile-and-a-half length of Puntarenas’ riverside waterfront investigating boatyards, only to discover we had gained nothing coming to Costa Rica: we still faced a waiting list four weeks long. Prices were no lower than in the U.S., the haulout equipment was disturbingly primitive, and with several skippers roaming the yards all wanting to haul out at the same time, and willing to pay cash on the spot to reserve a slot, the waiting list was getting longer literally by the minute.
	Don and I were looking at each other in disgust. We had the same reaction: why pay for hassles, hazard, and inconvenience? Since Costa Rica has nine foot tides, he and I had been toying with the notion of careening, and the available alternative was making this look like just a fine idea. After all, it was primarily a concern for the safety of our boats that had us looking at boatyards at all. Those marine "railway" cradles didn’t even have wheels, just greased wooden skids. A quick tete-a-tete with Don, and the die was cast. We would careen our boats at the same time, one day per side. The tides were going to be about right over the next few days, so off we went through the streets of Puntarenas to find bottom paint and the associated paraphernalia. A couple hundred dollars later we headed back to Gitana in John's funky Hotel Bahia Gigante water taxi.
	That afternoon at low tide I dinghied over to a nearby sandbar on the inside of Isla Gitana, paced off two areas, and identified landmarks by which to position the boats at high water. The substantial tide range allowed us to choose the exact location where our keels would come to rest. Next morning I was up at five a.m. and over at the sandbar pacing things off again, marking the area with driftwood and old tires again, and generally worrying like hell. Careening is simple in concept, and our snap decision to do so had been made in a typical testosterone rush on the street outside a particularly unappetizing boatyard. The reality of it, as I paced the sand, was looking scarier than it had the day before. I’ve been snake-bit often enough in life to know that simple concepts tend to have complicating details. Things got a bit easier half an hour later when Don showed up and announced he would be laying his boat down all the way around the end of the bar, near a gravel bank I wished to avoid, leaving all kinds room for Daybreak in what I thought was the prime spot. More room for error, I figured.
	We got underway an hour before high tide and reanchored Daybreak bow-and-stern parallel to the bar and about a hundred feet off. We took a third anchor ashore, dropped it behind a tree, and brought its rode back amidships. Easing the bow and stern anchors and taking up on this midships anchor, we brought Daybreak over to the bar inch by careful inch as pretty as you please. Leaving tension on the seaward rodes, Lynn was able to control our lateral position to better than an inch using winch tension on the breastline while I swam underneath the keel to feel for the fist-sized rock I’d placed there to mark the spot. Once located, we waited for the tide to drop the eight inches necessary for the keel to make contact on the chosen spot . . . because the second high tide of the day was going to be eight inches lower, and I wanted to get off the bar that night! As soon as contact was made, we hoisted the breastline to the mizzen masthead and pre-tilted Daybreak shoreward. When this rode went slack as Daybreak tilted further in the receding water, we got to work on the bottom on the seaward side. It was 9:30 a.m.
	To my amazement, we were done by lunchtime, before the tide had even reached full ebb. The bottom was scrubbed and the boottop sanded, solvent-wiped, and masked to receive bottom paint, the prop was scoured, the zinc changed, a small hole in the side of the rudder plugged and patched, two gallons of bottom paint was rolled on, and the mess had been cleaned up. For the rest of the day we had nothing to do but take pictures, admire our work, eat and drink, swim, and relax in the shade. I was grinning like the Cheshire cat. Every cruising sailor, I concluded, needs this experience. Cruising is not complete without it.
	Leaving the midships anchor and rode on the beach for the night, we got off the bar at dusk and anchored to sleep, arising early once again to repeat the process the other way around. Either Don’s tide calculations were off this time or he placed Moonrise rather overzealously. Whichever the case, at high tide that night she was still stuck fast, needing another several inches of water. We tied our bow to hers with a pair of docklines and attempted to pull her off, without success. Then we tried yanking her off with a bit of momentum. Still no luck. Time and tide were running out, and panic was encroaching. For the next two weeks there would be no tide higher than that one. Revving up Daybreak’s diesel to the max and achieving about three knots of sternway with our eleven-odd tons of mass, we gave Moonrise one last mighty tug, and off she came! It was a good thing Don had thoroughly back-plated all his mooring cleats. The two docklines we’d used were welded together by this time. We had to cut the knot.
	The next morning Don and I visited each boat whose skipper intended to haul out in town — each of whom had watched us with great interest the previous two days — and offered to help them careen their boats. This would have been worth several hundred dollars per boat in savings. To our amazement, not one of them took us up on it. We could scarcely imagine they would rather be in the hands of those Puntarenas boatyards, and we’d certainly demonstrated that a viable alternative existed — but no. No one besides us careened.

	We reanchored in the deepest spot we could find, on five-to-one scope plus a long snubber, because we were about to be graced by not one but two rafted boats, Moonrise, a Catalina 36, and Mañana, an Alberg 35, while we all rotated trips to San Jose with boat-sitting. We'd been at anchor off Isla Gitana for sixteen days. Our visas would run out in less than a month. It was time to do some tourist stuff! Don and Eileen and Rick and Hele took off first, returning a week later to relieve us. We took our turn with trepidation. Though Daybreak would be in the best of hands, we would be away from her for longer than we'd ever been.
	The two hour bus ride from Puntarenas to San Jose was a revelation. We quickly learned that only the low, jungle-clad land near the ocean is hot and muggy. Much of the interior is high in the mountains and blessed by a delightful climate. The average temperature in San Jose is 75º all year. Climate to one side, though, San Jose was pretty much a pit, especially downtown, where there was NO street parking (that's right, none). The street layout rivaled San Francisco or Boston for wedgeheadedness, there was rampant "petty" crime, and it was next to impossible to find anything. Like stores, and services.
	We rented a car and on Melinda Lee’s recommendation we stayed at a hotel in Escazu, a wealthy suburb high up in the hills southwest of San Jose in a gorgeous setting. The hotel was moderately priced, offerred reasonable accommodations, was nearly impossible to get to, and suffered from poor food and service. Though not as poor as it could get, we’d find. This was typical. Costa Rica is chock full of incredibly beautiful scenery and lousy accommodations and services.
	After a pricey, mediocre lunch we headed out to do some of our shopping at one of only two true supermarkets in San Jose. We'd seen it on the way into town. We headed for where we thought it was and immediately became hopelessly lost. We spent ninety anxious minutes with an absurdly inadequate map trying to get back OUT of a frightening slum called Pavas, as dusk fell and the fuel gauge tapped on Empty. Unknown to us, there was only one way into Pavas — the freeway exit we’d taken — and one way out — a tiny, hidden one-lane road that crossed under the freeway back to Escazu. Once you're in Pavas, if you don't know where the way out is, you're not going to find it by wandering around hoping the street layout will at some point start making sense. We finally broke down and simply followed a municipal bus. Slowly.
	We discovered, in the course of five days, that Costa Rican roads STINK, that Costa Rican maps bear little if any relation to reality, that it is normal that the way into an area cannot be used as the way out, and that most of the locals don’t know where the roads in and out are because they haven’t got cars, never drive, and don’t walk on the roads anyway because it’s faster to go cross-country. Taxi drivers are an exception, but believe it or not they can't help either, because the directions are so complicated you wouldn't understand them even if they were in English, which of course they're not.
	When you come into a town from the countryside, there is never a through road. Never. The inbound road just evaporates, dumping you into a complex of streets the layout of which is totally out of kilter with the road you arrived on, and there’s zero indication how to get out the other side. Most of the streets are one way. The one you get dumped on coming in does NOT connect with the road out, and there are no signs, ever. God help you if the town should lie at a crossroads, with four ways in and out. All this doesn’t touch on the quality of the roads, but that would take another page by itself, which is ironic because the roads have no quality.
	OK, so how about the scenery? Ah, finally some good news. The land is varied and spectacular. We went to the Monteverde Cloud Forest, which lies smack on top of the Continental Divide. This private nature reserve is owned by Quakers originally from the U.S. who emigrated (after being incarcerated after WWII for refusing to register for the draft) to find someplace they could live in peace. They bought a bunch of land in the Costa Rican mountains, set aside the uppermost portions in order to protect their watershed, and started making cheese for a living. They now make the best cheese in Costa Rica. (In fact, all the best products in Costa Rica seem to be made by Americans. You can imagine what kind of a bind this puts the government in.) They ended up acquiring more and more land up there and finally established it as a wilderness park, the largest private nature preserve in the world. Being on the Continental Divide, moisture-laden tradewind air from the Caribbean hits the northern slopes, drops tons of rain, and then the clouds themselves blanket the mountaintops and roll over to the other side, where they slide downslope and dissipate. The forest is thus in perpetual mist — Longfellow's "forest primeval". It is very wild, and very beautiful, and very full of birds, bugs, snakes, trees, vines, creepers, and mud. If you got ten feet off the trail (which would require courage and effort), you could be lost for days and could quite possibly die. One group of French girls had nearly done just that.
	At the visitor's center, when they handed us the map, they were assiduous about their warnings to read the map, read the trail signs, and don't leave the trails. It seems these three French girls had left the trail the week before we arrived, got lost and spent a pitch black night out there among the wildlife, finally stumbled across a trail the next day, and made their way back to the nature center by evening. The reality of nighttime in that forest could provide Stephen King enough material for his next three books. These girls saw lots of poisonous snakes. We went in daytime (when the forest is merely dark) on a loop trail to a small but spectacularly beautiful waterfall, on hand-crafted trails that never allow your feet touch the dirt (in order to avoid erosion). You walk on buried eggcrated cement bricks or on sliced tree rounds laid in the dirt and covered with metal mesh for traction. Very labor intensive. No wonder the entry fee was $9 per person.
	We stayed in a rustic hotel high on the mountain in a lush forest setting with wonderful views to the south over the Gulf of Nicoya. The restaurant there offered the best food we'd had yet. The hotel was owned and run by . . . Americans.
	We stayed only one night. In hindsight we wished we'd stayed three. Instead we drove a horrible road along the high ridge to Tilaran (thirty kilometers, three hours), then around the west end of Lake Arenal to the town of Arenal (twenty kilometers, one hour). After lunch in a small cafe we drove along the north side of Lake Arenal to La Fortuna (twenty kilometers, two hours). You understand, I hope, that ten kilometers per hour is the same as six miles per hour? Good. Just checking. Along this stretch we saw the densest, hottest, most humid, overgrown, fetid, forbidding, scary MESS of a jungle you could ever want to see. Profoundly beautiful when viewed from the open space of the road, but no one in his right mind would go in there without a machete a yard long and a rucksack full of antivenin! That's where the twelve-foot-long fer-de-lances live, the most poisonous snake in the world. Not to mention — well, let's not mention the rest of the fauna. It’s a jungle with not one cubic centimeter left unlived-in by something, a very full ecosystem, a rapacious food chain, both flora and fauna. Think of the Indiana Jones movies.
	We got to La Fortuna having seen nothing of the Arenal Volcano, which we had just finished driving completely around. It was lost in cloud cover, and La Fortuna itself being literally nothing to write home about, we decided, on the basis of the map (a bad mistake) that we'd head on back to San Jose that day. After all, it was only a hundred kilometers away (62 miles) over primary highways — the Costa Rican interstate, you might say. It was 2:15 pm, so we called the hotel to say we’d be back in about two hours, reserved a room, and drove on. HAH!! Some primary highways. We arrived back in Escazu over four hours later, having driven over the Continental Divide for the second time that day, in slashing rain, over huge potholes, at an average speed of less than fifteen miles an hour. After dinner at Pizza Hut (the best and most reliable food and service in town), we finally arrived at the hotel around 8:00 pm. It was the hardest day of driving we have ever experienced.
	In Costa Rica, one really has to rise above the conditions in order to appreciate the wonder, beauty, and intensity of it all. Sort of like cruising. It’s a fantastic place, but as they say, "getting there is half the fun".
	Oh by the way, the trip back to Daybreak from San Jose? Without going into detail about the parts that didn't quite work the way they were supposed to, this was the drill: 1) drive the rental car from the hotel to the airport and turn it in, 2) ride to the bus station in the rental car with a driver, to be dropped off, 3) ride the bus to Puntarenas, 4) walk about eight blocks (with eight bags of luggage weighing about 100,000 pounds) to the Soda Nacional for lunch, 5) walk four more blocks to Puntamar Yacht Services to hang out for two hours waiting for the ferry. Better to hang out there, where there are drinks and snacks, than at the ferry terminal, where there’s nothing. 5) take a taxi the mile and a half to the ferry terminal (no way were we gonna walk with those bags), 6) take the ferry to Playa Naranjo, across the Gulf of Nicoya about ten miles, 7) get picked up by John from Hotel Bahia Gigante in his gigantic four wheel drive dualie pickup, 8) drive five miles (45 minutes) to the hotel, 9) call Rick on Mañana by VHF radio to pick us up by dinghy, 10) ride down to the hotel pier in John's truck with our ton of stuff (including, you see, all the supplies we’d been in San Jose to buy that were unavailable anywhere else in the country, like birthday gifts for Tania), and finally 11) ride out to the boat in the dinghy (two trips, about a mile each, one way). Total distance: 110 km. Total travel time: twelve hours. Average speed: less than six miles per hour. There seems to be a trend in Costa Rican travel: slow.

	That was it on the Gulf of Nicoya for us. We were anxious to split. Daybreak had been at anchor behind Isla Gitana longer than she ever been in one place before. We had two weeks to get to Golfito, reprovision, refuel, and get into Panama before our visas went belly-up. And Golfito’s officials were not known for their sympathetic ways.

Chapter 11
On To Panama

	Unless you want to anchor in some pretty exposed places, famous for world-class surf but where no boat belongs, the trip from the Gulf of Nicoya to Golfito, the last port in Costa Rica, requires two overnight sails, with a stop at Bahia Drake if you like. We started by sailing the twenty miles down the Gulf to Punta Leona, just to get a head start on the first leg. There we found yet another hotel with yet another palm-studded lawn, and yet another swimming pool. Which we promptly used, for the price of a couple of beers.
	The wind that day was a blustery southwesterly, which should have warned us something was brewing. Normally the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which you can think of as an east-west low-pressure trough, sits on Costa Rica in summer like a thick blanket, stifling all wind. On the north it receives the northern hemisphere trades, while on the south a fairly local southwesterly flows in, local because there's not much to the south for wind to have come from. As disturbances form on one side or the other, the ITCZ sort of "breathes", moving northward or southward to bring one or the other of these breezes to Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. To the south, unbeknownst to us, was a smallish cyclonic disturbance.
	We left Punta Leona in a flat calm. By midday we were well outside the Gulf on the rhumbline to Bahia Drake when a mild easterly began to develop — right on our nose. By evening this had increased to twenty knots and was accompanied by a low black cloudbank. By nightfall, in pitch darkness, the wind had increased further and steadied at thirty five knots with rain slashing down. Still motoring with sail down, dead into it, we were on the edge of control. The motor had barely enough power to push us one knot on average. During lulls our speed would get up to two or three knots, but during gusts it fell to zero, and often we could feel ourselves being shoved backwards by waves. When this happened, Daybreak’s bow would fall fifty or sixty degrees off the wind, and not until the next lull could she climb back up. In other words, we barely had steerageway. This happened because both our masts are a foot thick at the base. Each presents over thirty square feet of windage, and one of them is located right in the bow of the boat. 
	Had the wind increased even a little, we would have been forced to set sail, which we had no desire to do, not least of all because our cockpit awning, which was still up and keeping us comfortable and dry, would have had to come down and get stowed. Then the sail covers would have had to come off and both halyards attached, a life-threatening process on a pitching, rolling deck that won’t stay pointed (or tipped) in any one direction. Fortunately this did not become necessary. After blowing thirty five knots for half the night, the wind slowly abated, and we motored gratefully into Bahia Drake.
	Drake wasn’t much of an anchorage, but it beat being at sea pounding into an easterly. It is utterly exposed to the west. The first land in that direction is Palmyra Atoll, 4400 nautical miles away, so naturally the wind shifted west. At least it had the good grace to stay under ten knots, but we spent a bumpy night and were glad to leave the next morning. We were, after all, heading further east. This new wind was in our favor.
	A mild overnight sail brought us into the Golfo Dulce ("sweet gulf") to anchor off the small village of Puerto Jimenez, which lies just up the western shore of the gulf, across from Golfito. We had visions of exploring all the way up to the head of the gulf to a well-protected, jungle-bound cul de sac called Bahia Rincon, but it was not to be. That night the outboard motor was stolen off our dinghy, which was on our deck at the time. We slept right through it.
	We had believed that anything on deck was safe if we were aboard. Obviously not. In the slim hope that the authorities might be able to recover it, we motored the ten miles over to Golfito, where the Port Captain informed us that our motor was the fifteenth to be stolen that August — and it was only August 15th. One motor theft a day among 30 or 40 yachts is not crime, it’s an epidemic. This was our introduction to Golfito, and it was only the beginning.
	We quickly heard enough stories to surmise that anything not locked down would disappear. In one case an outboard was stolen at night from inside the outer hull of a trimaran, through a hatch. These thieves didn't want dinghies, but if a motor was locked to a dinghy, they'd steal them both, saw out the dinghy’s transom, take the engine, and then set the dinghy adrift or sink it. The Hans Christian 38 Cirrus lost their whole rig this way a day later: a ten horsepower outboard and a brand new Avon Roll-Up, for which they’d paid $3700. We heard that the motors were being taken to Puntarenas to be peddled on a busy black market.
	We were lucky in that we were able to borrow an ancient 2 hp Johnson from a friend to tide us over until we could buy a replacement in Panama City. What an artifact. We cheered every time it started, then cheered again if we reached our destination.
	So, what else could happen? Well, Tania decided to watch very closely one evening while Lynn was dishing up dinner out of a frying pan, and contacted the pan with her bare right pectoral and nipple. Ouch! You can feel it, can't you? Frantic action with a dishrag dipped in the ice-cold water at the bottom of the refrigerator and applied to the injury kept it from being worse than it was, but the scream that had emerged from Tania’s lips was like nothing we’d heard before. We had been prepared for the possibility of burns by an LA friend who is a nurse in a burn ward. She’d recommended a medication which we’d gotten on prescription before leaving: silver sulfadiazine (SSD) cream. We were relieved to see it had the advertised effect. Though the wound would need care and attention while it healed, Tania felt no pain beyond the first half hour or so, and suffered no scarring at all. Nice medicine to have around.
	Not to be outdone by Tania, Roxanne developed a bad ear infection, so we visited a clinic to get it looked at. The infection was the result of a very common tropical fungus called hifus (EE-foos, en Español), and each of us had it. Roxanne’s and my cases were sufficiently advanced to require antibiotics for secondary inner ear infections, while Tania and Lynn just needed to kill the fungus with ear drops we would pick up the next morning before leaving for Panama. By the way, total cost for four examinations, 80 pills of erythromycin, and three bottles of the "fungus killer" drops — $49.
	We had only a day left on our visas, but Golfito was not done with us. The girls' new school materials were due to arrive by mail ($1200 worth) plus, finally, our repaired voltage regulator ($125 for the repair plus shipping). Paul, our friend, correspondent, and financial affairs manager back in LA, had sent all this in seven packages in order to keep individual packages under four pounds, the air parcel post limit. Three packages arrived (after three weeks enroute), and the voltage regulator wasn’t among them. The rest never showed up. We stayed in radio contact with Golfito via cruisers for the next ten weeks, checking. The rather expensive lessons thus learned were 1) don't mail separate packages, 2) don't use regular mail down there, and 3) when making the customs declaration at the U.S. point of shipment, call it "books and letters". That way it bypasses local (i.e. Golfito) customs, which was a black hole. Experienced cruisers, we then learned, use nothing but DHL international air express which, though it cost ten dollars per pound and often requires in-person pick-up at a major airport, always arrives, usually in a day or two, and can be traced with a phone call if there is any problem. Anything else, we saw, was false economy. At that time, believe it or not, mail theft was not a yet crime in Costa Rica.
	As if all this weren’t enough, my back went out. Way out. Prayer was in order, because spinal surgery was not an option. If my condition worsened, or even failed to improve, our cruise was going to be over in Panama. The bulging disk was touching the sciatic nerve again. Last time this had happened, it had paralyzed my right leg, and surgery had been mandatory.
	We bit the bullet and accepted all this as some sort of karmic lesson, obtained our zarpé (exit permit) by the skin of our teeth minutes before closing time after numerous frantic taxi rides to both ends of town and back chasing down nonexistent parcels (with my back in mortal agony throughout), all because we’d been given incorrect procedural information to begin with by "Rambo", the notoriously belligerent, obstructive, and unpleasant Golfito immigration official. So we were good and ready to say good riddance to Golfito. At least the taxis had been cheap. We had no idea yet how we’d get along without all the lost goods, but we did know we were leaving. At least we hadn't been burglarized and our boat stripped out, which had just happened to yet another yacht, this time an immaculate new CT 54 called Wind Eagle, which suffered $27,000 in losses. Fortunately, they were retired (read: "steady income", not "cruising kitty"), and insured. About two thirds of their loss was covered. Several flights back and forth to Miami were ultimately required, and the stories of their interactions with Costa Rican Customs were just plain horrifying.
	There was some good news: we did manage to find presents for Tania's upcoming birthday. It had taken two trips to Golfito’s Duty Free Zone and cost twice what it would have in LA . . . Listen, just in case you haven't gotten this message yet, everything you ever heard about things being cheaper in Latin America is hogwash. Maybe that was true twenty years ago, but not now. Some things are cheap — taxis, buses, medical care, rice, and beans — but the overall cost of living was certainly no cheaper than in the U.S., and many items were vastly more expensive. In the U.S. the sheer size of the market and economies of scale keep prices down. Just in case anyone ever asks you.
	OK. Morning brought a brand new day. At dawn there was not a cloud in the sky, and in fact it had been so cool during the night that we’d used a top sheet and a quilt! Even Roxanne, who tends to sleep warm, had crawled into her sleeping bag. On that bright, sparkling new day, feeling as if we surely must have finished paying whatever dues life expected up to that moment, we were hoping that maybe, just maybe, the missing packages would show up before our 24-hour zarpé ran out at 4:00 p.m. Lynn headed into town at 0630 to meet the doctor at the clinic to receive the medicine for the ear fungus. The doctor rode a bike, and she had to be at the hospital at 7:30, but she passed the clinic on the way, so . . .  While I’m on this subject, I’ve got to offer this woman the praise she deserves. The hours she put in would in the States have been reserved solely for interns, the boot camp trainees of the medical profession. She worked in surgery at the hospital from 0730 to 1600, at which point she mounted her 18-speed mountain bike, rain or shine (and believe me, between June and November, it was rain), pedaled to the clinic, which up to then would have been staffed only by nurses, and stayed until there were no more patients. We weren’t quite sure when she ate. Her name was Alexandra, and she spoke just enough English for us to understand her with effort. We liked her. Of course, one always feels affection toward anyone who, when your child is sick, and you're scared and thinking the worst, simply says, "Oh, she just has this silly fungus, no problem, take these pills for five days and keep her ears dry." OK. Roger. 10-4. Will do.
	You probably now think Golfito is a hellhole, but in fact it is a spectacular bay, totally enclosed. There were mornings when I found Lynn up on deck at sunrise in stunned, awestruck silence, just gazing around. The geographic surroundings were simply magical. We certainly had a hard time there, and of course Rambo did his best to make life impossible for everyone. He’s just that kind of guy. Many others fared better than we did, though some fared far worse. For the most part the people of Golfito were extremely nice. It would have helped to know in advance about the thievery and the mail difficulties. We might have had a much different experience of the place. But that’s not how cruising works.

	Southeast of Golfito, Punta Burica sticks out into the Pacific like a twenty-mile-long dagger, and the border between Costa Rica and Panama runs right down the middle of it. An overnight sail around it and then northeast around Isla Parida brought us to the tiny island of Isla Gamez, just beyond Parida. My word, what a beautiful place. We anchored just north of Gamez, about ten miles offshore of the Rio Chiriqui delta (inside of which lay the towns of David and Pedregal). Between us and the mainland was nothing but shoals and mudflats navigable only at high tide. And by the way, the tidal range had just jumped from nine to fifteen feet! Isla Gamez consisted of two rocky hills covered with jungle, connected together by a narrow sandspit shaded by coconut palms. The north-facing shore of the spit was a perfect tropical beach of fine powdery white sand, the kind that covers your skin like talc when you lie on it. A delightful southerly breeze blew across the spit through the palms each afternoon as we lay on the sand, in the shade, gazing up at puffy white clouds in a blue, blue sky, daydreaming. Wow. We sat on the beach under those palms with Don and Eileen, talking about life and work and cruising, and generally just enjoy each other immensely. Under those sorts of conditions, you find that there are few people in the world not to like. The kids frolicked in the water and made constructions of driftwood. We gazed out at our boats, floating on powder blue water against the vivid green jungle across the mudflats, and were taken by how pretty they were. Pride of ownership. We lazed and stretched our muscles like cats. Life was sweet.
	On the other hand, my back was a wreck. It had deteriorated alarmingly during the passage and got even worse the next day. Lynn and I lay in bed that night discussing what we’d do if the disc blew up again, and came up with a plan. We’d lose the rest of our cruise and a fortune in cash, but we’d be home, safe, and able to start over. That knowledge kept me going. For the next two days I did nothing but lay in bed and read. On the third day I was able to sit at meals, walk with care and effort, and go to the beach with my family in the dinghy. There I could stretch out on the flat white sand, in the luscious shade of a palm tree, and start doing my back exercises again. If we were very careful, we thought, we might just get past this crisis, get me healed up, and go on cruising. Time would tell. And time was what we had more of than anything.
	After five days my back was sufficiently healed to consider moving on, so we sailed 37 miles to Isla Brincanco on a mild, sunny day. Once there, as we sat at anchor in a cliff-bound forest-clad cove, protected on three sides, we had occasion to look through some photographs of ourselves on Daybreak as we had departed Marina del Rey nine months earlier. It had been an early winter morning, still and overcast, threatening rain, and we were bundled in jackets, hats, pants, socks, and shoes. We had huge smiles and were waving happily goodbye. It seemed like eons had passed. We’d been so inexperienced. So much had happened, and we had changed immeasurably. It took those pictures to make it clear. We’d been rank beginners, scared neophytes hoping life wouldn't swat us too hard. Looking at the photos, we knew we’d truly become cruisers. Daybreak had become our home. She was close and familiar, and we’d learned how to deal with her. In spite of her idiosyncrasies, she took good care of us. And she was a lovely boat.
	It is amazing how long takes to adjust to cruising. It is not just a matter of "slowing down". That isn’t it at all. That makes it sound like reduced expectations and goals, like "goofing off." It isn’t even close to being like that. Cruising is a very hard life by any modern standard. From time to time we found ourselves wishing we could afford a "vacation", just two weeks back in the states visiting friends and family, sleeping in beds large enough to stretch out in, showering in stand-up showers with unlimited water, having cars to drive everywhere instead of walking or taking decrepit taxis and buses, being comfortable instead of living in rolling sweat and unceasing sourness . . . but in truth we didn't want such a "vacation". We wanted to maintain the discipline of being there, not just visiting. We did live there. We belonged there. It was our home, the only one we had, and we had adjusted to it. Adjustment seemed to define the "pace" of cruising, constant adjustment, the willingness to live in a state of flux dictated by ever-changing surroundings. In "normal" life we learn our way around our city, around our job, around our neighborhood, and that's it. Then we do whatever we want within that environment, like buy or remodel a house, raise a family, and spend weekends entertaining ourselves. All the stores and services we could ever need are right where they were last time we needed them. But for itinerant mariners nothing is ever like that. As soon as we’d been in a place long enough to know a tiny bit about where things were and how to get there, we'd leave for a new place with new rules, new weather, new people, and new patterns. We were constantly on the steepest part of the learning curve. No slack.
	Think of it like this. You’ve come to a large foreign city. You have no car, no bicycle, and no place to live except your boat at anchor (not in a marina). You have one week available, during which you must 1) fuel the boat, with no fuel dock available, 2) buy provisions for thirty days away from civilization, 3) take on two hundred gallons of water weighing 1600 pounds (again, no dock), 4) find and visit the Port Captain, Customs, and Immigration and handle paperwork the requirements for which are unknown to you in advance, 5) exchange your traveler's checks for local currency, but not too much, because whatever you don't spend will be lost, and 6) just for added zest, shop for presents for your little girl's birthday, which is six days away, in a country where toy stores are virtually nonexistent, where toys cost three times what they cost at your local Toys R Us back home when and if you can find them, and where all books, even coloring books, are in Spanish. Now. After six or seven such days, after finding everything there is to find and trying to figure out what you're going to do about everything you couldn't find, sail away through unfamiliar seas along unfamiliar coastlines strewn with rocks and reefs, in unfamiliar climates in strange, difficult, unsettled weather in a boat with a few key systems held together with chewing gum and duct tape because you can't get proper parts, and you begin to get the picture. Did you do any sightseeing while you were in town? HAH!! Keep doing this over, and over, and over, twice a month on average, for months on end, and make it be a nurturing, enlivening experience for yourselves, your children, and the people back home who read your letters, and I mean really have it BE nurturing, not just say it is, and you have cruising in a nutshell. This is the "pace" of cruising. Yet for all its difficulties, it still beats the hell out of working.
	The south coast of Panama, a lush, wild, bejungled place, is marked by several large "inlets" or river deltas, and numerous offshore islands. In between are shallows and mudflats, and all around the islands are innumerable shoals and uncharted rocks. Nighttime landfalls were out of the question. The mainland is mostly low rolling hills covered by tropical hardwood forest and smothered in creeping jungle with occasional coconut palms. The islands are rocky, steep, and covered with the same high-canopied jungle, with an occasional white sand beach among the rocks. Isla Gamez had been particularly blessed in this respect. Brincanco, steep-to and isolated in deep water, was not. Surrounded by rocky walls and with a steep, anchor-unfriendly bottom, the cove did not beckon us to linger. We stayed just one night.
	With us were Moonrise and Mañana, who decided to visit a shrimper who rumbled into the anchorage late in the afternoon to sit out some rain. A coupla bucks, a can of coffee, and three tins of meat later they returned with five pounds of jumbo shrimp sin cabezas (without heads, nearly 100% meat), so we all got together aboard Daybreak and feasted as we had never feasted before. We filled a huge salad serving bowl twice with boiled shrimp, and went through a pound of melted margarine and a loaf of fresh bread. I have never eaten so much shrimp at one time before or since.
	The three boats sailed from Brincanco in the rain. I steered the twenty miles by hand in shifty winds, bare-ass naked except for a rain jacket for chill protection, and came up to the entrance to Bahia Honda in a blinding white-out squall which mercifully cleared off the entrance just as I was ready to heave to and wait it out. 
	Bahia Honda, an enclosed bay with a narrow entrance, was "Barter Central". Locals from a small fishing village on a small island inside the bay stopped by every day with produce for trade. They didn't want money. They had no place they could spend it. They wanted things like UHT milk, children’s clothes, toys, tools, and soap, stuff they needed but had no other way to obtain. We traded for potatoes, onions, cilantro, chiles, green beans, papayas, bananas, and plantains. It worked out pretty well — for three days we ate almost nothing out of our stores — but we felt a bit invaded. Those folks wanted desperately to see the insides of our boats, to see how we lived. We invited one young man aboard named Ishmael, age fifteen, and when he saw our wedding photo, he could only stare at Lynn's wedding dress and murmur "mucho dinero!". Yes indeed. I remember thinking the same thing at the time.
	The most energetic and well-supplied local barterer was an old farmer named Domingo, who came around with his twin daughters. (We thought they were daughters, anyway. Another cruiser who knew him well said the girls were, um, for rent.) He was an energetic and forthcoming businessman. The younger upstarts would have done well to watch and emulate. They, by contrast, would make a timid, indecisive approach, usually with nothing on hand to trade, preferring to ask what you wanted and then promising to get it for the next day. A pretty hit-or-miss proposition. Domingo always came prepared with just the right amount of everything, and learned his customers’ tastes in a single visit. For us: mild chilis, not hot, green beans, bananas but not plantains, a few green onions . . .  He was there every day. With unusual acumen he could see from our large antenna on the boomkin that we had an SSB radio aboard, and knew we must be in touch with other cruisers, so he asked us how many were yet to arrive: how many at Isla Gamez, how many at Golfito, how many days until they got there, et cetera. This man had plans.
	The rain finally abated, and the sun shone fitfully. Likewise the breeze: I was out in the dinghy with Roxanne trying to teach her to sail, also fitfully. Rain or shine, though, Bahia Honda was, in Lynn's words, "astonishingly beautiful". It was not a classic "tropical paradise", no beaches, no coral reefs, no trade winds, and very few coconut palms, but it offered great protection, quiet water, and rocky, rolling hills thick with deciduous jungle. The forest growth ranged from vine-y ground cover to slender-trunked trees seventy feet tall with no branches or leaves for the first sixty. Everywhere, all day and night, we could hear the insects, birds, and howler monkeys that lived in there. The water was murky of course, since several substantial rivers emptied into a bay only two miles across, but nonetheless it reflected the colors around it faithfully: gray/black when the clouds were thick overhead and the rain was threatening; silver-gray during the rain; the deep green of the hills when the sun was out and the wind was calm; and blue/white from the sky and clouds when a breeze rippled the surface in fair weather. In rain the hills were gray/green through the mist, or obscured by white-out during a real downpour, and then brilliantly, rampantly, explosively green in the brilliant sun afterwards. It never stayed the same even for half an hour.
	We were overjoyed to be there. Our various misfortunes, including the recently re-deceased refrigeration (I’m keeping my promise here), really involved nothing more than money and inconvenience. Of course, our money was precious because it paid for our freedom, and inconvenience usually translated into more time in port getting parts and making repairs, and less time out in quiet, pristine anchorages like Bahia Honda. Since our funds were finite, every day in port making repairs had to be bought with a lost day "out cruising". We were simply learning the hard way that the more mechanical systems you have on board to provide "convenience", the more inconvenienced you are going to be trying to keep them running.

	Ever since I had gotten hold of Defense Mapping Agency chart number 21852 from a northbound cruiser back in Puerto Madero, Mexico, I’d been dying to explore Panama's Gulf of Montijo. This small, shallow gulf, an estuary really, is protected by Islas Cebaco and Gobernadora, which sit right in its mouth. On the chart it looked irresistible. Moonrise and Mañana did not seem to share this fascination, but then they didn't have the chart, so I showed it to them. It didn’t help, and so after sailing together to an anchorage behind Isla Gobernadora, they headed onward for the Las Perlas Islands in the Gulf of Panama while we headed up the Gulf of Montijo alone.
	It was the right choice. The place was transcendental, and we had it utterly to ourselves. We had a luscious, light-air, flat-water reach about fifteen miles up the gulf to tiny Isla Leona, and anchored behind it in thirteen feet, mud. There were fifteen more miles of shoal water to the north of us, and many miles of river in two directions beyond that, should we have chosen to explore it all. The water, though murky like any river drainage in the rainy season, was nearly salt-free. We bathed in it. We washed the decks. We sat in the cockpit after dinner and watched the sun fade behind thunderheads over the mountains to the west, and watched its glow across four miles of lightly wind-rippled water between ourselves and the western shore. We luxuriated in the soft cooling breeze still wafting up the gulf from the ocean and over the hills of the island. The boat rode calmly to 100 feet of chain. We could have spent a week there. Our itinerary said we shouldn't, and in the end we didn’t, but never in our lives had we been someplace so beautiful, so peaceful, so placid, and so devoid of people, all at once.
	Protected as it is by islands spanning its mouth, Montijo is virtually swell-free, a small inland sea. With the substantial tides and river run-off, it is also quite shoal, averaging a few feet at low tide over most of its area, with deeper channels running down its margins. The bay’s calm expanse was broken by several densely-forested islands. Numerous small creeks spilled in from the sides, and forests of coconut palms lined the shores.
	If that place were in California, there wouldn't have been an inch of natural shoreline left. All of it would be houses, condos, marinas, and restaurants. The hills above would be covered with tract homes, without a square inch of native growth remaining for many miles. The waters themselves would be overrun with sailboats, fishermen, speedboats, water skiers, windsurfers, jet skis — and too dirty to swim in. The islands would be under the collective leasehold of a zillion yacht clubs, each with a private facility a couple hours' sail away from their docks. Unclaimed land would have been nonexistent since the early 19th century. The sunset we saw that night glittering across miles of untouched water would have been shattered by boat wakes and the noise of motors everywhere, not to mention loudspeakers blaring out: "Johnson, party of four, your table is ready!"
	In the fading sunset I shared with Lynn something I had always known but had not yet been ready to say to her, since it seemed anathema to ocean cruising. I prefer flat water. I mean really, in all honesty, what sailor doesn’t? Lynn, of course, agreed 110%. Hey, that place was catboat country! It seemed to cry out for a Cape Cod catboat, something with one mast, one sail, a huge lounge-y cockpit, and a dry little cabin, a boat that never tips very far and draws about a foot and a half of water with the centerboard up. We loved that kind of cruising! Sure, we'd sailed Daybreak across 4000 miles of open ocean to get there. That was the price of the place. I don't know of a single cruiser who likes rough conditions. Breeze, yes, but not wind. Obviously we would continue to sail Daybreak onward, possibly through conditions that would make the Pacific look like a millpond. The Gulf Stream? Cape Hatteras? We might even sail her to Europe and the Mediterranean. But we began to admit to ourselves that someday, somewhere, we wanted to settle down in a place just like what we were looking at, a place that never sees winter, with a house on the shore and a small boat at the dock, to sail among the creeks and tules as the day slides toward evening, to be together with each other and the breeze and the ripples and the trees. The Gulf of Montijo brought this image home to us in a very special way. Wouldn't it be great, we mused, if this place were in the United States?
	God, no. Perish the thought.
	The next morning, in a cloudy dawn with a breeze out of the rivers to the north, we stood on the bow and watched the rays of the sun stream through the clouds over the eastern hills. Not another soul in sight. The kids down below doing their usual kid thing, oblivious to everything except each other and the possibility of breakfast. Something about the place was stirring us, something right and familiar, some nameless deja vu. Human beings belong in places like that, doing, as Thoreau wrote, as little as possible. It was Thoreau who commented that the less work a man does, the better for himself and for his community. (For Thoreau, work was what one did to provide oneself with food, clothing, shelter, and money.) Such a sentiment was not popular in the manic New England work-ethic of the mid-1800s, nor now among money-addled, ultra-achiever America yuppies — even the ones who revere Walden as great American literature. Popular or not, Thoreau was right, and the Gulf of Montijo is one place where you can see the obviousness of it. It’s a good place to simply be. And no matter how many conversations we may have about what we ought to be doing about one thing or another, in the end we are here for only one reason: to be. To be here.
	The reality within which we modern humans live is one we have created by drawing and agreeing upon distinctions. One draws a distinction in exactly the same way one draws a line in the sand. Drawing it creates two sides which were not there before, and one finds instantly upon drawing it that one is standing on one side of the line or the other. If, at that point, one decides one likes one side or the other better, he may move to that side. He may live his entire life on that side if he chooses. He may engage in discourse with others regarding which side is better. He may enroll others in his opinion. With others, he may establish laws regarding which side is better. Together, they may establish special places to assemble and worship the "good" side, and denigrate the "bad". This conscious drawing of distinctions is a unique talent among humans, shared by no other species and, in fact, relatively new in the world. It appeared about ten thousand years ago, after literally millions of years of prior human existence, when the first conscious distinction was drawn: "I" and "not I". Thus was born modern human life.
	Interestingly, exactly coincident with the advent of conscious distinction-drawing in humans was the advent of another unique human talent: the ability to forget that they themselves had drawn the distinctions in the first place that give form to their lives. This is the first and ultimate act of irresponsibility a modern human commits, and even though we are taught to forget, until we reestablish our responsibility our lives are literally not our own.
	The distinctions Lynn and I had been taught to draw and live by back on land were those our neighbors and work associates also lived by. Without such agreement, no social intercourse is possible. But out there in virgin country, alone, where no society penetrated, it was possible to entertain a set of distinctions separate from those our society had taken as its bible. It was possible to look past what we'd learned, what we "knew". The distinctions which had shaped our entire prior lives were starting to come unglued and drift away like mist. Their very arbitrariness was what was beginning to become "distinct", and other possibilities began to present themselves. For us, that anchorage was a seminal place. We stayed there only one night, but we will remember it forever.

	We headed out of there at 0320 on a muscular ebb tide, bound for the Las Perlas Islands in the Gulf of Panama. The 35-hour trip was uneventful for the first 16 hours, which brought us to a point seven miles off the infamous Punta Mala ("Bad Point"), the place where you turn left to head for the Canal. It was just about dark, and a passel of ships were barreling down around the point in close formation. Lynn had gone off watch at 7:00 p.m., but I had to call her back up, because I’m color-blind. She called out the running light colors while I watched the radar screen through the companionway and steered. We were motorsailing, we were in the grip of the Equatorial Countercurrent, we had five ships within two miles of us, and we were sitting out there like a rabbit in the high-beams.
	Our five knot speed was nothing compared to the twenty six knots these big boys were making. Two of them passed within half a mile of us, and we boxed the compass twice trying to dodge them. One of the captains saw this, knew we were confused, and came up on the VHF radio to give us his course, speed, and probable closest approach to us, which he estimated at *gulp* three tenths of a mile! That's 1800 feet, friends, or about two of his boat lengths. Shee-yit! We swung 45º to starboard, announced our new course to him, and passed port-to-port half a mile off. Then he told us to watch for another ship close on his port quarter, which had been obscured from our view until then. While we made a 90º course change to port, into the first ship’s wake, thereby crossing the bow of the second ship (because there was yet a third ship further over to starboard), some crazy jerk of a captain on yet another ship came on the radio to berate us all for using the radio! Bear in mind, we were on VHF channel 10, having moved there after hailing on 16, and this other guy had followed us to listen in. He then proceeded to tell us, back on channel 16 where he had more audience, that we must all be rank amateurs if we had to resort to using the radio, and that all any competent skipper had to do was follow the rules of the road, speed up, slow down or change course as necessary, and everything would be peachy. The first captain riposted, "Thank you, Magellan!" Good grief! Me and my whole family were gonna be dead if I didn’t get it right, and this guy wanted me not to use the radio? Besides which, he was wrong. The rules of the road apply only to two ships at a time, and only in open, unobstructed waters. When five ships 1000 feet long doing 25 knots are converging on a piece of water a few thousand feet across, something besides a rule book is required. Isn’t that why we have radios? Every shipping collision I’d read about in the prior twelve issues of Ocean Navigator magazine had occurred because just two ships approached each other, with no other traffic, failed to signal their intentions, didn’t use the radio, and then both took evasive action which brought them onto new collision courses from which there was no time left to escape.
	Well, we survived. Later on that night, on my second watch as we headed northeast across the Gulf of Panama toward the Las Perlas Islands, we were passed within three eighths of a mile by a ship on a reciprocal course. He didn't acknowledge any of my radio calls and never changed course, though he was the give-way vessel. Who are these guys, and how do they get licensed?

	Let me illustrate the seriousness of these considerations. Mike and Judy Sleavin on Melinda Lee, mentioned several times earlier, had the dream of circumnavigating the globe. They set aside five years in which to do so with their children, Ben and Annie, who were nearly the same age as Roxanne and Tania. After exploring Panama, the San Blas Islands, and the south coast of Cuba they re-transited the Canal and headed southwest on the "milk run" to the South Pacific. Like many cruisers before them they visited the Marquesas, Tahiti, Vava’u, and Tonga, and headed finally for New Zealand to spend the southern hemisphere hurricane season. Eight days out of Tonga, having left in company with several other boats, they were thirty miles from the Bay of Islands on New Zealand’s North Island, in a gale, when they were run down by a freighter that never saw them, never felt them, and never stopped. Ben was killed instantly where he lay in his berth. The collision tore a gash thirty feet long in Melinda Lee’s topsides and ripped their liferaft from its lashings. Mike and Judy managed to get their inflatable dinghy in the water before Melinda Lee sank, and with Annie they got in. The dinghy was capsized so many times by the large waves that they decided finally to try leaving it upside down and hanging on to the grab ropes along its rails. In this fashion they survived eight hours, at which point fatigue overcame Annie and she lost her grip. Mike dove after her. Neither were seen again. Judy hung on to drift ashore many hours later, and was recovered in bad condition, minus a family. A year later, her mind was still useless from the shock.
	Lynn and I have only recently told Roxanne and Tania about this. We had to wait for them to grow up enough to be able to accept the news. And I don’t ever apologize for using the radio.

	Unlike Melinda Lee, we made it without mishap. After Punta Mala we experienced the full brunt of the currents for which the Gulf of Panama is famous. For the remaining 75 miles to the Las Perlas we bucked both current and wind, with intermittent rain as well. At least the ship traffic was behind us. In the morning, coming to anchor in Ensenada Playa Grande at Isla San Jose, it rained so hard we filled our tanks in thirty minutes flat.
	The Las Perlas Islands are a small archipelago only a thirty-mile daysail away from the Panama Canal. Getting there was quite a milestone. That being so, and the fact being that we hadn't had time (i.e. money) to see every place we had wanted to see, we sat in the cockpit over lukewarm cocktails and discussed our options. The itinerary we wanted to pursue added up to another twenty months, not counting time to settle down someplace where we could work, and possibly sell the boat. In reality we’d need a minimum of two years, probably two and a half, but with our funds dwindling fifty percent faster than planned, something would have to give. Things didn’t get any clearer in the course of two tall drinks, so we let the question slide and had dinner. Tuna again (we’d caught one on the way in). Moonrise and Mañana had left the bay that afternoon and snuck around the corner behind a small point, so we were down to eating all that fish ourselves. We had to cook it all, so we ate a lot. And had copious leftovers.
	God, what a mess that night was. It started raining at sundown and continued all night. In the morning wind started to build out of the east, shifting slowly south as it increased. Our anchorage was exposed from north through southeast. By ten a.m. the wind was thirty knots and rising, and there were three foot wind waves in the bay that were getting rapidly larger. The seas outside had reached seven feet. Torrential rain regularly reduced visibility to the point that we couldn't even see the beach behind our stern, and Daybreak was rolling and bucking on her anchor chain. Though Moonrise and Mañana had moved, we had thought the protection would be pretty good where we were, but things had gotten worse than we anticipated. We were worried and scared. By delaying action until conditions had become severe, we’d painted ourselves into a corner. Outside lay an archipelago of literally hundreds of islands, islets, reefs, and rocks, complicated by a fifteen foot tide range and vicious currents, plus no visibility, one marginal Xerox-copy chart, and our radar stone blind in the howling rain. Not a pretty picture. The possibility of going hunting for better spots was out of the question. Short of having absolute knowledge of a more protected spot nearby with a straightforward approach, our only alternative was to head south into the teeth of the wind and spend a day and a night at sea. Looking at the chart, we couldn't imagine that Moonrise's and Mañana's anchorage could possibly be better, but with storm-tossed open ocean against a treacherous lee shore as the alternative, we were ready to call and find out.
	Eileen called us instead, to inform us that their anchorage, while windy, had no swell at all, only six inch wind waves, a flat sandy bottom six fathoms deep, and wide open, trouble-free access. That sounded heavenly. Almost anything would have been an improvement. Our motor was already on to charge batteries, so we fired up the GPS and radar and started watching the squalls come through on the screen. In order to consider moving, we needed a radar-clear area extending two miles to windward. Just a window, that's all. We watched and waited.
	When it finally came, eye-ball visibility around us was less than a quarter mile, not even enough to see the point at the head of the bay that we needed to round. Don had mentioned that the point itself abounded with tidal rips. Nice. We raised anchor in the sheeting rain while praying the radar window would hold. Once underway, we’d be committed. If the window closed, we’d have to turn seaward, because remaining among the islands without visibility would be suicide. Seaward was the only direction radar could safely take us.
	Heading out, we quickly found ourselves in a thirty five knot "fully developed sea state" complicated by a strong windward-flowing tide rip, resulting in seven foot breaking waves with a very short wavelength — barely double our length — with overfalls, "sea smoke", foam tracks, rain, wind-driven spume, the whole enchilada. But mercifully, visibility improved. We didn't need the radar. We could see head-high waves breaking hard right into the bight our friends had vacated the previous afternoon. Daybreak was rolling through seventy degrees of arc, gunwale to gunwale, as we quartered the seas trying to angle across the wave train, first to get out of the bay we were in, and then to get into the next one. Hell on wheels. The ocean looked like some tricked-up movie studio product like you see in old World War II-era movies like Key Largo, so absurd it hardly looked real, but so real it was terrifying.
	Eileen had been right. The protection on the other side of the point was unbelievably good, though space was tight. We found a place in thirty five feet to drop the hook and hoped the wind wouldn't shift east or north. We needed a calm night, and sleep.
	The storm passed. We retired early, and slept like the dead.
	In the morning we moved ten miles north to Isla Pedro Gonzales, where the chart showed a fairly bulletproof anchorage open only to the north. It sounded like heaven, and it was. The protection was excellent. Since our windlass had been behaving erratically, which had endangered our escape from Ensenada Playa Grande, I seized the opportunity to take apart the chain gypsy and clutch, clean them up with emery paper, and regrease them. A Panamanian shrimp boat came to join us, and Don wasted no time, quickly scoring six pounds of shrimp, sin cabezas again, for a tin of chicken, a tin of beef, and a package of pancake mix. On his way back he handed us a pound with a cheery bon appetit. Feeling a sense of well-being we’d not experienced for days, Lynn put bread dough out to rise, we put some music on the stereo, the kids pulled out their Legos, and wonder of wonders, the sun came out.
	After one day of peace, quiet, sun, and some dinghy sailing, we sailed Daybreak to the very entrance to the Panama Canal, and picked up a mooring at the Balboa Yacht Club.

	My heavens. We were there. We had made it. Less than forty miles due north of us was the Caribbean! Legendary waters. Eighteen inch tides. (At Balboa they were twenty one feet.) Clear waters, white sand, coral reefs, trade winds . . . we could hardly wait! We were almost exactly halfway through our cruise.
	Our slip back in Los Angeles was 4392 miles of sailing behind us. That’s a lot of water and weather. Like everyone, we’d had notions about the size of the world, about sailing, about living aboard, about Mexico and Central America, and about the Canal. Like any sailor, we could envision what sailing there in a small boat might be like — not that we had thought our vision was accurate or anything, but we did have some idea. Having actually gotten there, it had become clear that the reality was NOTHING like ANYTHING we had EVER envisioned, and the sense of accomplishment FAR EXCEEDED anything we had anticipated. Our trip was far bigger than anything we had imagined.
	Back at TRW, where Lynn and I had both worked, a manager two levels above me went home for Christmas one year and spent two frantic weeks completely gutting and rebuilding the kitchen in his house with his own hands. A couple of days before he was due to be back at work, he sat on the newly-laid floor of his newly-constructed kitchen, gazed around, and simply soaked up the sense of accomplishment. He shared with me that this sense of accomplishment transcended anything he had experienced in his job for at least a year.
	We spend so much time, so much of our lives, working, but for most of us the things that matter, the things that will mean something to us if we accomplish them, are not to be found in our work. Daybreak’s safe arrival at the Panama Canal, with my family aboard, meant more to me at that moment than any other accomplishment in my forty four years of life.
	People talk about cruising. Some people buy boats capable of doing so. Some even move aboard. A few of these get untied from the dock, and on the West Coast, where we came from, they head for San Diego. Some arrive, but fewer leave, and of those who do, an amazing number turn back after the first few hundred miles. In Cabo San Lucas further attrition sets in. That’s where the Suck Factor first strikes. People get there and think they’re done. A lot of them are.
	The Suck Factor takes a toll in Cabo, La Paz, Puerto Escondido, Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco, Playa del Coco, Puntarenas, Golfito, and even Panama. You might think there wouldn't be much in Panama to hold a person, but we knew one couple whose boat had been tied to a dock in Cristobal for four years. Anywhere there’s flat water, calm weather, and services, the Suck Factor is in full force, and moving on takes a conscious exertion of will against the brutal fact that cruising is not about comfort, it's about adventure. Not only is it hard to go cruising, it's hard to stay cruising. The Suck Factor is nothing more than the colossal attraction that comfort, security, and familiar surroundings have for human beings. Cruising necessitates abandoning these things, and cruising stops when one is no longer willing to live without them. For practical purposes, the defining day-to-day characteristics of cruising are risk, discomfort, and insecurity. People do it in the hope that something they find out there will make the sacrifices worthwhile, and the ones who continue are those who find it — or who perhaps are just bullheaded. Operationally, there's no difference. While cruising, the time to leave a place and move on is when life has gotten back to "normal", because if you’re cruising and life returns to "normal", why bother? You can live a normal life back on land, a lot more comfortably.
	
	Even though we were at the Panama Canal, we still had no plan at all for when we got through it. The biggest factor was the weather. The window for northbound passage from Panama is only open from about November 1st to December 15th. Before that, the possibility of hurricanes is still present, and later on the winter northerlies in the Gulf of Mexico make life difficult until about mid-April. Our choices were either to be back in the states by mid-December, or to hang out in the deep tropics until April. In the first case, we’d have time to visit the Bahamas. In the second, we’d have an extended period in Honduras, the Rio Dulce (Guatemala), and possibly Belize (a fringe area of the hurricane belt). We could have one or the other, but not both, and either way, the western Gulf of Mexico was out of the question.
	We chose the Bahamas. That would put us in the States for Christmas, which had strong appeal. Quite frankly, we were pretty tired of Spanish-speaking countries. Another Christmas in Latin America? Thanks, but no thanks. Corky Reed, you see, the enigma in Lower Alabama, had just invited us to spend Christmas at his house on Soldier Creek.

Chapter 12
The Panama Canal: A U.S. Beachhead In Latin America

	Our overall Panama Canal experience could be described in a single word: money.
	Our first few days in Balboa were hard, busy, and expensive, and we weren’t even close to being done. It's amazing how much dough can go through one’s hands in a hurry when one arrives somewhere that things can be bought. Customs fees and visas, charts (wow), another new refrigeration compressor, and then provisions for the next 110 days (wow again). Still to come were things like a new outboard motor, Balboa Yacht Club mooring fees, our Canal admeasurement and transit fees, plus new voltage regulators from the States, replacement school materials for Roxanne and Tania, a new GPS (the old one had died), all shipped down at the aforementioned $10 per pound via DHL Air Express (we'd learned our lesson in Golfito). And that didn't count the "little" stuff, like meals out every day while running errands, and taxis everywhere we went. I calculated we’d be lucky to escape for less than $3000. Our "budget" was a joke. After 307 days of cruising, we were 141 days over budget. Our "three year cruise" was definitely looking like a two year cruise. It was time to face that fact.
	Checking in to the country and getting Canal paperwork handled was a piece of cake. Regardless of what anyone tells you, no agent is necessary. All we needed was Luiz Enrique, who sat right in the Balboa Yacht Club parking lot every day in his ancient maroon Toyota taxicab. Like all taxis in the area, his cost eight bucks an hour or fraction thereof, but his service was remarkable. He took Don and me to each government bureau in sequence, walked us in, selected the necessary papers from our packets, and took from us the necessary fees. He’d disappear into the inner offices, bypassing the waiting crowd, and return five minutes later with everything completed. Did he take the correct amount from us, we wondered? Who cared? We buzzed through four offices in an hour and got back to the yacht club in ninety minutes flat, door to door. His total fee? $16, including transportation. Who needs an agent?
	Comparing notes later with cruisers who had done all this without Luiz Enrique’s help, it was clear he had not pocketed so much as a dime beyond his hourly fee.
	Balboa and the Canal Zone were sooo American! Just like a 51st state. In fact, until Jimmy Carter got into the act, a development about which most Panamanians were not particularly happy, it might as well have been a state. The Panamanians liked it when the Americans ran the place. As far as they were concerned, the only good thing the American government had done for them lately was get Noriega out of power. There were bumper stickers everywhere commemorating the date he’d been ousted. No common citizen I talked to thought the Panamanians should run the Canal, except, of course, Canal Zone employees. And the planned shutdown of U.S. military bases there was going to cause real economic hardship.
	A small example of the U.S. influence: roads. There actually were some. Real pavement, too, in good condition, and when it needed work, a road crew would show up with, seriously, road equipment. In Mexico, we’d actually seen one crew working on the road surface with table knives and spoons. The Canal Zone and Balboa were so much farther into the 20th century than, say, San Jose, Costa Rica (which was about the same size) that most Americans could feel reasonably at home there. That had been the whole idea in the first place: a little piece of America in deepest mañana-land, next to the Canal. A fair fraction of the populace, like ten percent, spoke English, and the Panamanian currency, the balboa, was pegged to the dollar at 100:1 and completely interchangeable with it. The 1, 5, 10, 25, and 50 balboa coins were the same size and color as the U.S. penny, nickel, dime, quarter, and half dollar, and they were mixed together in every cash drawer. They even worked in the vending machines. All paper money was dollars. All prices were in dollars. Clothes, cars, and stores in Balboa were very similar to the U.S., and most anything one needed could be found there, with enough searching. They even had yellow pages, which might have been a real help except that nine out of ten streets had no names. There was no such thing as an address. Directions received over the phone made no sense unless you were a native. All directions were given relative to local landmarks and major (named) streets. Business cards never contained an address.
	Balboa, you must understand, is a small, self-contained town at the Pacific terminus of the Canal. Panama City, on the other hand, is the Third World. We were there primarily to provision and fix things, as usual. Not that we enjoyed it, but there wasn’t much choice. At least we weren’t complete aliens. They're used to dealing with Americans down there. Part of that had to do with money. We were spending it like water, and they really like that. But also there was simply more money around in general than in other Central American cities. We didn’t feel so out of place.
	Provisioning was like nothing we'd done before. The longest period for which we’d previously provisioned was one month. This time we needed to go three and a half months, as did Moonrise and Mañana. We all went shopping together so we could share a delivery truck back to the yacht club.
	We filled five large grocery carts with things like 104 liter-size packets of orange Tang plus 80 packets of other flavors, 30 pounds of flour (not enough), 24 liters of soft drinks, 12 liters of liquor, 14 bottles of wine, three cubic feet of canned fruit, and tons of canned veggies and canned meat. It took three bag boys and a checker over an hour to get it checked and boxed, and the checker's supervisor stood over her the whole time. The register tape was over seven feet long. Packing it up took fourteen two-cubic-foot boxes. Where would we put it all? Moonrise had another eight such boxes, and Mañana six, plus three cases of beer between them. Together we spent over $1700, which easily earned us a free truck ride back to the pier. The store manager had the box boys load it all into a bobtail delivery truck, and I rode down to the yacht club with the driver to provide directions. Everyone else went by taxi. It then took four Panamanian laborers, who were standing around waiting for just such an opportunity, another hour to unload the truck, load the boxes onto carts, roll the carts down to the end of the long pier and ramp to the water taxi dock, and finally load it onto one of the yacht club's funky little diesel launches. We commandeered one launch just for ourselves for the next hour, and piled it so high with boxes there was scarcely room for people. Boxes on the seats, boxes on the floor, boxes on the engine compartment, on the stern deck, even on the foredeck. We couldn't even reach the bow bollard to cast off the dock line without knocking boxes into the ocean. A friendly soul on the dock did it.
	We got it all onto Daybreak’s deck, mercifully between thunderstorms, and started the process of trying to find stowage space for all of it. This took the entire remainder of the afternoon, from three until seven, at which point Lynn collapsed with nausea and a major headache while I fixed dinner for the kids and myself and then did the dishes. Roxanne and Tania were troopers the entire time, something of a miracle considering they didn't even get lunch until after two o’clock. Once back aboard, they made doll houses and make-believe ovens on deck with the empty boxes, while for some reason it still didn't rain. They slept like zombies that night. As did we. Lynn was feeling better by morning. "Just" stress. Provisioning a boat anywhere, and especially in Latin America, takes a lot of energy.
	We said goodbye to Moonrise and Mañana that morning. They were going to transit the Canal that day and head for the San Blas Islands immediately, after which they were bound for Antigua. We were heading for Belize. We'd all been together daily for four months.
	We were of two minds about it. We were sorry to see them go, of course. We'd enjoyed their company through thick and thin. It was the end of an era, and we would miss them. On the other hand, we were ready to be on our own again, to be making our own decisions about where to go, how long to stay, and when to move on, unencumbered by co-travelers. There’d been a lot of relationships going on. Nothing wrong with that, but it was time for a break.
	So they left, and we stayed. We weren’t even close to being done with our chores. 
	Barely two hundred feet from Daybreak’s side, ship after ship passed by on their way to or from the Canal, usually doing twelve to fifteen knots, looking strong, powerful, silent, and unstoppable. Like Imperial star cruisers in the Star Wars movies, they rumbled low down in the auditory range where you feel the sound more than hear it, and even when carrying a bow wave ten feet high, the disturbance a hundred feet further back along their sides was less than six inches. Their wakes, rolling through the mooring area, bothered us no more than a dinghy wake. Even the most decrepit, neglected, forlorn-looking Third World rust-buckets still parted the water like gods. They made the moored cruising fleet look positively silly. I’d’ve been happy to command any one of those ships, but my colorblindness precluded it. Ship command will never be an option for me. It seemed likely that Daybreak was as far as my dreams of maritime glory would ever stretch.
	Our admeasurer arrived and measured our boat (for fee determination), which meant we could go to the Port Captain that afternoon and schedule our transit, possibly as soon as two days later. EXCITING! One yacht after another was going through, and there was a palpable electricity in the anchorage as each one departed.
	Concerning fees, everyone we knew (in 1993) paid about $230 to $250 for everything. Of this, $135 is the admeasurement fee, a one-time deal, and $50 is a deposit, theoretically refundable if you didn’t screw anything up during your transit, but of which we never again saw hide nor hair. The actual transit fee was $1.80 per "ton", which for us was about $40. A "ton" of admeasured capacity corresponds, I think, to one cubic yard of belowdecks volume not counting engine spaces and tankage. Daybreak measured twenty two "tons". At those rates, considering that a rather well-paid Canal Pilot stayed with each yacht through the entire eight to ten hour transit, the Canal Commission was losing lots of money on yachts, and we didn't understand why they bothered to measure them at all. After all, the admeasurement fee of $135 was spent solely to determine whether the transit fee would be $40 or $50, whereas the minimum annual salary at the time for pilots was $36,000, or $144 per day. They'd have been better off charging a flat fee without measuring anything. Say, $250 for all vessels under 80 feet. Oh well. It was just another bureaucracy. There was no explaining it. Even its own employees couldn't explain it. [Note: In early 1997 transit fees for yachts roughly tripled.]
	In August that year there were 1009 ship transits, an average of 32.5 per day (the Canal runs night and day, seven days a week, though yachts must transit in daylight). Canal Commission literature reported the average transit fee was about $30,000. For a "Panamax" freighter it was $100,000. That translated to $30 million that month. With monthly employee salaries-plus-benefits in the two to three million dollar range, I concluded that, even with massive maintenance bills on the seventeen tugboats, the numerous pilot boats, and the eighty locomotives for hauling ships lock-to-lock, the Canal seemed quite capable of operating in the black (as it must by law). I suspected that the rumors I’d heard of its financial indisposition were exaggerated.
	With our fees paid and our transit two days off, our preparations were complete. We had our crew of line handlers scheduled, our propane tanks filled, our lines on deck and ready to run (minimum four, minimum 125 feet long including a four foot eye, minimum 5/8" diameter for our boat. Ours were 3/4"), and we had meals and sleeping arrangements planned for everyone in case we didn't get through in one day (which just depended on the luck of the draw at Gatun Locks on the Caribbean side). We'd heard every story there was to hear. We knew about the prop wash from ships, about the hydraulic piston effect in Gatun Locks as the ship enters behind you, about the turbulence caused by the salt and fresh water mixing when the gates open to the Caribbean, about pilots who advise you in error about when to release lines and which lines to make fast first, about the water temperature in Gatun Lake (94º) and its effect on achievable speed (i.e. engine temperature), which is crucial for making it in one day, about the alligators on the muddy banks of Gaillard Cut — we'd heard it all. All that was left was to JUST DO IT, like in the Nike ads. We were as ready as we were going to get.
	There are people in the world who make a practice of having nothing in life be a big deal. They take everything in stride, no upsets, "no worries mate". Peaceful acceptance. That's all fine as far as it goes, but don't let any jaded, multi-circumnavigation round-the-world big-shot cruiser tell you any different, going through the Panama Canal your first time is a bonafide BIG DEAL. It’s the real thing, pal. It ain’t no movie. As a friend once said, "If it's only going to happen once, I want to be awake for it." I planned on going through with my eyes wide open.
	It went almost without a hitch. A dockline jammed on the lip of the last lock, but we managed not to hit anything or foul the prop while it was being cleared. An uneventful transit, but nonetheless it was absolutely the culmination of all the boat-handling skill I had gained in three and a half decades of sailing, and it took every bit that I had. There was a multitude of opportunities for disaster, and there were backup procedures in place for exactly none of them. If we didn’t get it right the first time, Daybreak was going to suffer. In the Panama Canal, the difference between an "uneventful" transit and an "eventful" one is a very fine line, and for vessels as fragile as yachts, what lurks on the other side of that line is disaster.
	Making it through in one day requires a speed of nearly seven knots through Gaillard Cut and Gatun Lake, so we had the revs cranked up as far as we could while keeping the engine temperature below 200º. We peaked at 192º, maintained 6.8 knots (in rain half the time), and made it to Gatun Locks with five minutes to spare after four hours of motoring. Had we arrived later, the lock-down could not have been completed before dark, so we would have waited overnight.
	During lock-down, standard Canal procedure is to raft up multiple yachts and maneuver them while rafted into and through all three locks. I was elected to maneuver Daybreak and one other boat, a 38 footer, under Daybreak's primary power with occasional assistance from our partner, who had marginal auxiliary power, inadequate lines, a disorganized and argumentative crew, and a somewhat less capable pilot, which is why our pilot had lobbied that Daybreak command the raft. He'd figured all this out. We rafted as quick as we could while fighting roiling tugboat wash, and slipped into the lock ahead of the ship just as he started to move in. We were greatly assisted by the incredible consideration of the pilot of this eight-hundred-foot-long behemoth, the Argonaut, registered in Kingston, Jamaica. Upon up-locking, where we’d been behind him, he did not turn his screws at any time inside the locks. Down-locking, when we lay ahead of him, did not enter the lock behind us until we were already stopped at the far end and passing our lines to the walls. This struck me as so unusual that I commented on it to our pilot, Carlos, who agreed that we could not have done better. He commented that piloting a yacht involves much more responsibility than a ship, because if a ship hits anything, no one is hurt, no one's home is wrecked, and insurance pays for any damage (even though the pilot himself may suffer rather badly, professionally). With yachts there's more danger. The turbulence and currents have to be experienced to be believed. The Canal was never intended for small boats, and every precaution must be taken.
	But we made it! I was feeling transcendent, like Odysseus, between Scylla and Charybdis, past the Sirens . . . I recalled the song lyrics by the rock group Steely Dan:

Well, the
Danger of the rocks is surely passed.
Still I remain tied to the mast.
I believe that I have found my home at last.
Home at last.

Who would have thought, I mused, that a British pop songwriter from the ‘70s would have read The Odyssey, let alone written a song about it?

	The Caribbean! It was almost unimaginable that we were in a different ocean, with nothing between us and the Gulf coast, Florida, the Bahamas, even Europe. That had never been true in our lives before. What had always been across the ocean from us was Hawaii, Japan, and the South Pacific. The Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico were places you drove or flew to. For ten months we’d been sailing smack up against the Central American coast, unconsciously waiting to turn left. The sense of freedom and release was palpable. Our ultimate destination was two seas away, and we had crossed the Continental Divide by boat.
	We pulled up to the Panama Canal Yacht Club and instantly knew we were in a new ocean for sure. The place had fixed docks, just like in Florida or the Chesapeake. No tide! And it was, therefore, shallow near shore. We took a slip three spaces in from the channel and plugged, unbelievably, into shore power. Full-time AC refrigeration, battery charger, water heater, a water faucet twelve inches from our rail . . . man, what living! The ultra-blue sky with little puffy white clouds, a lovely cool breeze wafting across the deck and through the ports, the water clear enough, even in that industrial harbor area, to see the bottom quite clearly (of course, maybe you didn't want to see the bottom) . . .  We’d only come forty miles from Balboa, but everything was different. We’d heard that underwater visibility in the San Blas Islands would be fifty feet. It was October, the month in which Panama historically gets more rain than in any other month, yet it didn’t rain for a solid week after we got to the Caribbean. The weather was hot, sunny, and calm in the morning, and cool, cloudy, and breezy in the afternoon. We had six inches of water under our keel at low tide. We could have stood on the bottom to clean our waterline. We were gonna like the Caribbean just fine.
	Except for several packages of mail we hadn’t yet received, we were ready to go. It seemed we were keeping DHL in the black singlehandedly. Incredibly, in the Canal Zone we spent over $1000 on air freight alone, but there was simply no other way to get stuff shipped there reliably. "Mail" is something of a non sequitur in Central America. With a sort of resigned futility we were still hoping to receive a box of children’s books my father had sent via surface mail from California. Not bloody likely.
	While we were waiting, Roxanne and Tania made friends with a retired cruising couple, Tony and Bertha aboard Wayward Wind, who were grandparents themselves and had been cruising for 20 years. Their first circumnavigation, Tony said, took three years. Their second took seven. This third one, if they could manage to return to San Diego that year, would have taken eleven. Noticing this trend, Tony decided it was probably time to stop cruising. Having a TV aboard their solid teak 50 foot ketch, they invited the girls over to watch morning cartoons, in English on a local U.S. Armed Forces channel, and they even made popcorn. The girls were ecstatic! Couldn't pry 'em loose with a crowbar.
	Two days later, to our surprise, we received the school books and voltage regulators. Those kid-books from my Dad were still lost in space, but we’d be around a few more days waiting for a new GPS from the nearest BOAT/US (Houston, TX). Our sole activity in Cristobal, it seemed, was to make phone calls and wait for the DHL man. It wasn’t a bad place to do this. We liked it a lot at that funky little yacht club. Outside the club fence and across the tracks, in the town of Colón, was another story. We didn't go out there much. 
	The girls had been DYING to get their school materials. Roxanne immediately sat down with hers and started going through them methodically, oblivious to all else. In two days she read every one of her second grade reading books cover-to-cover with no difficulty at all. Keeping her supplied with reading material was a continuing challenge. Both girls had just finished their respective school years and, in Roxanne's case, had sent off her final test packet (Tania didn't have tests in Kindergarten). We were a little out of sync with the "normal" school year, having gotten a late start (December), but we’d finished in about ten months with no strain. We were delighted.
	I tore open the package of voltage regulators and set about installing them. Both of them. I’d had it with those fancy solid state "smart" regulators. They cost too much and failed too easily. Besides, I figured, I was as smart as they were. I set one regulator to operate at 14.4 volts for fast battery charging, and the other at 13.6 volts for long distance motoring. Then I put a three-way toggle switch between them. The third position was for "OFF", for when (not if) they both failed. This might not have been as convenient as a "smart" regulator, but if it lasted longer than thirty days it would be an improvement. As long as I could remember to flip the switch, that refreshingly simple rig would do the job. If one regulator failed, it could be bypassed for full charging while the second remained available for float charging. And if the second one failed, I’d be pre-wired for simple on/off operation. I liked it.
	Naturally, having such a redundant rig ensured that no such failure would ever occur thenceforward. Boating is like that. Anything for which you are prepared won’t happen. Everything else, however, will. Our refrigeration was a good example. Utterly dependent as we were on the engine-driven system, it failed repeatedly. The AC system, which we hardly ever needed, worked every time. Don’t think, though, for all our mechanical problems, that we didn't like Daybreak. Au contraire. We LOVED her. I could conceive of building a better boat for us, but realistically, I’d be hard-pressed to do it for five times what Daybreak had cost.
	And speaking of cost, remember I said we’d be lucky to get out of the Canal Zone for $3000? We were at $4000 and climbing. It was sickening.
	We actually got physically sick. Lynn and I picked up some intestinal bug which was giving us diarrhea, stomach pains, fevers, chills, and aches all over our bodies. The kids seemed to be immune, but they get pretty antsy when both of us are so sick we can't give them their customary level of attention. An important thing to remember when cruising with kids is that both parents can’t be sick at the same time.
	Lynn got over it fairly quickly, but not me: bad intestinal cramps, diarrhea, taking lots of Imodium, "eating" nothing but liquids. I ate rice gruel for "bulk". You boil a bit of rice in a lot of water, and then drink the water. Bleah. In the midst of this we found out another shipment of school materials was coming, for which we would have to wait. Our planned four day stay in Cristobal was already up to two weeks, which meant our "month in the San Blas Islands" was down to two weeks. But it was a good day not to be doing much anyway, because it was raining a tropical deluge (finally) and had been since dawn. Dramatic, ripping lightning strikes, thunderclaps that made your skin shrivel, your brain go white with adrenalin, and your bowels turn to water. But of course, this last wasn’t new to me . . .
	Any of you who are religious and feel your faith wavering, go on down to Panama and stand outside in a thunderstorm. Going to church, by comparison, is a purely cerebral exercise. Rain was battering the awning and running in sheets down the ports. At least the night was dry. We got to sleep with the hatches open. (We'll leave it to your imagination what it's like with everything buttoned up tight and the incandescent lights on. Not until the tropics did we come to realize how hot a 25-watt lamp could be.) Walking the hundred feet to the phone required a sturdy umbrella and left it looking like something dredged up out of an English pond on PBS’s "Mystery!" At least there was a phone nearby. We could stand at it and look right at Daybreak. Nice scenery.
	As days dragged on, my bowels consumed all the Imodium on board, so we undertook a trip to a pharmacy and a bank in darkest Colón. We violated all the tourist rules by being white and walking from store to store. It was pretty bad. The buildings were decayed, many falling down, they were old, there was garbage everywhere, and there were derelict people in abundance. Let's face it, it was a slum, but not any worse than slums in the U.S. In fact, there are places in New York that make Colón look like Disneyland. Nonetheless, the bank had two armed guards, one inside and one outside, both carrying assault rifles. Aside from that it was a nice, small U.S. style bank with lovely wooden desks, beautiful carpet and upholstery, perfectly groomed employees, and fierce air conditioning. We counted our money, divided it up, stashed it carefully here and there on our persons, and walked outside again. Having Tania along probably helped (Roxanne was aboard Wayward Wind watching cartoons again). Kids are like gold in Latin America. Within thirty seconds of walking into the bank, one of the female employees had left her seat and handed Tania a fistful of candies. It was like that everywhere south of San Diego. It seemed that nothing was more precious to Central Americans than a child. They certainly went about having them as if this were the case.
	Back aboard, we were ready to bolt, finally, outward and eastward to the San Blas Islands. The final box of school books arrived, the GPS arrived, we were provisioned, we were fueled, we had full water tanks, full wallets, and a depleted bank account. The kid books from my dad were lost, but we’d given up on them anyway. If we didn’t move soon, the docklines would just about have to be cut from the cleats. On a brilliantly clear blue-sky day, October 13th, after spending *gasp* $5146.77 in twenty four days, we eased Daybreak carefully out of her cramped little corner of the Panama Canal Yacht Club docks and headed for the azure Caribbean.

Chapter 13
Easy Living In Kuna Yala: The San Blas Islands

	Portobelo, twenty one miles east of the Canal, is a town and a bay full of history. It was built in 1597 by the Spanish, who at the time were raping, pillaging, and plundering the entire "New World", laying waste to the Aztec, Inca, and Maya empires. The Spanish Conquistadores had a problem. They'd managed to steal so much treasure that they were almost literally buried beneath it. They needed a place to store it while waiting for Spanish galleons to carry it away to Spain. Thus was born Portobelo, where all that gold came to wait for a ship.
	If you're trying to store the riches of the three largest native American civilizations in a thousand years, you're going to want some protection. That's why Portobelo lies at the head of a mountain-ringed bay half a mile wide and indented two miles from the open ocean. On the hills on both sides, as well as on the waterfront of the city itself, the Spanish built stone forts high and low, bristling with cannon, to ensure that anyone so foolish as to try to raid their storehouses was going to have a very bad day indeed. A number of enemy fleets made the attempt, but none succeeded until 1668, when a fleet of buccaneers led by the infamous British privateer Henry Morgan attacked Portobelo overland, from the rear. The Spanish must have been very surprised to see him materialize out of the foliage behind them, and he lost half his men doing it. If you saw that jungle, you'd know why.
	The forts are still there, as are the cannon, though their wooden cradles have long since rotted away. The "modern" town of Portobelo lies smack on top of the ruins of the old one, and some of the ancient Spanish stone buildings are still occupied. The original town was three streets wide, parallel to the shore, with a creek running crosswise down through it. Three stone bridges were therefore built across this creek, and they are still there, with the same three streets crossing them, 400 years later. Today you can easily find your way around the town using the map Morgan himself drew for his royal sanctioners.
	Later on, after all the Europeans departed, life got "back to normal" in Portobelo, except that everyone was now Catholic . . . more or less. Lacking ongoing European religious guidance, strong primitive undercurrents of witchcraft, superstition, and the occult re-emerged. The local church, for example, houses a lifesize, black, recumbent Christ figure in a glass case. It seems that some miracle involving that Christ occurred, during or after which it turned black. Clearly a supernatural intervention. The event is still commemorated — by gobs of people from two continents. Bear in mind, we're talking about a wooden icon here.
	The celebration was scheduled to occur about a week after our visit, and we didn't plan to be around for it, because between fifty and one hundred thousand of the faithful walk there from all over Central and South America, and there were ZERO facilities for them. Portobelo barely had adequate sanitary facilities for its own residents, and no hotels or inns at all.  We'd met one guy in Colón, on his way to Portobelo, who'd walked from Nicaragua. For folks like him, Pepsi and snack stands were going up all over town, and souvenir booths were already operating in front of the church. We toured the battlements and the church, and strolled through town gawking. Then we got back in our dinghy and left.
	We were anchored right off a pair of these cannonaded forts lying one above the other on the hillside overlooking the bay’s northern shore. During our explorations we discovered that some of the darker stone chimneys and corridors tucked away beneath the battlements were home to a largish flock of bats. Thinking little of it, we headed back to the boat that evening. In the morning we awoke to discover that a banana in a hanging basket above our galley had been half devoured by something with tiny sharp teeth. That night we rigged our insect screens, but this barely slowed them down. Since our companionway screen just sort of hangs there, the bats would land on it and proceed to crawl down and under it. Three times in the night we awoke to the telltale whishy flutter of leathery wings as one of the little beasties tried to find his way back out, so up I'd get (donning glasses to protect my eyes), turn on the lights, open the screen, and let the damn thing out. Finally we dropped one of the companionway boards onto the bottom of the screen, which solved the problem, and we finally slept. Roxanne coined a riddle for the event:  "What's brown and eats boat bananas? A bat! In polka dot pajamas." (Huh?) She drew a picture to illustrate, which she proudly displayed on a bulkhead for weeks afterward. A bat in polka dot pajamas.
	We day-hopped another 21 miles to Bahia Nombre de Dios ("Name-of-God Bay"), where we anchored in a tiny corner on some mud flats behind a small reef, in six feet of water. It didn't appear that many yachts came in there. It was rolly in the surge sneaking across and around the reef, but the water was too shallow for us to let down our "flopper-stopper" centerboard. Welcome to the Caribbean. In the morning we headed out at dawn for the 37 mile run to Chichimé Cays, our first stop in the San Blas Islands, where the molas were said to be the best and the cheapest in the whole archipelago, and where there was also going to be a cruiser-sponsored pig roast in three more days. Price: $10 per boat. Sounded like a good deal. That party had been the talk of the SSB airwaves for weeks, sort of a "be there or be square" type of thing. We were wondering where the pig was going to come from.
	At Chichimé, having gotten away from the filth of Balboa and Colón, I could finally consider trying to clean all the harbor slime off Daybreak's bottom. When we'd arrived at Balboa our bottom paint, which was barely six weeks old, was clean and sparkling blue. When we left Colón it was dark brown, the result of civilization and copious Canal runoff. People who keep boats in those two cities have a major fouling problem. It's pretty clear why both yacht clubs had private haulout facilities. Even our head was fouled.
	Instead of such filth Chichimé offered coral reefs, warm sparkling clear water, tiny palm-studded islands, mild tropical breezes, cooling rains, brilliant sun, friendly natives, your basic tropical paradise. Honestly, you'd have to see the place. When we pulled in, we could scarcely believe our eyes. It was as if we'd been suddenly transported from Central America to the South Pacific. True coral cays, sand-covered islands sticking up about a foot or two above the high tide line, covered with coconut palm trees, with just a few native Kuna families living ashore in actual palm-thatched reed huts. It was a different world. There were islands literally everywhere. It seemed we could almost have walked from one to another on the reefs. The fringing reefs themselves had waves breaking on them from the constant northeasterly swell driven by the trade winds, but the lagoons inside were perfectly protected. The cays were tiny things, the longest perhaps half a mile, with an eighth to a quarter mile more typical. They appeared wherever the reefs had grown up enough to start collecting a bit of windblown sand. If it weren't for the palm trees, you’d run aground on them before you saw them.
	Having arrived over a hot, glassy sea under a glaring tropical sun, we jumped immediately overboard after the anchor went down, and stayed there. I donned mask and snorkel, and attacked Daybreak's underbody. There's something about clear water that forces yachties to clean their boat bottoms. I mean, you can see them, and so can everyone else. All that gutch stands out in putrid contrast to the blue-green splendor in which it is floating. Besides, you're gonna be in the water anyway. I spent two solid hours on it with a big yellow brush and a putty knife, holding my breath a few seconds at a time while scrubbing away. Got it 90% done before I was so exhausted I literally couldn't make another dive. My eyes were stinging from salt so much I could hardly keep them open. In the morning I'd finish the job, but meantime, it was already looking great.
	Everyone swam like there was no tomorrow. The girls tried out their new snorkeling gear, and Roxanne proceeded to locate every starfish within 50 yards (which is a lot of starfish). I dove to check on the anchor, thirty five feet down, from where I could look up and see the glittering wind ripples on the surface, and Daybreak, floating like a toy. Thirty five feet is a long way down. Lynn putzed around in the water for as long as she could between demands from the kids for this or that. She was a bit fed up with them.
	And then, the "mola monsters" appeared, the aggressive native females hawking molas boat-to-boat. Molas are the cloth panels of reverse-applique embroidery unique to those islands. Some are quite beautiful, and all are very labor intensive. We intended to buy quite a few, but not until the next day. We'd visit them at their huts in the morning, before the influx of cruisers for the pig roast (which would raise prices). Another ten boats were expected. The local Kuna patriarch, Julio, had two pigs ready for slaughter, and they'd be roasting all the next day.
	Exploration by dinghy in the morning revealed that over most of the reef area there was less than a foot of water at low tide. Since the tidal range itself was only about a foot, this meant you could explore several square miles of coral reef around there on foot in a pair of sneakers and not even get your shorts wet. At low tide the two small islands in the Chichimé group could not be circumnavigated by our dinghy, which draws about eight inches. The ocean within the San Blas archipelago is nowhere over a hundred feet deep, mostly 40' - 60', and yet a couple of miles to the north it dropped abruptly to over 2000 feet deep and stayed that way all the way to Cuba. Unlike in the Pacific, the term "Continental Shelf" has real meaning for sailors on the east side of the continent. So does the term "off soundings". On the west coast you're in deep water the minute you leave the breakwater, yet charts showed us that for much of the Gulf of Mexico the ten fathom line is fifty miles offshore! To put this in perspective, back at Catalina Island we had anchored in eighty feet of water regularly, a quarter mile from shore. I tried to imagine anchoring fifty miles offshore . . .  
	MOLA MADNESS! Upon visiting the island huts that afternoon, we found out why cruisers call it that. We shopped at all five camps on the two islands, and shot our mola wad and then some (as if we were on some kind of budget — HAH!) We bought molas of one kind or another for ourselves and all our relatives, ranging in size from little round "emblem" patches about 3" in diameter to full "panels" about 10 by 14 inches. The panels are used for the front and back of the native blouses worn by the women (none of whom, obviously, is more than 28 inches around), usually with a brightly patterned wraparound skirt. A complete blouse, we learned, cost the same as the two body panels that went into it. The sleeves, cuffs, yokes, bottom ruffle, and all the sewing were free! We bought embroidered animal masks for girls, and an appliqued T-shirt for Corky's wife Joan for Christmas. We'd gotten Corky a Panama Canal Yacht Club T-shirt.
	We just loved walking around on those islands! They were flat and shaded and clean and lovely. No matter where you went there was a coconut palm tree about every fifteen or twenty feet, which meant there was shade everywhere. Even the undergrowth, a bright green low-lying creeper about six inches deep, could be walked on barefoot. There were footpaths worn through to the ground going from camp to camp, and these were coarse white coral sand, just like the beaches. Our tender city-bred bare feet walked all over the islands, with no problem at all.
	The view and the ambience there must be experienced. Description fails. We could simply say that it was like your tropical island dreams, but it was real, and real people live there, going about the normal business of existence every day. It was simply idyllic. The water was blue and clear, the waves broke white on the outer reefs, the sun shone down, puffy white clouds formed on the horizon, the palm trees swished in the breeze, the natives relaxed in hammocks strung up in the shade. We swam, we snorkeled, we ate and slept, we had cocktails under the awning in the late afternoon, or without the awning if there were clouds to block the sun, we read, we listened to music, we did a little boat work . . . to quote Robin Williams narrating Pecos Bill, one of our girls' favorite audiotapes: "We eat beans, we ride aroun' a bit, and other'n that life's purdy slow 'round these parts". I mean, it was NICE there! To stand in the middle of one of those islands, in shade and a bit of breeze, and look out through the bright green palm trees at your boat floating placidly in a perfect aquamarine lagoon, well, that's what most of us are looking to find when we set sail. But we didn't expect to find it in Central America.
	We couldn't quite figure out what the natives were doing for a living. They gathered coconuts for sale on the mainland, they fished, and the women made and sold molas, and that was about it. They clearly weren't hurting, and they certainly weren't starving. Mola-making had started hundreds of years earlier, when there was no clientele for them, so they hadn't been made to sell. Molas were simply clothing. In other words, the Kuña women had devised a very exacting, time consuming, labor intensive method for adorning their bodies, which implies they must not have needed to work terribly hard at subsistence. As Daniel Quinn said in his book Ishmael (about which more later), people we call "primitive" do not lead the desperate, hard-scrabble, edge-of-survival lives we tend to imagine. The Kuña have been around for over five hundred years, and they are nothing if not relaxed. Why, for instance, do they all still pile into their cayucas, right down to six-week-old babies, and paddle out into the lagoon to meet every single vessel that visits their islands? After all those years, it couldn't just be that they were desperate to sell molas. That would pale rather quickly, and they didn't look bored. Besides, they literally had wads of cash. It seemed to us that, for them, it is still an occasion when strangers show up. That may sound corny, and only the Kuñas know for sure, but that's what it looked like. The Kuña people were just plain friendly.
	That didn't mean there weren't a few bad apples. One Kuña native told us that one of the Colombian drug trade routes goes right through Kuña Yala (this is the Kuña’s name for their territory, which stretches all the way to the mountaintops of the Continental Divide). Having been brought ashore there, the drugs would be hidden among native products (e.g. coconuts) scheduled to head north via Panama City. The Colombians dared not come into the islands themselves, so they needed local people to meet them at sea and ferry the drugs in. The prevailing Kuña view of Colombians was that, since they carried guns and only cared about money, they had to be muy loco. Most Kuñas wouldn't have anything to do with them, except for a scattering of young misfits with fewer scruples than the rest and a Colombian-like penchant for getting loco. They were willing to ferry drugs in their cayucas for the sake of a little coca on the side. They didn't even get paid. Then they'd use the coke to get truly loco, and everyone would avoid them like the pariahs they were: no money, no pride, and a bad habit. Sound familiar? These folks had all seen TV. They were aware of the drug situation in the States. As far as they were concerned, this was pretty much like that, just on a smaller scale.
	While we were there, we saw nothing of this sort. We just heard the stories.
	We went snorkeling and swimming off a tiny islet about fifty feet across, with four palm trees on it for shade, sitting all by itself on the reef jutting west next to the entrance channel to the lagoon. Just us and our dinghy, with a view of all the surrounding islands, and our boat among a few others in the lagoon a couple hundred yards away. Lynn observed, "You know, this might be as nice as life gets. If so, that would be fine with me." When, I wondered, is the charter trade going to discover this place? Perhaps we were seeing it in the last of its prime. I hoped not, but even without charterers there were plenty of boats passing through. Since the Canal passed several yachts a day each way, that's a lot of traffic.
	On the way back to Daybreak we stopped to buy some bread from Julio, the English-speaking patriarch of the largest Kuña encampment there (three huts). He baked bread two or three times a week in a little propane-fired oven which was the sole purpose of the third hut. We bought ten of his small baguette-shaped loaves, each about a foot long and an inch and a half thick, fresh and warm, for ten cents each. What a deal, we thought, until we discovered later that the price to Kuñas is a nickel! We ate five of them as soon as we got aboard. Mmm, good! I dinghied right back over and bought ten more.
	As thunderclouds began to form that afternoon, life was interrupted by the appearance of a waterspout! Boy, this sure got our attention. It passed within a mile or so of the anchorage and touched down on the sea for about a minute, in plain view of everyone. I watched that patch of water through binoculars, and would not have wanted to be anywhere near it for love nor money. Looked like someone had dropped a giant Osterizer in the sea, left the lid off, and turned the knob up to "puree". Whooeee! I got this all on video while Lynn cleared the decks of loose equipment, snorkeling gear, and so on, this after asking me "Uh, Lane, isn’t there something we should be DOING to get ready for this?" Oh, you mean like get the storm anchor ready to drop? Gee, that's probably not a bad idea . . .  Lynn is so pragmatic. I was too busy watching and filming. It's amazing how transfixing these grotesque natural phenomena can be. Interestingly, while this menace to local life literally whipped things into a lather not very far away, the wind in the anchorage remained a dead calm. The waterspout dissipated after half an hour or so, and was followed by LOTS of rain very fast, which lasted just long enough for us to fill the tanks. Nice of it.
	The atmosphere was clearly in a snit, and a wild night followed. We had nine boats in there, most of them bunched together near the mouth of the lagoon. Heaven knows why. Probably because it was closer to Julio's village, where the party was going to be. Like parking spaces at Wal-Mart. Winds got up to 22 knots, with torrential rain, the kind where you can't see the next boat in the anchorage. There were some fairly serious anchor drills, played out in gory detail over the VHF radio while lightning strobe-lit the scene surrealistically in electric blue-white. I was plain disgusted. My attitude is, if your anchor drags in less than 30 knots of wind, you are officially an Anchor Bozo. We had three such in the lagoon.
	I went over in the morning to visit Britishers John and Jane on Barnacle B, and John had this comment about anchors and anchoring: "People can talk all they want about this or that kind of anchor, but in the end there's no substitute for kilos." Yes! Scope too. Gotta have scope. John's modest production fiberglass thirty footer sported a 45 lb. CQR, an anchor that would have held boats twice his size. My kind of guy. There were boats in that lagoon anchored on three-to-one, even two-to-one scope, with CQR anchors which just won't stand anything less than five-to-one. There was one guy, my personal candidate for King of the Anchor Bozos, who, when anchoring his 32-ton cement ketch, only laid out two-to-one scope because he didn't have an electric windlass and didn't want to crank up all that half-inch chain by hand. He also had half the anchor he should have had, for the same reason. There was another boat swinging on seventy five feet of chain, with no rode and no snubber, in thirty feet of water. There was a boat with just one big fisherman anchor and no chain at all, in coral. There was a beautiful, classic, immaculate all-wood ketch there whose owner liked to anchor by the stern because they got better ventilation that way, but they used their tiny stern hook rather than the perfectly adequate bow anchor because it was too much trouble to run the bow rode aft. There was a Nordic 44 that night (the one with no chain) that reanchored five times by my count, in tight quarters, in a pack of boats, in pitch black driving rain with coral reefs or land on every side not five boatlengths away. Gee whiz, in 22 knots of wind? In flat water? In a clean sand bottom? A Tayana 37 reanchored when their CQR dragged. Plow anchors! Doesn't the name say it all? These anchors derive from a British farm implement that was intended to drag.
	What with the rain, the waterspout, and the general discumbobulation, the pig roast was wisely delayed by a day. Seems all Julio's wood got wet. No surprise there: we must have had about ten inches of rain that night. In the morning our dinghy, which was in the water with the motor attached, was completely swamped, gunwales awash, and the sea slopping in and out. The pigs, it turned out, were already dead. We hoped they'd keep for a day.
	The Kuñas have a real aversion to killing animals. They like meat, but they don't want the animals to suffer. So when it's time to roast a pig, they don't slice its throat, or beat it on the head with a club, or use any of the other methods you might think to try on a primitive island. Instead, they drown it. But not during the day. They wait until three in the morning, when the pig is sound asleep, then just pick him up and put his head in the water. Julio, who did the deed, says the pig doesn't even wake up. He swore it’s true. Haven't tried it myself.
	So the pig roast finally happened, and went off without a hitch, but it's hardly worth describing. I mean, it was a party, what else is there to say? We ate pig and a bunch of cruiser pot luck (always interesting), jabbered, lay around under the palms, someone had a guitar, another guy gave juggling lessons with coconuts . . . you know, the usual. Time to move on.

	October 20th, eleven days before D-Day (departure day, the big jump north), we moved ten miles to Holandes Cays, where we knew Moonrise and Mañana were getting ready for their own D-Day. We'd get to see them once more, for just a day.
	Holandes lagoon was about a mile across and absolutely littered with coral reefs. Except for the hole where we all were anchored, you could have waded anywhere you wanted inside the reef. With three boats it was tight. That night the wind blew hard, and we just sat there hoping the anchor would hold, because if it hadn't, there wasn't a thing we could have done. The pass was fifty feet wide and only eight feet deep. It would have been suicide at night or in thick weather.
	Even in good conditions, anchoring took longer in the San Blas. The person on the bow (Lynn, in our case) calls the shots, and she drops the hook only when she can see where it's going to fall and likes what she sees. Less than ten percent of the ground there is anchor-worthy.
	We were morbidly enjoying Moonrise's and Mañana's deliberations. The forecast that morning was for 20 - 25 knot ENE winds and six to nine foot seas. The previous day it had been 25 - 30 knots. The course to Antigua was 66.5 degrees true, almost exactly ENE, and 1062 nautical miles away. We were inwardly shaking our heads. That is one passage we had no wish to make. Our plan was to head NNW around the corner to Honduras, a beam reach, though with our reaching speed the apparent wind would be forward. As in the Pacific off Baja, twenty to thirty knots and six to nine foot seas is normal in the Caribbean. It's safe to say that only a small subset of the cruising fleet chooses to beat directly to the Lesser Antilles.
	We waved goodbye to them for the last time, and departed for Mangles Cays.
	It was starting to get ridiculous. At Mangles (Spanish for mangroves) we found another perfect coral lagoon, in clear, quiet water with complete 360º protection, and anchored Daybreak in a 35-foot-deep basin with swinging room for just one boat, surrounded by sandy sun-warmed shallows a foot deep. With barrier reef on three sides and two palm islands on the fourth (with the narrow lagoon entrance between them), the place was breathtaking, a picture postcard, a dream, an idyll. Like lying on your back on the lawn as a child watching the cloud shapes change and move. Like lying on the beach on a warm, lazy afternoon, half asleep in the soft breeze, daydreaming. Like being three years old, when life is innocent and sweet, and there's nothing you have to do, ever. Like a Winslow Homer painting. It was heaven.
	In the evening, gathering clouds and sunset colors combined to spread gold and pink across the shallows. Sitting out in the cockpit enjoying a Coke while dinner simmered on the stove, Lynn said, "Sometimes I need to pinch myself to wake up from chores and the kids. This place is spectacular!" Standing on the main boom earlier as she guided us into the lagoon, she had commented, "You know, if we were chartering this boat for a one-week vacation, this would be what we came for!" Yes, I thought, and we'd have paid several grand for the privilege. [When I wrote that, I didn’t yet know what owning Daybreak was going to end up costing. After everything was said and done, she cost us about $2200 per month of cruising.] We felt wonderfully fortunate. If we never saw anything nicer, we agreed, that would be fine. We had seen paradise, right up close, drunk it in, gotten it in our nostrils, our ears, our pores, wallowed in it, swum in it, breathed it into our bodies. What else was there left to do? We couldn't stay there, for heaven's sake! It wouldn't remain paradise for long if we did. There was only one sensible option: move on before the charm of the place faded.
	From one extreme to another: we left Mangles and motored six miles to Rio Diablo village, which covered two entire islands (connected by a footbridge) with a dense blanket of Kuña civilization. We were pretty much a sensation. We went ashore looking for a few groceries and were escorted all over both islands by a wiry middle aged man and his nine-year-old daughter. They took us to five or six different tiendas, none of which, it turned out, had any fresh fruit or vegetables, but we did get eggs, margarine, and four gallons of gasoline (premixed with two-stroke oil at god only knew what ratio). Our new outboard, purchased in Panama City and rated the same horsepower as the old one, was quite a bit more powerful, and drank gas faster as well.
	A quarter of the eggs were rotten. Remember in chemistry class when the teacher referred to the smell of rotten eggs? Sulfur dioxide. Lynn could never figure out why anyone should have thought that would explain anything to anyone, because Lynn had never smelled a rotten egg in her life. Rio Diablo changed that. She ruined a batch of pancakes before instituting a new "crack the eggs one at a time into a separate bowl first" rule.
	The dense-packed bustle of Rio Diablo was such a contrast with the tiny encampments we'd seen earlier, it was hard to believe we were seeing the same civilization. We were there on a Sunday, with everyone out in the "streets" (packed sand pathways) and "plaza" (a quadrangle of cement walkways laid on sand, with a few plants around). Many buildings were wood or cement, both of which must have been carried there from the mainland. Sanitary facilities consisted of a bunch of tiny little piers jutting out over the water, each with a small enclosure out on the end . . . 
	A day later we headed for Isla Tigre, another six miles, but we didn't make it. Three miles out we passed Farewell Island, and the sight of it shanghaied us. We abruptly dropped anchor, and swam ashore.
	Farewell Island appeared to serve as the Rio Diablo municipal swimming pool. Two motor-equipped cayucas arrived later, loaded with 17 year old high school seniors, for what appeared to be the Kuña version of P.E. — swimming. The place couldn't have been more perfect for it. There was a fringing reef to the north, deep water to the south with no dangers, and a sandspit extending several hundred feet out from the east end of the island to a tiny four-palm islet, beyond which the reef continued another several hundred feet. Shallow sandy bottom extended twenty yards or so offshore in the lee of the spit (becoming eel grass beyond), thus forming a large watery playground about five feet deep. What a delight!
	There were about thirty kids in the group. After their (more-or-less) organized activities there ensued a period of "free play" during which about ten of the girls swarmed around Lynn and the kids, chattering and asking questions. Several of these girls were already en novia (engaged), and their fiancés were identifiable by small heart-shaped tattoos, containing the initials of their betrothed, on their left pectoral right above the nipple. These kids would be married with children before the age of twenty, and they wouldn't be stopping at two kids either. Almost all would marry only Kuñas. Extra-racial marriage is forbidden by Kuña law. Those who chose to marry a non-Kuña would be forced to live outside Kuña Yala. They could visit, but not stay overnight. Expatriate Kuñas may not sleep on Kuña Yala soil.
Kuñas, by the way, comprise the second-smallest human race on Earth in stature, next to Pygmies. And they have the highest incidence of albinoism of any race.
	After lunch we headed once again for Isla Tigre, arriving just before the rain. The anchorage was surrounded by reefs and shoals, with a tight entrance complicated by the overcast and a few whitecaps, raising the question of what is just whitecaps, and what is reef? With care we made it in, and anchored off what appeared to be another village covering another entire island.
	It was, but with a difference. Unlike Diablo, Tigre Village had an active chief, Don Ramón, and a strong, vigorously-disciplined community. No one paddled out to meet us with a cayuca full of molas to sell, because at Tigre that was illegal. Don Ramón told us later that if anyone did so, he'd put them in jail!
	Our introduction to the village people came, innocuously enough, in the form of a young man who paddled by on his way home and introduced himself as "Jimmy" (actually Jaime Ramirez Carrera). He wore glasses and had two crabs he wanted to sell. We weren't interested, but we asked about tiendas in the village. He said there were some, but we should first come to see him when we went ashore. We'd heard this sort of thing before, usually from enterprising youngsters looking for tips in exchange for acting as village guide, but not so here. Jimmy had official standing.
	Once ashore, we asked for "Jimmy" but received mostly blank looks. Turns out the villagers only knew him as Jaime. Failing thus to locate him, we went on to ask about tiendas, which resulted in our being brought immediately to see Jaime in a nearby building. The rules seemed to be pretty clear in that town. Jaime asked us to sign their guest book, which showed only a couple dozen cruisers since the beginning of the year, two or three boats a month. From there he took us to the village Congress House, a large, open, thatch-roofed structure, in the center of which the village assistant chief was relaxing in a hammock while two other Dons sat nearby in chairs. Don Ramón was not immediately locatable. After introductions and some polite small talk, we were pronounced personas gratas, as it were, and Jaime was then free to take us anywhere in the village. An escort was required. He informed us as we walked that Tigre Village had been founded on that spot five hundred years earlier. In our own country, not even "Colonial Williamsburg" (VA) can make that claim.
	We saw it all. In one small tienda we bought bread and platanos, i.e. plantains, hard green banana-like "fruits" which never "ripen". Potato-like, you slice them, fry them, and eat them like French Fries. Further on we found the local fabric store, where the women got their mola supplies, and bought material for Kuña-style wraparound skirts and headdresses for Roxanne and Tania. Nearby the village cayuca maker was in the process of carving out a large sailing canoe, which to my surprise he said he could complete in five days. His adze and auger were kept very sharp using nothing more than a hand file. He demonstrated how he gauged the hull thickness (so he knew when to stop cutting), his method for building the mast-step and the removable thwart which served as the mast "partner", and other tricks of the trade. Fascinating. We finally located Don Ramón in his own hut, which was equipped with a tiny reception area near the front door consisting of two short wooden benches and a place for Don Ramón's chair. There ensued another "audience", whereupon our personas were pronounced gratas once more, and we arranged for Jaime and Don Ramón to visit Daybreak that afternoon at four p.m. Jaime then took us to another communal building, where something strange and inexplicable began to happen.
	In one end of this sapling, reed, and thatch building, partitioned off from the rest, were several middle-aged Kuña women, a very short dugout canoe, and a small enclosure where several twelve year old girls sat hidden from view. There were a number of tin cans on the ground, each with a long carrying string looped through holes in the rim. As near as we could understand, we were being invited to participate in some sort of Kuña puberty ritual by going down to the shore, filling two cans each with ocean water, and then returning to pour it over the heads of these twelve year old girls! We didn't want to misstep, especially in so sensitive an area, but our abysmal Spanish had revealed as much as it was going to. We finally shrugged our shoulders and said fine, let's do it. One of the older women led us down to the shore where we filled our cans, and when we all returned to the hut, she poured her water into the little dugout canoe and indicated we should do likewise. Thoroughly mystified by then, we followed suit, and that was that.
	Much as we questioned Jaime afterwards, all he could manage to convey was that it was a "tradition". We did learn that all twelve-year-old girls were taken to that enclosure and kept there in isolation for one week, and that they used the sea water for washing. It seemed that they were only allowed to wash using sea water brought by beneficent adults in those little cans, but we could not discover the origin or rationale for that. Maybe there was none.
	After going on to visit their hospital, their village phone (powered by seven large solar panels), and some other attractions, we returned to Daybreak to prepare for our "royal visit". They were late. At five we went ashore to investigate, and found Jaime and Don Ramón at the far tip of the island, playing baseball, oblivious to time. They hurried out to Daybreak, where we served them popcorn, soft drinks, and a bit of cognac and liqueur. Jaime did most of the talking, partly because he knew a bit of English, but mostly, we suspect, so his boss could maintain a regal silence punctuated by erudite pronouncements and observations from time to time. Ya gotta understand, Don Ramón was just an old guy in a white guayabera shirt, ragged pants, and a baseball hat, with no teeth left. Regal he was not. Nonetheless, it became clear that Tigré Village, comprising an incredible 1500 people on an island of perhaps twenty acres, was well served by his governance. Jaime seemed to be sort of the administrative assistant, and he took the job seriously. It was by far the most pleasant Kuña village to visit of any we'd encountered, and the presence of Don Ramón and the village laws regarding treatment of visitors were a large part of the reason why.
	In parting, Jaime commented that a period of three days of celebrations in the village was just starting (there was a full moon), and he invited us to attend a dance of the village women at seven the next evening. We decided to stay an extra day and attend. We just didn't know what "seven" actually meant. "Four" had meant nothing at all.
	The "dance" was very strange. We'll never know quite what went on there. We showed up at seven, went to the plaza which was only a dirt area about 20' by 30' between a couple of buildings, and sat down on a bench outside a tienda and next to a rather active dominoes game among four of the village men. Jaime showed up to tell us the dancing would start momentarily, but that he had an important meeting upstairs and would join us later. We were confused when several of the villagers said we were there on the wrong day, and no dancing would occur. It seemed they not only didn't know what time it was, they didn't know what day it was either. Kind of like cruisers, come to think of it. After an hour of waiting, by which time our kids were getting antsy and tired (having been playing rather boisterously with the village children), there ensued a dance of six men and six women. The men played bamboo pan pipes and the women shook maracas as they danced. The dominoes players ignored the whole thing. After a longish dance the dancers stopped, laid down their instruments and abruptly disappeared. In some embarrassment we wondered if they had perhaps been hastily assembled to dance solely for our benefit since we, possibly, had showed up on the wrong day. But the pan pipes had been lying out when we arrived, so something must have been scheduled.
	Unfortunately, we couldn't ask Jaime, because he and the village elders were very busy discussing something very important in an upstairs office. Sort of an emergency meeting of the village council. We never discovered the cause, but it certainly had their attention. It being late by then and Roxanne and Tania being ready to drop in their tracks, we took our leave as courteously as possible. Later on the music resumed, and presumably the dancing too. We never did learn what the occasion was. We heard one person say it happened every week! If so, that could explain the lack of audience interest. We'll never know.
	In the morning we headed east to a place called Snug Harbor, which was our final goal in the San Blas. Though secure, it turned out to be buggy, so after a semi-sleepless night, something we did not need just prior to an offshore passage, we went further east to Waisaulamulo Cays and anchored in a narrow bay about two miles long, protected by several islands, cays, islets, and a large reef which broke all the swell. It was a calm anchorage some distance from land, so we hoped there would be no bugs, and with luck, no visitors. A perfect place to gather ourselves for sailing. Weather permitting, we would take one lay day and then head out for Honduras.
	We were inundated by visitors! So much for planning. While trying to do school with the kids, we had four large cayucas within half an hour from the village of San Ignacio de Tupile, about a half mile away, and they were hard to get rid of. In retrospect we appreciated Tigré Village even more. At Waisaulamulo, subtlety wasn't working. Sometimes we wanted to be alone, and this was such a time. When they started staring in through the ports I blew up and told them to scram in bad Spanish. We were about to embark on our longest passage yet, 684 nautical miles nonstop, lasting five to seven days. All we wanted was to hunker down, relax, rest, read, swim a little, and listen to the weather. We'd be at sea in the morning.
	By midafternoon the cayuca count was up around fifteen, and I had gotten positively rude about the "no looking in the ports" rule. I'd graduated to lunging up on deck looking as annoyed as possible and yelling in my crippled Spanish. Nobody laughed. My volume got their attention, if not my size, and they bolted. "Uno muy loco norteamericano," they were probably thinking. Fine. Word would spread. Our home was forty feet by twelve feet. If we couldn't have that to ourselves, there wasn't much left, was there?
	Word did spread. An hour later we received a delegation of city fathers from the village, the middle aged spokesman for which knew perhaps ten words of English and was drunk. They came seeking donations for a fiesta in the village in celebration of the "International Year Of The Child", suggesting five dollars as an appropriate amount. We didn't have five dollars in change and didn't feel like donating a twenty, upon which they asked for candy instead, which we had bought for just such a purpose. We donated our last bag, attaching, at their request, a tag with our names and boat name. At this point the city fathers returned to their panga, leaving the drunken spokesman behind. In surreptitious tones he asked for liquor or beer. For the party, of course. When we refused (we actually didn't have any, which was fairly abnormal among cruisers), he too departed.
	We got the feeling that, having passed beyond Isla Tigré to points eastward, we had entered a less-frequented region where protocols were less established. From Tigré westward, islands and anchorages were no more than three or four miles apart, and yachts were abundant. Between Tigré and Snug Harbor lay a rather barren stretch of eighteen miles, and further east these stretches between good anchorages lengthened while reefs became more numerous, more abrupt, and less well-charted. There were "UNSURVEYED" regions all over the charts. On top of which, the coastline trended southeast, down toward the Colombia border and away from the well-traveled route to Cartagena. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful area. The natives notwithstanding, the anchorage was fantastic.

	We'd seen everything of the San Blas Islands we were going to see, and we had run out of time. It was October 31st. Halloween. Hurricane season would "officially" end at midnight. Having missed the November 1st departure date upon leaving Los Angeles the previous year, I was determined not to miss it again, and the weather looked OK. We would leave in the morning as soon as the sun was high enough to negotiate the tricky reef passages out of there. Worried about being offshore again, Lynn and I spent a mostly sleepless night.

Chapter 14
Hellbent Through The Western Caribbean

	Our experience of the six delightful days we spent on passage was virtually wiped out by the trauma of our experience of arriving at the island of Guanaja, Honduras. While attempting to negotiate the entrance to Guanaja’s lagoon at night, we and Daybreak T-boned the barrier reef. I have no excuse. By all rights, Daybreak should still be there.
	Two days prior to our arrival, we suspected we might get there around nightfall. We did everything we could think of for those two days to gain even two hours, but it seemed that everything conspired against us. The wind went aft and got light, so we started motorsailing. Then, against all predictions, we encountered an adverse current. Pushing at up to seven knots through the water, we could not make more than five knots over the ground. We needed to make six. Of course, we could have slowed down, thus delaying our arrival until the next morning, but incredibly, by the time we gave up on making it by evening, we couldn't have slowed down enough. We would have spent the night beating back and forth between Guanaja and the Honduras mainland, a distance of only twenty miles, in a rising wind. This had scant appeal. Besides, we had already prepared against a possible evening arrival, days earlier, by radioing ahead and arranging for another cruiser, already anchored at Guanaja, to go out to the entrance in his dinghy, sit there with his flashlight and handheld radio, and guide us in. His name was Paul. Further identification withheld, for reasons that will become obvious. This arrangement was our most crucial error, the bait that sprung the trap. Because Paul didn’t demur. He did as promised.
	Another boat, Valiant Lady (a Catalina 30) wanted to follow us in since they didn't have radar (not that it mattered), so they formed up three boatlengths behind us. In a twenty knot tailwind and three foot waves we came up to our approach waypoint via GPS, called Paul on the radio to ask him to blink his flashlight. He did, we identified it, and we headed for it. The idea was that we would aim directly for him. There were only three problems. First, Paul had chosen the much narrower and shallower of the two entrances. It was the one he’d used himself. In daylight. Second, Paul's knowledge of the entrance was inadequate for accurate nighttime positioning. Third, he hadn’t thought to bring a leadline. In short, he had no idea how deep the water was beneath his dinghy. In fact he had managed to place himself in only two feet of water behind the tip of the reef marking the left side of the channel — thereby leading us directly onto the coral. Bump-bump-crunch — suddenly there were noises which had no place on a boat.
	Lynn lunged for the centerboard winch and started cranking it up as fast as she could. I was slower. So reluctant was my mind to accept the evidence of my senses, it took a second or two before I reached down to shift into reverse, and then did not reverse very strongly at first. Meantime the noises got louder: CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH as the keel and hull pounded on the coral. I yelled out loud (to whom, I don’t know), "We're on the reef! We're on the reef!" and told Lynn to quickly radio Valiant Lady and tell them to stop before they plowed right into us. They got stopped in time, but for Daybreak, the news was all bad.
	Full throttle in reverse only pulled the stern around to port, broadside to the reef, where we were pinned by the bloody wind. Hoping against hope that we were only stuck on the very tip of the reef, I put the wheel hard to starboard and tried powering over into deeper water. No dice: there was way too much coral in front of us, and we succeeded only in putting ourselves further onto it, and further broadside. By this time Daybreak was high-centered on the coral and leaning to port while the wind and waves pounded her bilges onto the coral. I tried reverse one more time, and then forward again (just in case the coral forward of us had miraculously disappeared — hey, stranger things have happened). By then I was in utter despair, my mind already saying, "Well, this is it. End of the line. We’re done now. Time to launch the dinghy and get out of here."
	Just before I said this, the cavalry arrived. A guy named Terry, who lived on Pond Cay a few hundred yards away, jumped into his small motor boat and came out to help. We got a dockline over to him and tied the end of it off on our starboard stern cleat. As he maneuvered for position to try to pull us off, upwind and up-sea, I stuck Daybreak in reverse one more time — and this time, unbelievably, it worked! But now we had a new problem: Terry’s boat, tied to Daybreak’s stern by a twenty five foot dockline, was being dragged stern-first into the seas and banging against our topsides to boot! I figured this was the least of my worries and proceeded to motor sternward as fast as I could. Terry, alarmed at the possibility of taking a wave over his transom and being swamped, somehow managed to get the line free of his boat. I screamed at Lynn to haul it aboard before it could sink and foul our prop — no way was I going to shift into neutral! — and she did, whereupon I shifted into forward, spun the wheel, cranked the throttle to the stop, nearly put Daybreak’s rail in the water carving the fastest turn she’d ever made. All this while listening for the automatic bilge pump, which would tell us whether or not we were "making water" — that is to say, sinking. 
	No bilge pump noise. Good news. Terry offered to lead us around to the other side of Pond Cay where the "good" entrance was. We had a long talk with Valiant Lady on the radio about whether maybe we should forego this new offer to "help" and just sail the heck away from there for the night, or maybe for good. Don't ask me why, but we didn't. We figured at least Terry was a local. He actually lived there on Pond Cay, which separated the two entrances, and he told us that the other entrance was much wider and deeper, which, believe it or not, we'd already heard from about three other sources. But they weren't around to lead us in, were they? With my eyes glued to the green glow of the depthsounder readout, I followed Terry cautiously. I saw no depth less than 35 feet in the "real" pass. We anchored behind Sheen Cay, where Guanaja Village is. We listened some more. Still no bilge pump.
	I sat there like a helpless idiot. What could I say? Given the conditions, we shouldn't have been able to get off, yet we did. We had no right to get off. I could almost hear God muttering to himself, while we were aground, "What must I do to teach this guy this lesson? Do I let him off? Or do I waste his boat?" I dove over the side in the morning to check the damage: gouges from stem to stern, gouges from six inches below the waterline to the bottom of the keel, gouges half an inch deep on the bottom of the keel, but no other damage any deeper than the gelcoat. A lot of gelcoat gone. There were gouges on the hull in front of the prop, and on the rudder behind the prop, but no damage to the prop itself. The rudder, which is outboard and built like a brick on Daybreak, had suffered no structural damage to itself, its mounting hardware, or the hydraulic steering cylinder. There was cosmetic damage to the leading edge of the centerboard. No balsa core exposed anywhere. But I knew, after this survey, that if we'd been on the reef ten minutes longer, the outer skin would have been breached and the core exposed. Thirty minutes, and we'd have been sinking. Terry, who stopped by in the morning to check up, said we were lucky it happened in mild weather. He said usually it blows like stink out there, with waves breaking over the reef. Terry's observation pretty much summed it up: we were very lucky.
	Paul and I had a little chat that morning too. To his credit, he came to us. I didn’t have to go find him. He came overflowing with abject apology. I told him I didn’t blame him, but other than that there wasn’t much to say. He said he’d been wrong, and I said I’d been wrong, and we both vowed never, ever to do something that stupid again. Famous last words. Later on, in Alabama, I would raise going aground at night to a new art form.
	So. The passage itself (what I can remember of it) was basically beautiful. During the first day we experienced several thunder squalls in the afternoon, with winds up to thirty six knots, forcing us to reef and unreef until we could barely move our arms, but that evening we hit the trades, sixty miles and twelve hours further south than we were expected. To build a cushion of northing against a possible a header, we stayed closehauled on starboard tack through the night and finally eased sheets around ten the next morning. For the next two and a half days we close-reached northwest toward a waypoint at the entrance to the "inside" passage — through the maze of reefs and shoals off Cabo Gracias A Dios, at the Nicaragua/Honduras border. This shortcut saves a day, and we got there at ten o’clock at night. Sound familiar?
	The "short cut" was nearly 150 miles long. The outside route was a hundred miles longer and would have required extensive upwind sailing, so we committed ourselves to staying, for the next two nights and a day, within half a mile of the GPS rhumbline. In this way we passed by Quita Sueño and Gorda Banks, Alagardo and Half Moon Reefs, Cabo Falso and Vivarillo Banks, and Coral Ledge, turning slowly west and easing the sheets bit by bit. We emerged finally into clear water the next evening and headed for Guanaja, still 122 nautical miles distant.
	The Caribbean waters are so clear and free from suspended matter that they reflect the sky with a deep and amazing dimension. When the sky was empty of clouds, the sea shone a deep powdery azure like a perfect gemstone. We left the San Blas just after a full moon, and every night the lunar disk rose behind cloud banks to the east and ascended into the starry dome above. Every night we sailed on in lush tropical breezes under a jeweled canopy glowing with pale moonlight. Every night I lay out on the port cockpit seat cushion gazing up at the mizzen masthead as it traced oscillating patterns on the universe somewhere between Orion and the Pleiades. Every night we watched the moonlight glitter across the waves to starboard, and listened to our wake gurgling and hissing under the port quarter. Every night the seas were a little flatter, the wind a little lighter and freer, and the air a tiny bit cooler. It was magical, beautiful, perfect sailing in the Caribbean trades. You've heard about it. You've read about it. It was just like that. Except, it was real.
	That's a big "except". When we dream things, we don't dream them like reality, we dream them like a dream. Dreams have a fuzzy quality. No sharp edges. It's neither hot nor cold. Our bodies aren’t there, in the dream, but here, where we are doing the dreaming. Reality is not like that. In reality one's body adds in all the sharp edges, the hot and cold, the wet or dry, the hunger or thirst, the chores and responsibilities, the million things that just being alive and awake demand of us. The whole trick to having one's dreams become real is to be satisfied when they show up, knowing they won’t look like dreams then. Day to day life is never romantic, no matter where you are. Believe me. Paradise comes complete with the frantic icy rush of fear, the adrenalin, the nauseating bloom of raw panic in the gut, the danger, the embarrassment, the keel gouges, the battle scars, everything. The sharp edges, sometimes very sharp. And still, it is paradise.
	Lynn woke at daybreak the morning after. On other days she might have been delighted to wake so early, might have gone for a quiet row while watching the sun rise. Not so that morning. Her head was full of noise, and she wanted to hide, or cry.
	But what could she do? She was awake. The mental clatter wasn't going to stop, so she got up to sit in the cockpit. Her mind chattered ceaselessly about the near-disaster on the reef. Years of experience in corporate politics surged to the fore and as she attempted to deal with this monumental breakdown. In corporate America, one deals with mistakes by finding the someone or something that is to blame — besides oneself, of course. After all, one is naturally a consummate professional who does not make mistakes, right? So one must have been a victim of someone else's stupidity, or of circumstances outside the expected range of control, right? (What this actually proves is that there’s no room for humans in corporate America.)
	Lynn looked. And all she found was herself, and me, and Paul. She didn't blame me because, though I could have avoided the accident, I had taken what she thought were reasonable precautions for making the night entrance. We had a good chart. We had substantial local knowledge in addition to the chart, based on descriptions by others who'd been there. We had radar, and we knew what we could expect to see on it and where to place ourselves with respect to what we saw. And we had someone out there in a dinghy who'd gone in there before us and knew the entrance.
	She didn't blame Paul (though in corporate America he'd have been the obvious culprit), because it was clear to her that he was well-intended, had acted in good faith, and had actually gone through quite a bit of thought and exertion to be of assistance. We were the ones who made the decision to trust his guidance, and a captain is always responsible for his vessel.
	And finally, she couldn't blame herself. While her position at the time was deck crew, more or less, and she was nominally blameless, she had agreed implicitly that we ought to go ahead and make the entrance, and would not have made a different decision if she had it to do over again. So who was to blame?
	No one. Blame won't work in that situation. (It doesn’t work in corporate life either.) All there was room for was responsibility, acceptance, and learning. Oddly, neither of us was upset by the event at the time — in fact, other cruisers commented afterward how astoundingly calm Lynn's voice had sounded on the radio. We’d known we weren’t in physical danger. If there had been real danger to life and limb, we'd never have been there at all. If necessary, we could have gotten in the dinghy and rowed away. The reef wasn't out to kill us. It only wanted the boat.
	Somehow we knew we were fine throughout. Our lives would be fine. Sitting in the cockpit at dawn, a Native American saying crept into Lynn's mind — Hopi, Zuñi, or Navajo, she couldn't remember: "While treading the dusty earth pitying myself, great winds carry me across the sky."

	We liked Guanaja, once we got our heads out of our you-know-whats. We pulled into the fuel dock and got diesel fuel and water before checking in, came back out and anchored, and then went ashore by dinghy to handle formalities. So simple: we walked into the Port Captain's office (also his home), he relieved us of our Panamian zarpé, and that was IT. We headed to the Immigration office (and home), where he typed out four thirty-day visas for our four passports, stamped them, and collected a ten dollar fee for Daybreak. The visas were free. This took fifteen minutes. No crew lists, no boat documentation, no seven copies of anything, no "port taxes", no "quarantine fee", no mordida, nada. So we found a nearby café and celebrated with a round of ice-cold Cokes — real twelve-ouncers, not those silly eight-ounce jobs they sold in Panama. We walked around the island and, in spite of the poverty and squalor compared to the U.S., Guanaja was better off in every respect than anyplace else we'd seen in Central America.
	The layout, however, was strange. The high, rock-solid island of Guanaja, ten miles long and three wide, was virtually devoid of population. The people were all out on the tiny, low-lying cays on the fringing reef. In Guanaja village, the primary settlement, two or three thousand people crammed themselves onto Sheen Cay which, like Rio Tigré in the San Blas, has an area of only twenty acres. Every square inch of the cay was covered by structure, mostly on stilts or concrete caissons three feet high, and every inch of waterfront was lined with docks, piers, and boathouses. The smaller nearby cays were encrusted with private homes. A hurricane would wipe those cays off the face of the earth like a giant squeegee.
	Though our hull was bare and scraped in places, we didn't think osmotic blistering would occur in the five weeks we expected to take getting to Alabama, so we decided to wait and haul the boat there. At 0600 on our third day at Guanaja, we headed out for Belize.

	We made it, though not without effort (a phrase that describes cruising rather well). The passage was a whole 136 nautical miles, presumably in easterly trade winds the whole way. Not quite. After blazing through the first 123 miles in 22 hours — leaving, that’s right, 13 miles to go — the forward edge of a front swept down from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing rain and strong headwinds. These last thirteen miles took five and a quarter hours, and might have taken forever had there been more fetch. The night had brought rain squalls with gusts to 39 knots and sustained winds of 25 knots, all from the northeast, but when we got to Glover Reef, where we needed to turn northwest toward the South Water Cay entrance through Belize’s barrier reef, the wind backed to exactly northwest and strengthened to a steady thirty-plus. We tried sailing with double reefed main and triple reefed mizzen, but that wasn't working. Then we tried motoring directly to windward with the sails down for awhile, and were making about a knot, just about enough progress to get us to the reef entrance at dusk (and it was only 0500 at the time). Finally we re-raised the triple-reefed mizzen, sheeted it in hard to keep Daybreak’s head up and add a bit of forward thrust, and motorsailed on, tacking to windward with the engine maxed out. This worked. We made two and a half knots up the rhumbline, crossed the bar at 0930, and anchored under the lee of nearby Twin Cay. The rain cleared, the sky directly overhead broke open briefly, and a ray of sun shone down on us just at the moment we needed to cross the bar. Otherwise, we couldn't have entered. The depth in the pass was sixteen feet, with breaking reefs on both sides.
	We went below to make French toast for a very belated breakfast (the girls had been nibbling since dawn), then Lynn took a short nap while I crashed and burned like a broken hulk. I had slept barely an hour during the night. Around three p.m. we all swam and bathed, after which another torrent of rain allowed us to rinse the salt off the boat and even get a few gallons into the tanks. Lynn and the girls had made popcorn balls while I’d slept. Aboard Daybreak, after any ordeal we rewarded ourselves with sugar! We promptly ate half of them. As evening approached the wind finally calmed down.
	We were wondering how we were going to get through the passage to Alabama, during which a certain amount of nasty weather and upwind sailing was to be expected. The passage would be 525 nautical miles, from Isla Mujeres, Mexico, to Pensacola Inlet, Florida, with no place to stop along the way and fronts sweeping down out of Texas, causing the wind to swing through 360° every week or so in late fall. And behind the fronts, the dreaded winter northerlies. It looked like a bad scene no matter what. We might have considered just waiting for spring, but in all honesty it must be said that there is no "good" season for the Gulf of Mexico. One Texas cruiser had quipped, "It ain’t shaped like a toilet bowl fer nuthin’.
	A day later it was still raining and blowing out of the northwest, but we were in good protection and got lots of sleep. We were so glad to be there.
	The area inside Belize’s barrier reef, what we could see of it through the rain and grayness, looked like a nice place to spend a couple of months if we’d had that long to spend. The area is 150 miles long, 10 - 25 miles wide, and well-protected. It’s the second largest barrier reef in the world, next to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The cruising ground is neatly divided into two adjacent strips. The western strip, running along the mainland, is an open sound, two to five miles wide and 35 - 75 feet deep, with no obstructions. Since the prevailing wind is easterly 15 - 20 knots, sailing in this channel was reputed to be easy and delightful, like driving down a highway. The eastern strip, varying from five to twenty miles wide next to the reef, abounds with cays, reefs, and shallows. This was where one could anchor and play — and motor, not sail. No one in his right mind would sail in there unless he were in a very small, shoal-draft boat and knew the territory intimately. It was straight eyeball navigation in there, and movements had to be timed for the hours of 1000 to 1400, when the sun is high. It was crucial to be able to see the bottom. There were coral reefs and sandbars everywhere, and the only available chart turned out to be nearly useless.
	What we needed was a cruising guide, but we’d been unable to find one back in Panama. However, we'd made radio contact with a cruiser named Smith in the Rio Dulce, Guatemala, who knew the area well. Smith was his first name, by the way, and his directions were dauntingly complex. For a simple move of three miles as the crow flies, six over the ground, he dictated half a page of directions which differed substantially from those we had copied out of a cruising guide belonging to another cruiser back in the San Blas. What a maze! We chose to follow Smith’s instructions. After all, it had been his GPS waypoint (also radioed to us) that had gotten us safely through the reef at South Water Cay. In so doing he had already saved us an eighty mile detour around the southern tip of the reef.
	This and slow, careful piloting got us to Blue Ground Range. Who thinks up these names? Twenty feet counted as deep water, fifteen was average, and nine to twelve was common. The reefs themselves were covered by one or two feet of water, and if the sun wasn't out, they were invisible. With such good protection, there was no surge to provide telltale turbulence.
	After Blue Ground Range we moved ten miles southwest across the sound to Sapodilla Lagoon, on the mainland, a totally enclosed mangrove inlet and as good a "hurricane hole" as Belize has to offer: fifteen feet, mud bottom, total protection from seas, no more than 150 yards of fetch in any direction, and soft landings in the mangroves if the anchor were to drag. We spent a quiet night there and moved another ten miles in the morning, this time back across the sound to Pelican Cays.
	We were beginning to be disappointed. As far as the cays inside the barrier reef went, it looked as if we'd already seen what there was to see, which wasn’t much: mangroves on top of coral beds, no dry land, and cloudy water. Seen one, seen ‘em all.
	We hadn't spent a lay day since Guanaja. Truth to tell, there hadn't been much point. Whatever there was to do in one of those anchorages could be done in a single afternoon. What there was to do that day was tear down the head and find out what had been clogging it since somewhere off Glover Reef. We tackled it with trepidation.
	What we found was a rechargeable NiCad D-cell battery which had been sitting in a tray at the head of the nav desk. Seems it had gotten tossed loose during those first moments when 40-knot northwesterly gusts hit us off Glover Reef. I measured the heel angle required to get that battery into the toilet: sixty degrees. We hadn't gone over that far, so we must have been hit by a wave while heeled, thus launching the battery in an arc to leeward. It landed neatly in the neck of the toilet bowl eight feet away, plugging it perfectly. Of course, shortly thereafter one of the kids took a dump on top of it. Nice. We'd been using a stainless steel bowl ever since. I hadn’t been about to disassemble the head while sailing on our ear, beating toward the reef.
	This exercise taught us a nasty lesson. When human waste gets pumped through the head valves and out the thru-hull fitting, it gets chopped up pretty well, and it sinks. When it goes overboard "raw", out of a pail, it, uh, doesn't. The techno-weenies among you may want to speculate, based on this observation, as to the micro-structure, heterogeneity, and porosity of this, ah, substance. Then again, maybe you don't.
	They say cruising brings you down to the basics of life, to a raw and visceral experience of human existence. Now you know what they meant.
	Every day, based on what we found in the next anchorage, we’d change our itinerary, mostly by eliminating lay days. Out of fear of winter storms during the Gulf crossing, we’d set December 15th as our deadline for being across, but every day of margin improved our chances. Smith had said that in December the cold fronts came down out of the Rockies about every eight days. Since it took them three or four days to get to the Yucatan Peninsula, our jump-off point, and then a couple more for the northerly wind behind them to blow out, there would only be two or three days during which to scoot north. Unfortunately, Daybreak needed at least four days. Alternatively, we could leave in the southwesterlies that preceded a front and gamble that we'd reach shelter before it reached us. Heh heh. No thank you.
	We were sitting at our southernmost stop in Belize. From there on we'd be northbound. Between us and Alabama we could count the stops we’d make on the fingers of one hand.
	We blazed up to Garbutt Cay in a stiff ENE wind, weathering two squalls in the 18 miles and a third after dropping the hook. Thirty knot winds, then zero, then thirty, then zero . . .  We got so tired of reefing and unreefing. Lynn had been upset and jumpy for several days. She was so apprehensive about the Gulf crossing that she was second-guessing every move we made, worrying about what we "should" have been doing, where we "should" have been (as if we could have been somewhere else). Like, "Why are we sailing upwind? Why don’t we just go the other way?" or "This anchorage is just another mangrove cay. Couldn't we have skipped it?" or "Maybe we should just make passage now directly for Isla Mujeres. If we wait much longer we'll never get a weather window!" I suggested for about the 29th time that maybe she should get involved in writing our itinerary, so that each day she’d know where we stood. Anything to get her hypercritical mind-chatter turned off! For the first time, she did so, and immediately knocked off one anchorage and several lay days. If we kept to what she’d written and didn’t suffer weather delays, we’d get to Corky's house by December 4th, and in the process would bring our daily average since leaving the San Blas to fifty miles, a new record for us. Lynn was impatient to get tied up to a real dock and stop sailing for awhile. I was ready to go along with anything that would get her to stop complaining about the conditions when we were in them and simply sail.
	We were at Garbutt Cay because the town of Dandriga, a Port Of Entry (god knows why), was on the mainland just seven miles across the sound from there. It was high time we checked in to the country, and maybe buy some bread. We motored over there in a twenty knot tail wind and dropped anchor just off the creek mouth in three feet of nasty short chop on an exposed shore. We laid out 10:1 scope and two snubbers, one being a back-up in case the other chafed through. Getting in the dinghy was an acrobatic feat, as was getting across the bar into the creek without getting swamped. A loaded eight-foot dinghy in three foot breaking waves is some fun. We made it, and pulled out on the creek bank next to a tortilla shop, where we promptly bought four pounds of the best fresh, hot corn tortillas we'd had since Mexico. Next to it was a fruit stand where we bought a perfect pineapple and a bunch of huge juicy limes. With the help of a disreputable-looking "guide" who attached himself to us, we found a store that had bread. The proprietress was kind enough to break a fifty dollar bill for us, as well as to warn us that our "guide" was a notorious thief who should be quietly and quickly paid off and told to scram. We did so, then went searching for the government "offices".
	Lynn had observed that in Mexico and Central America the only people who took themselves and their jobs seriously were the officials. We quickly found that in Belize no one took anything seriously, especially the officials, and especially their jobs.
	The Immigration Office was closed and padlocked — no sign, no note, no posted hours, nothing — and the officer was upstairs in his living room relaxing over an extended lunch and some country music. He promptly came down to open up and take care of us, and was very pleasant about it. Since we had only the original of our Honduran zarpé (no copy), he let us take it with us to Customs to have it stamped if we promised to bring it back to him. We promised. Returning fifteen minutes later, his office was again padlocked, and he was gone. We left the completed zarpé upstairs with his teenage daughter, and crossed our fingers.
	The "customs officer" at the Treasury Building was a kid in his early 20's wearing tattered jeans, beat-up sandals, and an old faded green T-shirt that said "SHIT HAPPENS" in giant letters across the front —  a warning, I guess, not to expect too much from government employees. In the U.S., work for many people may be a necessary evil that they perform grudgingly, but they do dress up for it and at least pretend to be serious, because in general they need the job and don't want to upset their bosses (who are either a great deal more serious or better at pretending, your guess). In Dandriga on a Tuesday morning, no one was bothering to pretend anything, and clearly no one expected them to. Sort of refreshing, in a way.
	Belize did, on the other hand, seem to be serious about education. We walked past two schools that were raucously in session. Turned out they ran double sessions. The afternoon session had just started, and the uniformed morning-session kids were scattered all over town.
	We wanted to have lunch, but a quick survey of available eateries (plus the prevalence of cholera there) dissuaded us. Besides, we still had to go seven miles dead upwind back to Garbutt Cay. A night in the wave-tossed roadstead at Dandriga was unthinkable.
	Morning brought calm, cloudy weather and a light easterly, so we decided to set sail immediately for Robinson Cays 25 miles to the north. We very shortly suffered our first squall of the day, whereupon the wind shifted to the NW, almost on the nose, and we began tacking up the sound again. What had happened, we wondered, to "reaching up and down the sound in the tradewinds"? After several hours, with the wind slowly dying and shifting to NNE (on the nose for our final leg), we motored the remaining eight miles and dropped anchor in a well protected bight among several mangrove cays.
	Our immediate thought was, "Well, hey. Here's a good place to take a lay day, sail the dinghy and maybe even the windsurfer, etc. etc." . . . but it was not to be. During the night a "tropical wave" arrived from the eastern Caribbean, with a WNW wind sending an unpleasant chop into the anchorage from around the corner of the cay. Since we knew we'd be motoring the next 25 miles anyway (because for most of it we expected depths from about 8' - 13', and I wanted to be able to stop quickly if necessary), we figured what the hell, let's just LEAVE.
	Belize’s weather in fall was nothing to brag about.
	We motored north into a steady twenty knot northwesterly, under low, fast-moving gray clouds and occasional rain the whole morning, and got to Chapel Cay Marina about noon. The water was murky and shallow, down to seven feet — not good for one's stomach chemistry, several hours of waiting for the "thud" as the boat to lurches to a stop. East coast readers are laughing at this, I’m sure, but you have to understand, we had learned to sail in the Pacific, where if your keel goes *thud* and your boat lurches to a stop, you are DEAD. We arrived without incident and made it through a marina entrance barely thirty feet wide, in a stiff crosswind, in water white with silt.
	Chapel Cay Resort covered half the cay, but most of that was airstrip. The small marina on the west side and the small hotel a quarter mile across the cay on the eastern shore were the whole shebang. Styling was bottom-end California Delta: I mean Hicksville, like a '70's cheap furnished apartment, with plastic tropical print upholstery in plastic "bamboo" furniture. The bar was purpose-built for serious drinking, no ambience unless you call the buzz from the first three beers ambience. Domestic ten-ounce Belikin beers were two bucks while soft drinks were half that, expensive by Central American standards especially on a bare plywood bartop. There was no shortage of patrons, though, probably because there was nothing to do there except scuba dive, play ping pong, and drink. When the dive boats came back to the dock, the guests went straight to the bar, probably wondering how plastered the author of that article in Skin Diver Magazine had been when he wrote it. A copy, hanging in a frame, painted a glowing picture of a resort that was not recognizably the one we were standing in.
	Later on we were invited over for drinks and hors d'ouevres aboard a chartered Hunter 40 that pulled in next to Daybreak. They’d come from Belize City, and their "fully equipped" bareboat had no VHF radio, no instruments (they'd been stolen and never replaced — which meant no depth sounder), no tools, no reverse gear, no dodger, and no awning. Worse, the lifelines, long since gone, had been replaced with eighth inch plastic clothesline "heat-welded"  into eyes at the ends, apparently with a Bic lighter. Like elsewhere in Central America, the philosophy seemed to be that if a repair looked like the original, it must be like the original. Roxanne promptly tested these lifelines while running around the foredeck with Tania. Slipping and falling against them, they broke like rotted string, and she ended up floating flat on her back in the water, screaming for her mommy. Neither Lynn nor I were in much hurry to rescue her, figuring that if a child of ours is not in immediate danger and is capable of self-rescue, she should be allowed to do so. The yacht’s skipper, however, mortified and panicked, jumped in fully clothed to carry Roxanne ashore (in water three feet deep). He’d already been talking about suing the charter company, and this was sort of the last straw for him. Lynn took Roxanne over to our boat, dried her off and re-dressed her, and then they returned to help finish off the food which had to be eaten or discarded, it being the last day of their charter.
	That evening on the SSB we heard, about fifth hand, that the carton of kids’ books my father had tried to send to us in Panama had been located. Really. It seems the package had finally showed up at the Panama Canal Yacht Club where, true to his word, the inimitable Tony Blondell from the Wayward Wind had gotten his capable mitts on them. He had told us that if the books showed up, he would BY GOD get them to us come HELL OR HIGH WATER. And when a gung-ho retired Army guy says that, I tend to believe him. Besides which, Roxanne and Tania had pretty much stolen his heart. I think he’d have swum them to Alabama if necessary. Tony had contacted Corky directly via SSB for shipping instructions, and then both of them put the word out over the Western Caribbean Cruiser's Net (6209 kHz). We heard about it days later from another yacht, which was in Honduras at the time. Wouldn’t have surprised us if Tony had finagled the package onto a military transport bound straight to Alabama! That man knew how to work the system.
	Next on our agenda was a trip inland to the Mayan ruins at Tikal, Guatemala, again on the advice of our SSB friend Smith on La Dolce Vita. The prospect didn’t thrill me: two marathon travel days plus two dawn-to-dusk days exploring the ruins, intense travel in very foreign countries, but Lynn really wanted to go. The trip was a doozy.
	We got up at 0500, ate, closed up the boat, walked across the island toting all our gear, and caught the 0700 "water taxi" to Belize City. This term is a misnomer. We’re talking forty knots in a twin-outboard-powered cigarette boat, sixteen nautical miles over choppy open water in 25 minutes with a dozen passengers. Very macho. These drivers certainly loved their work. After a bone-jarring ride, we took a taxi from the river to the bus station, followed by three hours up into the mountains to a border crossing in the middle of the jungle with nothing for miles in any direction, only to discover that on the Guatemalan side there were no buses. So we hired a tiny minivan for $65 and spent three more hours bashing over the hundred kilometers of horrendous dirt, rock, and mud road between there and Flores. Flores is an ancient town perched on an island in the middle of Lake Peten-Itza, connected to land by a narrow gravel causeway. We checked in to the Hotel Yum Kax (that’s Yoom Cash), found a nearby restaurant, ate, and crashed. We slept fitfully and briefly.
	The drill for getting from Flores to Tikal was to rise at four a.m., shower and dress, cram ourselves into another tiny minivan, thirteen passengers plus the driver in a vehicle about the size of an early Honda Civic, and no seats for kids. We had to hold them in our laps. Then 63 km to Tikal, which took an hour. Once there, we bought our tickets and guidebook, had breakfast (finally), and start trekking. The van would leave at two p.m., allowing six vigorous hours of hiking through a six square mile area, with an hour at each end for meals. (The entire park covers over 200 square miles.) We did this for two days, then reversed the whole travel process to return to Chapel Cay in Belize.
	Tikal was a strange and amazing place. Our first impression was of its size. Just the central area of the ruins, the main pyramids and the acropolis, required ten kilometers of hiking to see. The Tikalan Mayans employed thousands of workers and spent over a thousand years to build the complex, entirely of stone and entirely without metal tools or drudge animals. The technology to move some of those stones scarcely exists today. The foundations for the complexes, and for the 4.5 kilometers’ worth of two-hundred-foot wide, forty-foot high causeways connecting them, were constructed of dirt and gravel. That's something like ten million cubic yards of fill at one and a half tons per yard, all by hand. Not even a wheelbarrow.
	Our second impression was that the jungle in which Tikal lies is fertile and beautiful beyond all description, full of wildlife, and wonderful for hiking. The girls identified a long list of animals, including acajutls, coatamundis, spider monkeys, deer, lizards, birds, bats, and so on. Just the landscape was worth visiting.
	Finally, it became our impression that the Mayans, particularly the priests and "religious" officials, were a remarkably sadistic and violent people. They weren’t this way to outsiders — they weren't an "aggressive" culture — but, rather, toward their own people. Human sacrifice was common. There are abundant similarities in behavior between the Mayan priests and today's "serial killers": torture, gore, corpse mutilation, and a regular, recurrent need to kill. In Mayan art, the image of bound prisoners awaiting execution is quite common, and strikingly similar to images found today in sado-masochistic pornography. A well-known image in archaeological circles, considered important, shows two priests in full headdress and regalia "conferring" over a stone table stacked with human femurs and skulls. Intricate ceremonial images, often of the sacrifice itself, were carved into such bones. All in all, whether or not the archaeological community chooses to comment on it, our overriding impression was of a radically top-heavy theocracy populated by priests versed in gory killing, the infliction of deadly pain, and corpse mutilation. These guys, it seems, enjoyed their work.
	I say "guys" because this was a "male thing". There are few female images in Mayan art. One of the suggested causes for the abrupt decline of classic Mayan culture around 900 A.D., after seven hundred years of intense activity, is the simple refusal of the general populace to continue to support this insanity by providing food, personnel, and victims. (Another is soil depletion, due to intense over-farming.) For whatever reason, almost simultaneously, from the northern Yucatan to central Honduras, all construction and priestly activity stopped. The remaining structures began to be simply lived in, looted, and defaced for another six hundred years, until the Spanish showed up.
	We climbed all the pyramids in sight, and wondered why one doesn't hear of accidents on those things. The tallest one (and the vantage point, by the way, for one of the scenes in the movie Star Wars) was 212 feet high, the smallest (that we climbed) was about fifty feet. While the stone stairways up them are wide, they are made with very tall, narrow steps. These stairways are extraordinarily steep. If you fell, you wouldn't stop bouncing until you got to the bottom, and there are no handrails anywhere, including around the tops of the pyramids. Rock-climbers call this "exposure". In fact, my rock-climbing experience was what allowed us to get the girls up and down these things. (There was no way we could have kept them on the ground short of World War III.) Our culminating achievement was getting the whole family up a thirty foot galvanized pipe ladder (with long steps, uncomfortably long even for me) which was affixed to the sheer vertical sidewall of the summit block of the largest pyramid. This ladder led precariously onto a four foot wide ledge across the front of the pyramid. If, from the top of the ladder, you had walked two paces forward rather than turning abruptly left, you would have fallen a hundred feet off the edge of the pyramid into the forest canopy.
	There was a ledge about a foot wide running around the entire roof comb, above a sheer drop. I leaned around the corner to check this out. It was well travelled. I returned with a paraphrase of one of Corky Reed's exhortations in my head: "There's jes' nuthin' aroun' thet rock Ah really need tuh see!" I decided I wanted to live to see my children grow up instead.
	On the drive back to Flores, the minivan driver and I became buddies after I commented that 130 kph was too fast for a glorified go-kart with 14 people in it on the roads of Guatemala. I pleaded: "Mas despacio, por favor! Ciento triente kilometre por hora es muy rapido. Mas tranquilo es mas bueno, no? Cien kilometre por hora velocidad maxima, OK?" ("Slower, please! 130 kph is very fast. Slower is better, no? No more than 100 kph, OK?") I include this quote because at the time I could scarcely believe it came out of my mouth. He actually agreed. Either that, or he thought about losing his cushy contract with the hotel if I complained. 
	We left the hotel the next morning at nine, figuring that the minivan ride to the border might take three hours, which would give us an hour to change money, transit the border, and grab some lunch from a street vendor (hopefully) before catching the one and only "express" bus to Belize City, supposedly at 1:00 p.m. The van miraculously managed to do the trip in two hours and 30 minutes, at which point we were told, upon entering Guatemalan Immigration, that the bus would leave at noon. We rushed, as best one can in banana-land, through Guatemalan and Belizian Immigration and Customs, only to run outside and be met by a hopeful cab driver imploring, "I can drive you. There is no bus. It left. I'm not lying." To which I replied, witheringly (I hoped), pointing at a bus: "So what's THAT?" —  and ran and stopped it just before it drove away (empty), asked the driver if he was going to Belize City (he was), and got all of us on board after a quick bathroom break for the kids. We got as far as San Ignacio, a whole nine kilometers, before being told that, actually, it was not an express bus. The real express bus would be arriving in San Ignacio in 25 minutes. The bus we were on would not be continuing for another two hours, but we were welcome to wait on board. Another miracle, the express bus arrived precisely as advertised, and we climbed aboard. "Express", by the way, is a euphemism. It stayed on the main highway, yes, but it stopped for everyone. Don from Moonrise once commented that if a Central American bus driver saw two people standing out in a field, he'd stop the bus, walk over, and ask them if they wanted a ride.
	We were pretty worried by this time, because the last water taxi to Chapel Cay would leave Belize City at 3:30 p.m. It was 1:15 p.m., and we had almost three hours to go. There was live entertainment along the way in the form of a domestic dispute and assault (in which I intervened to protect the woman), a knife attack (in which I did not), subsequent police intervention and an arrest, and a half-hour delay due to a head-on collision between two industrial-size dump trucks. What a mess. What a country!
	As the bus pulled up to the first outlying Belize City traffic light, we were verbally accosted through the bus window by an eager and enterprising young Belizian (on foot) who solicited our promise to use his taxi once we got to the terminal. We said fine, if he could get there in time. He beat us, and we were in his taxi with all our luggage three minutes after stepping off the bus at 4:05 p.m. Did he think the water taxis were still running, we asked? Yes, he said, the last one was about to leave. He whooshed us to the dock by 4:10 p.m., we paid him, jumped on the speedboat, and were underway 60 seconds later. We had a fast, balmy ride to Chapel Cay in the tropical sunset, and since there were no passengers for the hotel, the driver took us up the west side of the cay and dropped us at our dock, thus saving us the half mile trek across the cay with all our luggage. What a deal. It was PERFECT. The day couldn't have gone any better. But of course, not knowing that, we’d spent several anxiety-filled hours facing the prospect of having to take a hotel room in Belize City, which is a tiny, baby step above Colón, Panama — which I described earlier, you may recall, as being a step above the darkest slums of New York. Home again, back in our own beds. Small as Daybreak is, for us she was an improvement over the Hotel Yum Kax.

	Next day, 1238 hours, I was back from Belize City again, and I was 1) wasted, and 2) drunk. Hey, that place was a wreck. I deserved it.
	I took pity on Lynn and the girls and left them behind while I went alone into Belize City to check out of the country and do a few errands. (Fairly thin pity: Lynn had five loads of laundry to do. By hand.) Belize City is a pit, and expensive. I took the 8:15 a.m. water taxi, hired a taxi for fifteen bucks an hour, visited the four offices necessary to check out of the country, followed by the post office, grocery shopping, and two unsuccessful attempts to make a phone call to Los Angeles, then caught the water taxi back to Chapel Cay, this time the one owned by the legendary driver named Chocolate (he's mulatto) who, unable to afford wheel steering and cable controls, stood right in the back of his cigarette boat and hand-steered his twin pull-start outboards! Nothing fancy, just 75 horsepower in each hand. When he hit those throttles, he hunched way down and leaned forward so he wouldn't get blown right out the back of the boat!
	I was feeling pretty disgusted with Belize City, mostly because of how much everything had cost, when I was befriended by another passenger, an ex-Orange County, CA limousine service owner named Mike who had just bought a bottle of Grand Marniér, my all-time favorite liqueur. He wanted help drinking it. The idea of slugging such fine liquor straight from the bottle while pounding along at forty knots three feet above the eel grass and coral did not exactly seem proper, and I said so, but Mike had no such scruples, and it was his bottle. Besides, what the hell, ees the Careebbean, mon! So we killed half the bottle in half an hour. Fortunately I had arranged for Chocolate to drop me off on the marina side of the cay, just like the day before, so I wouldn't have to figure out how to walk across the island (drunk) carrying my traveling bag plus three boxes of groceries. Instead, I just yelled out (drunkenly) to Lynn, got the boxes onto the dock with her help, paid Chocolate off (he demanded and got a 50% premium for the dockside service), went below, and fell asleep for three hours. Ahhh yesss, another day in paradise . . .
	1500 mgs of Tylenol later I was semi-recovered and busy collecting weather faxes. Before leaving for Tikal I had pulled the Mobile faxes night and day for five days, trying to reach some understanding of the Gulf of Mexico weather patterns, and as a result I knew the pattern I wanted to see. All we needed for the moment, though, was a fair wind for the 220 mile jump from San Pedro, Belize to Isla Mujeres, Mexico, and the news was not good. The ENE winter tradewinds in the Yucatan Channel would put us on a hard starboard tack beat, while the northwesterlies following a front would make it a port tack beat. The best we could hope for was light winds and motoring. Three days and two nights of throbbing diesel, such a pleasant prospect. At least the current would be favorable.
	Hopping up to San Pedro the next morning, we began to wonder if we would get there at all as the depth slowly decreased from eleven feet to six feet on the flats inside the reef. We just managed to slither over the last stretch. San Pedro itself, on the west coast of Ambergris Cay about thirty miles NNE of Belize City, a stone's throw from the barrier reef, was a delightful spot, as clean a town as we’d seen in all of Belize, with water so clear we could see individual blades of eel grass on the sandy bottom by the light of a three-quarter moon. The evening breeze was light off the land, a bit cool in just a bathing suit but perfect with a T-shirt. In daytime we wore shirts only to block the sun. Locals said the breeze hadn’t exceeded ten knots for a week. Nice, but . . . maybe we should have left for Isla Mujeres a week earlier.
	Thanksgiving had arrived, and I’d gotten two fresh chickens in Belize City for the occasion. I threw them on the barbecue with the cover on to let them smoke. Canned yams, real mashed potatoes, fresh baked dinner rolls, whole cranberry sauce (also from Belize City), and cold Chilean wine . . .  I tended the chickens between faxes, and Lynn did the rest. We were coming to the end of Central America, and we gave thanks that we would make it back to our home country in one piece.
	If you're looking for tropical paradise, look between about 17 and 22 degrees of latitude. That's where it's at. The cold of winter is far to the north, and the stifling heat and torrential rain of the doldrums is far to the south. It's balmy, fairly dry, and beautiful. Take a shoal draft sailboat with you. The local fishing craft in Belize were twenty-five-foot gaff-rigged cutters, sort of a cross between a Friendship sloop and a Chesapeake Bay skipjack, mast well forward, a big main and two small jibs, one way out on a long bowsprit. With a draft of less than three feet they could go anywhere in Belize they wanted. They carried stacks of tiny one-man cayucas on their side decks, so their crew could paddle off alone to fish, then return to the mother ship. Very practical. Boats like these were all over Belize.
	That night I got up at 0135, 0320, and 0545 to get faxes. Just what I needed before a passage. At 0600 the decision was "go", so we went.

	It was not pleasant: 217 nautical miles of misery, 25 knots of NNW wind on the nose the whole way, six foot seas "nasty, brutish, and short", and heeled way over the whole time. Daybreak is such a pig going to weather. At heel angles like that, life becomes pretty much impossible. Just getting up and down the companionway ladder is a life-threatening chore. Sitting on the weather cockpit seat is impossible, because you slide right off and there’s no place to brace your feet. Cooking is an ugly prospect, but fortunately no one wants to eat anyway. Going on deck one takes one's life in one's hands, harness or no harness (and for us it's harnessed, believe me). No ports of refuge, a reef-lined shore, no place to hide anywhere, and nothing to leeward except the whole Caribbean. And Cuba. Didn’t wanna go there.
	We spent the first 24 hours hard on the wind with three reefs in, clawing our way north over, under, and through seas that were as square as they were because the wind was against the current. Daybreak’s bow, five and a half feet high, was dipping under the waves, scooping them up, and sending them aft. At least we were laying the rhumbline . . . until Day 2, when we got headed and had to bear off east behind Isla Cozumel as the wind increased. I really wanted to be west of the island for the very favorable current there, but no dice. We took our last reef, turned on the engine, and started motorsailing as close to the wind as we could. We tried motoring straight to windward without sails, but that didn't work. Not in Daybreak, anyway. Lynn was starting to say, "Let's buy a trawler!" — something that shoulders the seas aside while it plows inexorably forward at hull speed. Hmm. At times, the thought of four gallons per hour of fuel consumption day in and day out looked almost attractive. (Daybreak’s fuel consumption averaged 0.65 gal/hour.) I was ready to buy a Santa Cruz 50 or some other speed machine. Twenty five knots of wind should not be survival conditions. It should be a brisk breeze that any sailboat worthy of the name can handle with decorum.
	Anyway, we got there. At two in the morning. Our harbor chart told us that the approach would not be problematic, though we’d have to anchor out in the exposed flats between Isla Mujeres and Cancún until daylight. We followed our waypoints in, well remembering Guanaja, and dropped the hook in twenty seven feet of mostly unprotected water in thirty knots of wind. With lots of scope and a long snubber, she rode pretty well. After setting a back-up snubber we tumbled into bed about 0400. Yay team. Slept like zombies for, oh, maybe two hours, when the kids started stirring . . . 

	It was a good thing we hadn't tried to get into the harbor that night. In the morning light we found lots of coral heads in the approach, with depths of seven feet between them. Once anchored, we looked around and took a sniff. Ahh, Mexico. A familiar smell, if you like that kind of familiarity. Sort of like a mangy old dog who's been in the family for years. Yes he's raunchy, but he's yours.
	We didn’t want to stay long, but with eight fronts and four troughs over North America (just your average late fall day), it looked like we might be stuck for a few days. Fortunately we had more than a week of slack in our "schedule", which was about what the grapevine said we should plan on.
	The weather charts started showing fronts on top of fronts, and then something totally new to me, a dashed-line on the charts labeled "FRONTOLYSIS". OK, I give up. What's "frontolysis"? Probably something that, if you didn't know what it was, the weather man’s job was safe for another year. Government geek job security. Great.
	Things were getting dicey up north. Cold clear air in the northwestern U.S. and Canada was creating massive highs which rode the jet stream southeast, where they ran into warm Gulf air, creating intense cold fronts one after another as regular as drips from a leaky faucet. The most recent high had reached 1046 millibars over northern Idaho, and that's off the scale on my barometer. Must have been a nice week up there, but we needed them to have a blizzard! That would break the pattern and allow the trades to reestablish themselves. We'd settle for any landfall between New Orleans and Key West. We weren’t in a mood to be picky. If it was U.S. soil, fine! But it looked like there was nothing but trouble coming for the next four days. It was time to sit and wait.
	Meantime, Lynn and I had the intestinal bug again. The kids had had it on the way up from Belize (a nice little addition to the challenges of the trip), and we’d got it from them. Which was unfortunate, because that massive high in the Rockies started expanding and moving across the continent, sweeping the fronts away like dustballs on a hardwood floor. We weren't ready. We still had a rudder fitting to fix (oh, didn’t I mention that?). Sick or not, I had to go back there in the dinghy and pull apart the hydraulic steering to see what could be done.
	The clevis pin hole in the hydraulic ram end fitting appeared to be "whanged out" a bit (that's a technical term). It had gotten that way on the trip up from Belize, rough seas banging on that big, wide rudder. Needed a new fitting. Anyone know a good machine shop in Isla Mujeres? Just kidding. Well, we could just let it continue to rattle, thus whanging it out even more . . .  I had visions of the whole thing giving up the ghost in the middle of the Gulf, leaving me to hand-steer that monster rudder with an emergency tiller the size of a small tree. I foresaw broken ribs and other mayhem. Oh well. I put the pin back in upside down and backwards from the way it had been, which took up about half the slack. Good enough for mild weather, anyway. Well then, all we really needed was diesel fuel and water (that's right, the watermaker was dead too. Seals leaking all over the place).
	We talked by SSB with friends who had managed to get to Florida by this time and were calmly heading up the Intracoastal Waterway. We asked how their crossings had gone. They all said: "If we had it to do over again, we'd have left earlier." Oh, good. That helps.
	In a deep funk of cold and flu, I watched that high expand across the continent. No fronts anywhere. If this kept up, the wind in the Gulf would swing clockwise from northeast through east to south. The high had plenty of strength to hold off the lows behind it. It was the biggest high I’d ever seen. As long as it kept moving east, it was exactly what we needed.
	It was eleven a.m. I looked at Lynn and said, "Screw this waiting. Things look good. Let’s go fuel up, and if the high is still on the move on the 1310 U.S. fax, and the GMEX fax looks at 1420, let’s go for it."

	And that, for better or for worse, is precisely what we did.

Chapter 15
Welcome to "The Real L.A.": Lovely Lower Alabama

	The high did not keep moving. It parked itself over the Midwest and blew. The passage was a nightmare.
	The first forty miles north out of Isla Mujeres is bounded on the west by shoals, islands and reefs that guard the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. The wind seems always to be northeast in that area, so we knew we'd be closehauled for that stretch. What we didn't know was that an intense uncharted storm system had spun down out of that high and was lying right over the Yucatan Channel. We were about to get pasted.
	By six p.m. we knew the worst. The sky was deep black with storm clouds. The wind was northeast thirty knots and building. Three vessels which had left a few hours earlier were ten miles ahead of us and turning back, citing 35 - 40 knot winds, eight to ten foot seas, and no progress possible. We believed the wind and seas, but no progress? How can you make no progress with three and a half knots of favorable current?
	Shrugging, we pressed on alone. The wind got up to thirty five knots, gusting forty. We had all the reefs tied in, we were sailing on our ear, lee rail awash, falling off wave crests and pounding, hard green water over the deck on every wave, and we were hunkered down. That was the bad news. The good news was that the GPS said we were making seven knots straight up the rhumbline — though only four through the water. Unless your boat is sinking, that is no time to turn around.
	We sailed that way all night. The clouds began to break up by midnight, and the nearly full moon revealed a seascape of heartstopping force and grandeur. Ten to twelve foot rolling, glittering, breaking waves, sometimes breaking right over the boat. Earlier we’d sewed the dodger zippers closed (the plastic teeth were rotted and broken), and we were glad we had. That thin canvas and vinyl was all there was between the cockpit and the waves. We kept on toward morning, a slight wind veer allowing us to ease sheets a smidge, which on Daybreak means you just go faster and get wetter, but we were thinking Hah! Now we got it wired. The wind will continue to veer as the high moves east, and pretty soon we'll be beam reaching like a banshee straight for Alabama.
	It was not to be. We close-reached through the next day and night in thirty five knots of wind, the lee rail constantly buried as the seas worked their way slowly into the cabin through a dozen tiny crevices and orifices that had never before existed. Daybreak is normally an extraordinarily dry boat belowdecks, but not that trip. The seas had fire-hosed the caulking right out of the sea hood over the companionway hatch. Discomfort notwithstanding, our average ground speed continued to increase as we got into the heart of the Gulf Loop Current. Seven and a half knots. Eight knots. Eight and a half knots. Nine knots. Between 1100 and 1300 hours on the second day we averaged 9.26 knots, and at one point the GPS indicated a ground speed of 11.3 knots. That's cooking. Like a Ginsu knife, we were slicin' 'n' dicin'. We made 180 nautical miles in the first 24 hours, which is a 7.5 knot average. Life was looking up.
	On the third day the high finally moved, and we got the veer we’d been expecting. We arrived at the Pensacola sea buoy at 0034 hours on Saturday, December 4th in a light, rain-spitty southerly, and picked our way slowly inside despite of several unlit buoys and a maze of lights ashore. Corky, who had stayed by his radio as we approached, tried to talk us through a small unmarked cut to the nearest anchorage, but after running aground twice in the dark trying to follow his directions, we gave it up, located the regular ICW channel a bit further in, and got the hook down in the blessedly placid waters of Big Lagoon at 0300.
	Just for drill, I stayed up to get the 0320 GMEX fax. There was a cold front stretching down from a low moving across the Texas panhandle. We’d made it just in time. Rough as it had been, it was a good thing we’d left when we did. And we’d averaged six and a quarter knots for 525 miles.

	Coming in Pensacola Inlet we’d been rather busy. Due to the southerly wind we had not smelled land until we were in behind the barrier island. Then two things struck our senses at once: the eerie silver glow of brilliant white sand in moonlight, and the sweet, luscious smell of pine sap. Oh my. Home. I was almost in tears. My heart ached with a flooding joy of familiarity and remembrance. Pine trees. We had not seen or smelled pine trees since California. It smelled of north, of no more tropics, and no more Central America. It smelled of childhood, of where we had grown up.
	The twelve miles to Corky’s house was a revelation. We’d known nothing of Lower Alabama and had come there solely as a result of Corky’s ambassadorial verve. Pines. Forest. Placid, peaceful, shallow inland water, hundreds of miles of it stretching in both directions along the coast. Low population density, large lots, houses sparse and separated, the people warm and friendly, birds wheeling and singing, fish jumping, the breeze whishing gently through the tops of the trees, the sand on the beaches as white as powdered sugar . . . a magic land. There were two bottlenose dolphins making their home in Corky’s creek, and they’d just had a baby. The sun came up low and orange over the trees and grazed across the mirror-smooth water like a luxury car ad. It had to be heaven. The place was calling to us like God calling his children home. Something seminal in the air got hold of us and was pulling us close, wrapping us in its arms and whispering: "You've arrived. You're here. This is it. Cease your searching."
	As we motored up Soldier Creek, people waved to us and called out greetings from their docks. Everyone on the creek, it seemed, knew we were coming. At Corky’s dock a veritable committee waited to take our docklines. Corky and Joan were throwing a hamburger BBQ to inaugurate our visit. We were overwhelmed! Everyone was asking about our trip, our boat, about cruising with children, and we were asking about what living in Lower Alabama was like (pretty damn nice, was the regular refrain). It was a fabulous day, one we shall never forget.
	Waking up the next morning after a blissful night tied to Corky’s dock, wearing jackets and hats for the first time in months as we gazed at the mists rising from the waters of the creek, we could see we were in heaven. To our amazement, every bit of Corky’s hyperbole was true. A person couldn't ask for a nicer place to live. Maybe we would come across other such places, but that was the first such place we'd ever experienced, and a lovelier welcome back to our homeland could hardly be imagined. Thanks to grace, to providence, to the basic down-home southern goodness of Corky and Joan Reed, and to our blind luck in meeting them, we had come back to the heart country.

	A couple days later we all went to a Christmas tree farm up in Lower Alabama farm country to get a tree for the house, and Roxanne and Tania decorated it while the adults watched. That had been Corky’s plan all along. In the middle of this, two of Corky's friends, who were planning a cruise of their own, stopped by toting a few six-paks and a half-gallon of cheap whiskey already one third gone, intending to enjoy a few more drinks while they asked us about our experiences in the western Caribbean. Uncharacteristically, we hoped they wouldn't get around to going. One was a serious alcoholic, the other a clueless dilletante, and neither was much of a sailor. Not a good combination on a cruising boat. We had often seen that alcoholism and cruising don’t mix well because, once underway, there is nothing to keep you sober except an interest in being so, which according to Eileen on Moonrise alcoholics simply lack. Very bad news. While cruising, the one thing you really need is to have all your wits about you.
	After two days of unwinding, we were pulling out the boat-work list again. There were all sorts of parts we needed to buy, but for the first time in a year I could just call up on a toll-free number, say what I wanted, and three days later UPS would deliver it to Corky’s door. Wow. It was time to get out the catalogs and have a good time. This would really be Christmas!
	After a frigid night, a crisp clear dawn, and an early breakfast of cold cereal with fresh milk and coffee, Lynn and I left the kids snug in their berths with their books and took a dinghy ride up the creek. When we returned, we had a new problem: it was beautiful up there, natural, untrammeled, pristine, full of birds and other wildlife, great blue herons everywhere, ospreys, a forest full of pines and cedar and maple and oak, wetlands with reeds and grasses and tules, and mirror-smooth water. There were seasons there too, something dear to Lynn's heart but absent in Los Angeles: cold in the winter, warm in the summer, and leaves changing color in the fall — but no snow. Surrounding the place were miles and miles of inland water for daysailing, weekending and coastal cruising, and for offshore cruising there was the entire Bahamas chain, a thousand miles long, starting only a few hundred miles away. With a trailerable sailboat, the entire four thousand miles of the Intracoastal Waterway, with all its creeks and inlets (not to mention thousands of inland lakes and rivers) would be available. And finally, there was a pair of lots right there on Soldier Creek which fulfilled our every desire.
	They had everything. Two hundred feet of deep-water frontage, a full acre of virgin forest, all for about $130,000. Across the creek was a large area of protected wetlands. No one would ever build there. The creek and its bays and coves offered a huge wilderness play and exploration area for the girls and ourselves — boating, fishing, swimming, hiking, and wildlife watching. We wanted to raise Roxanne and Tania around water and boats, because it seemed to us that learning to run a boat at an early age led to a kind of responsibility and self reliance we didn't see much of elsewhere. The place seemed perfect except for one tiny drawback: what would we do to support ourselves there?
	What would we do, that is to say, that wasn't "just a job"? Because it was clear to both of us that no degree of perfection in one's living environment could compensate for inappropriate work. The second question was, if we managed to answer the first question, what then? Cut our cruise short and start working? Or it finish according to plan and then decide? Hmm.

	Winter was closing in. Six weeks earlier we’d been sweating in the San Blas, living in our underwear and swimming half the day. Three weeks ago we’d been in Tikal, hiking through the steaming Guatemalan jungle. Two weeks ago we’d been in Isla Mujeres, hiding under the awning, happy for rain and tradewinds. Now in Lower Alabama after a cold front the nights were freezing and we had all our quilts and blankets on the bed again, plus three layers of sweatclothes on the girls night and day. We wore pants, socks, shoes, sweaters, and jackets constantly, and we’d just borrowed two space heaters from a friend of Corky’s.
	How many cruisers travel north for the winter? Everyone in Corky’s neighborhood was going the other way. Anyone who had a boat was leaving for the Florida Keys or the Bahamas. This southward migration brought us an unexpected bonus: a couple we met at a Christmas party two houses down the creek were leaving for the Keys right after Christmas, and wanted someone to house-sit for them. We got the job. Starting December 28th we’d have a creek-front retirement home with beds, heat, a kitchen, a TV, a VCR, a hot tub, a dock for the boat, and even an old pickup truck. We promptly decided to extend our stay until mid-February. The owners would have been happy to have us through April!
	As another frigid night crept slowly toward morning, Lynn arose, got dressed, and picked up a book she’d been reading. I got up fifteen minutes later and did the same. Day broke. Dawn dawned. Light filled the sky, and after a night of rain and wind, the sun rose over the forest across the creek to the southeast and glowed on the trees behind us. Lynn made a thermos of coffee, poured herself a cup, and made one for me too. She took hers on deck while I grabbed my camera bag.
	Lynn said nothing for fifteen minutes and then suddenly exclaimed: "I just love this place!" A few moments passed, then: "This place is just too pretty." The tide was high, lapping under the dock beams. The rain-soaked planks and pilings steamed in the hard winter sun. The water reflected the forest and marsh grasses like a postcard image. Low mist drifted across the creek near the reeds of the wetlands. Boats floated placidly at their docks. Pelicans dived and fished. Blue herons perched on high tree branches. Squirrels scampered through the forest canopy and across the roof of the house. Lynn made cinnamon-and-brown-sugar coffee-cake for breakfast, and she and I brought ours up to the bench on the dock. Breakfast in paradise.
	Afterwards we walked up the road a half mile to where those lots were. We strolled down through them and surveyed the possibilities. We paced off dimensions. On our way back, three vehicles passed by on the road, two cars and a school bus. The school bus didn't stop, but the cars did — because both were driven by people who knew us. They stopped right in the middle of the road, rolled down their windows, said good morning, and had a chat. Passed the time of day. Asked how we were doing, how things were working out, whether the house-sitting arrangement was set, and so on . . . This sort of thing did not happen in Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, if someone stops next to you on a street and rolls down a window, you run like hell.
	Before going below to make breakfast, Lynn had stood in the cockpit and said to me, "You know, the Cinderella in me wants to wake up on Christmas morning and have you say 'Here, Darling. I bought those lots for you. I just knew you wanted them." Well, I may not be Prince Charming, but I’m as close as Lynn's gonna get. I hadn't bought the lots — couldn’t have bought them. Prince Charming was no pragmatist, he was just lucky, and of course the Sword of Valor and the Shield of Truth helped. (Or was that in Sleeping Beauty?) We also didn't have three Good Fairies looking out for us. (Yes, it was. Can’t keep ‘em straight anymore.) In fairy tales everyone who leaps impulsively for his or her dreams ends up living happily ever after. In reality people who leap impulsively end up in hock up to their scalp, or bankrupt. We wanted to live in a place like that. And we'd use the rest of our cruise to look everywhere between there and the Chesapeake Bay for the right place. But right then, in the absence of income or any plan for producing one, a full year before the end of our planned adventure, was not the time. If Lower Alabama was the place for us, it would still be there when we were ready.

	Twenty miles away from Soldier Creek, in the small town of Foley, was a giant new WalMart "SuperCenter". Nothing there cost more than it had in Central America, not even beans and rice. Most items cost 1/3rd to 2/3rds less, and the quality, selection, and availability couldn't be compared short of laughter. Everything you’ve ever heard about life being cheap in Latin America, you can just forget. Not even the land is cheaper, if you don’t count California and New York. You want waterfront property and a dock for your boat? You might as well go to Alabama. You won't do better in Costa Rica or Belize — and here you’ll have a lot less trouble with the construction industry! Europeans commonly to fly to the U.S., visit a Wal-Mart or a mid-Western super-mall, buy several thousand dollars worth of stuff, ship it back, fly home, and save so much money over European prices that it pays for the trip! Except for some real estate, things in this country are cheap.
	On our first visit Lynn suggested that, since I had lost so much weight, we should shop for some new pants for me. Remembering my youth with some pain, I had a screaming fit.
	"No way!", I said, "I will not go through that again! I can't get clothes to fit me in regular stores, I've tried since I was 13, it's embarrassing, it's a waste of time, I’m big, I’m fat, I'm sick of it, and I won't do it! The only place I can get clothes is the Sears Big and Tall catalog, so don't put me through this. I've been in this body for 44 years and I know what I'm talking about!"
	To which Lynn responded, "Sweetie, we’ll just look."
	"Yeah, right", said I, "that's what my mother used to say, and I'm sick of stores that don't carry anything in my size except blue denim overalls as big as tents, where sales clerks look at me like I'm El Globo the Colossal from the local circus, and I'm sick of standing outside fitting rooms looking like Humpty Dumpty in clothes four sizes too small about which my mother has said, ' Let's just try it on.' BLEAH!!"
	 To which Lynn said again, "C'mon, Lane, it can't hurt to look."
	Oh yes it can, I thought, it can hurt a lot. But all I said was "Okay, but you're gonna owe me bigtime!" So in we went, straight to the men's clothing section.
	Guess what? Turned out I’d lost over 50 pounds! My waist had shrunk six inches. We pulled pants right off the rack, starting two inches smaller than the pair I’d worn into the store. They fell right off. We tried four inches smaller. Still too big. Incredulous, half-naked in the changing room, I starting calling for sizes I hadn't worn for twenty years while Lynn groped through the racks and the girls carried garments to me. We ended up with several pairs of jeans that made me look better than I’d looked in all the time Lynn had known me. Lynn was ecstatic, needless to say. I was pretty happy too — until she said, "Now Lane, you need to say 'Thank you, dear,' for dragging you in here and putting up with all your s _ _ _ ." Grunt grumble . . . don’t push your luck.
	We followed this with shoes for the kids. Got Roxanne a pair for $2.76. Have you any idea how long we'd been looking for shoes for our girls? Do you know how much shoes cost in Panama City? What a store! What a country!
	Christmas Eve day brought sleet after a cold, cloudy night. It was snowing fifty miles to the north. Our borrowed heaters were on, the hatches were dogged and dripping condensation on everything, and we were hunkered down — more or less comfortably. Not wearing jackets below decks, anyway. As we lay awake talking in the middle of the night, Lynn noted that in this country we live as if money is more important than time and things are more important than people. In cruising we wanted to discover what happens when those are reversed. Our answer so far was: very good things. We’d decided to try living with that ranking after getting good and fed up with the other one. But cruising could only be a temporary and rather artificial escape from that existence. When we went back, we’d have to do what the society would pay for, i.e. for what doesn’t work and may well harm people. God help us, we thought, to find a better alternative.
	Human life on this Earth, we mused, might begin to work when all of our individual lives begin to work. Profound, huh? Like 2 + 2 = 4? Of course that means ALL our individual lives, all six billion, or at least enough to start a movement. We began to talk with each other about what we could do where individuals are concerned — e.g. helping people "cut themselves a little economic slack", as Ishmael author Daniel Quinn had written — as a way of extricating themselves from the web of economic necessity that keeps us all so thoroughly plugged in to the socioeconomic grind. Of course, this didn’t answer the question of how we’d support ourselves . . .
	We finally drifted off to sleep as Christmas Eve rolled over into Christmas Day. A Christmas morning of excited kids, good friends, joyful sounds, wonderful smells, and delicious food approached Lower Alabama slowly through the chilly darkness. Life was so sweet and we were so glad to be alive — glad to be cruising, glad to be in Alabama, glad to be married to each other, and glad to have our children. We were ready to arise to a Christmas filled with home, family, friends, love, peace, happiness, contentment, and a satisfaction so deep and abiding that sometimes we almost forgot it was there. But that night, we knew.

	We awoke to a shiny day with frost everywhere and ice on the rain water in the bottom of the dinghy. Walking up the slippery pier to the house required great care. As the morning unfolded, the girls got more presents than on any prior Christmas we could remember. The first present we unveiled, however, was a sign Lynn and Joan had had made for Corky. Three feet by four feet, it said "Reed's Landing" in big blue letters on a white background, with a logo of three green pine trees above their own reflection in water. I screwed it to the wall of his boathouse facing south, toward incoming boat traffic, and he was overjoyed. He had wanted such a sign ever since he’d bought the place. Later we enjoyed one of Joan's "small, simple" breakfasts: cinnamon rolls, toast with jam, bacon, sausage, eggs, orange juice, and coffee, after which I felt the urge to take a short ride around the creek in Daybreak. It was a mistake.
	The tide is low at midday at that time of year. Lower Alabama experiences only one tide cycle per day. Soldier Creek is not very deep to start with, and the water level had been lowered further by northerly winds and an approaching high. We went 200 yards upstream and ran aground. With some advice from a shoreside Samaritan we got off into the "channel" — six feet deep and perhaps sixty wide — within which we, with an overall length of forty seven feet, had to make a complete U-turn in a breeze. Then we tried going down the creek, and ran aground just past Corky's dock. Hmm. Things were shallower than I remembered. We got off under our own power and figured we might as well park it, because we clearly weren't going to get anywhere that day. We went aground twice more trying to cover the 200 feet back to the dock. An abortive Christmas boat ride.
	The rest of Christmas Day wound down as Christmases do, with football on TV, lots more food, a video for the kids, a fire in the fireplace, a drink in the hand, and friendship. The next day we planned to load ourselves onto a Greyhound bus to travel to California to visit our families. We were happy and thankful for our lives and our love, and happy for the parents we had and the life and love they gave us. Perhaps it is obvious, but it needs saying anyway: if not for them, we'd not have been where we were. We’d not have made the choices we'd made, not have married each other, not have been blessed with those children, not have known how to love or be loved. It seemed appropriate to visit them that post-Christmas season, bask in the warmth of their homes and the love they shared, and somehow find a way, through the embarrassment which always seems to accompany these things, to thank them in person.

	We went by bus because that’s what we could afford. Lynn's brother-in-law calls it "riding the dog". Lynn had never traveled by bus, though I had, in college. It hadn't improved in the intervening years. Fifty-four hours going west, fifty-eight coming back, semi-marginal sleep for the girls, marginal for Lynn, virtually none for me. Bolted down all sorts of crummy, expensive food in record time in lots of bus depots and fast food joints — like, thirty minutes for dinner in a Greyhound cafeteria with 43 other people, and us with two kids in tow? Come on! Or how about changing buses in San Antonio in the middle of the night, after the girls were already asleep, with sixteen items of carry-on luggage. Right. You can't believe it either. Here's the list: 2 backpacks, 2 duffel bags, 5 jackets, 1 book bag, 1 kid-entertainment bag, 1 camera bag, 1 snack bag, 1 hat, and 2 blankets. I know because we counted them at every stop. What was worse, San Antonio was a meal stop as well, which meant all that stuff had to be carted into the cafeteria and guarded while food was ordered, received, and carried to the table. A real family effort. We checked the kids' duffels on the return trip, got the number down to fourteen . . .
	It was great to see our parents, Lynn's in Santa Cruz and mine in Oakland. And the big question: how was California? Answer: just like we’d left it. A real nice place if only it had about 90% fewer people. TOO MANY PEOPLE. This world has too many people, folks. When people congregate, shit happens. Strike that. People happen. But I digress.
	Seeing our folks kind of tied things together, put us back in touch with where we’d come from, let us share everything that had happened to us, and allowed all of us to get clear again on how much we loved and supported each other. We wouldn't have missed it. And yet the reimmersion in all the old places, the familiar culture, the comfortable relationships, the intensely automobile-oriented activities, and the remarkable level of consumerism were a profound shock for us. It was so different from all that we had been doing, and yet so warm, so comfortable, and so familiar that our whole cruise — the boat, the voyage, a year of our lives, all of it — could just as easily have never happened. It seemed we could have walked outside, hopped in our old van, driven back to LA, and gone to work again on Monday. The sense of displacement was unnerving, and it stayed with us until we crossed the Alabama state line again going home: back to Daybreak — and there she was. Thank heaven. We slept aboard again and it was home. Cramped, cold, and rocky, but oh so right.
	
	We moved into The House the next day, and what a place: a retirement home two miles away on Palmetto Creek, with three bedrooms, three baths, a family room, and a master bedroom in a loft overhanging the living room, high in a gabled roof looking out over the creek through twenty-foot-high windows. The girls had a room together downstairs, and the other room was a sewing room where Lynn, at long last, intended to make Roxanne's long-promised quilt. We’d bought the fabric before leaving LA. Tania's got done in Costa Rica. And who needs a quilt in Costa Rica?
	We begged a jump-start from Corky and fired up the old Ford pickup that came with the house. Boy did we look "country" in that thing! All four of us on the bench seat, Tania on Lynn's lap, the groceries in the back wedged behind the spare tire, no tailgate, poking along back roads well below the speed limit . . . All we needed was a gun rack.
	With two TVs and a VCR at our disposal, we began an orgy of movie-watching. What fun! Lynn and I started the "video wars" again: blood-and-guts karate/kung fu shoot-em-ups vs. gushy romance. But, hey, we had a month, right? We'd watch 'em all.

	A tide check revealed that the time to get Daybreak out of Soldier Creek and over to the boatyard in Mobile Bay was . . . immediately. That very night. The temperature was predicted to be in the mid-20s. Maybe we should have hauled her in Roatan after all! We were hoping there'd be enough tide to overcome a growing high pressure and a light northerly breeze, and let us get over the bar.
	To this end we packed up the whole family at ten p.m., drove to Corky's, put the kids to bed in their V-berth (with Tania sick, throwing up every five minutes, and diarrhea too), fired up the motor, and left the dock at eleven. With less than a foot of water under our keel we crawled downstream. It was a crisp, cold, sparkling night as we idled along cautiously at one and a half knots. Gorgeous. Placid water, the canopy of heaven above, the pines and stars reflecting in the water, the lights of a few houses flickering through the trees, the children sleeping — even Tania, finally. We got to the creek mouth about midnight. And went thud.
	You may have heard boaters refer to running aground as "doing a little charting". That's exactly what we did next. We probably should have anchored Daybreak, launched the dinghy, and sounded the entire entrance with a leadline. But time was short and the water was dropping, so we used Daybreak. We nosed her aground every ten feet across the creek mouth, scanning the bottom all around the bow with the flashlight each time we fetched up. This showed us two things: first, that the water level was so low we couldn't actually float out over the bar, and second, that there was one little place where the bar was only about ten feet across, and only lacked six inches of depth. Lynn and I looked at each other. We conferred. We grounded again carefully and stood on the bow with the flashlight, staring at the submarine topography. One little spot. We’d have to be within two feet laterally to have any chance. What the hell, it's only sand and mud, there weren't any waves in there, the worst that could happen is we'd be aground for a day! Sooo . . . we backed up, got positioned, engaged the transmission, yanked up the throttle, and went ROAR-THUD-LURCH, and plowed across. Yessss!! We puttered around in the dark for another half hour looking for "deep" water to anchor in, settled for nine feet, dropped the hook, and went to bed satisfied. The temperature was in the low twenties and falling.
	We were up at 0630 in the frigid cold (no electric heaters now) and covered twenty miles of stunning small bays, creeks, canal cuts and backwaters on the way west to Mobile Bay, all the while thinking, "Boy, wouldn't it be great if we could take some time off and just poke around these waterways for awhile?" (Hey, wait a minute . . . ) Then we motored another twenty miles up Mobile Bay to the town of Fairhope in a stiff headwind which raised two feet of icy short chop on top of eight feet of muddy water. Upon arriving at Eastern Shore Marina, we looked at the dicey entrance — fifty feet wide, five feet deep, with twenty knots of wind on the port quarter to drive us deep into the mud should we so much as graze the bottom — and decided to call ahead on VHF. Fortunately there was someone in the office, who assured us that our four and a half feet of draft would be "no problem".
	"Even at this low tide?" The chart said 5 1/2 feet at low water, which it was, but the wind was northerly and strong, which pushed a lot of water out to sea.
	"Sure, c'mon in, no problem! Just hug the south side of the entrance!"
	Naturally. The lee side. And how do you "hug" the side of a fifty foot wide entrance lined by razor sharp corrugated steel walls sticking up above the water about two feet? Lessee, the boat’s twelve feet wide, so if we're on center we'd have nineteen feet between us and the wall. If we maintain ten feet between our topsides and the steel, that leaves nine feet. Were they telling us that nine feet off center was the difference between running aground and not?
	Yes, they were. And us with no insurance.
	We headed in. A Catalina 22 decided to meet us right in the cut, crabbing out sideways under power in the breeze with her keel and rudder raised, thus drawing about eighteen inches. Hey. How shallow is this place?
	Of such pleasures is cruising life comprised. We made it with "no problem" as advertised, with a few additional gray hairs (which, after Guanaja, hardly counted). Arriving inside, we passed a J/24 side-tied to a dock, getting ready to sail. One of the crew hailed us in perfectly clear, accent-free (I mean, West Coast) English:
	"Hey, did you sail that boat all the way from El Segundo through the ditch?" Ditch? That's what they called the ICW in those parts.
	"Um, El Segundo is in Los Angeles," I offered hesitantly.
	"Right," he replied, "I'm from Redondo Beach!" Ah. That would explain the "lack" of accent. By "ditch" he meant the Panama Canal. He’d clearly never been there. The ICW can be called a ditch if you like, but not the Panama Canal. Calling the Canal a ditch is like calling the Pacific Ocean wet.
	We tied up in the boatyard slipway, Corky met us, and off we went back "home" again, where we reveled in hot showers, and hamburgers for dinner! Except Tania. She conked out immediately with a high fever. At least she was done vomiting.
	Next morning the boat was high and dry. Well, maybe not dry: it had rained all night. I drove the forty miles over there at O-dark-thirty to get Daybreak ready for haulout, including spinning her around in the slipway. Due to her forward mast, she has to be hauled stern-first. Everyone at the yard was on hand to goggle as she came out. Good news: their unanimous opinion was that the reef damage was minor, perhaps even "slight". Corky, in fact, after driving over to see, said he thought I must have forgotten, during my initial underwater survey, that things are magnified forty percent when viewed underwater through a dive mask. The yard estimate was for a flat-rate bottom job plus five hours. I’d had visions of shelling out three grand. Hallelujah!
	Two easy-living weeks later, after waiting out a freezing spell during which no repairs could be performed, Daybreak was ready for launch. Since Corky was not available this time, we drove ourselves. Lynn and Tania drove the truck back while Roxanne and I drove the boat, via water of course, or at least mostly via water . . . It was a long day and a longer night.
	A minor last-minute repair in the centerboard trunk delayed launch enough that Roxanne and I would have to be negotiating the last ten miles, including the bar crossing into Palmetto Creek, in the dark — again. With high tide at about midnight, if we wanted to get Daybreak up to the house we had to get her over the bar by ten p.m. or so. We also needed the extra boost of a southerly wind to further increase the water level or we'd never make it to the dock, a common requirement in those parts. Now, southerly "wind" really meant southerly gale, because the wind only blew from the south when a front was coming — which was exactly what was happening that day. We figured we’d better get Daybreak up the creek that night or it wasn’t going to happen at all. On top of all this, I am colorblind. So you see, the stage was set.
	Off we went, Roxanne and I, twenty miles back down Mobile Bay in the teeth of thirty knots of wind, then twenty miles through the ICW to the Palmetto Creek bar. We ran out of daylight, as expected, with ten miles to go, but forward we went, me lighting up the buoys with a flashlight, Roxanne calling out the colors, and both of us reading the chart. Everything was peachy, no mishaps, until right at the entrance to Perdido Bay where the ICW curves right and our path diverged left, and sandbars abound and the markers become confused — right there Roxanne decided she needed an extra jacket. OK, said I, no problem, I've got the next buoy in sight — but be quick about it. I was barreling along at flank speed toward buoy #62, an unlit red nun on the left side of the ICW, planning to take it close to port before bearing left into Perdido Bay — thus missing, by the width of the channel, the huge sandbar just outside marker 61 and buoy 61A on the right (also unlit). I got there with Roxanne still below, but I knew I was OK, because she'd identified it for me, right? But just to check, I flashed my light on it as I thundered past, and there, in perfectly clear, white lettering . . . on a green background . . . it said . . . "61A". Huh? . . . AAAUUUGGHH!!! THUD  *groan*  Reverse, reverse!! (panic) ROAR as the engine cranked out the revs, and incredibly, we backed right off! Hah hah!! (Robin Williams’ most demonic voice in my head.) Dodged another bullet! Musta hit that shoal doing at least eight knots. Probably lost all the  paint on the bottom of the keel, but, feeling invincible, we forged onward into Perdido Bay . . .
	. . . wherein lay the entrance to Palmetto Creek, 500 yards wide and nowhere deeper than two feet, except for a five-foot-deep channel barely a boatlength wide marked only by three very unofficial wooden poles — with thirty knots of wind blowing straight into it. Fortunately (I thought) I had spent three days in the dinghy with a long stick charting the entire creek, had written a detailed piloting guide for the whole affair, and had even memorized it in anticipation of just this eventuality: a night entrance in inclement weather without Lynn. Such foresight.
	All I had to do was get within flashlight range of the first post and FIND it with the flashlight before running aground. In a gale-force tailwind. Roxanne was still belowdecks. She had faded entirely, it being past her bedtime and there having been no dinner. Suddenly there in the flashlight beam, behold, two of the posts. Not three? Hmm. I swung the light around. No post. Maybe one of them didn't have one of those shiny metal strips around it? Oh well, do or die. The wind had blown me to the right, so I came back left to get on range with the first post, using a well-lit condo complex across the bay (in Florida) as a stern marker, knowing I had to stay fifty feet outside the first post until I was lined up. I headed for the spot. THUD!!
	WHAT??? Reverse, max revs — Uh oh, no dice this time. The wind, the slope of the shoal, something, who knows? Ten minutes later, still no luck. Taking a moment to compose myself, I scanned the aft horizon with the flashlight. Oh, THERE it is! The missing third post — I mean, the first post. I’d gone past it on the wrong side, never even saw it, and had aimed for a spot fifty feet outside the second post. Heh heh, only missed by a hundred feet. Not one to give up without a fight, I kept at it, forward, reverse, left rudder, right rudder . . . and finally, after twenty minutes of anguish, Daybreak slowly crept astern and slid off. Whew! Thank yew, lord! I quickly got repositioned and entered the creek, easily this time, proceeded another mile using landmarks I'd memorized, to a point where further progress was going to require two adults. I anchored. You would have thought that by then I would have had enough.
	It was 8:30 p.m.. Rousing Roxanne, we launched the dinghy, attached the motor, headed upcreek to the house, ate dinner at last, and Roxanne crawled into bed. Lynn and I stared out the window through the sheeting rain, watching the creek. We needed six inches more water.
	By 10:30 p.m. we had it. I was a basket case by then, coming down with a cold, but we donned our sweatshirts, jackets and foulies anyway and headed out into the storm. Got to the boat. Brought the dinghy up on deck. Stowed the outboard. Started the diesel. Switched on the running lights. And raised anchor.
	Things went fine for about half a mile. We reached the first of two shoals which required very careful positioning, and ran aground. We backed off, repositioned, tried again — and ran aground again. And stayed there. We tried all the tricks that had worked before, including kedges bow and stern, but Daybreak wouldn’t budge. It was as if, having finally been run onto ground someplace that was absolutely safe, she’d decided the time had come to teach me once and for all the lesson I seemed determined to avoid: that cruising sailboats are supposed to spend their lives floating.
	At one a.m. we gave it up, left the anchors out, and headed home to bed knowing full well that high water had been reached — but I HAD to sleep, and Lynn could do nothing alone. Lynn steered the dinghy through the rain. I was simply beside myself. My boat was aground and not likely to be coming off for a couple of weeks (whenever the next southerly gale came along) — or worse, when the next sufficiently high astronomical tide occurred. Around June, say. With chills and a fever, I flopped into bed feeling like dog poop.
	Daylight came too soon. They say things always look better in the morning, but not this time. The sky was clear and the air was cold. That meant northerly wind, and all the water blowing out to sea. The creek was six inches lower than when we'd gone to bed. Daybreak was surely lying forlornly on her side in a tiny Alabama backwater she should never have been dragged into in the first place. I had failed her. I’d failed Lynn. I’d failed everyone, I was sick, I was disgusted, and I had no intention of getting out of bed, ever. My luck had finally run out.
	Lynn, however, was stalwart. She urged me to rise once more to the challenge.
	"Look," she said, "if there's any chance at all, it's now. We've got to try, one more time."
	"Lynn," I replied. "That boat weighs well over twenty thousand pounds, and its immersion coefficient is a thousand pounds per inch. There's six inches less water now than there was last night. That's six thousand pounds of downforce pushing the keel into the mud. There's no way." But in the back of my mind, remembering our breast-anchor technique while careening in Costa Rica, I realized there was one tactic I hadn't yet tried, and it held just the slimmest possibility . . . 
	Fighting the worst bitch of a cold I'd had in years, I staggered downstairs, struggled into sweats, jackets, and foulies once more, then sat in the dinghy as Lynn steered it down the creek. And there lay Daybreak, listing to starboard and mired hard. I got the bow anchor up into the dinghy — I don’t know how, given what it weighed — and Lynn reeled me in. I redeployed the stern anchor 250 feet off the port beam. Making my way back aboard, we duplicated the masthead anchoring rig we’d used in Costa Rica and started winching in line. Daybreak came upright and started tipping to port.
	We cranked and cranked. At fifteen degrees of heel I tried the motor. Nothing. More cranking. At twenty degrees, tiny bit of movement. Twenty five degrees, a bit more movement — just enough to show us that we were situated in a tiny pocket, with shallower water all around! We were once more defeated, ready to give up, when the cavalry arrived again.
	His name was Bill. Bill was old, retired, rich, lived nearby, and owned a 64 foot Hatteras that drew six inches more than Daybreak. There was, he said, a slight channel going across the creek to his dock that he had personally dredged using his twin three-bladed props and about a thousand turbo-diesel horsepower. He'd seen me go up the creek the previous night and had known at the time I'd never make it, but it had been raining so hard he'd decided to forego the joy of assisting. Now, in the morning, there he was with his lugubrious old floppy-eared hound named Earl, in a 21 foot center-console skiff with a single 225 horsepower outboard. He said it could go 65 miles per hour without even putting the sun awning down. The man was into power.
	Skeptical but desperate, we passed him a line and hooked the other end to our bow cleat. And slowly, with Bill pulling, our motor pushing, the anchor out to the side, heeled over 35 degrees with the anchor line bar-taut and our $25,000 carbon fiber mizzen mast protected by nothing but the skinny little running backstay, we literally dragged that boat bodily over a hundred feet of mud into a tiny channel barely five feet from the reeds on the shore. Frantically we dropped the halyard, unreeved the anchor line, buoyed it off with a fender, and tossed it over the stern. We motored out into eight feet of water and anchored at last.
	There was no joy or exultation, just a persistent ache inside, and the knowledge that Daybreak was once again floating, as she ought to be. There she sat for the next two weeks, ten minutes down the creek by dinghy, where she should have been all along, lying to her own ground tackle which had never failed her in three years. We went back to pick the stern anchor up out of the mud, and then "home" again, to bed, where I intended to stay for awhile.

	We had two weeks left in Alabama before our self-imposed departure date of February 15th. The boatwork list had been whittled down, but it was clear that we'd again leave with much left undone. But leave we would. It was time to be afloat again, time to find warmer climes (it had snowed one night), time to see the shore from the sea rather than the other way around. Time to stop the bank account hemorrhage that always happened when we were ashore or fixing the boat. Lynn had just finished updating our accounts. We had just enough for another year plus enough after that to start over again on land — barely. We had toured Lower Alabama thoroughly. We liked it, and might yet return. But now it was time to go.
	We spent an entire day at Wal-Mart just buying the nonperishable goods for the next four months — nine hundred dollars’ worth, and the cold provisions would add another hundred at least. Our largest provisioning yet, it filled the bed of the truck, and it surely was going fill Daybreak. Back to the house at 4:15 p.m., we sat the girls in front of a video and started ferrying groceries down the creek. The first dinghy load was only one fifth of the total, yet already Lynn was groaning for lack of space. Our feet and legs ached from standing and walking all day, and Lynn still intended to make cookies that night for a tea she was having the next day for all our Alabama friends who’d been so good to us. The girls were being wonderful. They did really well whenever they simply had to. Real troopers. They crashed early that night, even before the cookies got made. Very unusual for them. Lynn and I would have liked to do the same! How could we have been there for over two months and still be rushing like fiends at the end? It was like leaving L.A. a year earlier. We still hadn't learned when to call a halt to preparations.
	At noon on February 14th, after one last errand in the truck, we parked it in the garage, locked the house, and dinghied out to Daybreak, where we spent a quiet afternoon and evening preparing ourselves to be cruisers again. In the morning, our big Bruce anchor would come up out of the Alabama mud at last.

Chapter 16
Western Florida:  Your Money Or Your Life

	The anchor did come up in Palmetto Creek, only to go down again twelve miles later in Big Lagoon, FL, where it stayed for seven days. Our destination was Tampa Bay, 295 miles ESE across the corner of the Gulf of Mexico, so naturally the wind blew twenty knots from the ESE for a week. Having beat to windward just about once too often in Daybreak, we chose to wait, and finally left under power in calm conditions under a clear sky. We were glad for the enforced inactivity, though, and used the time to explore the Gulf beach and barrier island areas around our well-protected anchorage.
	Once underway, the clear conditions lasted about an hour. Then fog. Thick fog. We forged nervously ahead using the radar until 0300, when 12 knots of wind sprang up exactly from ESE again, still in fog. An hour later the wind was 18 knots, and by 0730 it was 22 with a building sea. Our forward progress was almost nil and our fuel consumption prodigious.
	Something we should have figured out earlier but had only recently realized is that wave height is proportional to the square of the wind velocity. This means that while a ten knot headwind only raises one-foot seas, at twenty knots they're five feet, by twenty five knots they're eight feet, and at thirty knots you're looking at eleven foot seas. On Daybreak, we generally stopped motoring when the wind over the deck got above twenty knots, because by then our speed would be down to three and a half knots and our mileage to three mpg (from a normal of eight). On a 300-mile passage with a 91-gallon fuel tank . . . Well, it was time to start sailing. We pre-reefed the sails, hoisted, and got set for a loooong day.
	It was soon clear we would not make Tampa by nightfall. Even after reaching the sea buoy, it would still be fifteen more miles in the ship channel to the first tenable anchorage. We knew the right answer by then: slow down, stay comfortable, and enter at sunrise. This plan worked fine until 1930 hours when, fifteen miles from the sea buoy, with Lynn already in bed asleep, Roxanne and I spent a busy hour dodging shrimp boats and two ocean-going tugs pulling barges. Suddenly there was a lot of traffic. Around Tampa Bay, as in Panama, it never stops. When a windshift lifted us onto the direct course for the sea buoy, under a clear sky and a nearly full moon — and low on fuel — I had a choice: dodge ships all night under sail, or run for cover. We headed for the sea buoy.
	Once in the channel, ship after ship crowded us against the shoals outside the buoys before we could get in behind Egmont Key. When a beast five hundred feet long and weighing a hundred million pounds comes at you down a channel one ship-length wide, you want to be in water so shallow that the ship will run aground before it can hit you. We got the anchor down a couple hundred yards off the harbor pilot station inside the key, and hit the sack at 0230 after three days at sea, just as it started raining. Hard rain. What timing. Can you imagine lying offshore all night dodging ships, under sail, in the rain?
	We’d caught another big yellowfin tuna, and got a good fifteen pounds of meat off it. Now that we had the fixin’s on hand, Roxanne and I had been gobbling down sashimi. We cooked the remainder for storage. Fish won’t stay fresh long, and there’s a big difference between "fresh" and "sushi-fresh". "Sushi-fresh" means you catch it, you carve it the moment it stops twitching, and you eat it immediately, raw. With enough soy sauce, wasabe, and ginger, I think I could have eaten that entire fish. Don’t try this with supermarket tuna.
	By morning the wind had shifted north and we were unprotected, so after a quick breakfast we scooted down Tampa Bay and into the ICW, through two quick bascule bridges, stopped for fuel, and came to rest 49 miles later in a rain-spitty corner of Sarasota Bay. In eight feet of water, we were protected by barrier islands from every conceivable threat.
	Suddenly we were in "the real Florida". It would have been wonderful except for all the people and houses. I know this is obvious, but if all you can see in a place is people and houses, then what that place is about is people and houses, regardless of what it might once have been. Having experienced the Gulf of Montijo in Panama, we could see what had been lost in Florida. Sarasota Bay was the Gulf of Montijo transplanted into the U.S., and it was just the warm-up. An area as lovely as anything we'd seen in Central America had been ruined by too damned many people and too damned much money, a fatal combination.
	After two more days and eighty more miles, something had flipped inside of us. Some deadbolt had chunked into place that would never open again. Lynn described her reaction as "physically sick". I was verging on revulsion myself. Which is odd, because nothing we saw was unprecedented in our own prior experience. Anchored at Kitchel Key in the evening, in the artificial light of a condo development near Sanibel Inlet, it was certainly no worse than, say, the Marina City Club back in Marina del Rey, which hadn’t nauseated us at the time. We hadn't liked it, and we knew that it was part of what we wanted to leave behind, but it hadn’t seem abnormal.
	Now it was clear to us how utterly abnormal everything in our country is. We'd seen Costa Rica, Panama, Guanaja, and Belize, all of which, like Florida, have innumerable mangrove islands and keys, hundreds of square miles of quiet, protected water. But with fewer people to intrude in those countries, those who did "intrude" not only weren’t objectionable, they were welcome. At Kitchel Key things had gotten so out of whack that there wasn’t even a nighttime. The glow from the condos banished natural darkness, and we missed it. We found ourselves asking: What is going on here? What has happened to us? Why are we feeling this way? Why do we think this is wrong, and why does it happen here and not other places?
	Of course it came down to people and money again, too much of both, but the money was only a symptom of something deeper, something that only happens when large numbers of people live in close proximity and share the societal agreement that products are what will most improve our lives. We compete for products, and manufacturers compete for us. The money, great gobs of it, comes out of that.
	Daniel Quinn wrote,:

"We live in a society that is chock full of products but leaves many of our most fundamental and most urgent needs unanswered. Needs for which no product can provide a solution. This seems very obvious, of course, but there's also something here that is not so obvious. Our entire economy is based on making and getting products. The more we make, the more we get, and the more we get, the more we want, which keeps us and our consumerist economy going. All our economic exchanges take place in a matrix of competition." [my italics]

	This seems pretty close to the root of it. Not so much that there is development, but that it is based on the assumption that there must be, will always be, economic winners and losers, and that winners will always do whatever they can to distinguish themselves from losers. Otherwise, as James Carse pointed out in Finite and Infinite Games, they haven’t won. Therefore, people at the top of the economic food chain compete with each other to live in the nicest places in the country, while those with progressively less money compete for progressively less attractive digs nearby — still within the urban complex, because that's where they must work. That's where the money is. It doesn't matter WHO has more or less money, it only matters THAT there will be money. If it exists, we will compete for it, and when we get it we will spend it in an effort to distinguish ourselves from lesser competitors. The property value structure, the drive to own and exploit the most scenic areas, the need to build ever larger houses on ever more attractive homesites, come directly out of the fact that we Americans relate to one another as competitors. As if life weren’t hard enough already, we compete with each other for everything in this society simply because we’ve chosen to value only commodities of which there is a limited supply.
	You may think this is a tautology. You may think value is defined by a limited supply. It is not. It is defined by a limited supply of something you have chosen to value. Supply and demand create value, not just supply. This becomes clear when you consider, say, the value of diamonds to a gorilla.
	All around us between Tampa Bay and Sanibel Inlet we saw the physical manifestations — real estate, boats, cars, stores, restaurants, etc. — of a glaring and obvious economic pecking order, for position within which people were competing intensely and had competed for their entire lives. We also noticed a feeling in the air that is exactly what you would expect when everyone is at each other's throats economically, every hour, day and night, seven days a week. On weekends Floridians compete for the "best" places to go in their boats. They compete to have the fastest boat so they can get there before everyone else and get the "best spots", and they compete to have the biggest, most luxurious boat so they can experience a maximum of comfort and a minimum of inconvenience once they get there. Boats being boats, there is a tradeoff between big slow boats with lots of amenities and small fast boats that can get there quickly, so Floridians compete to strike the right (competitive) "balance" between the two. The obscenely rich make the obvious competitive adjustment: big and fast, which anyone familiar with boats will tell you is insanely expensive. In our country, the analysis of such considerations and the choice among such options are what we are pleased to call "expressing a consumer preference" — voting with your wallet. In this country there is no other way to vote. Without money, you are disenfranchised. The bottom line in Pine Island Sound, which is the only place there is to go by boat if you live in Fort Myers, is that if you're not already where you want to be by noon on Saturday, then don't even bother showing up, because all of the "most desirable places" will be full. In other words, YOU LOSE!
	Imagine how a weekend spent like this prepares a person to deal with Monday morning. Then during the week Floridians compete to be in a position to leave work early on Friday. We watched this happen. We were making our way down Lemon Bay toward Boca Grande on a Friday afternoon when suddenly, around three p.m., the waterway exploded with activity, motorboats everywhere, moving suddenly and with purpose. At five p.m. it stopped as if a switch had been thrown. In the morning (Saturday) we sailed down across Charlotte Harbor, past Boca Grande, and into northern Pine Island Sound, where we passed between two small keys, Useppa Island and Cabbage Key. Each had a little marina or two, a couple of restaurants, a store, and a fuel dock for weekending boaters, some of whom had already arrived. These keys were the local weekend destinations. A mile or two later, while ghosting southward on a peaceful morning, we were suddenly confronted by an oncoming armada of powerboats thundering from the south with dark purpose. The order of march was clearly speed über alles: first the cigarette boats, then runabouts, then fast cruisers, then cabin cruisers, then trawlers and luxury megayachts, all heading to that tiny pair of "rustic, outlying" keys thirty miles from Fort Myers and Cape Coral. By noon this parade was OVER, and we resumed our delightful sail through a deserted Pine Island Sound and into San Marcos Bay, undisturbed by wakes. Later in the afternoon, we even saw a few sailboats.
	Some people didn’t join this parade, because they’d already won. They had successfully out-competed the parade of boaters, and everyone else for that matter, for waterfront digs so splendid that they didn't want or need to go anywhere else for the weekend — or during the week either, if they had enough loot stashed away. They spent their Saturday morning sitting in deck chairs under sun umbrellas (or gazebos) on the ends of their docks, drinking tall iced beverages and watching the parade pass by, thus demonstrating wordlessly but eloquently to even the dimmest wit that ultimately, competing by boat just didn’t cut it. The boaters, it was apparent, had already lost the larger game.
	Now don’t be thinking that I think all this is particular to Florida. It is not. If this does not correlate with something in your own experience, wherever you live, I might well ask what planet you have been living on. Back in California, the weekly parade to Catalina Island was just the same, and we were very familiar with it. The same went for the Mammoth Mountain ski area, the Sierra Nevada backpacking areas, the SoCal "local" mountain picnic areas and camping spots, lakes and rivers for waterskiing, desert areas for off-road driving and motorcycling, beaches to lie on, surf to ride, parking places to park in, stores to shop in, movies to see (or even rent), and that was just on the weekends! And what about at work? We all know how competitive that is. Isn’t it clear that we Americans are in competition with each other every waking minute?
	Lynn and I had simply never been in a position to see this before. Cruising on Daybreak, we had experienced fifteen solid months of no competition, and in fact a great deal of real cooperation in its place. The cruising community is massively intradependent by comparison with any normal American town. To quote Quinn again:

“. . . while the exchange of products is the fundamental economic transaction of our currency-based society, the exchange of services is the fundamental economic transaction in what we condescendingly call "primitive" societies. Such societies are not rich in products, but they are decidedly rich in the things we Americans so painfully lack: community, shared vision and values, and security in every aspect of life from cradle to grave. In "primitive" societies, economic exchanges take place in a matrix of cooperation, as ours take place in a matrix of competition.”

	Security in every aspect of life? When was the last time you experienced that? Not since you were born, I'll bet. It's the competition that drives us all crazy, and makes western Florida the way it is.
	And eastern Florida? We’d give it a miss. We planned on coming no closer to it than fifty sea miles.

	We headed south in the early morning through the bascule bridge in the Sanibel Island Causeway, out into the Gulf again, heading for Marathon in the Keys. The short overnight hop terminated around noon the following day and wore us out. We had more than enough wind, which most of the time was too far forward for comfort, but the sailing was spectacular. We watched the moon rise over cloud banks into a clear starry sky while barreling along on a close reach at over seven knots with three reefs tied in. Wind over twenty knots, sails vanged down perfectly and looking great, the booms eased well out to starboard and flirting with the wave tops, the lee rail skating just above the water, Daybreak sailing herself under locked helm only, no autopilot. The nearly full moon lit the entire scene with cold silvery light while Orion and the Pleiades maintained station above the mastheads. There's something transcendental about twenty-odd thousand pounds of boat blasting through the night with no motor, no helmsman, and no moving parts.
	Naturally with all this speed we got to the Bahia Honda Channel, north of Marathon, about three hours before dawn, so we hove to and waited. Really. I think this was a first. The channel was a nail-biter. Six hundred feet wide, only six feet deep, in the middle of what appears to be the open ocean. With absolutely no landmarks or visual references of any kind, in water so murky there was no chance of seeing bottom, with a solid thirty knots of wind blowing across the fifty miles of Florida Bay . . .  How did people do this before GPS? The chart is very good, and six hundred feet is within civilian GPS accuracy (barely), so just after the sun broke the horizon we eased slowly through this mile-long tidal ditch under power, keeping the GPS crosstrack error below 180 feet (0.03 nautical mile). Then the wind veered south, forcing us to spend the next four hours pounding into the short chop making less than three knots, beneath rain squalls and thunderheads. Finally got the anchor down in Boot Key Harbor at midday. We were beat.
	This passage gave us a new appreciation for the term "shoal water". For 121 nautical miles, a fair fraction of which was spent over thirty miles offshore, the deepest water was twenty eight feet, and toward the end we breathed easy whenever the depth sounder showed more than seven. When there's only two feet of water under your keel, the wind is howling, and the sea is rough, navigational precision is essential. We had learned to dread the horrible *THUD*. After a lifetime of sailing in California, we were not used to shallow water.
	We had beaten a large frontal system by a day or two. There was nothing dramatic in its approach, so I took no special precautions (and didn’t know any better), but then one of the local liveaboards came around asking if we needed any help resetting our anchors or setting out more of them. I was nonplussed. We had followed the local practice of setting a Bahamian Moor, which I disliked (and was about to learn to loathe), but we were forced into it by the crowded conditions and the fact that everyone else was doing it. We told this Samaritan, in some bewilderment, that we thought we were OK. The wind had been blowing 20 - 25 knots ESE to SE for two days. We were not yet sufficiently versed in eastern U.S. weather to know what this meant. It meant that the mother of all fronts about to strike. The strength of a front, we would soon learn, can be gauged by the southeasterly preceding it. Just multiply the southeasterly wind two or three, and you’ll have a good estimate of what the initial wind will be behind the front. After that it tapers off. Everyone but us seemed to know this. Everyone else, we learned later, listened religiously to the NOAA marine weather. Not us. Since there was no such thing in Central America, we were out of the habit.
	When the rain started pelting down, we blithely went about collecting water. Then a sudden 180º wind shift left us lying to our smallest anchor. Seconds later the wind was howling 45 knots as the water around Daybreak turned white, the anchor pulled loose, and we were careening downwind sideways, certain to hit at least one boat before the main anchor could fetch us up. Yelling for Lynn to start the motor, I ran to fend off the bow of a thirty footer that was about to T-bone our starboard side. We hit it going five knots sideways, but I managed to deflect its bow enough to scrape by without damage. We were lucky . . . but then the dragging anchor, a 20 pound Danforth Hi-Tensile, got a bite again and brought us bow-to-wind with a jerk — exactly alongside the boat I’d just deflected and about ten feet away. In winds like that, Daybreak will sail back and forth forty feet or more, happened all the time, so it would only be a matter a minute or two before we'd hit our neighbor. Using the motor I managed to keep us clear while Lynn eased out another thirty feet of scope. We drifted astern, and there we sat: hanging once again on two anchors, one of them apparently fouled with that of the boat next door. With other boats crowded all around, we were in no position to take another windshift. All this took place, I should note, in a fully protected anchorage only seven feet deep, with a thick mud bottom. No wave action at all.
	Once the wind dropped to twenty knots, I donned snorkeling gear and dove to our secondary anchor to see if it was fouled. It was not — by a hair. I tried raising it from the dinghy, but it was too well buried. The shackle was elbow-deep in the mud, and the rest of it was below that. I could see that even using our stern anchor winch, it wasn't going to come loose. We were going to have to yank it up with Daybreak's own momentum, from between two other boats, in half a gale, less than an hour before darkness.
	We buoyed it off, cast its rode overboard, raised the main anchor, and then began the ticklish process of retrieving the Danforth, its forty feet of chain, and three hundred feet of rode, without hitting anybody or sucking the rode into our prop. Lynn did the grunt work while I tried to maintain position. We failed the first time, and she had to jettison the entire pile instantly while I circled to try again. The second time, she managed to get her hands on the chain just as I brought the bow over the anchor. She took a quick wrap around the mooring cleat, and I motored forward to break it loose. It came, and we wandered off to find a new spot just as daylight faded.
	We had anchored on one hook all over Central America, in much deeper water, sometimes in crowds just as thick, and never had a problem. My longstanding belief that there is only one situation where multiple anchors are appropriate — when the anchorage itself is too small for one boat to swing on one hook — remained unshaken. The experience left us with some trepidation concerning the Bahamas, where, as you might guess, the Bahamian Moor is popular. This was the last time we used our stern anchor for the purpose, switching to our 60 pound Danforth Hi-Tensile "storm" anchor instead. Given that we had no windlass with which to raise it, we were going to be getting a lot of exercise in the months to come.
	Afterwards, all the local were quick to tell us, "This was nothing. During the ‘Storm Of The Century’ a few years ago, we had 100 mph winds here for eight hours."
	"Yeah," I responded, "but that was a hurricane."
	"Oh no, that was only a front, just like this one."
	Huh?
	The light was beginning to dawn.

	Two days under sail had not erased our reaction to western Florida, and Marathon brought it home with a vengeance. Having passed the halfway point in our available cruising time (I mean money), at some point we would need to start thinking about what to do afterwards. But we’d gotten "spoiled". We didn’t want our old life back. We wanted something along the lines of what Daniel Quinn had called "a new way to live", but it seemed that no matter where we finally settled down, if it were in the U.S. our lives weren’t likely to end up being much different than they’d been before. We hadn't left that lifestyle to take on cruising as a new lifestyle. For us, cruising was temporary. We’d left in order to provide ourselves time to think about how to start again, time to get away from American life, to give our minds and hearts a chance to roam in freedom, and see what came up. A lot had come up. 
	Most of it will sound familiar to you. We noticed that our culture values things over people. We are more interested, for example, in the price, size, and style of our houses, cars, and clothes than in the number and quality of our relationships, and yet the things we own do not give us the satisfaction, security, and sense of well-being we really desire. We noticed that as Americans we value money more than time. We spend forty, fifty, sixty or more hours a week in an effort to increase our "standard of living", yet the money we earn can't buy back the time we spent earning it, doing things we don't enjoy in places where we can't be ourselves. We noticed the absurdity of corporations that profess a dedication to teamwork, shared responsibility, and "excellence" while their own internal cultures are thick with cutthroat personal competition and the reality that any failure will be excused if you aren’t "at fault". We noticed that a tremendous loss of leisure has occurred here, contrary to what we were all taught, as schoolchildren, to expect in this brave new technological age. We work harder today than human beings have ever worked in the history of this planet, though there has been absolutely zero change in the basic requirements of living. We noticed that products — more, better, different, new, improved, innovative, imaginative products — exert the most extraordinary power over us. We shop not to buy what we need, or even want, but rather to narcotize our discontent — and to learn what more there is to want, and buy. Our children literally don't know "what they want for Christmas" until they watch a few hours of Saturday morning cartoons and see the ads. Or spend a morning in Wal-Mart. If TV disappeared tomorrow, the toy industry would crash and burn the day after.
	In the community of cruisers, we noticed that in order to have a community people must have real time to spend with their neighbors. But to get that kind of time in America, we’d have to stop working five days out of every week and stop spending the other two days shopping for new products and performing maintenance on the products we already bought. We noticed that even the poorest people we met in Central America, in fact, especially the poorest, have much more time "off" than we have here, time to hang out with each other, time to converse, time to spend with one's own and one another's children — so much time, in fact, that the very notion of "spending time" is a complete non sequitur there. People "spend" what they perceive there is a shortage of, but in Central America there is no shortage. They have more time on their hands because they don't require as much to live. They don't need as much money because there's less they need to buy and fewer places to buy it. I’m not saying they live a superior lifestyle, or that it’s one you or I should want, but that is largely because you and I have grown up in a world full of money and endless ways to spend it.
	Sadly, now their world is starting to look more like ours. Our experience of the people in these countries was primarily one of sadness, because while historically they come from a "primitive" culture of small, close-knit communities, their present surroundings and culture have become "modern". Given the opportunity, they quickly opt for more things and money than they now have. But if they knew nothing of our culture, would they be so quick to crave its products? It is interesting that in the Amazon rainforest, when the expansion of modern civilization encroaches on the home range of a primitive tribe, its people don’t run out of the jungle, to join up. They run into the jungle, to hide.
	In Alabama when we visited the local Wal-Mart, our first "real" store in over a year, we went absolutely nuts. There's very little that can't be bought at Wal-Mart. With a house to stay in, a car to drive, and stores like that, we succumbed. Our daily expenditures instantly doubled. At that rate we would soon exhaust our savings, and our cruise would end. This doubled "burn rate" continued literally until the day we moved back aboard, at which point it ceased abruptly. Though Lower Alabama is a profoundly beautiful place, we spent our time there shopping, not cruising. In fact, we did no cruising AT ALL there.
	From these experiences, I concluded that the moment by moment unfoldment of our daily lives in America is controlled by our relationship to products and the product culture, and that it is in fact an addiction. I could not possibly begin to deal with it unless I first became conscious of its existence and the nature of its influence. We Americans are addicts in a culture within which this particular addiction is transparent — unrecognized and unrecognizable. Lynn and I could wish for "a new way to live" until hell froze over, but would not have a prayer of creating one as long as our phenomenal addiction to consumerism remained unconscious. The first brick in the edifice of a new life would have to be the breaking of this addiction. We could talk all day about what was happening "out there", in the culture, but the problem was not out there, it was "in here", inside us. Alabama had proved to us that we were dyed-in-the-wool, dues-paying, life-member consumerist addicts, right down to our toenails, and then Florida rubbed it in. We had a few months left in which to figure out how to get a grip on our addiction, and then to figure out what to do then.

	In the midst of such considerations, we had the logistical requirements of living to take care of, which at that moment meant *ahem* shopping. We needed to find a grocery store and top off our larder, because word had it that groceries in the Bahamas were going to be expensive. One cruiser had said, "Anything you want to eat down there, take it with you!" As usual, we unearthed the location of the nearest supermarket by asking around the fleet, and also found out the best place to tie up the dinghy while shopping: alongside a rock ledge by an empty lot at the furthest northeast corner of Boot Key Harbor. Armed with this information, off we went.
	About four hours later, we negotiated the dicey trip through the afternoon chop back to Daybreak, loaded to the gunwales, got everything aboard, and began the laborious process of finding stowage for all of it. It was time to go. We'd seen enough of Florida to know that its basic culture is sort of like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing paeans to real estate development, and Marathon was just a bunch of has-been strip malls with a four-lane highway down the middle. We decided to leave for the Bahamas in the morning.

Chapter 17
This Bright, Blue Paradise: The Central Bahamas

	We departed Boot Key Harbor at mid-day after fueling up, and sailed 20-odd miles east up the "Key-chain" to Long Key Bight, where we dropped anchor for the night in 5' 9" of water. We measured — carefully. It was already three hours past low tide. We'd be seeing a lot of shallow water over the next three months. Might as well start getting used to it.
	We had a 24 hour weather window starting around noon the next day. We could just make it to South Riding Rock on the edge of the Great Bahama Bank before a northerly churned the Gulf Stream into a maelstrom. The next leg would take us across seventy nautical miles of wide open marine wilderness utterly devoid of land, nearly devoid of aids to navigation, and nowhere deeper than fifteen feet. Scary. Since we couldn't do that in a day (and only a fool would sail the Bank at night), we planned to anchor out in the middle of nowhere and hope the wind didn't blow too hard.
	The Stream pushed us faster than we expected, so we passed South Riding Rock in the wee morning hours and aimed instead for North Cat Cay. Everything went swimmingly until we tried to anchor, whereupon something went *clink* inside the windlass as Lynn tried to stop the chain, and, rather than braking to a stop, Daybreak continued on backward toward the rocks! Hearing Lynn's panicked cry I stopped the boat, then ran forward to help grab the chain. Lynn had managed to stop it before all three hundred feet ran out of the locker, and had gotten a loop wrapped around a cleat. We put the snubber on and were safe for the moment, but the innards of the windlass were no longer connected to the "out-ards". It spun freely.
	Without a windlass, Daybreak's anchor gear is pretty much unmanageable in anything other than a dead calm. The wind was southwesterly ten to fifteen knots with two to three feet of swell and chop right into the open, rocky bight where we were anchored. Bad news. The front would presumably bring a northerly, a direction from which we would be protected, but its strength was predicted to be  25–35 knots, and if the Gulf Stream seas managed to sneak around the point . . . well, the prospect of being immobile in such conditions was unthinkable. We had to leave while we could. We also needed to be near a phone and a place where we could receive air shipments of parts. South Cat Cay, home of the upmarket Cat Cay Club and Marina, was just a few hundred yards away. We could slip through the pass, around the corner, tie up for a few days, order the parts we needed, and spend our spare hours at the pool. No problem! We called up on the radio, asked about dockage — YIKES! Very pricey. We decided to have breakfast and think it over.
	One breakfast later I was poring over the charts looking for alternatives and found — ta da! — Bimini, just eleven miles further north, it reportedly had a good anchorage (and cheaper marinas, if necessary), solid 360º protection, and daily air service to Miami. Off we went. And when we got there . . . wow.
	The scenery was just plain astounding. Heart-stopping colors, like something out of a Jantzen swimsuit ad, all azure and pale ice blues, aquas, greens, and pinks. Astonishing. We boggled that a patch of Earth could look so much like art. We always thought Winslow Homer had dressed things up a little. Not so. If you saw a photo of it, you'd think a professional studio had airbrushed the print. On the way in, we first saw bottom at ninety feet.
	Which is not to say the entrance was easy. With onshore conditions, a low tide, and a channel that snaked in behind a sandbar and then tightly hugged a rocky lee shore for a mile in depths as shallow as six feet, we had little leisure in which to gaze rapturously seaward at the Winslow Homer colors. Daybreak was rolling rail-to-rail and yawing wildly in the steep quartering seas while I manhandled the helm and sweated bullets watching the depthsounder. The keel was feeling bottom suction. A foot of clearance in rough water, on a lee shore, when the bottom is solid rock, is not enough. Couldn't slow down, though. We'd have drifted aground in moments. We began to breathe again as we passed behind the sheltering tip of North Bimini Island into Alicetown Harbor.
	The anchorage lies over a narrow strip of tide-scoured bottom, with Alicetown to the west and to the east several miles of very thin water that nearly dries at low tide. Protected though it is, the bottom is problematic. Much of it is slab limestone with a thin layer of coral sand over it, so you can't tell rock from sand until your anchor goes clank. The deeper pockets tend to collect sand, and that is where you drop anchor — but not before you find two such holes, because an absence of swinging room demands two anchors. This is especially crucial at Bimini, because its anchorage is also the seaplane runway. There were two arrivals and two departures each day, at times with no more than a few feet of clearance between the plane’s wingtip and Daybreak's rail! Sometimes, on a high tide, they'd edge over onto the shoals to gain room. Ninety knots in ten inches of water. What do you suppose they tell the passengers? Probably nothing.
	The harbor was populated with four-foot manta rays which cruised the bottom endlessly when they weren't jumping six feet clear of the water. Maybe they're harmless, but we didn't feel like swimming. Their smaller cousins, the bat-rays, inhabited the shallows. They were visible from hundreds of feet away as black blotches gliding across a sparkling blond expanse. In a dinghy it was possible to sneak up within a foot or two before they'd dart away. What a fantastic spot. We could see we'd be there a few days. The windlass could wait.
	When I got around to attacking it, results were mixed. After removing both gypsies I discovered that the screws holding the case cover on — stainless steel in aluminum — were electrolyzed so badly that I couldn't get the windlass open. That was the bad news. The good news was that in the process of working the chain gypsy off the shaft, something inside went *clink* again, and the windlass shaft re-engaged itself. Fine, I thought. I'll take it. Turned out the internal ratchet had simply stuck open. I actually had to read the manual to figure this out. (I resort to extreme measures occasionally.) Probably just low on lube oil. Don't know why. Maybe because I'd never put any in. None had ever leaked out, after all, and the oil level sight window was opaque. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. I poured in some of 90 weight, tested the ratchet, pronounced it fixed, and buttoned it up. There was never a peep out of it afterwards. I like problems like that.
	Bimini harbor was a place of peace and serenity until 0730 the next morning. Alicetown harbor is packed with spectacular sportfishing boats, and I mean major bucks. In that crowd a 40-footer is small and a 30-footer is a dinghy. Most of the competitors had boats in the 50'–60' range, and the largest in the harbor was a custom 72' Donzi prototype. This monster was not the "queen of the fleet", however. That honor went to a 60-footer called Showpiece, which lived up to its name in spades and put the rest of us in our places. Low, swoopy, and gleaming, with polished refrigerator-white hull and decks (no non-skid — too tacky), optically smooth mahogany caprails and upper steering station trim, a varnished transom so perfect you could see about six feet into the wood, a foredeck devoid of lifelines, rails, or pulpits because, you know, they would interfere with the classic lines . . .  And of course, the name Showpiece fifteen feet long in glittering iridescent gold leaf on the transom. The thirty-foot-high polished stainless steel tuna tower, the trolling outriggers, the racks of gleaming rods and reels — every single object on the boat was literally spotless, because every time that boat returned from even an hour on the water it was washed down with fresh water and chamoised dry, from the radio antennas right down to the waterline, by a pair of hired hands who worked from dawn until dusk daily. Judging by the gelcoat, the whole thing got compounded and power-buffed once a week. Showpiece set the standard for big bucks competition sportfishing in Bimini.
	When 7:30 rolled around, fifty gigantic pairs of diesels with exhaust pipes a foot in diameter roared to life and got underway, filed out into the harbor, and idled in place waiting for the 8:00 a.m. start signal. Fifty boats costing between $1 million and $5 million each, burning gallons of diesel a minute, with crews of seven to ten, all to go fishing! Does anyone understand this? The top prize money, lots of it, not jus' no steenking trophy, still wouldn't begin to pay for the tournament costs for even one of these guys. I say "guys" because you can't really imagine a woman going in all for this macho stuff, can you? Me neither, and we didn't see any — or at least, none in what you might call "active" roles. Some nice foredeck decor, though. Yeow.

	After they left and peace reigned once more in la-la land, we got ready to raise anchor. Five minutes later we no longer had an anchor roller.
	Due to shifting tidal currents, our two anchor rodes had gotten wrapped, and clever me tried to unwind them in current by motoring Daybreak around them. This probably wouldn't have worked even if we’d had a fin-keel, spade-rudder sailboat, which Daybreak sure as hell is not. STUPID!! And excruciatingly embarrassing. At least we still had the anchor platform. Didn't bust that, not that I can take much credit. There we sat, unable to raise or lower our anchors again. The conditions were mercifully mild, it was only 8:30 a.m., and we had until noon to leave if we wanted to leave that day. I walked forward to review the damage, then sat down in the cockpit to think. Lynn settled in with a good book as far away from me as the confines of Daybreak allowed, and maintained a circumspect silence. I was smoldering.
	Three hours later Daybreak had a new roller assembly kluged together out of some spare teak, a big stainless steel bolt, a spare polyurethane roller, and a bunch of fat sheet metal screws as long as my finger. As far as getting the anchor up and down, it worked. As far as taking the loads of being anchored, it wasn't going to get the chance. From then on the snubber would go through one of the bow chocks, not over the roller itself. I took all this as a signal that the whole mess needed to be rebuilt the way I'd always known it should have been in the first place, but that would have to wait. In the Bahamas, where a loaf of bread cost $2.75 and a gallon of milk costs $6.60, a custom TIG-welded platform wasn’t in the cards.
	It being not yet noon, we got the hell out of there and headed for our first "real" Bahamas anchorage, an overnight sail to the east. Labeled Great Harbour on the chart, it's a largish open bight on the Bank protected by Great Stirrup Cay (at the north end of the Berry Islands), in eight feet of water over sand and eel grass. The trip started out a bit raucously as the wind swung around in the wake of a mild little front, but as evening fell the breeze died, the sails slatted, and we motored slowly through the night in calm seas trying to avoid arriving before morning.
	Though it was only our second Bahamian anchorage, we already could see that nothing else in our experience could hold a candle to these islands, with the possible exception of the San Blas Islands — and the Bahamas chain is a hundred times the size of the San Blas and a whole lot closer to the States! Unless a person were hell-bent to do ocean passages, we’d say just forget all that drama and go straight to the Bahamas. West Coast cruisers included. Good grief, just buy a boat in Florida! There certainly are enough of them. The Bahamas group is 500 nautical miles long, 130 wide, and it's a cruiser's dream come true. Delightful in every season, it would take years to explore, and it all starts forty five miles from Miami Beach. Besides which, they speak English and accept American dollars. What more could you ask?
	That night another front passed, bringing 20–25 knot winds, but it was all over in a few hours with no rain. I got up at 0300 during the strongest gusts to check for chafe on the snubber. No problem. We lay securely while the wind whistled across 70 miles of the Great Bahama Bank, snug and warm in our beds, thinking that not once in three years had we been sorry we'd bought that big Bruce anchor. People laughed at the time, but it had not dragged once. Which is more than could be said for some others.
	Right around the corner was a perfect one-family beach, where we swam, built sand castles, washed our bodies, and lay out on beach towels — just us, on a jewel of a beach a hundred yards long, with the fabled gin-clear water, the powdered sugar sand, the hot sun, and our backs to a low bluff that provided a sunny lee. It was perfect.
	The Bahamas advertise with the slogan "It's Better In The Bahamas". It may be hyperbole, but it isn’t a lie. Cruisers go there from Canada, Europe, the Med, and the entire U.S. East and Gulf coasts, and many never leave. Why should they? There's no place better. We had three months to spend there, we'd only been there a week, and already we knew we'd have to come back some day. The sea and the islands there are lovely, the water is stunning, the sun is ever-present, the temperatures are comfortable, the humidity is mild, the winds are moderate most of the time, and the light and colors in the endless shallows are an absolute delight. The place seems divinely designed for boats — for sailing, for swimming, for lazing in the sun, for dozing in the shade, for being together with the ones you love, for being happy, for being whole, for being at peace.
	A fabulous evening ensued. Pasta salad with chicken and artichoke hearts for dinner. The kids to bed after stories. The soft soothing strains of Suzanne Ciani's The Velocity of Love on the stereo. A frigid bottle of our favorite cheap champagne between us while the girls snuffled and turned in their sleep, clutching their teddy bears. The stars sparkling down from the clear cool sky, a quarter moon glittering across water rippled by a light evening breeze. Our bow snugged up under the quiet lee of the low hills of the cay, and under our stern the magnificent expanse of the entire Great Bahama Bank. A few other boats a comfortable distance away, their hulls shining pale and ghostly in the moonlight, their cabin lights glowing warmly through the ports, their crews doing whatever they did of an evening, while we did likewise. The sea was the sea, the sky was the sky, and we were where we were supposed to be. No cars, no power poles, no roads, no telephone lines, no halyards slapping, no voices, no neighbors, no motion but a vague rocking to remind us distantly that we did indeed float, no noise but the occasional lapping of wind ripples against the hull, no cares except for each other, no concerns but the love we shared, the life we were spending together, and the luck which had brought us there.
	Lynn and I married each other in order to be together. We'd had children so we could be with them. For 482 days we four had been together every minute of every hour of every day. Modern psychologists and marriage counselors back on shore may advise more private time, more personal space, more separate friends and activities to punctuate the closeness of family life, but we had no such need. We had what we wanted — what we chose, for better and for worse. Once again, that evening, life was as good as life ever gets.
	And then, along about bedtime, it got even better.

	After one more stop in the Berry Islands, at Frozen Cay, we sailed on down to Nassau to buy a few groceries, fuel up, and head for the fabled Exuma Cays. The daysail from Nassau to Allan's Cay, near the north end of the Exuma chain, stands out for me as one of the transcendental experiences of my sailing life, and the anchorage, when we got there, boggled the mind.
	After threading our way out through the shoals and reefs around the east end of Nassau harbor, we set Daybreak up on an easy starboard close reach for the forty mile crossing. In a velvety light southwesterly breeze under a pale blue sky, we glided through three to six inch seas above a clean sand bottom accented every hundred feet or so by bright orange sea stars. We spent nine almost unbearably delicious hours watching the shadows of our sails slide silently across the rippled sand ten feet beneath our keel. We were making just enough speed to put a few gurgles in the wake. It was hot and the girls wanted to get wet, so they donned their safety harnesses and we lowered them over the lee side by their tethers, dropped them back aft of the transom, and towed them. They were screeching with delight! Conditions were so quiet, Lynn had the leisure to make a potato salad, and even conduct school belowdecks, after which most of the afternoon was spent sitting in the shade of the mizzen letting the breeze cool our skin while we stared into the water, transfixed. These Bahamas, we mused, are just something else. Lynn said the only way she could imagine a world more exquisitely beautiful would be on some alien planet.
“What can you imagine,” I asked, “that would be any better than this?”
"Oh, maybe pale pink water with gold glitter in it."
	I have a photograph of the anchorage at Allan's Cay, a slide actually, that I pull out and look at from time to time. Taken from the bow looking aft across the anchorage along Daybreak's starboard side, with the inflatable dinghy drifting alongside her quarter, she looks like she's stumbled accidentally into someone's swimming pool. The sand bottom is that white, and the water is that clear. Wind ripples refract the sun and play bright lines across the bottom in endlessly varying geometric patterns while sunglint sparkles off the surface. When I look at this photo, something happens in my heart. It is still hard, sometimes, to believe that such a place actually exists on this earth, though I have been there.
	We shared the anchorage. Allan's is the first stop in the Exumas for many southbound yachts — that's why we chose it. It's the best anchorage in the northern Exumas. Having arrived and taken a look around, it was clear that a person could get a pretty bad case of mañana fever down there. One crystalline anchorage after another, one pristine white beach after another, one warm sunny day after another, one glittering coral-studded snorkeling playground after another . . .  How does one hundred foot underwater visibility strike you? As long as the supplies (and refrigeration) held out, there'd be a strong temptation to just lay out under the awning and keep something tall and cool close by. Margaritaville.
	We wouldn't have been alone. No one around us was working very hard at life. We were looking at our itinerary sort of sideways and thinking, "Hmm. Maybe some changes would be in order here." Like, maybe we should just stay right there, for about a week, sailing the dinghy and learning to windsurf. Or, maybe sand down the cockpit coamings and, my god, varnish them! Maybe we should cut our average daily mileage in half, double our "down time".
	Maybe, we thought, we should just never leave.
	We lazed and explored for two days and then, figuring there must be more cays like Allan's to the south of us, we sailed twenty two miles down to Hawksbill Cay, just inside the north end of the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park. As we approached the anchorage, we were agape. Hawksbill is a skinny cay three miles long with no enclosed harbors, but no matter, its western shore is my candidate for "quintessential Exumas shoreline".
	The Bahama banks may be thought of as very large, very shallow bowls of land lying just below the surface of the ocean. They are perhaps thirty feet deep in the middle but shoal slowly upward toward the edges until there is almost no water at all at low tide, then they drop off abruptly into deep water. Though Bahamian tides are minuscule, as they occur the sea must flow on and off the banks in a very thin sheet over this edge. Therefore, it flows fast, like water over a dam spillway, twice daily in each direction. This action moves sand to the edges of the banks, where it collects in places and islands begin to form. These islands block the tidal flow, which becomes restricted to inter-island channels. The resulting increase in current scours these channels right down to bedrock but also brings sand preferentially to the ends of the proto-islands, causing them to become "C"-shaped (concave side toward the shallows). In time this concavity fills with sand, becomes dry land, collects a few wind-driven seeds, and sprouts foliage. The foliage stabilizes the new land so that new sand accretion can continue while older accretion begins to turn to limestone (the sand is made of coral). Over millennia an equilibrium is reached in which the tidal passes become quite narrow, swift, and deep. The amount of current that can reach the center of the banks thus diminishes, sand migration from center to edge virtually ceases, and the physical configuration stabilizes. What residual migration does continue results in slow growth of the islands toward the center of the banks, and consequent lengthening of the inter-island tidal channels. For this reason, the water on the banks side of these islands is very shallow, often for some miles offshore. In the Exumas, which lie in a NNW-to-SSE line 140 miles long, with banks to the west and mile-deep Exuma Sound to the east, it is commonly necessary to sail several miles out onto the banks following a tidal channel before one can turn and sail parallel to the island chain.
	At Hawksbill Cay, this geophysical process is illustrated to perfection. The exposed western shore, facing the banks, is lined from end to end with blindingly white crescent-shaped beaches which shelve off so slowly that over a hundred feet of sand becomes exposed when the tide drops twenty inches. In the most popular anchorage, near the southern end, yachts anchor a quarter mile offshore in six feet of water — and it's only that deep because, being close to the tidal channel, it has been slightly scoured by tidal eddies. Further north, near the waist of the island, you can't get so much as a flat-bottomed rowboat within half a mile of the beach at low tide. Inflatable dinghies, motors raised, must be towed shoreward on foot, and still end up anchored in ankle-deep water a hundred yards offshore.
	As if Hawksbill Cay's beaches were not already the perfect playland, a small lagoon with a dinghy-able inlet thirty feet wide opened through the beach near our anchorage. Inside, protected from breeze by limestone hills, lay a natural kiddie swimming pool seventy five yards across and three feet deep at high tide, with a perfect sand bottom. At low tide, portions of nearby sandbars dried out, forming the best sand castle playground we'd ever seen. With a plastic bucket and a table knife, we built everything from Mayan pyramids to Tolkienesque spires and castles.
	Hawksbill Cay also introduced us to a form of vegetation for which we developed an enduring affection: the casuarina tree. This stunted, scruffy looking pseudo-longneedle pine, a native of Australia, gets its name from the flightless cassowary bird which likes to shelter beneath its branches in that country, and well it should. A more peaceful heaven can scarcely be imagined. The tree’s thin structure and open foliage provide a shifting, lacy shade from the tropical sun while admitting the breeze almost unimpeded, producing a murmuring, whispering sigh that flows and ebbs. Utterly hypnotic. In the Bahamas they grow only in sand on or near the beach, and having once laid down beneath one, a person may simply not get back up for a few hours. Lying on my back looking up at the sky through the swaying branches, dozing occasionally, lost in reverie, I experienced a sense of peace and security I had not known since about the age of three. An overwhelming deja vú brought tears swelling into my eyes. In the presence of such an intense experience of childhood, there is infinite sadness in being an adult . . . yet only as an adult could I have been there. I sat up and moved over next to Lynn, who was sitting on a low branch with her legs casually crossed, watching her children play in the shallows. How ever will we stand, I wondered, working for a living again?
	It had been interesting to notice that every single yacht we had met in the Bahamas hailed from the east side of the Americas — the U.S., Europe, or Canada. Back on the main beach, a pair of cruisers, by way of small talk, asked us how we'd enjoyed the rocky, roll-y night we'd just had. Taken aback, we sort of hmm'd a bit and said, well, a foot of wind chop didn't seem all that bad. Looking puzzled, they asked,
	"So, uh, where are you from?"
	"Los Angeles."
	"Oh. That's unusual" . . . (pause) . . . "Um, wait a minute, you didn't sail here, did you?"
	"Yup, roger on that."
	But hey, what did we know? Maybe Hawksbill Cay counts as a rough anchorage in those parts.
	We spent two days there and sailed down to Warderick Wells.

	On a low rocky promontory overlooking the jewel-like cove at Warderick Wells sits the headquarters of the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, occupying one of the most picturesque scraps of real estate in all of the Bahamas. This cove, where only mooring is allowed (no anchoring), has large areas of sand flats that dry at low tide, between which are narrow, deep tidal cuts. The whole thing is surrounded by a few low rocky "cay-lets" which appeared capable of providing protection in most conditions. (We’d soon see. A front was coming.) Since the water is clear and varies in color with depth, the harbor looks like a watercolor dreamscape painted by a child who was only given blue, green, and white paint to work with. It was astoundingly lovely.
	Exuma Park is really something. It extends for twenty two nautical miles along the chain of the Exuma Cays, covers four miles of sea on either side, and boasts exactly one paid employee: Ray Darville, the Park Warden. Ranger Ray, as we called him, appeared at first to be somewhat dim and slow-witted, as if either slightly drunk or thoroughly stoned on marijuana, but he was neither. He turned out to be quite knowledgeable — he just couldn't put a complete English sentence together!
	It clearly took someone very special to do that job. What a wild operation he ran. Every last inch of every trail on the extraordinarily rugged island was cleared and blazed by volunteer labor and named after them. The headquarters itself had been largely built by volunteer labor and was staffed entirely by volunteers. All ongoing projects were being accomplished by volunteers, and all the headquarters electronics, wind generator, solar panels, computer equipment, library, and so on, had been contributed by yachties and other benefactors, virtually all non-Bahamian. The trail map of the island, and the inch-by-inch survey of the island it had required, had been done in 1989 by the crew of a yacht called Azimuth. Since only a few copies of the map were available (the nearest copy machine being in Nassau, a $300 plane ride away), hikers were required to return their maps after use.
	Ray had two small but speedy outboard skiffs (225 hp), and with these he patrolled the 176-square-mile Park area alone. Hunting for poachers with no sidearm or weapon of any sort, he was a man on a mission. First offense: minimum $500 fine for the skipper, maximum $500 fine per person aboard. Ray had personally shut down the $30,000 to $50,000 per week fishing industry of the small town of Black Point, which lay on Great Guana Cay just outside the park boundary but which was getting most of its lobster, conch, and grouper inside the park. Ray took exception to this. Though he described his actions as having had "an impact" on the town's livelihood, he had nonetheless recently managed, as a result of a hitch in flight schedules which left him stranded in the town overnight, to prove that he could still walk down Black Point's main street in the dark without being shot or stabbed. Ray, by the way, is white. The town of Black Point is emphatically not.
	Drug smugglers who used the Cays for drug drops got the same treatment — with respect to fishing, which is flat-out illegal inside the park. Ray would stop by and point out to them that while drug interdiction and firearms enforcement were not, repeat not, in his job description, wildlife protection most certainly was, and that if one of them should decide to combine pleasure with business by taking a few lobs for dinner before leaving the area, they'd deal with him again personally — and the Uzis they carried strapped around their necks weren't going to slow him down. Unless, of course, they shot him, in which case they were going to be in more trouble than they could possibly imagine, because their boat's description and location had already been radioed in. The Bahamas Defense Force would get them in the end.
	Most smugglers, needless to say, were sort of blindsided by all this.
	"You mean," they responded, "you'd be willing to die over a few crummy lobsters?"
	"That's a roger, my friend."
	With the result that he had never been challenged to prove it. Ray thus demonstrated himself to be either totally fearless or a few cards short of a full deck. Like I said, it ain't a job, it's a mission.
	Mooring fees there were $10 for one night, $15 for two nights, or $30 for a year's membership in the "Support Fleet", which included unlimited mooring. This was a no-brainer. We joined right up, and we've paid our dues every year since. How could any self-respecting cruiser not support that crazy operation? Yachties working full time on Park projects get free mooring and all their supplies paid for (unless they can donate some) — and meals too, sometimes. One volunteer who went there every year had gotten the Carolina Skiff Company to donate a 24-foot flat-bottomed patrol boat for the purpose of surveying and sounding the Park, and he had towed it down to Warderick Wells personally behind his 35-foot sloop. He had then used it to research and write a cruising guide to the Park, which is now sold only through the Park headquarters, with the proceeds benefiting the Park. That is some kind of dedication. We knew we'd have to come back someday.
	The Bahamas was in the process of spoiling us. It was doing something to us, and we could feel the change. The sun and breeze and ocean and sand, the colors, the exquisite visual and tactile experience of swimming in that perfect water, the warmth of the days, the balmy perfection of the nights, the pleasant ache of muscles after a morning of hiking and an afternoon swimming, the full moon sending its silver glitter across a quiet cove as the sun set on the opposite horizon . . . With the unprecedented (for us) fact that Daybreak, at least for awhile, seemed to be more or less working, what it all added up to was that we really had no reason to move from one place to another. What was one more perfect aquatic playground, more or less? What was one more exquisite beach, one more glorious expanse of glistening sand flats at low tide, one more coral garden for snorkeling, one more glowing sunset, one more cool drink in the cockpit at dusk? What’s wrong with HERE? Not a damned thing. Our silly itinerary, a work of pure fiction residing on my computer's hard disk as nothing more than the magnetic alignment of the spin dipoles of a few electrons, was the only thing that kept us going. How absurd.
	For this reason and no other, we moved seven miles, to Little Bell Island.
	Georgetown, our southernmost goal in the Bahamas, was at that point only seventy nautical miles away, yet we were beginning to wonder if we would ever get there. Since leaving Nassau we had made progressively shorter day-hops of 40, 22, 14, and 10 miles, each time to an anchorage more spectacular than the one prior, and we were spending longer in each one: two days, two days, four days, and now, at Little Bell Island, six days. At that rate, I figured, Daybreak would come to a complete halt about fifteen miles further down the Exumas. We would drop our anchor and simply never raise it again. Our week at Little Bell Island was as close to living in a dream as anything I have ever done.
	For the last mile into the anchorage Lynn had the conn from the bow, spotting dangers and directing me around them. She describes this challenging quarter hour as follows:
	"I don't know, Lane, it was kinda rough. I had to be up on the bow the whole way, and, you know, with the wind blowing like it was . . ."
	Five knots.
	" . . . some of those bottom formations looked ominously dark . . ."
	No depth less than sixteen feet.
	. . . "and dropping the anchor, that was sorta touchy . . . "
	Ten feet of depth over perfect white sand, and hardly a ripple on the water. Once down, the lettering on the shank could be read with perfect clarity from on deck.
	"We may have to stay here a few days and rest up for the next passage!"
	Yes, indeed.
	A few minutes later, while staring out across the flats with a cold drink in hand, Lynn asked:
	"How long could we stay here if we wanted to?"
	I had guessed this would be coming, having had the same question myself. I had already consulted the itinerary.
	"Seven days."
	"Including today?"
	"No, today counts as a passage day."
	"Oh, right." We’d come less than a mile.
	Having read of some reputedly excellent snorkelling along a reef on the edge of Conch Cut about a mile south of there, Lynn organized the family for an outing and we pushed off in the dinghy around mid-morning. From the dinghy it looked a little scary for the kids —  a "real" coral reef, starting in sand flats in two feet of water and sloping off to about thirty feet at the dropoff, with a fair tidal current running along it onto the Bank. Our plan was to "drift dive", where you float along over the reef with the current, watching the scenery while hanging on to the dinghy painter. I got in the water first, as usual. I always check the lay of the land before we let the girls in, looking for shallow spots, fire coral, sharks, and barracuda. Having splashed in with my mask on, I was back on the surface two seconds. "It's incredible!" I gushed. The underwater scenery, which looked simply interesting from the dinghy, surpassed description when viewed through the dive mask. Every conceivable type of coral, every conceivable color — brain coral, staghorn coral, tube coral, fan coral, sponges, reds, greens, purples, yellows, blues, browns, tans — in depths of four to fifteen feet and water so clear it was like floating in air. Horizontal visibility was in excess of a hundred feet, beyond which the scene simple faded into a deep, hypnotic blue, bounded below by the coral garden and above by the mirrored water surface. Roxanne commented, after regaining the dinghy, "I think that's the most beautiful place I've ever seen!" Lynn was gaping. Nothing had prepared us for the possibility that such a spectacle could exist in nature.
	People who go there from the East Coast, we wondered, what must they think? Do they think the Exumas are normal? Do they carry that image with them as a standard against which to judge the rest of cruising? What disappointment must they experience as they move on to the Lesser Antilles and Venezuela? It doesn't get any better. From the Exumas outward, slowly in all directions, it just degrades. Among experienced cruisers, Georgetown is known as Chicken Harbor because so many cruisers "chicken out" there as they face the ocean passages and upwind sailing that lie ahead of them — a stretch nicknamed by one cruising guide author "The Thorny Path" — but maybe part of it is that when people consider leaving the Exumas to go elsewhere, they simply can't think of any good reason why they should. We had yet to arrive in Georgetown, and had already reached that point.
	If transcendent scenic beauty were the only objective of cruising, then truly there was no point in budging. In cruising there's always only one reason to move on to some new location. As in mountain climbing, you go "because it's there". Depending on the place, it may not always seem at the time as if it is worth being there. But it is always worth having been.
	We needed a new challenge, I decided, so I broke the windsurfer out of its lashings. This would be our third attempt.
	We had three advantages this time. First, we were in quiet water. No jet ski wakes. Second, we had some wind, five to seven knots, which is perfect. Third and most important, we had instructions, received from an old friend from mine from childhood, whom we had visited while in California. He had taught a number of people to windsurf, had figured out exactly what a novice windsurfer needs to hear, and had spent about ten minutes relaying it to me. I quickly discovered he was absolutely right.
	I had, theretofore, managed to "sail" that board a rickety and precarious grand total of perhaps a hundred feet in three or four one-hour sessions. This time, I got right up on it without a single introductory fall and proceeded to sail the thing halfway across the anchorage. Then fell. Four falls later I got the knack again and sailed it the rest of the way across the anchorage, then back (falling to tack), behind Daybreak (falling in her windshadow), and then out across the other side of the anchorage — and back — and for the first time was actually able to aim for the boat with some assurance of getting there. Lynn jumped in and took over while I got in the dinghy to chug alongside, trying to impart what I'd learned, and she promptly sailed away at over twice the speed I could make in the dinghy under power. Soon she felt she'd gone far enough (downwind and downcurrent, of course), dumped the sail (neither one of us could tack), and asked if I'd trade places and sail it back — upwind and upcurrent! Wonderful. I proceeded to probe the thin edge of upwind sailing on the thing, unable yet to actually turn my head and look where I was going because I'd have fallen down if I did. This being so, I had to call out to Lynn for a status check. "No problem. You're doing great!" Now, time to tack. This stellar move consisted of heading the board into the wind, crashing the rig onto the new leeward side, then remounting and sailing away on the new tack before losing, to the current, all the distance gained. The final test was to crash the rig upon arrival at Daybreak without 1) hitting her with the board, 2) hitting her with the rig, or 3) being so far away from her after completing this maneuver that I could not reach her rail. In current. I accomplished (1) and (2) but not (3). "Quick, throw me a line!" I cried, and Lynn did, thus saving me another twenty minutes of "tacking".
	It was, in short, a fabulous day! Guess what we planned to do the next day? Guess who spent a few rabid minutes with the itinerary that evening to see how many more days we could spend there? 
	Up bright and early in the morning, I was hot to trot, but this time there was a 10–13 knot wind blowing across the anchorage. Full of hope and testosterone, I experienced abject failure, and worse. The extra wind was more than I could handle. I spent an exhausting hour and a half getting up and falling down, ended up half drowned, barely able to move, with my fingertips nearly sanded down to blood by the non-skid — and only a few yards from drifting into the rocks. Lynn came swiftly to the rescue, towed me a few yards out to deeper water, helped me unrig the board, and then towed me home, where we discovered that in all the confusion the mast step fitting had fallen off the board, and was lying on the bottom of the anchorage somewhere! AAUUGGHH! So much for windsurfing. The nearest replacement was probably in Ft. Lauderdale (we'd already broken the skeg into three pieces and glued them back together. No new skegs in the Exumas). Refusing defeat, I went back out there and spent another hour with a mask and snorkel in a knot and a half of tidal current, looking for it. And came back ready to die. Bummed out in paradise.
	The next day at slack low tide I tried again while Lynn stood by in the dinghy. Imagine searching about an acre of ocean ten to fifteen feet deep, full of rocks and coral, looking for a small black object the size of a child's fist. After a fruitless hour of strenuous snorkeling (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but you should try it), I was ready to give up at last when Lynn recalled towing me out away from the rocks before I'd disassembled the board. One last glimmer of hope. So I moved no more than ten yards, stopped, stared, dove — and ten seconds later emerged with the fitting clasped high in my right hand like the Lady of the Lake clutching Excaliber. Boy was I happy. And exhausted.
	Our last day at Little Bell Island was truly a sweet farewell. Bright, sunny, and blue with a mild breeze, we swam, sailed the dinghy, read books, and napped in the shade. We knew we'd come back some day — we didn't know how or when — but that place is special. We said a wistful goodbye and departed in the morning.
	South of Little Bell Island is a ten mile stretch of the Exumas known as Pipe Creek, consisting of a small archipelago of cays enclosing a narrow, tortuously winding stretch of reef-strewn shallows described in the cruising guide as

"a wonderful area for shoal draft boats to explore. If you've not been here before, at least seek local knowledge; better yet, use a guide your first time through."

Taking this warning to heart, we anchored between two cays that were part of an oval "charm bracelet" of cays surrounding an enclosed area of shallows about three miles long and one mile wide, so shallow that at low tide much of it was dry, and what remained couldn't be navigated by any boat deeper than three feet. The colors were about what you'd find in a bag of salt water taffy — blues, tans, greens, occasional browns and oranges, all in delicate pastels — the place looked good enough to eat. Full of tiny cays and rocks, coral, and brilliant tropical fish, this three-square-mile protected aquatic playground was like nothing we'd ever seen. (I’ve been saying that a lot, haven’t I?) A few yachts had found their way through the deeper leads into the edges of the area, where they’d managed to find holes large enough to anchor in. At low tide, their hulls half obscured by dry, exposed sand shoals around them, they looking like alien incongruities lost in the Arabian desert. These were ultimate gunkholes: places you couldn't get your boat out of at low tide. Pipe Creek had hundreds of them. We didn't try any in Daybreak.
	After a day of exploring Pipe Creek by dinghy, we moved on to the legendary yachtie hangout of Staniel Cay, home of the Staniel Cay Yacht Club and the Happy People Marina. The place could only be described as "podunk". Eschewing the windy, tide-ridden main anchorage, after consulting the tide table we slithered onto a sandbank in five feet of water right across from the "yacht club" and only two hundred yards from the popular "Thunderball Cave", featured in the James Bond film Thunderball. In squally weather we considered leaving without seeing the cave, but were glad we didn't. It was spectacular, with several entrances, some under water, some with a foot or two of clearance at low tide, its roof open to the sky — and it was thick with fish. The girls were ecstatic at finding at last a safe, secure snorkeling playground. Roxanne was particularly eager to demonstrate how she could swim through the underwater entrances and then down to the floor of the cave, just like her daddy. Not bad for a brand new eight-year-old.
	We stayed to play an extra day before heading down to the town of Black Point, on Great Guana Cay, in the teeth of twenty five knots of wind. The "prevailing" ESE winds of the region were prevailing in a big way. They blow more strongly in spring, which is when we were there, and it hardly helps that the Exumas trend southeast. But what the heck, only 60 more miles to Georgetown and then we'd be northbound. With our luck, the wind would die right about then.
	Lynn was ready for another birthday — number 41. We could scarcely believe it had already been a year since she had turned 40 trying to windsurf at Isla Ixtapa in Mexico. To celebrate, we went ashore to look for a place to have lunch, and located Lorene's Cafe. In the tiniest, dustiest, most godforsaken burg in west Texas you might break down and deign to eat in such a place as an absolute last resort because there was nothing else for a hundred miles in any direction. But in Black Point, Lorene's was a garden spot. Cruising does give you perspective.
	Black Point was a nice little village by Central American standards, but you'd call it a dump in the U.S. It had two tiny stores, two cafes, a clinic, a phone company office (with antenna tower and pay phone), a school, a teacher's residence, two decrepit wooden piers, a scattered assortment of forlorn houses mostly without windows — and clustered together, on a "hilltop" a couple hundred yards away, a few rich folks' homes (an enclave of drug runners, someone later told us). We didn't see a church, but there had to be one. This was black folks' country, and blacks from a slave background (which is most of them in the Caribbean) are reliably religious. If you think that's racist, go visit any of a thousand towns between New Orleans and Washington DC, and then the Bahamas. Your doubts will fade. When we'd been in Staniel Cay on Sunday morning, for example, every single resident had been in one of two places: worshiping in the Baptist church (all the women and children, and a few men), or shooting craps in the shade of a gazebo outside the yacht club's patio bar (the rest of the men).
	But the anchorage was worth it: a large L-shaped bay with a palm-studded beach at its head and seven to ten feet of crystal clear water over pure white sand extending a mile offshore. A square mile of dinghy-sailing and windsurfing playground with great protection from northeast through south, but god help you in a northwesterly. We had discovered on the way down there that if the wind blows twenty five knots over long stretches of water ten feet deep, the waves get very abrupt, if not terribly big. In ten feet of water, a four-foot windwave breaks, which means there will never be a wave larger than four feet — but there sure can be a lot of them, and they sure will stop your boat! Motoring upwind in such conditions is like trying to drive a '49 Chevy up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We had learned to hate it.
	I shouldn't complain, actually. The motor was running better than ever, because I had just discovered that the funny mushroom-shaped thing on the top of the air intake was actually a filter screen, and that it could — and should — be cleaned. Could this have explained the increased fuel consumption, the slight overheating, and the occasional smoke that had recently appeared in the exhaust? I'd say so. The screen was crusted an eighth of an inch thick with grease and gutch. I was amazed the motor would even start. While I was at it I adjusted the valves — twelve thousandths of an inch by feel, since I had no gauges — also for the first time in three years. I'd been hearing the telltale tapping of a loose lifter. Hmm. The engine had 2218 hours on it. Turns out you're supposed to adjust the valves every 300 hours.
	Ran real fine afterwards. If anyone asks, tell 'em I like Perkins diesels a lot. About as delicate as a ballpeen hammer, but that 4.108 just kept on chugging. If only it were bigger . . . 
	With the birthday cake frosted and decorated and Lynn's presents ready to be opened, we delayed the festivities when a half a gale with occasional rain swept through. Not quite enough rain, though. Worried about our water consumption, we jumped at every opportunity to collect some, but all we'd get would be the murky, brackish first few gallons of water that came off the deck. Then the rain would stop. Staniel Cay had had no water to spare at all (and had been out of diesel fuel too). Folks in Black Point said the town had at most "a few gallons" to spare. Since we weren't hard up yet, we let it go and sailed eleven miles to Big Farmer's Cay.
	Big Farmer's had a small resort of sorts, but hardly our style, and the anchorage, being directly opposite an inlet from Exuma Sound and exposed to the tradewinds, was uncomfortable and disquieting. After a jerky night we moved nineteen miles to Lee Stocking Island, this time taking the "outside" route, re-entering in a horrendous wind-against-tide situation known as a "rage" in the Bahamas. Probably shouldn't have tried it, and wouldn't have if the cut had been even twenty feet narrower, but we made it through while rolling horribly and taking breaking waves over the stern. Once inside, the anchorage was tide-ridden, choppy, and constricted by rocky shoals, not to mention a bit too crowded for safety. We did manage to get a tour of the marine research facility there, but took off in the morning.
	This time we went "inside", it being our last chance to do so. The next stop, inside Black Cay near Rolletown, would be our last before Georgetown, and the hop to Georgetown had to be "outside". Besides, this last "inside" hop was reputed to be lovely. What an understatement. We remember this day as "The Passage Through Heaven."
	It required some planning. Though only ten miles long, several portions would be only five feet deep at high tide, and at no point would there be adequate room to raise sail. With sharp limestone rock on all sides through much of it, we'd motor for sure, and with only six inches of clearance under the keel in places — the first of which, over rock bottom, was only a mile away — timing the tide would be critical. I'd been watching the tides for days to calibrate my computerized tables. Given how slow we'd need to go through the tight spots, I figured we had maybe fifteen minutes of margin on the timing. Off we went.
	Although we had to come to a complete halt in places as the keel nearly grazed rock, with Lynn conning from the anchor platform we made it through through safely, without touching once, though at one point the keel left a trail of milky eddies across a quarter mile sandbar. Sand? Hey, no problem.
	But the beauty — my god. For two hours, Daybreak was silent. Never before had scenery caused me to experience physical sensations. It was literally breathtaking. Later, Lynn wrote:

	"We passed through the most beautiful scenery we've seen to date, absolutely heartbreaking. What was interesting to me was that I've said I wanted to "be here now", but I could always blame my inability on circumstances ("now" is too yucky, or the kids have my attention, etc., etc.). Not so this time. I spent the entire time up on the bow, leaning against the mainmast watching for reefs, and the kids didn't bother me once. All I had to do was keep an eye out for dangers, give Lane occasional direction, and take in the beauty surrounding me — and it was hard. Quite frankly, it was unconfrontable for me to be in the presence of that much beauty with nothing more to do than be there and get it. Just let it in. I found the experience upsetting. What's wrong with this picture? Usually, when I'm in such a beautiful setting, I'm doing something which occupies me (walking, hiking, talking), and I stop to admire the beauty from time to time in little manageable moments. This was the first time I'd tried to be with it for hours at a time. (Maybe I should be acknowledging myself for my achievement instead of wondering at my incapacity.) The other source of resistance I can identify in hindsight is that if I liked it that much, I would (and do) want to come back. That would mean buying into more cruising, which I am not ready to admit to yet. Lane is constantly discussing ideas for cruising boats and I totally resist the whole conversation. I have a voice in me calling for comfort and security, tidy and righteous concepts of self, the end of uncertainty. Even though I can see with my own eyes that these ultimately buy immobility and suffering, even though I know better, they have a siren call. I want to go back to work and make a bunch of money and have nice clothes and look nice and drive a car, be independent, be intelligent and purposeful, have a daily "to do" list, and know who I am and what I'm supposed to do. At the same time I recognize that this cruise has been one of the most nurturing and growthful periods of my life."

	That ten-mile stretch of wonders opened our eyes to a fact to which we had until then been oblivious: A boat limited to five feet or more of depth can only explore the tiniest margins of the best parts of the Bahamas. Two feet less draft would mean easily fifty times as much cruising ground. Huge areas of banks, reefs, and tiny cays lay scattered everywhere. In that short stretch alone I saw twenty places I'd have loved to anchor and spend a week or more, but Daybreak could anchor in none of them. The areas "behind" (south and west of) Great Exuma Island, and nearly all of the area around Andros Island — the largest island in the Bahamas — are totally inaccessible to virtually every ocean-capable sailboat. I could see that an entirely different approach would be necessary if the Bahamas were to be truly explored, and that a feast of astounding beauty awaited those who did. I could imagine spending the rest of my life there, a lifetime of such peace and bliss as I could scarcely fathom. Gazing out beyond the western end of Great Exuma Island at hundreds of square miles of tiny cays, some scarcely larger than Daybreak, scattered across the paper-thin ocean like jewels in a rain puddle — oh my, did it call to me. I knew I could not leave there with no plan to return. Such a gravid overabundance of beauty could not simply be traveled through as if on a tour bus. We needed to stop, really stop, for days at a time in every new location, each one of which might be no more than a mile or two from the last. The scenery raked the consciousness, leaving gashes one would bear forever if one did not stop, soothe them down, heal them over in the course of some days at anchor. But we had no time for such stopping. John Muir, having once seen the Yosemite, was still going back a lifetime later, because he literally could not stay away. What ever would we do, I wondered, if something like that were to happen to us?
	And that is exactly what has happened. I sit at this keyboard, staring beyond the screen, out the front window, across the yard, across the street, vaguely southeast. Those gashes are with me still. I ache for that place.
	Small wonder Lynn found my rantings hard to take. We were within a few months of the end of our cruising time, yet I could think of nothing more than wanting to go on, forever.

	From such a place, in the presence of such an experience, one's outlook on the world tends to readjust, perhaps radically. I thought back to the Florida Keys, and the horror struck me that they must once have looked something like this. But they're connected by road to the U.S. mainland, I thought. What if they weren't? Hawaii shows the answer: an absence of roads doesn’t deter American developers one whit. Condos, hotels, and resorts on every beach, every headland, strip malls, tour buses, amusements, the whole shitty mess. Sure, much of the Hawaiian interior remains undeveloped, but that's only because developers exploit the best places first. Give it time. In the Bahamas things weren't so far along — yet. But Freeport and Nassau provided clues to the future. Both are pits. Money pits. I find it marginally encouraging that they are the only two places cruise ships can stop in the Bahamas. Their harbors were blasted out of solid limestone and coral. But no place is impervious to dynamite. It would only be a matter of time.
	Environmentalists who speak of the necessity of developing a "global consciousness" don't begin to go far enough. Having read Julian Jaynes two or three times over (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), it was clear to us, given his definition of consciousness (and how many of us have ever even bothered to ask if there is one?), that while we are conscious as individuals, we are not conscious at any level beyond that — certainly not as a species — and we behave accordingly. What we do to our fellows, what we do to our cities and towns, what we do to our country, our neighboring countries, and what we do to our world, are the actions of a collective entity that clearly cannot yet think about what it is doing. Millions of us can see as individuals the consequences of our culture's consumptive behavior, but the collective behavior itself is a sleepwalking juggernaut, and we individuals are just along for the ride. No one is steering. We must learn to do so, because, as Jaynes also makes clear, the emergence of consciousness in homo sapiens has swept away, like diaphanous morning fog in the blaze of the rising sun, all possibility of finding direction or authority from anywhere outside of ourselves. I'm speaking here of God, the Bible, redemptive religion, astrology, the occult, dreams, oracles, Tarot cards, Nostradamus, the whole stinking mess. If this sounds extreme, read Jaynes and see what you think. While we cling to these things in our deep desire for an authority in life higher than ourselves — for something good, right, immutable and incontestable — they are nonetheless simply vestiges of our species' relatively recent preconscious past, when there were, literally for practical purposes, gods who told us what to do. But that is all OVER. As in the aftermath of the death of a loved one, the unwillingness to let go and start anew remains, a barrier to all progress. But there's good news here too: all that god stuff was just us, the whole time. Our right brains were literally speaking to our left, speaking to us, and we called it "god". So we shouldn't have far to look, at this juncture, to find the authorization we require. We "just" need to begin to do consciously what we did unconsciously for 8000 years (from 10,000 to about 2000 B.C.), and do it better.
	Jaynes defined subjective conscious mind as:

" . . . an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics."

That's the short version. He says it has six key features:
1)	Spatialization. We think utterly in spatial terms. Our "mind-space" is 3D, even where abstract concepts are concerned.
2)	Excerption. We don't think about everything at once. We focus down.
3)	An analog "I". We hold an image of ourselves within our analog mind space — like our "piece" in a Monopoly game, our little pot-metal scottie dog or top hat — and we direct it within our created analog mind-space so we can observe and evaluate its success.
4)	A metaphor "me", in other words, a "self" who watches the analog "I" and judges the results. This self is what we think of as "who we are" — but must not be, because it isn't the "me" having the thought.
5)	Narratization. We entrain all our experience into a storyline in time, even though we did not actually experience any passage of time at all in the moment. (In fact, we are apparently incapable of doing so. We've invented the concept.) And finally,
6)	Conciliation. We reconcile what we now experience with what we have experienced (and have fashioned into our story), mostly by discarding what doesn't fit. This is why most adults have such a hard time learning anything "new". Their stories have become so well crafted, not much that is new will fit. Not enough holes in the world view. Children don't have this handicap, so they are still capable of learning.
	If this is what consciousness is, then we are individually conscious, and collectively not. Very not. No wonder we act collectively as we do. We have no clue. We’re lost in space. Individual consciousness is not sufficient to apprehend and govern what we are collectively doing.
	The answer would seem to lie in the right brain — actually, in the synthesis of the right and left brain. Perhaps that sounds trivial, but it isn't meant to be. I'm speaking literally here. The right brain is the part that knows things. It doesn't figure them out, it just knows. It is where the "gods" used to reside, and the parts of the right brain that correspond to the speech centers on the left are the source of what all humans once experienced as the voices of the gods. Since the advent of consciousness, the synaptic structure of human brains has literally changed so that we no longer "hear" the right side, and are instead "consciousness". This is not a result of evolution, by the way, it is learned. That's why it could happen so fast. Natural selection takes ten to twenty thousand generations -- hundreds of thousands of years. This is why our children are so different from us adults. All children in our culture learn to be conscious, usually completing the training by about the age of ten, but they don’t start out conscious. The process is what we call "growing up". (In this model, by the way, schizophrenia is nothing but reversion to the synaptic structure that existed prior to 8,000 B.C., i.e the loss of "consciousness". It is absolutely terrifying to its victims because, since the loss starts from consciousness, they get to watch it happen. They literally watch their selves disappear as control is taken over by the "speech centers" of the right brain — reported as voices, demons, possession, multiple personalities, etc. Hundreds of case studies confirm this.)
	Lynn and I saw all this as indicative of the need for a new phase in the development of consciousness in homo sapiens, "collective consciousness", for lack of a better term. Something akin to it has already begun to emerge in what we call "communities", but the extent of the influence never gets beyond fifty people or so, which is exactly the size of hunter-gatherer communities in our "ancestral environment" (and of your work group at your job), and for exactly the same reason: homo sapiens do not appear to have the mental equipment (yet) for anything bigger. Hence my comment that the "global consciousness" notion of environmentalists is too limited. Which is not to say I don't support it. We need a global consciousness per Jaynes, complete with all six aspects he details, and there is plenty of evidence to indicate that our species is capable of such a development rather swiftly. But how to develop such a consciousness?
	It seems to Lynn and me that a place for us to start is by persuading our right and left brains to coexist with each other, much as we persuade young children to coexist with each other. In other words, to parent our brains. If consciousness can be learned, so can this, but it would require an interesting mental shift: we would have to stop thinking of ourselves as being our "metaphor me" and create in its stead a new "self" which resides in neither the right nor the left brain, but rather superior to and consisting of the synthesis of the two. We — who we really are — would lie heirarchically above them. We would become the parent to our hemispheres.
	Gee whiz, you're thinking, this guy travels ten miles in shallow water and goes wacko. Don't I wish. I wish I didn't think about this stuff. I wish things weren't such a mess all around us. I wish $50,000 a year weren't virtually a poverty-level wage in any large American city. I wish I could go spend the rest of my life cruising around in water that looks like candy. (Perhaps I will someday.) I wish the only economic choice these days weren't between inescapable poverty and obscene wealth, between wage slavery and barony. I wish my children could choose, if they desired, not to go to college, without condemning themselves and possibly their children to a life of economic servitude to rich people who are busy digging up the planet and, in the process, polluting whatever they don't actually cart away and consume. I wish we could all live a "normal" life. I wish a lot of things. The life you and I lead is as abnormal as any that has ever been lived on this planet, and historically speaking such abnormality is a very recent development. I wish Julian Jaynes — and Daniel Quinn, who wrote Ishmael, and James Carse, who wrote Finite And Infinite Games, and Robert Wright, who wrote The Moral Animal — weren't right. But they are. I wish life were simple. But it's not. Cruising life was simple, and my family and I had about four months of it left before we’d be back, re-immersed in the gutch of modern American living. Not one of us, not even Lynn, was looking forward to it, and if you're reading this book, perhaps you share some of our sentiments. A day such as that, wandering through a piece of Earth upon which the hand of God still lay as if on the thigh of a lover as she sleeps, made returning to a land shaped by the hand of man a very sad prospect indeed.

Chapter 18
Summer Camp in Georgetown

	After a lay-day at Black Cay, a luscious little spot with a tiny cul-de-sac of anchorable depth somewhat exposed to the west, we arrived finally in "Chicken Harbor", a.k.a. "The Trailer Park": Georgetown, where (for southbound boats), the harbor-hopping ends and the real sailing begins. From there to Venezuela, where eastern Caribbean cruisers must go to avoid hurricanes, is a long 1500 miles, the first half of which is dead smack upwind and the second half is simply close-hauled. From Georgetown, 350 miles of the Bahamas still remain (I include the Turks and Caicos geographically, not politically), but beyond Georgetown the sailing changes from easy day hops in protected waters to serious day hops and even — gasp — overnighters between island groups. Anchorages become more coral-choked and difficult. Beyond that, it's the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles . . . you know, foreign countries. (The Bahamas really aren’t. The only thing foreign about them is that you have to get your passport stamped and buy a new fishing license.) On the other hand, Florida and the womb-like security of the Intracoastal Waterway are just 320 miles downwind the other way. This choice quickly separates the real cruisers from the dilettantes.
	And there they all are. At the season’s peak, Elizabeth Harbor contains over four hundred yachts. When we arrived, there were half this number, with few southbound boats remaining, and northbound boats leaving at the rate of ten or twelve every day. In a few short hours we saw it all — dogs barking and whining, dog poop on the beach, dinghies whizzing everywhere, diesel generators running (on powerboats), foredeck gasoline generators running (on sailboats), three-quarters-drunk cockpit cocktail parties with exaggerated laughter and other signs of gregarious inebrium, a morning VHF net, a variety of organized shoreside activities  — afternoon volleyball, a post-lunch mommie yack session on the beach while their kids played together, definite social groupings among boats that had clearly been there awhile — ye gods, what a zoo! If it hadn't been for the upcoming Out Island Regatta, which we really wanted to see, we'd have been in our usual "tank up, do mail, buy perishables, and split" mode. Instead, we planned to be there two weeks.
	A garden spot it was not, though it was nice enough. Pretty clearly, at some time in the past the whole of Elizabeth Harbor had been as crystal clear and pristine as the stretch between Lee Stocking Island and Black Cay had been, but that was before all those boats began showing up every year. Four hundred boats means upwards of 800 liveaboards, plus an equal number of Georgetown residents ashore, all dumping raw sewage into a shallow, enclosed bay. Cruisers really have to care about this. Their health depends on it, not to mention the health of the environs they visit. So, based on the area and depth of the bay and the known tidal range, I decided to do the flushing efficiency calculation. Result: about ten percent flushing per tide cycle, resulting in an average equilibrium concentration of roughly 0.4 part per million fecal matter (higher near town, lower near the bay's two narrow entrances) — not enough to pose a hazard, but enough to support a nice little bioculture. It certainly explained why the underwater visibility was only twenty feet or so.
	We spent two days anchored right off the Victoria Lake entrance to take care of shopping, gasoline for the dinghy, water, phone, and mail. It was easy to see what people found to like about the place. For cruisers, Georgetown is a never-ending summer camp for grown-ups, where any role from spectator to participant to camp organizer is available. Every activity you’d find in a small retirement community of a thousand or so souls is represented: church, community service, government and politics, charity, welcome wagon, ninety kinds of organized recreation . . . if there’d been a golf course available, there’d have been a country club. The town itself, its residents outnumbered at the height of the season, treats the floating community like the economic bonanza that it is. They are helpful and friendly, and anything can be procured one way or another. The largest grocery store, Exuma Markets, in a livid pink stucco building, handles mail, UPS, and fax, the first two for free. Their private dock on Victoria Lake, around which the town is built (and open to the harbor via a tunnel cut through seventy five feet of limestone), is available for cruisers’ general use. A water hose is provided for filling jerry jugs, one of only two sources of free water in Georgetown, and the only one with dinghy access. (The nearby marina charged ten cents a gallon for town water, but offered the convenience of direct fill into your tanks. "RO water" — ocean water desalinized by reverse osmosis — could be obtained for 70 cents a gallon for those who couldn’t abide the slightly gritty taste of the town’s dusty cistern water in their morning coffee.) For two bucks, cruisers can join the nearby public library, where book donations are also welcomed in support of the island’s children. Their school is across the street from the market. It goes without saying that restaurants, bars and taverns with tree-shaded outdoor patio areas are ubiquitous. And expensive. There are also two laundromats, two gas stations, a fuel dock, fresh baked goods from "Mom", a large, cheerful black woman who sells them directly out of her Chevy Astro van every morning, an open vegetable market, a meat market, street vendors with permanent stalls selling T-shirts and all kinds of souvenir goo-gahs, a fine church on a hill with lovely views back over the lake and out over the bay, a liquor store, hardware stores . . . basically, most anything you could want was available for a combination of Bahamian and American dollars, in congenial if rustic surroundings from helpful English-speaking people, in the heart of paradise. And for those special marine needs, both West Marine and BOAT/US could get parts to you down there in a few days via UPS, the most reliable shipper in the Bahamas.
	We figured we’d need a fair amount of water, so we tied up to the rugged cement mailboat/ferry wharf against a string of huge tractor tires (ugh!), using our own fenders in a pathetic attempt to keep our topsides clean, and began a jerry jug brigade to a roadside faucet a short distance away. With my bad back, I wasn’t looking forward to schlepping 200 gallons of water 12 gallons at a time (96 pounds per load), but with the whole family pitching in, we began the task. Amazingly, the tanks were full only 66 gallons later. We had somehow managed to live for the 29 days since Nassau on less than 2.3 gallons a day for four people, for eating, bathing, dishes, laundry, the works. At that rate we could have lasted three months! While in Elizabeth Harbor we splurged and upped our consumption to three gallons a day, necessitating a trip in the dinghy to the Exuma Markets dinghy dock every four days.
	Having completed our town errands, we went looking for playmates for Roxanne and Tania, and ended up anchoring across the harbor in the lee of Stocking Island (not to be confused with Lee Stocking Island), in a small cove crowded with boats just off "Volleyball Beach". We quickly learned that every afternoon there’d be one regulation and one non-regulation volleyball game there, and that most of the cruising families would congregate there in the afternoon while this went on. The swimming beach was lovely, there were swinging ropes hanging from the huge casuarina trees, and all the boats were close enough to shore that the kids could run back and forth in the dinghies on their own. Our girls quickly made a friend and invited her for dinner and overnight, and enjoyed it immensely. We looked on somewhat in horror, because this 8-year-old was in third grade and had spent three years in an elementary school in Boston, where she, like any normal kid, had learned all the "social tricks" of being cruel, mean, low, and manipulative whenever there was something to be gained by it. Our own girls hadn’t had the same opportunity, but probably would have been acting likewise if they had. Lynn said she felt like we were raising our children for the slaughter. We had thought about continuing home schooling after returning to land, but we knew that sooner or later Roxanne and Tania would have to learn to deal with all the behaviors, good and bad, that people exhibit. We couldn’t run away forever, though the temptation was strong.
	We began some serious lazing around. On my water runs to town I’d also buy milk and bread, and that was about it. So I checked out the volleyball situation. There were three makeshift beach courts, two of which were in daily use. At the "regulation" court there was a serious three-game "tournament" every afternoon at 3:00 pm involving young men from both town and the fleet, none exceeding 30 years of age and all in a smoldering, testosterone-induced competitive trance. The sides were always evenly matched, never exceeded six per side, the rules were strictly enforced, and there was an unofficial but peer-pressure-mandated beer break between games.
	At the "cruiser" court there was a substantially less “regular” game. Anyone who showed up could play, whether or not the sides remained even — or at less than seven people — and a game was 21 points, not 15. The only rules were that boundaries were enforced (loosely), service had to be underhand, and no one person could hit the ball twice in a row. Number of hits allowed per side was unlimited. If you were new and proceeded to serve overhand, your side did not lose serve. You just had to serve it again. And if you forgot again later, same deal. No penalties.
	Now I, having played a fair amount of regulation volleyball in my time, eschewed the "cruiser" game, where of course I’d have been entirely welcome and where there were constant shrieks of excitement and delight, and walked over to the "regulation" game 75 yards away through a lovely stand of casuarinas. Two things rapidly became clear. First, it was a closed game. I wasn't going to be invited to play anytime in the foreseeable future. Second — amazingly — no one was having any fun at all. Mistakes triggered serious ridicule from the opposing players and castigation by the offender’s teammates, there was no chatter or gaiety, even during the beer breaks, and in the end everyone knew (and carefully remembered for future reference) who had won. It was just plain depressing. So I strolled back over to the "cruiser" game, lowered my competitive standards, and was promptly invited onto the court right in the middle of a game. In fact, I was invited directly into the service position (where I immediately learned the rule about overhand serves). The game finished close, but at times each team was as much as ten points ahead. Forgetfulness of the actual score was common, and no one remembered beyond two minutes afterward which "side" had won because the "sides" meant nothing in the first place. The greatest enjoyment was produced by especially good volleys, where every hit was unlikely and its accomplishment a minor miracle. FUN! Sure, it was Mickey Mouse, but in the world of cruising, just having gotten there was so far beyond "Mickey Mouse" that there wasn’t much left to prove in a mere volleyball game, so why compete seriously? I liked it. It was a real-world, hands-on demonstration of James Carse’s Finite And Infinite Games, and a clearer example could hardly be imagined.
	We were waiting eagerly for the Family Islands Regatta, formerly called the Out Island Regatta, a three-day series of races for native-built wooden sailing craft. It was scheduled to start in two more days, and contestants were arriving from all over. By morning there were over eighty race boats on hand, and they were phenomenal beasts.
	There are five classes, "A" through "E" in decreasing size, and the design rules are brutally simple. The hull must be of full-keel design, outboard rudder, traditional wineglass sections, and must be built entirely of wood. The mast must also be of wood. No synthetic sail materials or running rigging are allowed, no winches, and the only size limitation is overall length. Draft, beam, and sail area are unlimited, as is crew, who use long 2-by-12 "hiking boards" extended out over the water to windward to leverage their weight. Ballast is internal lead pigs, loose.
	Rig proportions are outrageous. The largest, "A" class sloops with huge mainsails and tiny fractional blade jibs, are 28 feet overall, have masts 60 - 65 feet tall, and booms 40 - 45 feet long extending at least twenty feet behind the stern. "B" class boats are also sloops, while the smaller classes are catboats. "C" class boats are 17 feet long with masts forty feet high and booms twenty five feet long, racing with five to seven crew ("A" class boats used over twenty). The masts, located way forward in the bow where the rigging base is quite narrow, are nonetheless supported by wire rigging with no spreaders or backstays. The entire rig is breathtakingly loosey-goosey. For the yacht design buffs among you, these vessels have a sail area to displacement ratio of forty or fifty, compared a typical value of fifteen or twenty. Worse, they are displacement hulls. They absolutely, positively cannot plane. When they go downwind in a good breeze, they bury their bows horribly, there’s no vang to keep the mainsail from twisting, so the boat is constantly trying to death-roll, and the entire crew moves way aft as the bow tries to submarine. They sail on the ragged edge of death and destruction at all times, but remain things of exquisite grace and beauty in the process.
	The report after the first day of racing was as follows. Three races: Class "C" catboats at 0830 (about 20 boats), Class "B" sloops at 1130 (about 10 boats), and Class "A" sloops at 1630 (about 15 boats). Wind twelve to fifteen knots. Collisions: rampant. Crew overboard: numerous reports, plus one that I witnessed. Sinkings: two, at the gybe mark, both of which I watched up close and personal. Protests: none. Collisions are expected. There is only one word to describe those races, and that word is PANDEMONIUM!!!
	This is not like your Saturday afternoon club races back home. These guys start out anchored with their sails down. At the starting gun, half the crew hauls in the anchor as fast as they can while the other half raises sail. Anchor-hauling propels the boats forward nicely, and off they go toward the windward mark, which is where we stationed our dinghy for the first race, anchoring thirty yards beyond the mark. On came the "C" class boats — 17 feet, 2200 lbs, six-person crews on the boards, 370 square feet of sail area . . . wow. At one point five boats approached the mark on opposing tacks and tried to round the buoy together. All five collided, hulls grinding together, masts pounding each other, huge overhanging booms caught in each other’s rigging . . . only four escaped. The inside boat was forced down onto the mark by the other four, executing an unplanned gybe. The 26 foot boom swept the deck. The boat heeled sharply, causing the boom to drag in the water and thereby rendering the crew incapable of spilling wind from the sail. The boat heeled further while the crew, who had so far miraculously escaped injury and forcible ejection from the boat, crawled up over the high side rail as the mast struck the water. The boat, ballasted by loose lead ingots in an open cockpit, sank like a stone in twenty feet of water, leaving the crew with three feet of dry mast to hang on to. It was all over in a few seconds. The Race Committee’s response was simply to wait until all remaining boats had passed the mark and then move the mark thoughtfully to one side about a hundred feet, so the submerged boat would not be run over on the next lap!
	OK, we wondered, how does one go about raising a 2200 pound boat from the bottom of the bay with nothing but a thirteen foot Boston Whaler? The answer was simplicity itself. One particularly energetic crewmember dove to the bottom and released the halyard holding the sail up on the mast. After pausing for breath, he then dove repeatedly into the sunken hull, each time passing a loop of line around one of the lead ingots, whereupon it was raised into the skiff. Since the boat and everything aboard it were wood, it eventually and quite naturally floated to the surface. The crew then removing the remaining lead, the sail, and the mast as the boat lay on its side, righted the hull (which by then was floating like a cork), and bailed it dry. It was then towed home with all its paraphernalia laying on its own deck, and reassembled in knee-deep water near shore. It raced the following day.
	Well, we thought, surely this sort of thing just cannot be allowed to happen to the big Class "A" boats. After all, they weigh eight or ten thousand pounds, half of which is lead. They must have better procedures, or less sail, or better crew, or something. Wrong on all counts. Disaster struck at the first gybe mark, except this boat sank without a collision, and since she was bigger it all happened more slowly. She simply gybed, broached, capsized, and sank. She was still there at sunset, after everyone else had gone home.
	Due to her size she was not as easy to retrieve. Relieved of ballast she floated, but the salvage crew was understandably unable to get her upright with the mast still in her. However, rather than remove it, they employed the services of a large utility vessel which towed their boat underwater at about five knots toward the nearest beach. The mast did not take kindly to this treatment and converted itself into kindling, though the hull made it in one piece. Frantic late-night phone calls resulted in the location of a replacement mast, which was rush-delivered to Georgetown the following morning at 11:00 a.m. by ferry, a bare wood pole 65 feet long devoid of all fittings. The race was scheduled for 2:30 p.m., but a poll of the participants and a bit of arm-twisting by the committee resulted in a delay to 4:30, thus allowing this vessel the dubious privilege of spending the afternoon frantically transferring their own fittings to the new mast and resizing all the rigging. The race finally started at 6:00 p.m. about two minutes after the hapless vessel reached her position behind the start line. She had still been attaching her shrouds to the chainplates while under tow to the line! She finished in the middle of a ten-boat fleet.
	The day was not without other dramas. That afternoon Elizabeth Harbour was visited by 30 - 40 knot winds and tropical-class rainfall. A number of boats dragged their anchors, among them . . . ours. We were fortunate to be both aboard and on deck at the time. Now we knew why people said grass bottoms have poor holding. It wasn’t because the anchor wouldn't penetrate the root mass — we had no such problem. Rather, it was because the root mass weakens the soil: our anchor simply pulled out a divot about two feet across and a foot deep! We were blessed by a rising tide and a shallow sandbar to windward (there were rocks not far to leeward). Lynn cast off the the second anchor line and I motored Daybreak upwind onto the sand, holding her there with throttle while Lynn pulled up the main anchor, cleared it of real estate, and dropped it right down again in clean sand on the bar, in four feet of water. Then we backed off a hundred feet and snugged up both lines, and sat through an afternoon and night of 20 - 25 knot winds and rain.
	We were about done with Georgetown. The regatta was over, and we couldn’t take the camp atmosphere much longer. Still, we were reluctant to leave. From there on we’d be northbound until the money ran out, which wasn’t far away. We still had the Abacos between us and the States, but it was beginning to be time to start thinking about the "w" word:  w _ _ _ .  Oh my. (Whimper.) Why couldn’t there be some other way? By the time we got to the Chesapeake Bay, our adventure would be finished. It was already the beginning of the end.

Chapter 19
Reluctantly Northbound: The Abaco Cays

	We left Georgetown at 0530 the next morning and motored 65 nautical miles to West Bay, at Little San Salvador Island, in a greasy calm and stifling heat. It looked like summer had just arrived with a vengeance. We made it in eleven and a half hours in gorgeous azure water as flat as a pond, but boring! On the way we hooked two large dorado. The first one broke the line and took the lure and leader, but we landed the second one, a monster as dorado go: 49" nose to tail and a real fighter. They're known for tail dancing, and this one put on quite a show. They're also known for getting off the hook that way, especially as you try to bring them aboard. We'd lost several that way. It sure is frustrating to get within three feet of one of these guys and watch him shake the hook. This one was the first fish we'd caught in the Bahamas, but by himself he more than paid for the twenty dollar fishing license. Got about ten or twelve pounds of meat off him and immediately gave away a third of it. Doesn't mahi mahi cost eight or ten bucks a pound back home?
	We were back in the "boonies" again, with three other boats in a beach-lined crescent bay a mile long. A nice change after Georgetown. No problem with water clarity there, no sirree. First saw bottom at one hundred feet coming in.
	We awoke in the morning to about the most perfect weather imaginable. Our neighbors left, leaving us alone in the bay under a bright blue sky with a wind of five to eight knots, surrounded by clear clean water brim-full of astounding Bahamian colors. The beach was blinding white sand as far out as one could wade and still touch bottom. While the kids played on the beach, building sand castles and frolicking in the shallows, Lynn and I windsurfed until we were toasted. We're not talking about points for style here, just getting from point A to point B and back again. We could barely move afterwards. From dawn to dusk not a cloud marred the sky, and not a puff of wind above eight knots ruffled the water. Having gotten used to responding to some level of meteorological emergency almost daily for months on end, with the safety of ourselves and Daybreak in the balance, this was like a vacation.
	It lasted twenty four hours. Morning dawned blustery as we prepared for the overnight passage north to the Abacos. Fortunately the wind was from the south, though the forecast strengths of 10 - 15 knots had turned out to be 15 - 20 knots. We awakened sunburned, sore, and not quite ready to rock and roll.
	At that moment the western North Atlantic was convulsed by some complex and scary gale systems and fronts. The previous evening every vessel within twenty four hours of the Eastern Seaboard fled for shelter. Boats heading north from the Bahamas turned left and aimed for Florida. Winds north of 32º N latitude and west of Bermuda were predicted to be forty five knots by that afternoon. Since we were headed only for 26º 19' N, we figured we'd be safe, but on the other hand, there'd be no shelter enroute. We'd be passing the east coast of Eleuthera, as forbidding a coast as there is. After that we'd cross the Northeast Providence Channel, which might as well be the middle of the ocean, then attempt to enter an intricate, Z-shaped twelve-foot-deep entrance, surrounded by reefs, that was said to be "untenable in easterly winds exceeding 18 knots". In "settled weather" — which means that you know where the wind will be coming from and about how much of it there'll be — this would not have been worrisome. However, we were beginning to catch on that the Atlantic is seldom "settled". Winds could come from just about anywhere, any time, and at any strength. This made anchorages like the one we were in — wide open on one side — worrisome even on the finest of days. Gathering our energy, at 0815 we set off.
	The day went fine until towards evening a low band of darkness began to appear many miles ahead. We sailed along in the dark with some trepidation as an intense electrical storm developed roughly sixty miles in front of us. It reached such altitudes that we could plainly see its lightning flashes for hour after hour through the night. It was predicted to dissipate by the time we got there. No such luck.
	Fortunately the hammer fell during a watch change. Lynn had come below to wake me for my watch, and she was briefing me on conditions while I began to dress.  Suddenly the light wind shifted forward, causing the sails to flap, and pitch darkness engulfed Daybreak — no moon, not even starlight. I leapt naked up the companionway ladder, sniffed the air and smelled heaven knows what, lunged for the halyards, threw their coils onto the cockpit floor, and blew both stoppers. We call this  "crashing the sails", and on a cat ketch with full battens it works pretty well. Seconds later the wind was blowing thirty knots, Daybreak was ninety degrees off course (soon to be 180°), rain was slashing down, and lightning was all around us. It took a few minutes to get the sails secured and the motor running, but we finally got headed north again, slogging slowly forward under power toward a destination still 30 miles away.
	We later learned that this phenomenon is called a microburst. Its intensity is largely due to its localization, and being localized, it is short-lived. The wind clocked all the way around the compass over the next two hours, then returned more or less to SSW, enabling us to make good time the last few miles. As morning dawned, the rain kindly abated right when we needed to negotiate the channel. This particular entrance, at Little Harbour Bar, involves steering directly for the rocks of a headland until one is about two hundred feet from death, then turning right and snaking between two parallel reefs, both with breaking seas, and finally turning left again into the bay, all with no buoys or marks of any kind, just your eyeballs on the surface of the water. You read the depth in the behavior of the swells. Mercifully there was almost no wind by then, and we got in safely and put the anchor down in five feet of water (that's right, six inches under the keel) at dead low tide over sand flats and eel grass. We had intended to enter the nearby "hurricane hole" at high tide later in the afternoon, but things were so peaceful and the bay so empty that we decided to stay out in the open. If the wind spun around to the NE we'd regret it, but there was soft bottom in all directions, the fetch wasn't too bad (under two miles in the worst direction), and after our anchor-dragging experience at Stocking Island we had decided we'd rather sit in the open with a little wind chop than be shoe-horned into a tight spot surrounded by boats and rocks! Besides, we vastly preferred being on one hook. It's so much easier to leave and relocate, or to reanchor in the event of dragging, whereas with two hooks in a cramped space things are just plain impossible. We had learned that there's scarcely a more helpless feeling in cruising than to be on two hooks in a crowd and have one of them come loose. Sometimes it's necessary, but I’d be happy if the Bahamian Moor went the way of square-riggers.
	During lunch later that day we were all listening to one of the wonderful Winnie-the-Pooh children's tapes we had gotten from another cruising family at Georgetown, which I’d not yet heard. One passage struck me as being particularly appropriate for us:

	"Now then, Pooh," said Christopher Robin, "where's your boat?"
	"I ought to say," explained Pooh as they walked down to the shore of the island, "that it isn't just an ordinary sort of boat. Sometimes it's a Boat, and sometimes it's more of, um, an Accident. It all depends."
	"Depends? On what?"
	"On whether I'm on top of it or underneath it."

	Right. Or in the engine compartment.

	Arriving in the Abacos, we felt just that much closer to being back in the States, that much closer to being back at work, and that much closer to being no longer cruisers. I have to tell you, Lynn and I were not of a mind to go gently. American society looks a helluva lot different from the outside than it does from inside. It took a year of being outside to see how true that is, and at that moment we did not want to go back at all, let alone "pick up where we left off". I was growing crustier and more cynical, and was not finding it easy to keep any hope of great things alive in the face of cultural and economic reimmersion. We were undeniably "on our way back". I was beginning to feel trapped and desperate again.
	When we first left Los Angeles to go cruising, we had chosen cruising in preference to living and working ashore in Los Angeles. That's obvious. In Little Harbour, 532 days later, one might have been tempted to ask (and in fact we did ask), "If you had to choose between cruising as a permanent lifestyle, with all that it would ultimately entail, and your former lifestyle, with all that it entailed, which would you choose?" Barring the complication of children, the answer was: cruising, by far. Because the fact is that any lifestyle in and of itself is a complete waste of time, and if it's going to be a waste of time, one might as well have fun and be surrounded by natural beauty and splendor in the process. I say this because, cynical as it sounds, this is the level of worthwhileness most cruisers find in cruising. People who haven't cruised find this hard to believe, but it's true. (It is open to question, of course, whether life itself is a complete waste of time, but the fact is that most of us aren't contemplating suicide.) We left LA hoping to do better than "fun and beauty", and at that moment, as finances forced us to look realistically ahead, it was our proclivity to force the issue: to find some way to ensure that cruising not turn out to have been just a more agreeable waste of time, if by no other means than by creating some new, more worthwhile life ashore and attribute it to having been cruising. Another question arose: In the absence of budget constraints, would we keep on cruising? And how about this: If all we did after cruising was go back to work in Los Angeles, would cruising have been worthwhile? The answer to both questions was Yes, but neither answer gave us much comfort. When we talked to other cruisers about moving back ashore, they invariably responded, "Well, just earn more money quick so you can get cruising again!" But why? The point was to learn something, but what if there was nothing to learn?
	In this quagmire of uncertainty, squirming in the inescapable prison of our own steel-trap minds, we contemplated the inglorious necessity of earning a living in the face of our desperate desire for more than that. I'd had an idea for an enterprise that could have involved tens of thousands of Americans in taking a public stand for the preservation of Earth's environment and backing it financially, but there were several problems with it, chief among them that neither I nor Lynn had the background and ambition necessary to pull it off. Then I had another bright idea so useless I'm not even going to describe it even vaguely. But the environmental thread, and the related non-consumerist thread, were running deeply through our thinking.
	We Americans produce and consume. It's what we do. We produce products for others to consume, and we consume the products others produce. Together we produce huge quantities of products, and we consume them all. Our lives are governed and distinguished by this. Our economy grows in direct relation to the speed with which we consume the raw materials we dig out of the ground. Our economic health, in other words, depends on accelerating the destruction of our physical environment.
	The majority of us spend what we earn at least as fast as we earn it and usually faster. Speed counts here. There’s a radio ad these days for a credit card that justifies consumer debt with the slogan: "Because life won’t wait." Horseshit. Life has waited for three million years. Regardless, our consumerist economy offers a wonderful panoply of exciting new products to exchange our money for, so that no one ever finds himself embarrassed by extra money and nothing to spend it on. It is the fact that most of us want desperately to spend everything we earn and can’t stand not to spend it that ensures this panoply continues to exist. Rolls Royces only exist because there are people in this world so rich that they literally don't know what else to do with their money, so we "help them out". If Rolls Royces did not exist, we'd have to invent them. In fact, we did. Money burns a hole in our pockets. We have no clue how much would ever be enough. I even know a boater who named his trawler Never Enough. He’s a real jerk, for what that’s worth.
	Most of us save for the future only if forced or induced to — by involuntary company-paid retirement plans, company-matching plans (401k’s) with massive early withdrawal penalties — I mean, it's our money, but how many of us would save it if we weren't coerced to? Our rate of savings as a nation right now is about four percent of disposable income and has only been lower than that for one year since 1960, while our level of consumer debt (excluding home mortgages) averages nearly twenty percent of annual disposable income. Our debt as a nation is an astounding four times our government's annual gross income, which is to say our government owes four times what we annually pay it in taxes. Almost thirty percent of its income goes to cover the interest, and it continues to borrow, in the form of the national deficit, an amount equal to twenty five percent of our nation's gross income annually. After subtracting out interest payments, that's thirty six percent of disposable income added to our debt each year — and this DOESN’T INCLUDE what we each owe individually on our homes, cars, fur coats, and VCR’s. I mean, what sort of people are we? I'll tell you: we are a nation of people who simply can't get enough of anything, and we will indebt ourselves to hell and back in order to get more. In the back of many minds there's a voice saying "Save? What for?" Or more likely, given these debt levels: "Save? How?"
	Back in LA I knew a man who was under so much stress at work that his dentist fitted him with a "night guard" bite plate because he was grinding his teeth so badly in his sleep they were being reduced to powder.This same man confided to me that the only thing preventing him from buying the new $50,000 Corvette ZL-1 he coveted was the prospect that it might be damaged in the parking lot where he worked. Huh? With that fifty large in his pocket he could stop working for an entire year and solve his dental problems in the bargain! Did he fail connect his teeth-grinding with his earning capacity?
Why do we do these things to ourselves?
	The cost of consumerism is two-fold: it destroys the earth, and it erodes our personal freedom. It is widely accepted that if we were to be asked to repair the environmental damage we cause in the production of a product, any product, we'd quickly discover that the cost of doing so vastly exceeded that product's production cost itself. This says that we as a culture do not yet consider it necessary to include environmental repair in the cost, though the Earth may well be in the process of teaching us. The ozone hole over Antarctica, for example, is a direct result of refrigeration, air conditioning, and the use of degreasers during the assembly of integrated circuits and printed circuit boards, all of which we now demand as consumers. I am convinced that no degree of technological cleverness is going to impact such problems until the consumerist pressure disappears — that is, until we stop consuming. Just the raw tonnage being consumed tells me so.
Allow me to restate it so there is doubt about what I just said. The only way to reduce the current level of ongoing environmental destruction is to reduce the number of pounds of products we demand. Period. In other words, stop buying. Is that clear enough? We have to STOP IT.
	Yes, I know what that would do to the economy. I'm not stupid. But the whole point here is that we have an economy the Earth can't support, and the arithmetic isn’t complex. This is just what's so, and no amount of cleverness will change it. In our culture, we like to think there'll always be a clever answer — it almost defines who we are — but not this time. This time I believe we're in for it.
	And what about the personal freedom I mentioned? As I said earlier, consumerism is an addiction that goes unrecognized in our society. If you are skeptical, imagine being told you may not buy something you really want, that you have been planning to buy and have been saving up for, and that you have the money for right now. You'd be beside yourself. What if some authority could force you not to spend, say, half your income? Made you keep it and just let it pile up instead. You'd want to kill them, or at least vote them out of office. Yet if each of us effected such a reduction voluntarily, no American would ever again have to work past the age of forty, and I submit that every one of us, and our nation as a whole, would be massively better off. Think of the increase in art, in philanthropy, in community activities, in family participation in their children's and grandchildren's education, and in plain old time to be together. Instead, we exercise "discretion" — allocating our "discretionary income" to the acquisition of more and more stuff, as if stuff is what has the best chance of improving our lives. Werner Erhard once said, "We count so little [as individuals], we make so little difference, we matter so little, that we can't even act in our own intelligent best interest." The bald truth.
	What if someone had told us at age twenty that we had a choice: we could either buy and own everything we wanted and could afford, or we could stop working for a living at age forty? What would we have done? What if we had known that for three million years, up until about 10,000 years ago, two days a week is all human beings ever worked in life? Our local discount department stores are full of luxuries, not necessities, and they're all selling quite nicely. That's why they're there. Nothing that isn't being bought is even on the shelf. Think about that the next time you're in Wal-Mart. Take a look at what's on those shelves. Someone’s buying it. Do we really need to work those extra hours so we can buy it all? Look at the car dealer down the street from you. He's not selling all those new cars because our old cars don't work anymore. Look at what he takes in trade: nice, shiny cars about three years old that drove in under their own power, and that anyone in Central America would cut off their right arm to own. Few people who are in the market for a new car actually need one — and no one needs a Rolls Royce. Think about that the next time you're grumbling about the proliferation of car dealers around your neighborhood. They proliferate because there's a market, and the market is us. We buy things because we believe it’s the quickest way to improve our lives — that's the argument all advertising makes — and if some is good, more is better.
	When our houses get filled with stuff we've bought, we clean house to make room for more and better products that continue and will always continue to appear. As we mature, we consider that we now have a different "self" to "express", so we look for different products to buy that are consistent with our developing self-image. As our incomes grow with time we look for more expensive and higher quality versions of what we've already bought several times over —bigger, better, fancier stereos, cars, houses, kitchens, bathrooms, bicycles, boats, beds, barbecues, home decorations, art objects, toys, call-waiting, call-forwarding, cellular phones, pagers, computers, Personal Digital Assistants . . . good grief. When we die, we leave it all to our children in the moronic belief that it's worth something, and they promptly throw most of it away because they already own a still newer, more improved version. "He who dies with the most toys wins" may be a joke, but it's not a lie. This is what we call self-expression. And yet how much more of ourselves might we have available to be expressed if we stopped spending all our time earning money for, shopping for, and buying all this stuff? On Daybreak we led a life of astounding simplicity compared to our previous life, and yet we had so much more to think about, and do, and say, that it took on average five hundred words a day in letters back home to begin to express it. We were living on one seventh of our previous income, about half of which went into Daybreak, yet we did not feel deprived in the slightest. What, we wondered, had the other six sevenths accomplished? Surely upon returning to "normal" life, we could trade some of that extra income for the time and freedom to pursue the dreams we'd always been keeping on the back burner.

	The Abacos are much more developed than the Exumas — which admittedly wouldn't be hard. They're much farther north and west, closer to U.S. shores, and therefore closer to supplies and to American tourists. Harbor-side cafés and bars are full of youngish free-spenders and other tourist-types very much like on any U.S. shore. Marinas and resorts are everywhere, and they meet our stateside standards. Ironically, one of the advertisements we ran across in our cruising guidebook, for the Guana Beach Resort and Marina (on Great Guana Cay), offers "The Total Out Island Experience" — with marina, swimming pool, ice, live music, dining, boutique, "Best Ocean Beach in Abaco", beach BBQs, "package liquor", hammocks in a palm grove, air conditioned rooms and villas . . . Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the "out islands" start south of Nassau? And couldn't this ad describe any beach resort south of Long Island, NY?
And, um . . . doesn't "guana" mean birdshit?
	While some of our reaction upon encountering such centers of civilization was due simply to their contrast with the places we'd recently been, another part of it owed to the style of cruising we were doing. We had little money, so we avoided marinas and even restaurants. We derived our greatest satisfaction from long periods spent in remote wilderness areas, which necessitated the conservation of water, fuel, and food, plus the development of an intimate familiarity with our own garbage.
	The logistics of this kind of cruising, just like the logistics of any lifestyle, shape one's experience. Because we needed to live efficiently, less efficient living often came as a shock to us. We filled one thirteen-gallon white kitchen trash bag about every ten days, compared with one or two days when living ashore. Full bags got stacked in the head to await shoreside disposal facilities — sometimes requiring a fee, but one we were happy to pay. No food went into these bags, just paper and plastic. Food waste went into a special container in the galley to await disposal over the side in deep water, and the same went for cans, bottles, and jars. We sank them offshore, in water deep enough no one would ever anchor or snorkel there, and where not much garbage was already likely to be. Our human waste went into the water after being thoroughly broken up by our marine toilet, and if this little item of equipment malfunctioned we disassembled and fixed it ourselves. We also had a holding tank we could pump overboard in deep water (but with the entire cruising community discharging directly in the anchorage, there wasn't much point. On Daybreak the process was also quite cumbersome — something we'll correct next time around.) The tank held ten gallons, which was a two-day capacity for the four of us. We decided whether to swim off or near the boat only after evaluating the number of boats around us, the water depth, our proximity to shore populations, and the tidal flushing action present. With this as the shape of our lives, we often felt out of place where large numbers of people were regularly flushing toilets without the remotest idea where their waste went afterward. Such behavior looked irresponsible to us.
	Do birds and squirrels and lions and elephants have to concern themselves over where they take a dump? Not hardly. Then why must we? Answer: because there are so goddamned many of us! Our waste disposal problem is just a tiny indication that human population is a problem. Once again it is clear that most of the problems we humans face would utterly disappear if there were 80% or 90% fewer of us! No such reduction is likely in the near future, but I am led to suggest that in this modern age when most American children survive to adulthood quite nicely, perhaps two children is the most any responsible parent should consider having. We all tend to talk about things as if there aren't any simple solutions, but I recall the refreshing conversation I had with a British cruiser in the San Blas Islands, regarding yacht anchor design, who said, "Well, you can talk all you want about anchor designs, but in the end there's no substitute for kilos." Likewise where environmental issues, crime, drugs, juvenile delinquency, gridlock, and a host of other social issues are concerned, there's no substitute for 90% less population.
Lynn observed that consumerism is only an issue because there are too many consumers. The experience of boating rather quickly teaches us that most of the time the simplest solutions are best. "Boss" Kettering, one-time Chief of Research at General Motors, said of automotive design, "Parts left out cost nothing and cause no service problems." The quintessential "go small, go simple, go now" cruisers Lin and Larry Pardey have said, "Omitted equipment won't deplete your cruising funds, either at purchase or when it needs repair, and won't keep you in port waiting for parts." The simpler a boat, the more cruising its crew will do while "cruising". Could it also be that the apparently more complex issues we confront in our society aren't really so complex either? Perhaps cleverness and ingenuity only become necessary when simple approaches are being ignored. I'm not suggesting that we kill off nine tenths of the world's population — but couldn’t we let a few people die without replacing them immediately? I suggest that we start to notice what our numbers are doing to us, and that as individuals we stop contributing to them.

	In the midst of such thoughts we visited Lynyard Cay and Hope Town (north end of Elbow Cay), then made the left turn onto a WNW course that would, if followed for another 225 miles, put us in Cape Canaveral, FL. For the first hundred of those miles we would still be hopping up the chain of the Abaco Cays, having just reached the heart of their treasures.
	From the top of the Hope Town Lighthouse, which we toured, we had been able to see Man-O-War Cay quite clearly, three miles distant. No point in raising sail. We were there in thirty minutes, and found the neatest, cleanest, most gracious and attractive little waterside community we'd come across. Naturally there was a pretty strong tourist influence, with gift shops, quaint little cafés, and so on, but they were nice little shops and cafés, with many locally handmade items for sale. A former sailmaking shop that could no longer make a go of it had switched to nautical sportswear and canvas products, all perfectly made and displayed in a spotless, breezy shop at the water's edge. There were several boatyards, two of which made a variety of small boats prized throughout the Bahamas: a couple of sizes of well-conceived utility runabout, and a heartbreaking twelve-foot Bahamian sailing skiff, cat-rigged, lovingly hand-made all in wood, carvel-planked, keel and ribs sawn from natural crooks of deep red tropical hardwood pickled in seawater until long after they would no longer float. The lumber for these things didn't exactly, uh, grow on trees there in the Bahamas. We hadn't the guts to ask what these little jewels cost after seeing a quarter-scale half-model of the unplanked skeleton of one of them, on a varnished wall plaque, for $1800! Ooooh, but what price perfection, huh? Gitchyer wallet out. I'm guessing upwards of ten thousand . . . 
	Why, we wondered, is this one particular community such a gem among Bahamian towns? First of all, it's in the Abacos, which see a lot more tourist traffic, so the overall economic standard is higher. But even so, Man-O-War Cay stands out. Second, it's mostly white. Sadly, that matters. Third, it's a fairly religious community — god-fearing, the guide book said — but that's not unusual in the Bahamas. Fourth, it is dry. No liquor. Not in the stores, not in the restaurants, not in the homes, nowhere. Hmm. Could that be it? Could that explain the well-kept cottages, the well-tended gardens, the fresh paint, the clean windows, the lack of dirt and dust, the sharp clean clothing, the orderliness, the industriousness, the friendliness, the fresh faces? Mebbe so, mebbe so.
	We motored from there to Great Guana Cay in glass-like water six to fifteen feet deep above sand and eel grass. Bypassing "Guana Beach", we put the hook down in seven feet of water in a large, open, quiet bay in the lee of the northwest end. "Lee", that is, for "prevailing" winds, which had not prevailed since our arrival in the Abacos.
	The day had been witheringly hot, but things improved once the anchor touched bottom. It seems we'd been traveling WNW at six knots while a six knot ESE breeze blew, resulting in exactly zero apparent wind while underway. Having stopped, suddenly the breeze was perfect — for novice windsurfers! I had sprained my hand the previous day when the windsurfer mast came loose while I was "tacking" (I mean, falling down preparatory to turning the board). Something whacked the back of my left hand as I fell, and I was in pain the rest of the day. Slept with an Ace bandage on it. I wondered if I might even have broken it, but conditions were so perfect that afternoon I just had to go out again, and what a delight! Lynn, being lighter, had already learned to tack, and I was determined not to be left behind on the learning curve. Finally did it: three times in a row without falling off; what joy! To be able to turn the board around and sail back home without getting salt water jammed up my snout, that was an improvement. I could do it in three to five knots of wind, no more nor less, if the water was absolutely dead flat. As Clint Eastwood said in Dirty Harry, "A man's got to know his limitations."
	A postcard sunset developed, silhouetting the casuarinas on the point. In balmy air, with the glow in the western sky fading, the water going liquid gold, then pale, the kids running around on deck a few final minutes before bedtime, Lynn and I awaited the late evening quiet. I remembered a morning from my youth, when my father, brother and I had sailed after sunset in our 26 foot Danish double-ender from Moss Landing, California, to the marina at Monterey some twelve miles across the exposed southern expanse of Monterey Bay. With the boat finally secured in a slip and all of us bedded down, we fell asleep to the gentle rocking of the remnants of surge that snuck through the harbor entrance, to the creaks and sighs of docks and pilings, to the smells of the sea and of a working harbor, and to the distant barking of sea lions on the outer breakwater. After a deep, dreamless sleep I awoke at dawn, and stuck my head up through the forehatch to discover a still, peaceful harbor in bright sun, stirring to the sounds of commercial fishermen preparing their vessels. The sense of serenity, happiness, and well-being of those moments, so different from being in a house, overwhelmed me, and I first entertained the thought of one day living on a boat.
	Sometimes on Daybreak, where such well-being was commonplace so much of the time, a morning dawned so perfect as to wake us up to our profound good fortune and remind us that it is there all the time. Under clouds remaining from a soft predawn rain, the sun peeking through wherever it could, and beneath us the placid feel of a solid boat at anchor in the perfect protection of an enclosing bay, we put some soft contemplative music on the stereo and some pancakes in the pan. Roxanne, who asked if she could help cook them (Lynn said yes), commented, "I like mornings like this, when there's music and we're not in a hurry." In other words, when there is time for her. Tania, having come back to me (still in bed) to get her ritual good-morning hug and kiss, lingered for a cuddle and spoke of things she was coming to notice about life with her developing mind and sensibilities. Patterns and rules, the organization and sense of things — getting the storyline down. The dinghy was making pitty-patty sounds in the wind ripples, a friendly little noise that signalled things were fine outside, that nothing threatened.
	We spoke about this over breakfast. We recalled the frenzy that had consumed us in our last months in LA as we sold the house, held yard sale after yard sale, gave away truckload upon truckload of unsalable possessions, and moved aboard Daybreak. Tania and I had each entered the hospital, she for hernia surgery and I for my back, and we maneuvered around the demands of two jobs trying to accommodate all this. Even without the extra work of getting ready to leave, that life was far more complex on an average day than cruising ever got. It was full of so much more that we thought of as security — doctors, services, supplies, water, power, insurance for everything, jobs, regular income (and lots of it) — yet it had so little experience of real well-being. Day-to-day back then we’d had almost no choice about what we did. On Daybreak we had nothing but choice. We had gone to work every weekday morning whether we wanted to or not, we had put the kids in school and in daycare whether they (or we) wanted to or not, we had done the shopping on Saturdays whether we wanted to or not because that was the only time available for it, and if we went sailing at all we went on Sunday with all the rest of the LA sailors, for the same reason. It was never possible to wake up of a morning and simply choose, say, to go to the mountains that day, or to the beach. Or to Timbuktu. We'd had so much more money, yet so much less financial security. Had one of our jobs disappeared, we'd have been in real trouble within a month or two and could easily have lost our home. On Daybreak that morning we had enough money to support us, if necessary, for another eighteen months. We owned our home. We paid no income taxes because we were below the poverty line. When we went to find jobs again, we would have nearly twelve months in which to do so if we stayed aboard, even in a marina.
	So there we were, beginning to think about what we'd like to do that day. School for the kids, and then: Swim? Windsurf? Snorkel on the reputedly unexcelled reefs just around the point? Read? Sail the dinghy? Lie on the beach in the shade of the casuarina trees? Bake cookies? Our itinerary said we'd be in Georgia on June 1st (we had decided to bypass Florida), and we'd leave the Abacos on May 30th to get there. The jump-off point was 108 nautical miles away, and we had 18 days to get there. What should we do? The only constraints were the charts and our six knot maximum boatspeed. We had plenty of fuel and water and, having provisioned well, our average daily expenses were down to $11.58. What would you have done?

	The wild and deserted island of Allan's/Pensacola Cay got its double name because it had once been two cays separated by a narrow gap. A hurricane filled the gap, and now there were trees growing there. The result was a nicely protected anchorage with no dangers on approach. We sailed there after a rough night at Powell's Cay caused by a squall with winds of 28 knots that made the shallow anchorage a lee shore. With only four miles of fetch, winds under thirty knots wouldn't normally have concerned us, but Georgetown had taught us that when there's any grass on the bottom, security is illusory. So we spent the hour between one and two a.m. sitting in the cockpit in our foulies, with the engine running, ready for anything. The squall passed, as squalls do. It was nothing serious. Of course, one can never know that in advance.
	In its wake a lovely ten to fifteen knot northeasterly blew all morning as the clouds cleared, enabling us to sail right off the anchor and blaze down to Allan's/Pensacola on a beam reach doing six to eight knots in ten feet of water. What glorious sailing. We came into the anchorage as the wind faded, and I unlashed the windsurfer to take advantage of the remaining breeze. With my strength and skill expanding, I went planing all over the anchorage.
	Life was getting pretty easy around there. Daybreak's equipment continued to work — mostly, anyway — and our provisions and fuel seemed to be holding out. Our "daily chores" consisted of school, running the motor (to charge batteries and run refrigeration), and meals. The Bahamas were starting to look like "the place where it all came together". The knotmeter still didn't work, the hydraulic steering drive fitting was worn and needed replacement, the sails needed attention, sheets and halyards were starting to chafe in places, the engine had a slow oil leak, the anchor roller was still kluged together since the Bimini fiasco, the engine coolant cap fitting was held on with nothing but glue (the solder had failed), the galley hatch molding leaked when it rained, and all the cosmetics needed attention . . .  We'd get to all of it some day, probably when we got ready to sell her. In the meantime, no worries, mate! What a life.
	1850 hours: heaven. How good could it get? We had macaroni and cheese for dinner — don't laugh, that was one of our favorite meals when fresh provisions were low. Kraft if possible. Try it with pepper and Parmesan cheese sometime. It was our children's favorite food. After dinner, since someone was going to have to get wet again anyway to retrieve the windsurfer for the night, I went out again and spent an hour in a mild evening breeze visiting the extremities of the anchorage. Lynn started a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and I caught the scent as I passed behind Daybreak's stern. So much for sailing. Got the windsurfer aboard, started a Joni Mitchell CD, snacked on cookie dough and hot, fresh-baked cookies, and lay on the deck playing with the children while daylight faded. If this kept up, we were in danger of getting badly blissed out, which can be a grave mental disease. (I knew this from having endured a remarkably resistant strain of it while a freshman in college. Not much schoolwork got done that quarter.) Thinking about going back to work was starting to take on a new flavor, like: what would we do if we had enough money to keep cruising forever? We were getting close to that frame of mind even without the money, but even so, we knew we didn't want to cruise all the time. Soo . . . what else did we want to do?
	I was drawing boats again, my third design. It is one of the things I like to do. But to what end? It was unlikely I'd ever build any of them, and just like writing, everyone knows you can't make a decent living at it. It was just something I wanted to do. But also as with writing (which doesn't mean much if no one ever reads it) a boat design doesn't mean much if no one ever builds it. The implications of those facts were more than I could face.
	Night came like a train wreck at Allan's/Pensacola. Around midnight a trough came through packing forty knot winds and slashing rain from the NNE. We'd been sitting up talking about our future when it all started. Thinking it wouldn't amount to much, we started collecting water. We did fill the tanks in the end, implying a quantity of rain which is rare in the Bahamas, but we had to interrupt the process because I was having trouble standing up on deck in the wind. It became apparent that we again needed to be sitting in the cockpit with the engine running, in case we dragged. Though the wind was coming across the cay, affording good protection from seas, we had a line of rocks and cay-lets about an eighth of a mile to leeward. We were lucky, and stayed put. Two other vessels in the anchorage did not.
	Luck did not abandon them entirely. The tide was low, and both had sufficiently deep keels (5' and 5' 10") that they fetched up on sand before hitting the rocks. Through the height of the squall they lay there, broadside, a few yards from destruction, as they were raked by gale force gusts and sheets of rain like the crude special effects from an old Bogart movie. Key Largo comes to mind. In the Bahamas they call these things "white squalls".
	When the wind finally eased and the stranded vessels were able to power off on the rising tide, neither had any idea where they were. Neither had radar, and neither, unbelievably, knew the lay of the cay with respect to the compass. They couldn't identify the anchorage, though less than 200 yards away every anchored boat had its masthead and deck lights on. On VHF they called for help in identifying a spot to re-anchor, and boats with space beside them flashed their deck lights for identification.
	One of the boats had dragged from a position only 75 feet to starboard of us, and the other had had two fairly decent-sized anchors down. These young folks were looking forward to cruising on their recently purchased Wauquiez ketch. They were out for a two-week shakedown. They'd bought their anchors "by the book" (the BOAT/US catalog) plus one size — not a bad plan in the absence of experience. But most catalogs don't adequately anticipate real life. Their recommendations are usually calculated for maximum winds of thirty knots. This couple would go back home to Florida, think it all over, and probably scrap that Fortress FX-37 aluminum anchor for which they'd just paid several hundred dollars, not to mention the forty five pound CQR that came with the boat. A 24-hour gale at Santa Cruz Island back in California, during a shakedown with Daybreak, had done the same thing to us in the winter of  '91. We went back to Los Angeles and shelled out two thousand bucks the next day for new anchor gear, thankful we still had a boat.
	In the morning we motored the entire thirty five miles to Great Sale Cay in headwinds, and got the hook down just as they began to increase. Oh boy, we thought, just what we didn't have energy for. Still, having suffered thus far through a day of no sailing, I decided I needed to go windsurfing quickly before the wind increased beyond my range. Launching the dinghy first in case I required rescue, off I went. Wow. During a session made brief by the fatigue of simply hanging on, the winds got up to sixteen knots, the board speed got up into the "OH SHIIIIIIIT" range, my legs got into that classic bent-knee, low-down, ready-for-death rigor, and my butt was grazing the wind chop. It quickly became clear why speedboard sailors want ultralight boards. It's because the entire driving force has to go right through your own body: from the sail, through your arms, down your legs, through your feet, and into the board. As I had just discovered, that force is tremendous. Those footstraps they use, it dawned on me, aren't just a convenience for dealing with the vibration and chop. They're there because foot friction alone can't begin to provide sufficient force. Those guys aren't leaning so far back because they think it looks cool. They're doing it because that's how much leg angle it takes to keep the board pushed out in front of them! On the board we had, a monstrously heavy "regatta" board with the largest sail available, it was literally everything my limbs could do to push that behemoth across the water, on top of a hissing wake. I came back with my eyes wide.
	Great Sale Cay would be our penultimate stop in the Bahamas. Our last stop would be at Grand Cay, sixteen miles north, for fuel before heading for St. Marys, Georgia. Once departed, we knew we'd be unlikely to see the Bahamas again for quite some time, so we were milking our stay at Great Sale for every possible pleasure.
	The hop to Grand Cay had us motoring in headwinds again. If they persisted, we'd have to wait them out. The idea of the 270 miles to Georgia across the Gulf Stream in an 18 - 20 knot northerly did not bear considering. By the time we arrived at Grand Cay, the wind had died and a blissful calm ensued. We snugged Daybreak into the tight anchorage near the fuel dock, across the lagoon from the town. We needed to catch up on sleep for the passage. The weatherfax showed a strong high that would hold off rough weather for a couple of days, just what we needed. We'd be leaving in the morning right after fueling up. The high would probably mean no wind for sailing, but we weren't feeling picky. We preferred safety and comfort over aesthetics.
	We passed a quiet night.

Chapter 20
Toward A New Dream: The Southeastern Tidelands

	We were up at dawn, anxious to take advantage of the weather and the tide. We fueled up at the funky Grand Cay fuel dock, felt our way slowly through five miles of reefs and extreme shallows, found the pass in the barrier reef, and stood out to sea. As expected, we had an uneventful passage — motored two thirds of it for lack of wind — and picked up the St. Marys River entrance buoy two mornings later. From the buoy it was fifteen more miles in a well-marked ship channel to the actual inlet, then another five miles up the St. Marys River to the town of St. Marys, where we planned to reprovision.
	We'd been a bit confused on the way in. Where were the ships? The channel was dredged to 42 feet for fifteen miles, from the ten fathom line on in. It sported jetties two miles long coming off the beach, and proceeded from there all the way through Cumberland Sound and up into a cul-de-sac called Kings Bay, the entire length scrupulously marked with buoys and ranges, but with no ship harbor in evidence anywhere. We saw a notation on the chart next to one of the gigantic range markers: "Maintained by the Navy". Hmm.
	The mystery resolved itself dramatically as we came to the channel dogleg about halfway in. Something low and black appeared in the distance pulling a huge wake: a Trident nuclear submarine! A missile sub, a "boomer". The kids were bouncing with excitement, and pulled out their copy of Things That Sail by Huck Scarry, to compare the illustrations there to the real thing. Turns out King's Bay is the largest Trident base in the country. News to us. The Navy doesn't bother to advertise this fact on charts of the area. I wouldn't want to come in there at night. I don't imagine those guys are in the habit of showing running lights.
	The town of St. Marys, beside the St. Marys River at the edge of a magnificent salt marsh (if a salt marsh can be magnificent), is a "national historic site" within which no development is allowed. Much restoration was going on. All the "civilization" — the supermarkets, the malls, the six-screen movie theaters, and so on — lay outside "old St. Marys", which kept things quiet, slow, and laid back in town, but also meant we'd need a car for shopping. What remained in the old town were some shrimp boats, the decrepit Lang's Marina (one-third full with thirty boats), a small launch ramp, a fishing dock, three restaurants, an antique shop, and various historic buildings: antebellum residences, clapboard churches, and colonial-era store fronts, behind which were the quietest, most ancient treelined residential streets you can imagine. Spanish moss in every tree, leaves in every street, quaint and lovely. At the river the high ground gave way to marsh: square miles of velvet-green, wave upon wave of delicate shades, dotted with brilliant white egrets like party confetti on a well-tended lawn. Meandering slowly through, circuitous and aimless, was the river, an estuary sustained by nine-foot tides and constant rain. At dawn and dusk, it was something special. In between, it was just hot.
	Facing the river we found a classic American watering hole, a casual bar/restaurant the like of which our country (and no other) seems to produce ubiquitously. We decided to splurge on lunch to celebrate our safe arrival and our return to our native land. We walked in, and a vertiginous mixture of shock and utter familiarity arose in our breasts. This perfectly "normal" American eatery had caught us between two worlds, screaming its abnormality to us, its customs and norms an assault on sensibilities still stuck in the Third World. Who or what had we become? If normal is the appropriate word for most of life on Earth, then what's normal is squalor, poverty, dirt, trash, poor food, nonexistent services, bad roads, junk cars, and wretched health care — all kept dubiously operational by a pathetically disorganized, inefficient, and often graft-ridden social infrastructure. What we take for granted here as the "normal", boring background of daily life is in truth wildly anomalous, a glaring abnormality, and the fact that we and the other developed nations, barely one fifth of the world's population, run the whole show on this planet blinds us to how out of touch we really are. India, one of Earth's most populous yet least developed nations, has a population three and a half times that of ours. China is five times our size. Among developed nations England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Canada taken together approximately equal our population, and some of these are only semi-civilized by stratospheric U.S. standards. Japan adds a measly 125 million, half our number. This one fifth of living humans, one species out of millions and a bare flyspeck in terms of numbers, rules all life on Earth.
	Look at us. Look at what we can't imagine living without. Sparkling supermarkets full of crisp, exotic produce, fresh safe meat and dairy products, and fifty three kinds of breakfast cereal, are not normal. Our delightful waterfront eateries with bottomless glasses of perfectly brewed iced tea, frosty mugs of perfectly chilled draft beer, and perky, bubbly young waitresses eager to please, are not normal. Our pristine marinas full of expensive boats, hooked up to unlimited free potable water, ice, megawatts of AC power, hot showers, laundromats, marine supplies, fuel docks, and shopping of every description nearby, are not normal. Our perfectly paved streets full of gleaming late-model cars with sumptuous upholstery, four barely worn matching tires and a full complement of hubcaps, are not normal. These things may be nice, but they are not normal. We are not normal. It's important to understand this, because the price we are paying in order to have these things is higher than we are aware, and it can't go on forever.
	This is going to sound silly to you, because you have experiences like this every day, but for us it was a revelation. We settled down for lunch at a table near the windows, overlooking the river. Roxanne had nachos, with cheese, beans, meat, chiles, guacamole, sour cream, and salsa, and ice-cold Coke. Tania had a bulging, juicy cheeseburger with batter-dipped fries, and an icy glass of Sprite. Lynn had a crisp, artfully-presented taco salad and the above-mentioned perfect draft beer in a pre-chilled glass. I had a grilled chicken salad and iced tea, endless glasses of it, fresh-brewed, on a steamy summer day, with Sweet 'n' Low, no lemon, just the way I like it. For dessert Lynn had Heath Bar pie, Tania had a chocolate sundae, and Roxanne and I had French Silk pie, a cool delicious chocolatey confection. (As Lynn says, "If it ain't chocolate, it ain't dessert!") All this cost $48 including a generous tip. Throughout the meal we ate with silly delight, savoring the wild variety of flavors, agog at such sumptuousness (to which the other patrons were utterly inured), and stunned by the fast, easy service provided by an effervescent waitress in her mid-20s. By any normal standards that meal was nothing short of AMAZING, yet in years past we had eaten meals like that all the time. Never thought twice about it. Among such restaurants we discriminated between the merely good and the truly excellent, a level of refinement a normal person would find incomprehensible. Isn't this the sort of quality and service you expect when you go out to eat? Do you ever think, while you are eating, while you mentally evaluate the food, the service, and the ambience against other establishments of your experience, that all the money in the world couldn't buy you a meal like that in Puntarenas or Playa del Coco? Of course not. Not even in the finest resort in Mexico could you find a meal like that, yet in our country they're everywhere, available on demand. Every product or service we take for granted is like that. Automobile service, medical care, clothing, haircuts . . . we expect and assume a plethora of commodities most of the world would find jaw-dropping, and yet you, even after reading this, are not astounded. Perplexed perhaps, because you can see that we were astounded, but you aren't. Even our own astonishment was unlikely to last long. It would soon be glazed over with returning familiarity. We could see that in Los Angeles we had been absurdly out of touch, and we would probably become so again. It had taken prolonged distance and displacement to glimpse this at all. How long would it take before our sensitivity to it disappeared?

	Walking through town afterwards, we stopped in a small bookstore run by a retired Navy officer who, upon discovering we were cruisers, promptly offered us his van for shopping. "I spent thirty years on active duty in the Navy," he said, "I know what it's like to be in an unfamiliar port with no transportation." We accepted, and thanked him. He didn't ask for a phone number, address, or even a driver's license before handing us his keys. Thanks to his generosity, we took care of our logistical needs quickly and easily the next day, loaded three carts-full of food aboard Daybreak, returned his keys, paid our marina bill, and anchored in the river for the night.
	This was the second place we'd found (the first had been Foley, AL), where the local bookstore owner knew everything. History, demographics, economics, politics — if it had to do with the local area, the bookstore folks were the ones to see. We used this trick often.
	From St. Marys we headed out to Cumberland Island National Park and spent a day hiking the island: across to the beach, then down to the old Vanderbilt mansion (unrestored and in disrepair), and back up the western shore, all in beautiful palmetto and pine forest. John Kennedy Jr. just got married there, in an ancient, dry-rotted chapel. If he was looking for somplace remote, inaccessible, and historical, he sure found it. The island is only accessible by boat, and while regular tours visit from St. Marys, crowds are absent and development is nil.
	After having spent six days in the St. Marys area, we wanted to start making some distance. Figuring to catch the tide early for the twenty-five mile run up to St. Simons Island, we raised anchor at 0530 and headed down the Brickhill River, a tidal backwater into which we had moved for the night. An hour later we rounded a sharp bend at full chat with two knots of ebbing tide behind us, and went hard aground.
	Spurred to frantic action by the falling tide, we tried the usual stuff, but it rapidly became clear we were stuck rock solid. Never had we seen tide fall so fast. I was panicked because I knew the shoals there could have steep sides, and in fact the one we were on dried completely while only four boatlengths away there was thirty-five feet of depth. You see, if you go aground at the edge of a shoal and your boat tips toward the deep water, it’s possible there may be nothing to support your hull after the water is gone. It may go completely horizontal and be flooded. This is aside from the probability that the fuel tank will drain through its vent, the batteries will capsize and throw acid everywhere, the motor will dump all its oil, the refrigerator will spill its guts, the stored food will fall out of lockers and shelves, including bottles of molasses, cooking oil, mayonnaise . . . not a pretty picture. With dark visions of a flooded boat screaming in my brain, from the dinghy I probed the water with an oar on the deep-water side of Daybreak and was relieved to find mud two feet below the surface. Even so, the heel angle was enough to put the hull ports and rail underwater. No water entered the cockpit. At thirty four degrees of tilt we prepared breakfast, ate, and spent an inglorious five hours in the hot sun before getting uneventfully unstuck on the rising tide.
	I'd like to say the shoal was uncharted, but it wasn't. Too bad for my ego. Well then, I'd like to say that the extent of the shoal was greater than was shown on the chart — but it wasn't. OK, I'd like to say that I simply misjudged our lateral position between the banks of the creek, and went aground simply by misplacing the boat. But that's not what happened either. The fact is, though I had studied the seven miles of the Brickhill River carefully on the chart before setting out that morning, had memorized its shoals, and knew how to avoid each one, I'd simply missed one. Passed my eyes right over it on the chart, failed to register its existence. We plowed our 20,000+ pounds into it going eight knots over the bottom. Live and learn. After escaping, we proceeded on up to St. Simons Island, working against the current all the way, and tied up at Golden Isles Marina.
	Our reaction at that point to the waterways of Georgia was mixed. The area was undeniably beautiful, but also buggy, tide-ridden, more developed than we expected, besides which the water was opaque and there were jellyfish! We had clearly gotten spoiled. We had an "over-developed" sense of what "undeveloped" meant, and we'd gotten used to clear Bahamian water. Bug-wise, Georgia had a real smorgasbord, including some vicious horseflies. They especially liked human bodies dripping with salt water. This made windsurfing a very precarious sport. Those buggers would bite anything that moved, breathed, sweated, or swam, and they weren't shy about it.
	Two days and 47 miles further north, at anchor next to Wahoo Island, the refrigeration choked again. Shit. I was bummed out, man, screaming obscenities. I’d describe it, but I swore that off, right? I just mention it to remind you, the system still had problems. For a few moments I actually had the thought that maybe I'd had enough of that stupid boat. This passed quickly.
	We'd come straight up the Waterway for two days without layovers, mostly out of disappointment in the available anchorages. The Georgia tidelands lie behind barrier islands. On the east side of each island is beach, facing the Atlantic. Behind the beach is a band of grassy dunes backed by oak, pine, and palmetto forest. The forest gives way abruptly on the west to salt marsh interlaced with estuaries, resulting in a maze of gooshy islands with occasional hummocks where the ground is high enough to permit forest. It is through these marshes that the ICW meanders north.
	So, what's the problem? There's no place to go ashore! Nothing but mud, marsh grass, and bugs, and channels too narrow and winding to sail in. Boring. Being boat-bound wouldn't have been bad if we could have swum, sailed the dinghy, or windsurfed, but the water was uninviting, the jellyfish abundant, and the tidal currents swift. We worried that Roxanne or Tania might fall overboard while Daybreak was at anchor. Sure, they could swim, but not three knots! And getting the dinghy launched and rigged for rescue would not happen quickly.
	On top of this, we began again to be preoccupied with thoughts of w _ _ _ . Less than six months left! What a revolting prospect. Lynn had come up with a number of ideas for herself that seemed promising and workable, but no such luck for me. Going back to engineering wasn't in my plans. That left a variety of possibilities that either wouldn't pay much or for which I had little or no background. Besides, all my thinking started from the premise: "Well, if I'm going to have to w _ _ _ . . . ".  Not a very powerful place to come from. Lynn asked me, "Well, what do you want to do?" My answer was, "Want? What I want is to buy an eighteen foot open sailboat and sail it from Cape Cod to Brownsville, Texas. But that sure as hell won't pay the bills!" Why does w _ _ _  have to be so egregious?

	Another thirty eight miles and two days brought us to Isle Of Hope. Having spent 128 nautical miles in Georgia's waterways, we pretty much had the lay of the "land", and the lay of the "land" was: marsh! In the few spots where a foray ashore was possible, the forest was dense with undergrowth, draped with cobwebs, and full of ticks carrying Lyme Disease. Yuch. Better to wait and go ashore in towns — except that few towns were blessed with a good nearby anchorage. Marinas charged from one to two dollars per foot per night, so that was out. Even in Isle of Hope, which had an actual, official, federally-designated anchorage, the local marina owner considered anchored yachts sufficiently undesirable that he charged four dollars a day for dinghy tie-up. These factors led us to formulate a new plan: stop for lay days only in towns we knew we wanted to visit, anchor out in the sticks between such towns, and visit only towns with decent anchorages. In this fashion we planned to visited Savannah, Hilton Head, Beaufort SC (that's BYEW-fert), Charleston, Georgetown, and Beaufort NC (where it's pronounced BOE-fort, and y'all best not confuse the two).
	The rule in that area for waterfront homes seemed to be the bigger the better. Five or six thousand square feet was a cottage. These were not people with kids living at home — certainly not in Isle of Hope, a small, old, beautiful waterside residential community a few miles from Savannah. Its big attractions to us were the designated anchorage and the bus to Savannah.
	Local word had it that the only boats the local marina operator wanted to see were permanent marina tenants (preferably who never used their boats), and transient "cruiser-boozers" who would pull up to take on 4000 gallons of diesel fuel or so, and then disappear around the bend. The boats in the decaying marina had to belong to the "inland" residents of Isle of Hope, because the waterside residents each had their own pier jutting out over the fringing marsh, with multiple floating docks, roofed gazebos, boat hoists, air-conditioned dock houses and glassed-in verandas for entertaining, swim ladders, water slides, a fifty foot cabin cruiser, a twenty foot runabout with four hundred horsepower clamped to the stern, several jet skis, various small sailboats, a windsurfer or three, water skis scattered about like discarded toothpicks, plus acres of professionally-manicured lawn under canopied oaks three centuries old and a hundred feet across, dripping with Spanish moss, and beneath them the stately neo-antebellum mansion of Parthenonic proportions.
	I can imagine these folks might not have appreciated the way liveaboards and transient yachts marred the view from their modern-day fiefdoms, but one or two lots back from shore nothing of that sort was the case. There the houses dated from around 1900 — smaller, well-kept white and pastel clapboard homes with a classic entry stair and double doors in front and a wide veranda all the way around. Of course they were cheaper, less pretentious, and had no water view, but nestled in the rich old-growth Georgia oak forest, they had prodigious appeal.
	We met one of these residents. After settling ourselves by the curb of a Saturday morning for the ninety-minute wait for a bus to Savannah, a 72-year-old gentleman named Jack, from the house across the street, pulled up in his Cadillac Seville, rolled down the window, and said, "If you haven't got a gun or a knife, I'd be happy to give you a ride into town." Nope, no guns or knives here, mister, just yer basic American family. Thanks very much. Jack was employed in the fertilizer business, where he'd been for 35 years. He was scared to retire, he said, because everyone he'd known who’d done so was now dead. His 1906 home, white and pale yellow, looked like it had been built yesterday. He gave us a rundown on what to see in Savannah while providing us an air-conditioned ride straight to the Savannah Visitor's Center.
	Savannah was founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe, who represented a colonial business consortium back in England. When he got to the banks of the Savannah River, the first thing he did was lay out a street plan with a park every two blocks, right in the middle of the street. Pedestrians walk through the parks while carriages (and cars) go around. With its very short blocks, the city was made for walking, and that's what we did. In the one square mile of historic "old" Savannah there were no fewer than twenty seven parks, three of them covering eight or ten city blocks. Oglethorpe was a man with a plan, and the plan still works.
	We traversed ten of the twenty seven parks during our meandering tour, had a delightful lunch of submarine sandwiches and cold Cokes at a little hole in the wall hangout, visited the souvenirs-and-food mall built into the old brick cotton warehouses along the waterfront, spent two fascinating hours in the Ships of the Sea Museum (four stories of photos, ship models, and memorabilia, and a forty minute video of the 8500 ton, 375 foot long, four-masted square-rigger Peking rounding Cape Horn in 1929 — wow), and caught the next-to-last afternoon bus back to Isle of Hope. We disembarked a mile short of the marina in a tiny burg called Sand Fly, GA, where a Piggly Wiggly supermarket (who comes up with these names, anyway?) would provide transportation back to the river for shopping yachties. When our time came, the manager polled the bag and stock boys to find one who was at least 18 years old and had a reliable car. We rode back to the dinghy in a throaty silver Trans Am with mag wheels.
	Evening arrived with a bang. Georgia in summer echoes the deep tropics: it's hot and there's a lot of water lying around. Great gobs of evaporation convect upward during the day, resulting in thunderheads, thunder squalls and apocalyptic rain. This natural spectacle, and the anchor drills that tend to result, make for lively dinner-time entertainment.
	We called ahead to make arrangements for a couple of stops. Larry, friend of a friend in Beaufort SC, upon hearing us say where we planned to anchor and that we wanted to visit him, responded, "Anchor? No way! You're staying right here at Port Royal Landing Marina, and you're staying for free!" Well. Twist mah arm. We don't pass up offers like that. Feeling flush at this unexpected hospitality, we decided to call Fred and Pam, a couple we'd met in the Abacos, who had invited us to stop by their home in Hilton Head. As with Larry, we said we'd anchor in the tules just beyond the marina and meet them at the dock by dinghy. "Oh no," they said, "you'll be our guests at Skull Creek Marina. We'll call down there right now and tell them to expect you. And by the way, don't make plans for dinner!" We were bowled over once again by Southern hospitality. Oddly, Larry hailed from Southern California and Fred and Pam from Pennsylvania.
	One more errand before leaving. Lynn prepared a wrapped and beribboned plate of fresh-baked cookies to take to Jack in gratitude for the ride he had given us. He wasn't home, but his wife answered the door. She took about half a second to figure out who we were and exclaimed:
"Well haah, y'all!! Jack told me awhl about meeting y'all yestuhday and about all y'all's cruise! Please come in, come in, come on insahd where it's cool. What're y'all's names? Mah name's Vahginyuh!"
	We were swept away by this woman. We told her about cruising, she showed us around her stunning century-old home, and we then talked about Savannah and hurricanes and all sorts of things while the girls ran wild through the house (at her invitation), playing with the toys she kept out for her grandchildren. We sat in splendid cool comfort in a gracious, antique-filled living room right out of Southern Living, while a sharp thunder squall rolled overhead and a ton of rain ran wildly off the eaves. She begged us to stay another day or two and to borrow her car to see more of the Savannah area. What a sweetheart! But we declined, having already made other plans to the north. After the rain, she grabbed her umbrella (because the trees drip mightily), and walked with us down to the marina, where we bade farewell and parted. "It has been an absolute delaht to visit with y'all," she said. "If y'all ah evah in this area again, please stay longah and come see us raht away!" We wouldn't miss it.
	We raised anchor and went straight to Hilton Head.

	There were two striking aspects to our visit there, polar opposites that together left us utterly unnerved. The first aspect concerned our hosts. The second concerned what we saw on the island.
	Fred and Pam received us like visiting royalty, and so did the marina. Calling ahead by radio, this response came back before we could utter a word: "Yes, Daybreak, we have a complimentary berth reserved for you for a minimum of two nights. You'll be on the end-tie on F-dock, right next to Fred and Pam's boat, Simplex. Call us again when you're on approach, and we'll have the dock manager meet you and take your lines." Wow! And when we got there, who should the dock manager turn out to be, but a guy we'd first met in Magdalena Bay on the outside of Baja, aboard his 57 foot ferrocement schooner. He'd gotten to Skull Creek a week before us, and already had a job.
	It being blazing hot, we stopped by the Coke machine on the way up to the office. As we entered, the day manager saw our soda cans, reached down into a box, pulled out four of those foam soda can insulators (emblazoned with "Skull Creek Marina", of course), handed them to us, and said, "There'll be no warm sodas at Skull Creek!"
	Fred and Pam had gone to get some lunch and arrived after an hour or two. You have to understand that we had never actually met them in person before. They'd simply verbally admired my windsurfing a couple of times as I whizzed by, and we had bid them farewell via radio as they left Great Sale Cay for home. It was then, seemingly as an afterthought, that they had invited us to stop at Hilton Head. And here these total strangers scooped us into their car, took us to a dazzling upscale grocery store, directed us to choose ingredients for dinner, bought everything to which we pointed, and chauffeured us back to their waterfront condo for a delightful dinner and evening.
	The next day they showed up bright and early to spend their whole day giving us a complete tour of the island. We saw the different residential developments, the shopping areas, the tourist areas, the nature preserve areas, visited a neat little bookstore, had lunch at Pizza Hut (the children's choice), and they finally dropped us back at the marina that afternoon where we said our goodbyes. Such incredible hospitality surprised us constantly in the South. The generosity went beyond anything we've ever experienced.
	But now, the other side of the coin: Hilton Head. This part is difficult.
	Hilton Head Island is one hundred percent developed, a "designed community", and it isn't small. It's eleven miles long and four wide, most of it manicured to a fare-thee-well in a human-engineered version of sylvan beauty, and what remains has been "left in its natural state" by explicit human design. In other words, nothing exists on the island without human permission, including the bugs and alligators.
	Carved out of the island's thirty-seven square miles are several perimetered, restricted-access residential developments of a few thousand acres each, called "plantations", plus a public-access commercial zone. A precious few hand-picked retail establishments are allowed inside each "plantation". Much local discussion centers around which plantation is "best", and their residents are highly proprietary: they chose their “plantation” carefully after considering property values, zoning rules, building and landscaping covenants, degree of retail development allowed, whether leasing to non-owners is permitted, and so on. Fred and Pam spent half an hour telling us how they had made their own selection, and it was like any conversation about the "good" and "bad" parts of a town — except that in Hilton Head the differences, amid such comparative wealth and refinement, were of such small consequence we were dumbfounded. Does it really matter whether your house is on the beach, on the golf course, or in the forest when it takes a million bucks and a special pass to get you in there at all — and when just across the bridge is all the poverty, squalor, and hopelessness of rural South Carolina?
	Residences range from two-bedroom condos to waterfront homes in excess of ten thousand square feet. There are greenbelts everywhere, bike paths on every road, carefully preserved alligator ponds (surrounded by lawn), and several "nature preserves". There are rules about how your house can look, how many trees you can or can't cut down, how big the commercial signs can be — all of which most reasonable people would welcome. I mean, rules like these keep developers and private home builders from going nuts and messing up the views, property values, and residential serenity of everyone else, right? As if it were one gigantic golf course, Hilton Head is all of a piece. (Actually, there are twenty four. Golf courses.) Driving around, we found ourselves vaguely uneasy — then less vaguely, and more uneasy. But why? We couldn't put our finger on it. What, we thought, could any sensible person possibly object to here?
	It didn't gel until we visited one of the nature preserves. Fred warned us we'd have to be quiet. We wondered why, but not for long. The sign at the entrance that said:

"Please make no unnecesary noise in the Nature Preserve,
as the animals are disturbed by the intrusion of unnatural sounds."

Oh, OK, we thought, that's nice. How thoughtful, sensitive . . .  Hey, wait a minute. Everything on this fucking island is an intrusion on the wildlife. Give me a break! And what about this "unnatural sounds" business? What about us? Aren't we natural? "Look", I said to Lynn later, "I'm an animal too, as natural as a bug, and SOMETIMES I'M NOT QUIET!"
	Nature preserves? What they have preserved there, for the wildlife, is the swamp. Where you couldn't build houses or golf courses anyway. Big deal. If you took a horizontal cut through that island three feet above the high tide line, everything below the cut would be nature preserve and everything above would be inhabited by people. Every square centimeter of buildable land on Hilton Head is developed.
	So there it was, the whole point Daniel Quinn had made in his book Ishmael staring us in the face: we humans thinking we're different, not really animals, not really subject to the same laws as the rest of life on Earth, thinking that the Earth is ours, put here for us to run, govern, rape, pillage, and plunder as we wish, to cultivate, mine, deforest, landscape, shape, sculpt, to dump garbage on, burn, grade, dynamite, build highways across, to use, abuse, save, protect, ignore, hate, or love as we see fit, like there aren't any pre-existing rules about how life ought to be lived around here. Lynn and I, looking for where and when and how to return to life in our native land, were confused, not knowing what to think or what to do, because it was only after having seen the vast wilds of Costa Rica, Panama, Belize, and Guatemala that we had begun to realize how the developed nations behave toward the Earth. We could see the truth of what Quinn had written, and yet it would be unreasonable to blame either the developers or their customers. All of us were brought up here. This is how we live. Our culture seems natural, even inevitable to us. Quite frankly, we don't know any better.
	Questions raged inside us. How big a house is "big enough", and how big is "too big"? Is it just "whatever you can afford"? How much development is "too much"? How many stores is "too many"? How many kinds of breakfast cereal on the grocery shelf is "too many"? How much pollution is "OK"? Is it just when humans are adversely affected that we should back off? How many species of life is it permissible to extinguish beneath the juggernaut of human expansion? How many brands, kinds, styles, and sizes of cars do we really "need"? How much money "should" a car cost? How much automotive pollution should be "allowable"? How many cars "should" a single family own? How much iron ore "should" we be digging up each year to build those cars? How much bauxite for the aluminum? In general, how many pounds per person per year of non-renewable resources is it "OK" to consume? How ought we to live?
	A short time later, on a trip to visit a friend in Florida, we toured Kennedy Space Center, where we saw a short movie concerning a fictional occasion when the first human boy born off-planet (in a colony on Mars) comes to Earth for the first time, at the age of ten. The plot is not important, but the moral is. In the penultimate scene, as he and a girl he's met on the shuttle gaze out the windows at the stars, he repeats to her what he's recently heard from an elder crewmember: "It's all ours, as far as our eyes can see, as far as our imaginations can take us."
	Yes. This is the same species that sent colonists from England to the Choptank River on the Chesapeake Bay, where they began slowly buying up land as "needed" on the Delmarva Peninsula — for tobacco, of all things — from the singularly peaceful Choptank Indians, who had absolutely no basis upon which to understand, let alone anticipate, that these settlers would eventually want, and take . . . all of it. And if NASA and its current visionary leader, Dan Goldin (a man beneath whom I once worked), are any indication, this same species, these homo sapiens, having refused to settle for "just" all of Mesopotamia, or "just" all of Eurasia, or "just" all of the Americas, certainly aren't going to stop now, and settle for . . . "just" the entire Earth.
	With such thoughts spinning in our heads, we visited Beaufort SC and headed for Georgetown, from whence we took the above-mentioned trip to Florida. Hurricane Alberto chose that moment to arrive in the Florida panhandle out of the Gulf of Mexico, with the apparent intention of veering NE and spend its last energies over the Carolinas. Gulp. To our chagrin and that of our hostess, we turned around and drove back. A former cruiser herself, she understood, commenting, "You don't own a boat. It owns you." Naturally, once back in Georgetown, no weather of significance appeared. Just a whole lot of rain.
	Beaufort was another shot-in-the-dark "a friend-of-a-friend says look him up if you're in the area". So we did, thus meeting Larry, former Los Angeleño and friend of our old sailing buddies Doug and Nancy Russell (who, if you have a very good memory, you will recall were the folks who accompanied us to Catalina Island on the first day of our cruise). Larry and his Ericson 29 had moved to Beaufort, where he lived aboard it at Port Royal Landing Marina and was employed as dockmaster. We'd called Doug first to ask if he really thought this was a good idea (Larry didn't know us from Adam), and Doug said "absolutely no problem". When we called Larry a few minutes later, Doug had beaten us to it. Larry laid out the red carpet for us: three nights as guests of the marina, treated us to dinner — wow. We were beginning to wonder if everyone in the South was like this.
	We got acquainted with several of the marina employees including — are you ready? — Fleetwood Harow Covington, Port Royal Marina's ultra-laid-back native South Carolinan Harbor Master. Plus other liveaboards: "Red", the self-acknowledged Beaufort town drunk, who worked for the power company; his wife, the marina's receptionist; a guy named Lee who built refrigeration & AC systems for boats; and believe it or not, Lane (that's right, another Lane), who was a self-employed mason who specialized in reconstructing ruined historic brick and "tabby" churches. ("Tabby" is a 1700's-era limestone-based aggregate which used oyster shells for fill). Lane took us to a tabby church ruin he was working on, then lent us his truck for the day while he worked, so we could drive around the Beaufort area. We spent the day with the kids in the back of the truck until it got so hot they were melting. Saw historic Beaufort, did some shopping, went out to lunch — such luxury!
	Larry said he loved Beaufort and living aboard. He "worked" about 60 hours a week, "work" consisting of just being the nice guy he is, doing what came naturally, filling up a few boat fuel tanks from time to time, setting people up with transient dockage, and doing whatever else happened to need doing. Larry fit in so perfectly there, he just never looked like he was working, though he certainly was.
	Port Royal, by the way, is one of those marinas that requires a tremendously long causeway built out over the salt marsh to get to the docks. One morning I measured the round trip from our boat to the bathroom: four tenths of a mile. The marina personnel used a golf cart.
	Our refrigeration had gone bust again, so I got to spend a blazing South Carolina summer morning down below, wrapped around a running diesel. Sorry — I had to mention it.
We took two days to make the sixty three miles to Charleston and stayed two days, the first one just to rest my back, which had been acting up again, and the second to do a walking tour. At Charleston, you anchor out in a crowded little niche crammed between a ship channel and a muddy foreshore, tide-ridden, half-full of moorings, and wide open to southeasterly weather. The alternative was a marina we couldn't afford, so that was that.
	You can kind of think of Charleston as a "Savannah wannabee". For starters, it didn't have James Oglethorpe to think things out in the first place. Worse, the historic district had become badly diluted before anyone got around to thoughts of restoration. When the original buildings, street widths, curbs, and trees are gone, when first floors have been turned into garages, there's no remedy. Yes, scores of cherished 250-year-old homes along the Battery and facing Battery Park still exist, and yes, people still call it "The Holy City", and yes, it's the only city General Sherman spared in his "scorched earth" campaign across the South during the Civil War. In addition, Charleston sits on a peninsula smack in the center of a superb natural harbor, the mouth of which is protected by the island stronghold of Fort Sumter (where the Civil War began). It certainly doesn't lack for civic zeal and promotion . . . in fact, that may be part of the problem. Charleston's historic district has been turned into a topsy-turvy collection of restaurants and cutesy souvenir shops, sort of Disneyland Main Street gone to seed. We walked three miles of it, ate lunch, bought milk and bread, and we were done. On the basis of sailing you’d choose Charleston. Other than that, choose Savannah.
	In Charleston we learned, at last, how the Civil War got started. We'd never been very clear about this. When you grow up in California, it seems that sometimes you don't learn much about anything that goes on east of the Rockies.
	In the 1840's, before the Gold Rush and before California was even a state, slavery was becoming a major political issue back East. Congress was in open turmoil due to mounting pressure from northern states to abolish slavery outright. The slave states were alarmed because they were outnumbered in both the House and Senate, and they figured (incorrectly, as it happened) that they'd be economically doomed without slaves. Unlike the North, the South’s economy depended mostly on agriculture. On top of this, they truly thought of slaves as drudge animals, and the idea of starting to treat them as human beings was almost physically revolting. Slaves were, after all, only niggers. They had the approximate social status of mules, and comparable economic value. A slave who died represented a capital loss, and not much else.
	Five of the slave states, opining that the U S of A was nothing but a loose affiliation of independent states, any one of which could leave any time it chose, decided to do exactly that. They formed a Congress, elected a President and Vice-President, and served notice: "We're outta here!" President Lincoln was not amused.
	South Carolina was one of the five. Those cocky Charlestonians took one look across Charleston Harbor at solid brick Fort Sumter, a federal facility sitting out there all by its lonesome on a little sand island, and figured, "Well hey, it's ours now!" — and took it. Lincoln became even less amused, and sent the U.S. military to take it back. Thus began the Civil War.
	Oh by the way, the Emancipation Proclamation? I always wondered how Lincoln could get away with such a thing, but I thought he issued it before the war. In fact, I thought that was why the South seceded. Not so. He issued it after the war began, and he got away with it because he had substantial latitude as Commander-in-Chief. War powers and all that. Cleverly, the Proclamation affected only states that opposed the Union, which not all slave states did. This was a not-so-subtle hint: if you abandon the Confederacy, you get to keep your slaves! At least until the war is over.
	He followed up after the war by quickly by pushing the 13th Amendment through Congress. And the rest, as they say, is history.
	On to Georgetown.

	We loved Georgetown, and we don't even really know why. Everything happened in Georgetown.
	Georgetown is not big, about ten thousand people. Like Charleston it sits on a peninsula, at a fork where the Sampit River meets Winyah Bay. Its economy, its skyline, and its prevalent aroma are dominated by a steel mill (Georgetown Steel) and a pulp mill (Kraft International Paper). The steel mill is noisy but doesn't smell, and the pulp mill smells but isn't noisy. Together they're just about all the town can handle. Claiborne Young's cruising guide says that the prevailing winds keep the smell away from town, but I beg to differ. The prevailing summer winds are southwesterly — right from where the pulp plant is. West is also where the bad weather comes from, and we had a pile of it. This is how we found out about the mechanical characteristics of the mud on the bottom of the Sampit River.
	Let's set the scene here. Directly opposite Georgetown's waterfront (all six blocks of it) is a wooded "cedar marsh" island. The small side-channel of the Sampit thus formed is about eleven or twelve feet deep at high tide. Our anchor platform is five and a half feet out of the water. Since adequate anchor scope means 5-to-1 or greater, we needed 5 x (11.5 + 5.5) = 85 feet of rode. Daybreak is 47 feet long tip to tip. OK, rocket scientists, what's our total swinging radius? Right, 132 feet. Let's make it 150 feet so we have a bit of room for error. We don't want to hit anything, so the river needs to be three hundred feet wide, right? Guess how wide it really is?
	Two hundred feet. Hmm. This presents, shall we say, a problem in seamanship. "The solution is left to the student", as my college physics texts used to say. OK. If we swing into the waterfront, we hit boats, piers, pilings, and other bad stuff. If we swing into the island, we hit mud. There's a hierarchy of values here. Also, the prevailing westerlies and southwesterlies blow across the island, towards town. We figured we'd set two anchors, to try to reduce our swinging radius (except there was no way it was gonna get below 100 feet), and we'd favor the island side of the river. Accordingly, we put our two biggest anchors down, one upstream and one downstream, each about 50 feet from the island. If the wind swung east we'd be on the mud in seconds, but in the prevailing breeze we had a marginally comfortable 30 - 40 feet between our stern and death. In this position we experienced our first South Carolina "afternoon thunderstorm" — which might better be thought of as The Daily Visitation By The Wrath of God.
	Weather reports were saying "moist, unstable air mass over Georgia and the Carolinas, air temperature 90 - 100 degrees , water 85 - 90 degrees, afternoon thunderstorms". Under these conditions, when the sun comes out in the morning, water vapor rises off the land (because everything is wet), and it soars upward to form "convection cloud cover". This is a euphemism for an ugly, seething, malevolent black mass that would make Steven Spielberg very happy.
	Here's what happens. The clouds get denser and denser as they gain moisture, and the water droplets in the cloud get bigger and bigger, until they can no longer stay afloat in the updraft. They start to fall. They meet smaller droplets which haven't started to fall yet, coalesce, get bigger, and fall faster. The runaway result is what we all call a "cloudburst". The entire cloud, all fifty zillion pounds of it, drops its entire load in about two minutes flat.
	When fifty zillion pounds of water drop out of the sky in two minutes flat, it pushes all the air out of the way like a big piston. That air has to go somewhere. Where it goes is down toward the ground, like water being poured out of a pitcher onto a floor. It goes splat and scatters in all directions. Now, think of a tiny little boat down there.
	First there's a stifling, slick, greasy calm filled with deceptively peaceful sounds like birdsong and the voices of children playing. And dark. Then there are a few portentous, insistent little puffs of wind, usually from a new direction, causing boats to spin abruptly and skid sideways to a new position, causing tight little knots of fear and nausea to form in the stomachs of the more experienced cruisers — because this little precursor is invariably followed by A HUMONGOUS BLAST OF WIND from yet another direction, signaling the onset of the thunderstorm. In Georgetown this blast commonly reached fifty knots, and Daybreak's anemometer is conservative. Beneath its force, boats went skittering across the river on suddenly-slack anchor rodes and fetched up when they reached the ends of their tethers, putting thousands of pounds of surge loads on their anchors from some direction they weren't dug in for. We experienced this every afternoon our first week at Georgetown.
	No problem as long as the anchor holds, right? Finally we come to the mud — the yoopy, gloopy, greasy, slimy, monkey-poop toxic waste that passes for river bottom around there. We found that no anchor exhibited more than a tenth of its nominal holding power. Our sixty pound Danforth Hi-Tensile  — our "storm" anchor, easily capable of holding over 4000 pounds of force in reasonable bottom, absolutely refused to set. We could drag it anywhere we wanted with the motor in reverse, at any speed above idle. The Bruce had to be set carefully, starting at idle and working slowly up to 1500 rpm — no higher, or it would drag. This is an anchor that regularly took full throttle in reverse everywhere we'd been for a year and a half.
	Boats dragged. Koinonia, a Morgan Out Island 41 with a virgin cruising family aboard, dragged straight down toward the pilings during a forty knot squall while the owners were ashore. Thinking the children (8 and 14) were aboard alone, I was in the dinghy in seconds, rushing over in the pelting rain, forming a plan as I went and hoping Daybreak didn’t pick that moment to break loose herself. Fortunately, no one was aboard. Koinonia’s transom stopped five feet from the seawall — ran aground, I think. Her owner came running down to the dinghy dock (ten feet from Koinonia's rail by that time), and I ferried him aboard, tied off the dinghy, he got the engine started, and I took the helm, and he went forward to handle anchors. Together we got the boat out of trouble and reanchored, all in gale force winds and blinding sheets of rain that once again looked just like the movie Key Largo. Good grief.
	Against this backdrop we were expecting visitors for a week, followed by the car trip to Florida. Sheesh! No way could we leave Daybreak at anchor. We would put her in the cheapest marina we could find. Cheap compared to a wrecked boat, anyway.
	Now, these visitors. Back in Beaufort we had received (somehow) a phone message from our good friends David and Niles in Los Angeles: "Coming to visit. Will be in Savannah on the 22nd." Savannah was 150 miles behind us.
	We called back and left a message: "Rent a car and drive to Georgetown." They shifted their flight to Charleston (sixty miles away), planned to stay a week, and needed a hotel room. Taking a walk through Georgetown, just two blocks up from the dinghy dock we came across a nice looking bed-and-breakfast called The King's Inn At Georgetown. We decided to take a look, and walked in — with kids, clad in yachtie-chic: clean T-shirts, same old shorts and sandals — to a positively sumptuous late 1700's seven-room mansion totally decorated in antiques by someone who knew what they were doing. We shortly met the person responsible. A stout fireplug of a woman, with short, ratty hair not yet regrown after chemotherapy, walked up from the back of the house sweating from work, in clothes considerably less chic than our own. She had a drill sergeant's voice, marginal-to-nonexistent manners, and boundless energy. Her name was Marilyn, she owned and ran the joint, and she was a marvel. (Her husband Jerry helped out a bit but had his own hands full with a snack-food distribution business that required him to drive something like 300 miles a day!) We looked at each other, bit the bullet, and asked if she'd have any problem with seven days' worth of two wild-eyed gay guys whose lives depended on a suitcase full of pharmaceuticals they carried around, that absolutely had to stay cold, and by the way could they have some refrigerator space to store the drugs in? "NO PROBLEM, SOUNDS LIKE FUN!" she responded in her daintiest voice. Thus began a week that none of us would soon forget.
	"The boys" (as Marilyn called to them) never went off California time and slept until noon each day. We saw some countryside, went to the beach, swam in the pool, lazed around the veranda, ate lunch in each one of the five (count 'em) restaurants in the Georgetown historic district (plus an ice cream parlor), had dinners aboard Daybreak except for one sumptuous dinner at the King's Inn, hosted by Marilyn just for "the boys" and us, and spent hours talking with Marilyn. Talking and sipping fresh iced tea on the screened veranda while the kids played in the pool. Talking in the sitting room while the kids banged away on the baby grand. Telling stories 'til the cows came home. Marilyn treated us almost as if we were hotel guests too. Or family.
	Days later, after "the boys" had left and we'd been to Florida and back, we were up at the King's Inn when a letter arrived for Marilyn from Niles. It was a thank-you note. How many places have you paid to stay where you wrote them a thank-you note afterwards? Marilyn was mortified that she'd received the note before she'd found time to write one herself! In the days remaining, we had them to dinner aboard Daybreak, swam in their pool some more, talked even more, and took them a warm coffeecake the morning we left. Marilyn came down to the dock to say goodbye. She was still there waving when we rounded the bend, a mile downriver.

	Three days of travel — including one through Pine Island cut, a.k.a. "The Rock Pile", the nastiest single stretch of the ICW — brought us to Carolina beach in North Carolina, a few miles north of Cape Fear. We anchored inside the lagoon, a natural harbor with homes all around it, several marinas, a number of large tourist boats, and the beach only 500 yards away across a well-populated sand spit. Vacation-land. It was the first decent anchorage we'd had in weeks — totally protected, with good swinging room — and that yoopy, gloopy mud, which was turning out to be a Carolina specialty. The harbor was also perfect for novice windsurfing, and I did so.
	That evening our education in east coast weather escalated. While we were sitting out thirty knot gusts in the greasy mud, there was a waterspout a hundred miles north of us, in Pamlico Sound where we'd be in another week. It capsized a thirty foot sailboat. At night. Don't sail at night is the lesson, I think. Or even in the late afternoon. A 28 foot cockleshell of a boat next to us, with three puny anchors deployed on rodes that looked like kite string, dragged all over the harbor with nobody aboard, while we watched. We reported it to the Coast Guard.
	At Wrightsville Beach, ten miles further north, our education continued. Boy. Wild times in the atmosphere that afternoon. For a change, we had a bulletproof anchorage with a hard sand bottom. Under a blue sky we dropped anchor in twenty two feet and rang out 150 feet of chain. The anchor fetched up, the bow whipped around, the chain went bar-taut as I applied full reverse, and we moved not an inch. Yes! That's how life's supposed to be.
	Good thing too. We got the first squall of the afternoon ten minutes later. Amazing. We'd been preparing to put the dinghy over the side with the idea of visiting the beach, when a blue sky with a few puffy clouds became solid black, a balmy afternoon breeze became a gale, and a mild summer day became an onslaught of rain. Yet in thirty minutes it was all over.
	An hour later, same thing all over again. I had taken a look abovedecks a few minutes earlier and had seen dissipating clouds, a mild sea breeze, and the afternoon sun making a reappearance. I went below for a bit, and Daybreak suddenly reeled under a broadside onslaught, the anemometer went to thirty knots, and gigantic raindrops started pounding down. I rushed up to look and saw a sky like Armageddon: a black, boiling, cloud mass barely 500 feet off the deck, with those wispy gray streamers hanging down from its belly that mean massive instability: tornado weather. 
	Lynn pointed out that while she knows there was no requirement that she experience a major adrenalin rush every time this happened, three times a day was too much. It was the up-and-down that hurt. Thirty knots isn't all that bad when it's steady, but when it comes and goes so suddenly, the following question arises: If the wind can go from zero to fifty knots in fifteen seconds as it had in Georgetown, what's to keep it from hitting sixty? Or seventy? I mean, how exposed were we, really? I was beginning to think wistfully of California, where the summer breeze never exceeds twenty knots and spends all day getting there.
	There are lots of people in this country who wonder out loud how any sane person could live in California, what with the earthquakes, fires, mudslides, and all that. I have this response. People who'd choose instead the daily threat of tornadoes for half of every year, the biweekly threat of hurricanes for a quarter of every year, and at the same time would choose to live in a house on a low sandspit 500 feet wide, facing the Atlantic, their front door no more than five feet above high tide and a hundred feet from the surf line when storm surge can easily reach ten to fifteen feet, in a region of the country where the sustained wind associated with a mere frontal passage has reached a hundred miles per hour within recent memory — these are people Californians should not feel guilty about ignoring.
	The average incidence of tornadoes in the central Midwest — say, Kansas — is over one per week during the hottest four months of the year. I looked it up; it's right in the encyclopedia. This doesn't include mere funnel clouds, only full-on tornadoes that touch ground and do damage. How would you like to live through every summer afternoon of your life not knowing the stupid weather was going to blow everything you owned, and maybe you, to smithereens? There's a reason those folks have storm cellars. 
 	And there's a reason why California is so popular.
	The afternoon's squalls, as it turned out, were only mild harbingers of a doom yet to fall. Evening brought the main event. It started five or six miles inland and drifted our way. I was in the cockpit counting seconds between the lightning and the thunder, and watching for funnel clouds. The setting sun had left a putrid, pus-colored edge on the underbelly of the storm. It loomed closer, and closer, and as rain began to spit the lightning strikes got so close I could see them hit ground. When the count of seconds gets below five (one mile), thunder takes on a high, crispy ripping sound that sends electric bolts of cringing panic down your spine and causes involuntary ducking reflexes. Twice I found myself doubled over on the cockpit floor before I got to "three": FLASH - "one - two" - KABAMM!!! - "Jesus!!!"
	The closest strike was a few hundred feet away . . . say, ten boat-lengths? It struck the sandspit next to the inlet, just across the channel from us. I watched it hit the sand and didn't even get to "one". At that point I finally recognized the wedge-headed idiocy of sitting in the cockpit waiting for lightning to strike Daybreak as if I could do something about it, and went below for the rest of the evening. Come what might.
	Next morning we headed for Beaufort. That's BOE-fort this time, in Nawth Caro-lahn-ah, and don't y'all make no mistake about it, heah?
	Having had enough of hand-steering under power day upon day between the marker stakes of the ICW, and with what appeared to be a good exit to the sea about a quarter mile from us, a solid tailwind, and an honest-to-god ship channel at Beaufort seventy miles away, we decided to save a day and let the autopilot do some work. I looked up the times of sunrise, sunset, and morning and evening nautical twilight, saw that we'd make it in daylight if we could be out the channel at first light and maintain five knots, and had the anchor up at 0515. We crept cautiously out Masonboro Inlet as soon as there was a glimmer of light to see by.
	On a blazing hot day we had a wonderful broad reach to within seven miles of the Beaufort entrance buoy, where increasing wind forced us to choose between dropping a sail or hand-steering. Since we were doing mid-eights over the ground in twenty knots true and I hadn't sailed in weeks, I overrode Lynn's objections and pressed on. Things were peachy until we got to the sea buoy and made the gybe for the channel.
	Ship channels in those parts, of course, are dredged, and therefore narrow. They funnel the tide. Probably we should have learned something about wind-against-tide situations five days earlier coming up the Cape Fear River. Daybreak had been almost uncontrollable, and we'd only been motoring. This time we were sailing eight-plus against a four-knot ebb in a frisky tailwind that had raised five-foot seas about the length of our waterline — all in twenty feet of water. (The chart says forty two feet, but I beg to differ.) I was steering just about lock-to-lock on every wave and thinking, "Gee, now that we're in it up to our scalps, maybe we should try and get some sail down!" Daybreak was on the edge of broaching, in a channel barely ten boatlengths wide, surrounded by surf-covered sandbars.
	Rather than broach accidentally, I chose my moment, rounded up, and blew the mizzen halyard. A few tense minutes later, during which the ebb was setting us toward the shoals, we had it under control and were again headed up-channel. The main had to stay up to help us breast the current. Inside the spit we finally found enough protection to round up and douse it as well. Arriving finally at the Beaufort waterfront under a setting sun, we found nearly every square inch of space occupied by boats on moorings. Our shoal draft let us skinny in to a spot right up against the mud, where we dropped two anchors and declared it to be "Miller Time". Actually, Coke time. There's still nothing that beats an ice cold Coke at the end of a steamy hot day!

	Beaufort is another one-street town — Front St., just like Georgetown — but in this case it isn't backed up by much. In a land of sun and heat it's a town without shade, even in the residential districts, which are 1940's vintage or so, when people's idea of a clean little community was to chop down all the trees and have lawn and cement everywhere. The waterfront, for all of this, was actually pretty nice, but no garden spot. We were actively looking for possible places to live at the time. Beaufort didn't make the list.
	For yachties, the central attraction is the Maritime History Museum and the associated Historic Watercraft Shop across the street from it. These impressive facilities are absolutely free, but best of all, they maintain two free courtesy cars for visiting cruisers to use for shopping. Ninety minute limit on weekdays, two hours on weekends, and we took advantage. The museum, larger and nicer than you'd ever expect, included a wonderful high-ceilinged maritime library, converted from a sitting room, furnished with comfy old chairs, antique side-tables, and lamps, with nine-foot-high shelves lining all four walls, packed with marine books. We spent hours in there. The rest of the place is a monument to the days of working sailboats, with emphasis on the small, shoal-water craft endemic to the area 60 - 150 years ago. Altogether, a delightful place.
	The Historic Watercraft Shop had three smallish boat restorations going, and there were eight or ten hulks lying around the perimeter which had been either dug up out of the mud of Pamlico Sound or dragged out of a marsh on the edge of somebody's farm. The shop milled its own lumber. I mean, there were trees fifty feet long lying on the floor along one side of the shop. These guys were not keeping the local lumber yard in business. For previsualization purposes, there was a model shop in an upstairs corner. All this was apparently funded by the Friends of the Museum, which means private donations. Pretty impressive for a little backwater town.
	We left Beaufort hoping to find a safer anchorage somewhere between there and Oriental, twenty one miles up the Waterway, because the forecast was for intense thunderstorms, gale-force winds, huge hail, and possibly tornadoes that afternoon. After some man-made cuts north of Beaufort, the Waterway dumps into the headwaters of Adams Creek which empties into the Neuse River which empties into Pamlico Sound which . . . well, you get the idea. We found a hidey-hole in a shallow side channel called Back Creek. We got the hook down with less than a foot under the keel, and reeled out a hundred feet of scope just as a white squall bore down on us from up-creek. We'd just got ourselves back under cover when it hit, building rapidly to over forty knots and churning the creek into a muddy milkshake. With less than a mile of fetch in any direction and about fifty yards in most, with only nine inches of water under the keel and nothing but mud to hit if the anchor dragged, we looked on the proceedings with a certain detached equanimity, even interest . . . at least until the lightning got within a thousand feet. At that distance a thunderclap reduces your sense of personhood to the consistency of mucous, and you know it was just a roll of the dice that a thousand feet was not zero and you and everyone you love weren't fried to a crisp like pork rinds. Again we huddled below, Lynn reading to the girls in the main cabin while I stood on the bottom rung of the companionway ladder, watching things topside. This time the squall passed overhead harmlessly, and peace returned.
	Once calm prevailed, we became so enamored of Back Creek that we stayed an extra day, had school, and took a dinghy ride up it. The creek was two miles long and had a grand total of four houses on it, all well-buried back in the trees, none of them imposing. We saw several perfect locations for a backwoods homesite of truly rustic character, and began to wonder what land cost around there. There'd be no roads, boat access only, which would mean propane for cooking, a diesel generator for electricity, a percolation field for sewage, and fuel oil for heat, all of which would need to be self-delivered in one's own sturdy utility skiff. Many might blanch at this scenario, but it held real attraction for us. Sort of like cruising, but with land under you. God knows what we'd do for a living, though. That was the problem everywhere.
	After a long, lazy lay-day we headed for Oriental, a town which gives new meaning to the word "sleepy". If it got any sleepier it'd be in a coma. We walked a circle tour through the place in about an hour, including rest stops on park benches, and there were no people and nothing happening. There'd been a minor fishing fleet there for decades, and two fish processing plants gave the tiny harbor a business-like smell. We tied up to the "town dock", which had room for a fifty footer on each side if they drew less than five feet, free for 48 hours — but if no one else wanted the space, you could stay indefinitely. There were three small marinas, one right there in town and two more in a creek a half mile north. All required dredged access channels from half a mile out in the Neuse River , but the town kept up with the dredging, so it wasn't a problem.
	During our walk through town we saw no "For Sale" signs on any property, and I mean none, though there was a realty office (one). This was very unusual, but we didn't know what it meant — and since we couldn't find a bookstore, we didn't know who to ask. There was, however, a sail maker. Oriental claims to be the sailing capital of North Carolina. If so, the rest of the state must be pretty dead, nautically speaking. Whatever the case, Haarstick Sails seemed to think there was enough business there to have opened an office. There was no one in it when we walked by.
	Believe it or not, we weren't wandering aimlessly up the ICW. We actually had a goal, which was to get to Manteo, NC, on Roanoke Island, in another nine days. We'd been invited by my parents to come to Duck, a few miles north of Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks, to spend a week with them and my uncle's family in a pair of rented condos. We'd be leaving Daybreak in the Salty Dawg Marina. Really. We'd spend a luxurious six days in air-conditioned comfort, with real beds, showers, and all the rest, with the beach about a hundred yards away. That would be a treat. In case you haven't ever thought about it, beaches are not something a yachtie gets to see much of. Real open-ocean beaches don't go together with boats very well.
	Beyond Duck, however, we still had no plans. Though we knew the end was near.
	We sailed up to Spring Creek from Oriental in what we had come to understand is typical summer weather on Pamlico Sound. The wind starts blowing from the southwest as soon as the sun breaks the horizon, and it grows in intensity through the day as thunderheads form overhead. By noon the wind is pushing thirty knots and localized thunder squalls are everywhere, like bowling balls rolling through a chicken coop. We were the chickens. Sometimes they missed us, sometimes they didn't. Lynn wrote home: "Never have we been in a place with such consistently violent weather."
	We started out in about 15 - 20 knots and set a single-reefed main for off-wind sailing. We moseyed on up the bay at five or six knots when a squall passed just ahead of our bow, leaving us dry but with less wind. So I pre-reefed the mizzen and raised it. This was a mistake. Five minutes later we were doing eight-plus, heeled over and wallowing in the short chop, so down came the mizzen, which brought us back to a comfortable six knots with twenty one miles to go. By the time we reached our left turn into Bay River we were doing eights again and the wind was twenty-six over the deck . . . that's thirty-four true. We sailed upriver until we were abeam a side channel called Bonner Bay, where navigational intricacies dictated that we drop sail. Bonner Bay quickly splits into two creeks. We took the right fork, Spring Creek, and picked our way carefully two miles up a twisty unmarked channel, in places no more than three boatlengths wide, between shallow mudbanks. Fortunately the chart is very good in that area. We dropped the hook in a swinging-room-only cul-de-sac seven feet deep amid pristine forest, swamp, and marsh.
	There was one large house in a prime location further up. Turned out it was a duck hunting and fishing lodge, and they owned much of the surrounding land. That explained the emptiness. We chuckled. Wouldn't it be ironic if the organization responsible for more private forest conservation than any other in the U.S. turned out to be the National Rifle Association?
	The wind continued to howl, and tons of rain dropped on us, but it all cleared up by evening. A normal Carolina summer day. We ate dinner on the cockpit coamings in a light breeze, talking about the prospect of living in such a place. Dusk brought a nearly full moon over the pines as the sun's glow faded behind clouds in the northwest. After the bedtime-story ritual, the kids reluctantly hit the sack. We followed not too much later, after some reading. 
	The mosquitoes arrived around eleven p.m. as the breeze perished. So much for paradise. So much for wanting to live there. We waged an all-night battle involving screens, insect repellant, and bug-smashing. Roxanne was moaning in her berth. She was hiding under her sleeping bag, and getting overheated. I killed the mosquitoes swarming in the forward cabin and Lynn sprayed both kids with bug juice while they slept. Returning aft to our cabin we proceeded to cover the headliner with bloody streaks as we smashed bugs into paste. You could tell which ones had already dined. We finally sprayed ourselves from scalp to toe and tried to sleep. We didn't know how they were getting in the boat, but we knew we had to figure it out. We had heard it would be worse in the Chesapeake.
	We were way out of touch, badly spoiled. Most people would call a day like that a vacation. If you had a day like that on a vacation, you would count your blessings and say you got your money's worth. We thought the wind blew too hard and there were too many bugs and it was too hot. Then we looked at each other and thought "Jeez Louise, WAKE UP! This incomparable freedom ain't gonna last forever." And incomparable is surely what it was. Imagine someone raised in, say, Pakistan, watching us whimper. "Oooh, poor babies, you had to swat a few mosquitoes after your  brisk day of flat-water sailing on your own private yacht." Right.
	We are so American. We were raised in the post-War glory days in California, went to college at our parents' expense, got excellent jobs that provided us ultimately with a six-figure combined income, lived in a lovely little town with great schools, parks, stores, and security, and all this hadn't been enough. So we chucked it all and bought Daybreak, had sailed 8200 nautical miles thus far in twenty months with nothing more pressing on our minds than our own preposterous happiness, and there we were, thinking to ourselves: "Well, this is nice, but it isn't gonna last much longer. What can we do now that's better than this?" And incredibly, whatever it was, we thought we would probably be able find it. That was our plan, anyway.
	We had to be careful not to turn accidentally into "yuppie swine", about whom Garrison Keillor said, "How convenient for them, to grow up in a country that offers such opportunities and blessings as would only be a fantasy in most of the world, and then check out in disillusionment." We hated to admit it, but that sounded like us. However, he also said, "You hear them at the grocery store deliberating balsamic vinegar and the olive oils, the cold-pressed virgin oil vs. the warm-pressed experienced olive oil, and you think, ' These people probably subscribe to an olive oil magazine.' " We weren't over that line, but in this country, it's a pretty short step.
	We concluded we'd been thinking about going back to work all wrong. (We'd even graduated from calling it "w _ _ _ ".) We'd been searching for a way to set ourselves up in THE perfect situation, right off the bat, but of course there was just no way that was going to happen. So we backed off and began to ask, "OK, what IS the perfect situation, and what's it going to take to get there?" As if, you know, we might actually have to work for it.
	The situation we wanted was to be able to take our work and our earning capacity with us wherever we went. Including to sea. To be able to live and work wherever we wanted to, both within the country and for extended periods while cruising. To be connected by phone, fax, or modem, and to work at "home", wherever home was. To have our address as economic contributors be a phone number and an e-mail code. To have to be present in person only occasionally. And to raise our children at some degree of remove from modern U.S. culture.
	Pretty intentions. We would see.

	We came up to Campbell Creek in solid rain as a cold front rolled through. We spent an unproductive hour toward the end picking our way two miles up a marked channel in another side creek with a fishing boat landing at its head. The channel was dredged, but that was all, so there was no place to anchor where we wouldn't get run over by menhaden trawlers in the middle of the night. After running aground just past the landing, we turned around, churning mud every which way, and left to try Campbell Creek instead. We were glad we did. Boy was it lovely.
	"Lovely" needs a bit of qualification, though. The scenery was placid and attractive, but there was one minor drawback to those North Carolina creeks: jellyfish. A special breed called sea nettles seems to like brackish water. They're not found in the ocean or in fresh water, but in between, they're everywhere. The jellyfish density got up to about one per cubic foot. A person couldn't dive in the water without hitting ten or fifteen. In all that heat, we weren't swimming.
	They have canopies two to six inches across, and gross slimy tentacles five feet long. We had to wash their body parts off the chain as we raised anchor so we wouldn't get their tentacles on our hands. They came apart like wet Kleenex and wrapped around everything they touched. They also got into the engine cooling system. Those critters, in combination with the mosquitoes and horseflies, could be the reason the area was not more populated. The lesson from western Florida seemed still to apply: the really nice places in this country are already taken.
	We made it to Manteo after two more stops, with three days to spare on our schedule. We'd been aiming for the place for five and a half months. Lynn commented that she was proud of us for being able to arrive so near our target date, given that we'd traveled 2200 nautical miles from Alabama to get there. Then she chuckled: "Boy, are we ever out of touch with reality. Most people routinely time their arrivals to within a few minutes, and here I am feeling smug that we can do it within three days!"
	We'd just had one of our finest days of sailing ever. Starting out from the top of the Alligator River in a cypress swamp, we sailed forty miles in water never deeper than fourteen feet, in southwest winds up to twenty five knots. We didn't reef. The apparent wind was aft of the beam except near the end, and our boatspeed was mostly in the high sevens and eights.Even in flat, protected water we were exceeding hull speed — in a full-keel displacement hull. When Daybreak gets over seven knots, she starts getting this freight train feel, the wake starts hissing, and it seems like nothing in the world could stop her. The bow lifts, the stern squats, the stern wave moves about twenty feet aft of the transom, and water barrels by the quarter rail in a white froth that's hard to focus on. When it gets like that, I just hang on, steer, and smile.
	We were there, of course, to meet the relatives and hang out at the beach. Planning ahead for Daybreak's week by herself, in often violent weather, we'd ordered all new docklines and had them shipped ahead to the Salty Dawg Marina. They were there waiting for us — fifteen thousand pounds of breaking strength each, and we tied on all eight. They didn't look all that big once they were out of the bag, but we were glad to have them. It had been blowing thirty knots ever since we'd pulled in.
	All we could think of by that time was work — moving ashore, getting Daybreak ready to sell, and heading for a future we were only beginning to devise. As this process unfolded, a dynamic appeared in our relationship that we had never noticed earlier: Lynn and I each want nearly the same things, but I want them so loudly and ardently, and talk about them so incessantly, that Lynn resists them on principle just so she can avoid feeling railroaded. But two days earlier, coming up the Alligator-Pungo Canal, the following statement emerged from her mouth.
"As I look toward the future, the only two things I can see that I'm really committed to doing are going back to the Bahamas and cruising the canals of France."
	I was steering at the time, and looked at her agape. "Huh?" Because each of those is a one year proposition, and both involve boats.
	"Yes," said Lynn, "that's what I want to do, and if you'd shut up from time to time, I might surprise you."
	No kidding.

	With our days of cruising coming to a close, it was easy to look back and see how good a life it had been. If you haven't done it before, it's impossible to imagine how good, because what you imagine isn't it. What we had imagined was sailing, and anchoring, and swimming, and seeing places we've never seen. And fear. All that had happened, of course, but what we'd learned, what we were taking with us, had more to do with time: the time we'd spent together, the pace and pulse of living when it's who we are that matters, not who we can manage to pretend to be — when the purpose of clocks is to know when the tides will occur and how soon the sun will set, not when it's time to be at work and how soon we have to be at the next meeting. We like an existence where a few days one way or the other isn't a big deal. It seems so much more human. We like being together as a family, watching our children grow day by day, being there in person for the events that are shaping who they are. We like being there to answer their questions even when they come with so many, and sometimes such silly ones that we are irritated. We knew we would see so much less of them back on land, with us working and them in school. We like being able to love them, not just daily but hourly. To hold them in our arms or on our laps and know they are happy to be there, and safe. The time would come when they would no longer want to be there, when our love for them would seem to them like a burden and an annoyance. The time to be with them is now. In fact, there is no other time.
	Lynn and I love being married, and being together. We are blessed, we think, that we basically like each other. In spite of our occasional protestations, we suit each other well. For both of us, there is no one else we'd rather be with. When we are separated, even for only a matter of hours, we talk afterwards about everything we each experienced. We don't want to miss anything that happens to each other. When we were working, this was impossible. Too much was happening. Cruising is not like that. When there's so much happening that a husband and wife haven't enough time left to talk it all over, maybe too much is happening. When a job is so stressful that there's no emotional space left at the end of the day to be together with each other, maybe that's too much stress.
	It is of interest to note that the level of work-related stress that interferes with a marriage is much lower than that which will threaten a marriage, and this in turn is lower than that which threatens individual health. In other words, a person can tolerate more crap than a marriage can. If a marriage is to be successful, the level of individual stress that was "allowable" prior to the marriage must be drastically reduced.
	Cruising time is a radically different commodity than the wretched, pinched-in little thing we manage like slaves at our jobs. Time had stretched before us like summer vacation does for children. We'd behaved as we had in younger days. We hung out with friends — just hung out, with no intention or agenda. We got together with friends for meals. We arranged picnics on the beach. We read books. We listened to music. We talked late into the night. We wrote letters, even newsletters. We thought. We contemplated. We sat by blue Central American swimming pools under brilliant green Central American foliage drinking cold amber Central American beer. We laid on beaches, romped in surf, snorkeled in brilliant coral, windsurfed across green-fringed, sun-drenched aquamarine bays, ate cracked conch in dirt-poor Bahamian cafés, and played volleyball under the casuarina trees. We played. We lived the way humans were born to live, I’m convinced.
	And we learned that a whole lot less money is necessary in life — and a whole lot more possibilities are open — than we had previously supposed. Considering all that, plus the sailing, the anchorages, the swimming . . . and even the fear . . . well, regardless of circumstances that might intervene, we were not done cruising.

Chapter 21
A Sudden Stop In Swan Creek

	The end began in Duck. Unbeknownst to us, within two weeks we would abruptly declare cruising aboard Daybreak to be over. A week later we would be tied up in a marina, we would own a car, Roxanne and Tania would be in school, Lynn would be looking for a job, and I would be writing this book.
	The end began in Duck because of one small event I almost wish now had never happened: I received from Cruising World magazine acceptance of an article I'd written and sent from the Bahamas. At the time, we'd been trying to think up some sort of transportable profession and writing was the best we could come up with, notwithstanding the fact that writing is about as idiotic and improbable a way to make a living as any on earth. Our other ideas were so far-fetched I’ve already refused to mention them. It's bad enough having to talk about writing — but I can't finish this book otherwise.
	Lynn and I thought of the Cruising World article as a test: if it got accepted, we'd take that as a sign, because the odds against that happening were literally about three thousand to one. Acceptance, we figured, might mean something. Such naíveté.
	What it meant was I got lucky, nothing more, and right now I'm not sure if it was good luck or bad. As I write this sentence, it has been over two years since that article was accepted, and the damned thing still has not been printed. For this plus twenty one of my original slides, which I cannot get back until after publication, I got paid $650. At that rate I'd need to sell one article a week to make a living, and if the acceptance statistics were correct I'd have to write three thousand articles a week to do it. Lounging in an air-conditioned beach condo in the Outer Banks, blissed out on cruising, with an acceptance letter in my hand and a stupid grin on my face, still I could think clearly enough to see that writing articles wasn't going to cut it.
	Ah, but what about books? Books, once published, provide ongoing royalties, right? And they allow more freedom of form and content. And the longer turnaround time involved might permit some real cruising in the process. Cruise and write, cruise and write . . . what a mantra. 
	Of course, there must first be a publisher who wants to print what you write, and publishers' wants are tricky things. Saying you're going to write for a living without testing the water first is like playing poker without looking at your hand. I had bluffed the universe, and my bluff had been called. Now I had to turn my cards: I had to write. I had to write in spite of the fact that every single person I knew who had actually succeeded at writing had said: FORGET IT. Undissuaded by this, Lynn and I let writing determine the shape of our future.
	Each time we'd done such a thing previously, it had turned out well. We'd led charmed lives, Lynn especially, and I know we'd gotten cocky about it. Cockiness in the past had burned me a time or two, though now, in choosing so wildly improbable a future, cockiness might well turn out to be the least of my worries. Writing looked like a great idea at the time.
	Meantime, we had a cruise to finish.

	We wanted to be in Washington DC within nine days in order to meet a friend, and that meant we had to hurry. The Potomac River alone would take at least three of those days. After that we'd slow down again, and spend a month in the Chesapeake before picking a place to settle. Or at least, that was the plan. It said so right on the itinerary.
	We left Manteo in twenty knots of northeasterly wind. It had been blowing thirty five all night, and raining. Several beach houses had been washed into the Atlantic near Nag's Head as ten-foot waves lashed the Banks. The beach at Duck (we later learned) was completely gone, and waves were picking at the porches of vacation homes there, hungry to add them to the carnage.
	We had a helluva time getting out of the marina because the dredged channel was barely a boatlength wide, and the surrounding water was less than three feet deep. Daybreak maneuvers abominably in close quarters, especially in a breeze, and the channel markers were a bit arcane. After grounding once just backing out of the slip, then again before clearing the docks, we managed to negotiate the wave-tossed channel without further mishap and set sail with two reefs. After clearing the northern tip of Roanoke Island, we headed northwest up Albemarle Sound close to the wind, punching into short chop in half a gale in water barely six feet deep — a process which is not kind to a sailor's innards.
	But the wind relented and allowed us to lay our course. The trailing edge of a warm front passed, freeing the sun, our point of sail, and our spirits all at once. Approaching the Pasquotank River, we shook out the reefs and gurgled happily along on a beam reach at six knots, enjoying the growing warmth, the flat water, and sunlight glittering on wavelets. In midafternoon we ghosted into Elizabeth City on the last zephyrs of the dying breeze, making a leisurely knot or two and marveling at the picturesque setting. While we hadn't seen anything yet but waterfront, it was the nicest waterfront we'd seen on the Waterway.
	We pulled into the town docks and were met, as advertised, by one of the famous Rose Buddies, who give a rose to every female aboard every visiting yacht that stops there. You must understand, Elizabeth City is not on the Waterway. In fact, it's a good twenty miles off the beaten track. Yachts only stop there whose draft permits and whose inclinations dispose them to travel the "alternate" route between Albemarle Sound and the Chesapeake Bay: the Dismal Swamp Canal. The Army Corps of Engineers says the Canal has a "project depth" of six feet, a euphemism that means it was that deep once, when it was built, but the day you arrive, who knows? It is bound by locks, one at each end, each of which opens four times a day.
	You have to want to go there. People in a hurry don't bother, and that’s most people. Elizabeth City lobbies hard to keep the Canal open in the face of "dwindling government resources", not to mention plain old political disinterest. (How can government resources dwindle? When was the last time your income tax burden "dwindled"? Only when your income dwindled, right?) Against all odds, they've succeeded. Inside the Canal there is even a Dismal Swamp Visitor's Center, complete with another free dock.
	The name notwithstanding, the Swamp is quite beautiful, and people who come to see it travel slowly. Not that they have much choice: if they tried to run the Canal from lock to lock in one day, they'd need a powerful motor yacht, and they'd leave such a monstrous wake that the banks of the Canal would erode away in no time, so there's a speed limit. They'd also risk thwacking their great expensive props on the bottom, bending them into pretzels. All the more reason to travel slowly.
	After we tied up, our elderly Rose Buddy handed Lynn and the girls their roses and proceeded to give us a one-man verbal tour of the city — its three restaurants, its one grocery store, its clothing store, gift shops, and variety stores — all at warp speed in a thick Good Ol' Boy accent made doubly impenetrable by what appeared to be an utter absence of teeth. Left 'em home, I guess. It was a fabulous performance, and we felt truly welcomed. If this weren't enough to get their point across, there were also red, white, and blue WELCOME flags all up and down the docks, and a sign covering the entire wall of a nearby brick building, facing the river, that said:

Complimentary Dockage
Elizabeth City Welcomes Visitors
to Mariner's Wharf

in letters about six feet high. Along about this point you begin to believe they really mean it. Yes, of course they're looking for business, but they go about it exactly the right way: they make people feel welcome, they don't grub for money, and they have a great reputation among yachties. Poor as we were after our stay in Manteo (and after buying still more parts for the boat), we came intending to spend money. How could we not? Tales of Elizabeth City's hospitality to yachties over the years were legendary.
	After a lay day we headed for the Swamp in spectacular weather. The Canal is so narrow that one's masts barely clear the overhanging branches. Upon meeting another vessel, one must find a gap in the branches and snuggle up to the bank. If the oncoming vessel is another sailboat, it is necessary to find a place with gaps on both sides. Fortunately, the Canal is dead straight. With miles of visibility (binoculars help), there is time to find a good passing spot.
	We stayed overnight at the Visitor's Center dock with three other boats, filling the available space, then continued northward. We were planning eight straight travel days, for five of which in a row we'd average over forty nautical miles. That's work even in the best of conditions. We hoped for cooperative weather.
	Suddenly we were in the Chesapeake, our goal for eight and a half years: to finish our first two years of cruising with a circuit of that body of water. We chugged through the massive shipping complex of Norfolk, heading for tiny Deltaville. Deltaville? It had been recommended to us by an Australian cruising couple we 'd met in Georgetown, SC. In fact, our most useful and detailed information regarding the Chesapeake area came from those foreign visitors.
	What can be said about Norfolk? East Coast readers may already know more than they care to. West Coasters can just imagine San Pedro, Long Beach, San Diego, and Alameda, plus the Navy shipyard at Mare Island, all rolled into one. Container ships, coal ships, bulk carriers, car carriers, tankers, submarines, destroyers, aircraft carriers, troop carriers, supply ships, dry docks, 135-foot-high lift bridges, with the requisite waterfront tourist attractions sandwiched in between: the Harbor Walk, Shoreline Village, Pier 39, and Mariner's Square-type developments, the dinner-cruise "head boats", the Friday afternoon youth sail racing fleets, the ubiquitous tugboats, the barges . . . you get the idea. Seen one such harbor, seen 'em all. We were glad we didn't have to anchor there.
	(A year later, a friend of ours did. He and his fiancé, sleeping peacefully, got run down in the night by a commercial fishing boat. They were fortunate, and lived, and their boat didn't sink.)
	The scale of the Chesapeake is hard for newcomers to appreciate, especially West Coasters like us, who can't quite get their arms around the fact that on the East Coast almost no one sails in the ocean. It's too far away! From Norfolk north to the mouth of the Potomac River is sixty nautical miles, and it's a hundred miles from there upriver to Washington DC. The Bay continues north from the Potomac's mouth another hundred nautical miles to the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal, and in terms of shoreline and anchorages, the Bay itself hardly counts. What counts are the umpteen major rivers emptying into it. Just the mouth of the Potomac River is twelve miles across. The deep, downstream, ship-navigable stretches of the James, York, Rappahannock, Potomac, and Patuxent Rivers average sixty miles in length. That's six hundred miles of shoreline just in the estuarial portions of the "big five" rivers on the west side. The Eastern Shore has so many rivers emptying into it that it can scarcely be said to have a shoreline at all.
	None of this includes the side rivers, the side-side rivers, the creeks, the side creeks, the coves and cul-de-sacs, and the major feeder streams which originate in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania. A mathematician could have a field day trying to calculate this system's fractal complexity, and the amount of shoreline it contains. For the non-mathematical reader, consider this question: what is the general relationship between the area of a body of water and the length of its shoreline? The answer: there isn't one. The shoreline it can have is unlimited, and can in fact be infinite, even though its area may be quite small. The Chesapeake estuarial system pretty much falls in this category. If an ocean-cruising sailor expects to do much else with his life besides cruise the Chesapeake, he must either never go there in the first place, or else assert some selectivity once he arrives. I doubt there is a living human who has "seen" the whole Chesapeake.
	For a fair fraction of this system, the water wouldn't reach your eyebrows if you jumped overboard. Even if you're short. The water there, as the saying goes, is spread pretty thin. In fact, the tide having receded after we anchored in the flats of Back River that afternoon, there was a square mile of water around us where great blue herons waded knee deep. Proportionally speaking, the water in the Bay is about one tenth as thick as your breath condensed on a cool window pane. But where evaporation is concerned it's the area that counts, not the thickness. If you were God and wanted to create a humid climate, the Chesapeake is a pretty good way to do it. The Everglades is another. You'll notice how few people cruise there.
	Deltaville, where we arrived the next day, was a charming place for boating. We'd love to have stayed there a day or two, but time was short, so we pushed on to the mouth of the Potomac, anchoring in Kingscote Creek by the tiny town of Lewisetta. Washington DC was still three travel days away.
	The business of no lay days was starting to tell. We'd had two straight days of twenty to thirty knot winds, and that night there was supposed to be a cold front coming through which would shift the wind to the northwest — right down the axis of the Potomac. There was even a tornado watch in effect. Travel by boat in such conditions is like an ant walking across a billiard table. The Back River to Deltaville run had been thirty three nautical miles, then forty four from there to Kingscote. The next day would be forty three nautical miles, the one after that thirty eight. That's to seven to ten hours of sailing per day, depending on the wind. Not a vacation. It was manual labor, and like most manual labor, it wasn't happening in an air conditioned office. It was 91 degrees in the cabin at Kingscote Creek, and that was a cool day. At Deltaville it had been 94, moist, and stagnant at bedtime. Humidity in the 90's, no breeze. Around midnight, bugs or no bugs, I went on deck and slept on a cockpit cushion. In our berth it was literally too hot to sleep.
	We passed a stormy night in Kingscote Creek, with a front passing in the evening and rain all night, but at least it was cooler. The alarms on our watches woke us at 5:30 on a gray morning with a gusty wet wind out of the northeast, so we slept another hour and a half in the hope that it would veer. Since neither of us was in the mood for a long day heeled over punching short seas, we planned to motorsail under reefed mizzen. As it turned out, the wind eased and the rain stopped, allowing us to sail briefly until it died altogether, whereupon we motored on through a glassy calm, slick like no ocean is ever slick. No swell, no ripples, nothing — unless, of course, you count the wakes of the fish trap buoys in the two-knot adverse current . . . you just can't win sometimes. We made fifty seven miles in the face of it, and crept into shallow Aquia Creek as far as our draft would allow. The Woodrow Wilson drawbridge on the Capital Beltway — the only drawbridge on any U.S. Interstate highway — was thirty three miles away.
	It was quiet. A few houses, not much development, and wide, shallow, peaceful water. The bustle of Washington didn't reach there. It was more like a forest-shrouded mountain lake than anything you'd call a "creek". Except in the entrance (from which we were not far), depths ranged from two to five feet, the width from a half to one mile, and it went on "inland" for some distance. At that moment it was as flat as water gets. And being 130 miles from the ocean, the water was finally free of salt — and jellyfish! It would have been perfect, if not for the bugs . . . 
	We were tired. Life looked good. We took a lay day.
	It was all starting to come into focus, the feeling we'd had about everything we'd seen on the east side of the country. Here's the short version: it's beautiful, but it isn't a fit place for human beings! The forests, rivers, creeks, and salt marshes are an endless visual delight, but one has to protect oneself from the environment. The climate doesn't invite you outdoors like it does in the West. Houses in the East are heavily insulated, screened tightly at every portal, invariably air-conditioned, heated for winter, and the people who live there make forays outside. It reminds me of Alaska in that respect: in winter there, you’d think three times before setting foot outside your door. In the East, if it isn't the heat it's the cold, and if it isn’t the cold it's the humidity, the bugs, the wind, the rain, the snow, the squall lines, the thunder and lightning, the tornadoes . . . With a nice house, a nice car, nice stores, and a nice office, you can keep it all at bay, behind glass, where it "belongs". You wait for a propitious moment, and then rush outside for a few well-planned hours of "outdoor enjoyment" — with some good cover to run for close by.
	 My father describes everything east of Denver as having two fairly nice seasons: May and October. On the East Coast, if you are out in the open, the environment pretty much grabs and keeps your attention, and as often as not makes you wish you were somewhere else. This is not just the modern-day reaction of urban sybarites. The town of Williamsburg was founded in 1633 on the "high" ground six miles inland from, and perhaps fifty feet higher than, the first colony at Jamestown. It hadn’t taken the colonists long to realize that if they kept living down by the water, there'd be none of them left due to deaths from mosquito-borne diseases. They were literally dying like flies.
	Were we guilty of a conceptual error? Is it basically like that everywhere? Is it like all the rest of life, where you need to have highs and lows or you can't tell the difference, so much so that if what you're really having are high highs and then not-so-high highs, with no lows at all, you still think they're “real” highs and lows and respond accordingly? Los Angeles comes to mind. "Damn!" we'd say on a "brisk" sixty-degree SoCal morning, "It sure is chilly today!" The residents of Phoenix don't feel hot until it's about a hundred and ten in the shade, and they put on sweaters when it gets below eighty. In Anchorage everyone's still in T-shirts until it gets below forty. In Fairbanks it can get to one hundred degrees on a sunny day in summer, and the native population is ready to be hospitalized. The same folks don't even think about staying indoors in winter unless it's minus twenty or thirty degrees outside, in a place where it occasionally gets "into the fifties" — below zero. Down in Costa Rica all the yachties are living in their underwear while the natives wear long pants all the time and add jackets when the temperature slides below eighty — even though it never gets over ninety five there. And no one there but a tourist uses bug spray. In fact, you can tell the tourist towns from the rest of the country by the availability of insect repellant in stores.
	I could talk for hours about the climatic differences between the East and West Coasts, but I was beginning to wonder what the point would be. We kept thinking about the perfect place to live, when maybe there's no such thing. The Bahamas were pretty close (for the very rich), yet with no trouble I could have written a list of everything I knew we'd complain about if we lived there. Kinda silly, but we couldn't seem to shake it.
	We left Aquia Creek at dawn and got up to Smoot's Cove after lunch, motoring all the way through the constant rain remaining from a tropical storm that had first gone ashore in Georgia. Water was falling on us that had come from the equatorial Atlantic. The dreary afternoon was spent napping, playing with the kids, and listening to music. It was going to be a long night. We'd be lucky to get to bed by two. We were there to wait for the Wilson Bridge to open. We were feeling lethargic and grumpy, and the heat, oddly unaffected by the rain, didn't help much. Let's get this over with! we thought.
 	Smoot's Cove is a place you've undoubtedly never heard of. How could you? It isn't on the map. It isn't even on the chart. We only knew it had a name from reading about it in the Waterway Guide. Whatever notoriety it has among yachties is due to the fact that it lies just south of the Wilson Bridge and is the only place for fifteen miles that you can anchor while you wait. The bridge opens only twice a day, at midnight and 4:45 a.m. We'd called ahead to make a midnight appointment. Our mast, at fifty one and a half feet, was too tall by eighteen inches.
	The bridge tender argued otherwise. "The height gauge says there's 52 feet right now," he said, "and I think there's another two or three feet in addition to that." You think? Hey buddy, we’ve got two carbon fiber masts here, they cost $25,000 to replace, and we don't have insurance. So maybe we'll just wait, OK?
	(Don't ever tell a bridge tender your actual, exact mast clearance. Always add a foot or two. These guys actually believe the height gauges, and they don't believe there are wakes.)

	Washington Channel, which lies right next to the heart of Washington DC a stone's throw from the Jefferson Memorial, is home to the Capital Yacht Club, a couple of marinas, and several restaurants. If your mast is taller than fifty feet, once you get through the Bridge you have about five miles of the Potomac River and one mile of the Anacostia River to sail in. You are hemmed in by bridges. Yet the Channel is the sailing center of Washington. In view of the fact that the deepwater portion of the upper tidal Potomac is less than a quarter mile wide, that's not saying much. It's a motor boater's world. We were going because we wanted to visit Washington, you can anchor there for free, and for five bucks a day the Capitol Yacht Club will extend you a transient membership complete with showers, laundry, a kitchenette, free phones, TV, and a dirt-cheap bar. It's the best deal on the Chesapeake.
	As I said, our cruise was coming to an end. I say that now, in hindsight. At the time, we thought we had another month. Plenty of time. We didn't think of ourselves as staring the end in the face quite yet. Squinting sidelong at it, perhaps.
	We and a dense rain squall passed through the Wilson Bridge together, on schedule, at midnight. The squall chose that moment to settle down over Smoot Cove and the Bridge, and make our lives miserable. It lifted a bit after the bridge, so we began picking our way very carefully up the narrow channel which covers the last six miles to Washington. It turned out to be no problem. There was so much light from the city, reflecting down from the cloud layer, that every buoy was visible a quarter mile before we arrived at it. Finally turned the radar off. We dropped the hook in Washington Channel at 1:30 a.m. and were sound asleep fifteen minutes later. We slept in.
	After a Sunday sail with some old family friends from my childhood, we went to spend a couple of days with the family of a former colleague of Lynn's. We enjoyed their huge, elegant home in the pricey, forested suburb of McLean, VA (home of the CIA), which gave us a taste of the sybaritic possibilities of land-based living around DC. Their newly remodeled kitchen had roughly twice the square footage of our whole boat — and had cost more than twice as much. The drive to their home meandered up the Potomac through lush forest. Old-growth Virginia timber stood close about their house and those of their neighbors. Sallie and Lynn had both hired into TRW, in Los Angeles, in the summer of 1977, and had worked together for years. Now that Lynn was ready to work again, Sallie was busy acquainting her with current developments, and contacts, in her field. This resulted in our decision to stay in the area, which meant our cruise was already over. Daybreak was going nowhere from Washington.
	We'd had the end figured differently. We'd figured we would decide in advance where we would go to settle down, then we'd go there, and then we'd stop. This would give our minds time to prepare themselves. As it happened, the end hit me like a blow to the head.
	At this point David and Niles showed up from LA, and we did the DC tourist thing with them as guides. We visited the Jefferson Memorial, Arlington Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, the Viet Nam Memorial, and the Albert Einstein Memorial (hey, how many people even know it exists? David did). On the way back to the boat we took a side trip into East Potomac Park to see the sculpture "The Awakening" (known later to Roxanne and Tania as "the buried giant"). Then, while cruising slowly north along the Potomac shoreline in David's great whale of a rental car, I saw a high performance motor boat screaming toward the shore.
	I quickly reviewed my sketchy knowledge of the DC waterways. "Hmm," I thought. "I didn't know there was a bridge in that spot." There wasn't. Nor any water for a bridge to go over.
	No one having seen this but me, I yelled for David to stop the car, and as I leapt from the door I said, "Anyone who knows CPR had better come." David and Lynn followed at the run. That boat had gone from fifty knots to zero in four feet, and the seawall was in its forward cabin. Boats don't have seatbelts. I was envisioning carnage.
	The engines were still roaring, and starting to smell — their cooling systems were sucking mud. A brave shoreside fisherman, having been sitting mercifully to one side of the impact, had crawled aboard and switched off the ignition by the time we got there. The engines were ticking with heat when I climbed aboard, to find the boat deserted. Hmm, I thought, maybe the driver bounced out? "OK," I said, "Everybody look for a head bobbing around out there!" and pointed towards Virginia. There he was, right in the middle of the river, his head barely visible in the chop. My first impulse was to back the boat off the wall and use it to rescue the guy, but a quick survey of the bow damage quashed that idea. The first six feet of boat, starting a foot below the deck, was gone. The deck itself was protruding through the guardrail atop the seawall. Seeing this, I jumped down into the cockpit, located the VHF radio, and called in a Mayday on channel 16. 
	Seconds later, inconceivable numbers of DC and Marine Police showed up. Their boredom, apparently, had just been blessedly terminated, and every officer who wasn't needed elsewhere arrived. A motorcycle cop arrived on the scene before I was even off the boat. Concluding in a glance that the person walking up the foredeck and hopping over the guardrail (miraculously uninjured) must be the boat's driver, he promptly began grilling me in a surly tone as to whether I had lifejackets and other legally required safety equipment aboard. Summoning scant patience for this fool, I spread my arms and allowed as how I hadn't a clue whether there were lifejackets aboard or not. Which was not the answer he expected. His voice now dripping with the deadly sarcasm only someone with the summary power to throw you in jail can generate, he growled: "You don't know if you have any lifejackets?" Summoning still less patience, I paused, indicated the head bobbing in the middle of the Potomac, and suggested maybe that's who should be questioned about life jackets — if someone could please rescue him first — and then maybe ask him what he was doing going fifty knots in a ten-knot speed zone.
	Meantime, the rest of the cavalry was noisily arriving: rescue helicopter, two rescue boats (one of whom nearly ran the victim down), half a dozen squad cars, double that number of motorcycles, and finally an ambulance. Miraculously, the "victim" was rescued (rather than drowned or decapitated) and brought ashore, where he was thoroughly checked over by the assembled paramedics against his loud protestations. They pronounced him healthy, apparently, because his protestations increased. Presumably the questioning had started. We left as he was trying to explain how the heck he had managed to cause twenty thousand dollars' worth of expense to the DC taxpayers, not to mention endangering the lives of a dozen innocent shoreside fishermen. As life thus returned to "normal", we returned to Daybreak.

	Not even Lynn relished the prospect of living ashore, let alone in the city. For both of us, that long-absent but brutally familiar acid heaviness was settling once more into our lower intestines, the eternal symptom for us of the press of "civilized" living. The need for speed. Punctuality. Alacrity. Professionalism. Responsibility. The look, the clothes, the cars, the attitude, the schedules, the stores, the shopping — these were things we had left behind on purpose, and to which we did not wish to return. And yet at the time, our dream of a mobile income being still just a dream, we had to be where the money was. And in Washington DC, there is certainly money. Roughly a fifth of the Gross National Product goes right through the Capitol Dome. The federal government is not going out of business.
	In less than a week we would be settling. We would review our financial situation in detail. We would pick a marina and move there. We would hook up the phone, plug in the shore power, buy a couple of heaters, insulate the ports and hatches, snug the boat down tight, and get serious. We'd buy a car, and car insurance. We'd get a new driver's licenses, and open a local bank account. Lynn would get a job. And then, sooner or later, we'd move ashore and sell our beloved Daybreak, who for all her faults had been very good for us — a boat we knew so well, but could not afford to keep once we moved ashore.
	Or . . . maybe not? Lynn had lately become something of an exponent of the complete surprise. She who had spoken of little the previous few months except how lovely it would be to be back ashore again, where nothing moved, the howling wind carried no threat, and we could lie snug in our beds as the storms passed harmlessly overhead, had this to say as we walked down the Washington waterfront: "You know Lane, this will probably surprise you, but maybe we should consider just staying aboard Daybreak." Surprise? Dumbstruck is more like it. "After all," she continued, "it would cost so much less, and our lifestyle aboard the boat is more in keeping with how we say we want to live." All very true, but I never would have bet Lynn would choose Daybreak over a house. Especially in a place that had a real winter.
	In no time, it seemed like everything under the sun had changed. We arranged a slip for ourselves in a tiny, funky marina in Swan Creek, just off the Potomac River in Maryland, six miles south of the Beltway. We joined the yacht club there so we could get bathrooms and showers. We located the nearest Wal-Mart, the Motor Vehicles office, the local elementary school, and the bank. We collected opinions about the school, and we arranged to buy a car. And yes, we decided to stay aboard Daybreak. And not just temporarily.
	Twenty four hours later, upon driving in a borrowed car to the school where the girls would be going, we discovered to our surprise that school started that very day. Oh well. The girls would just have to start late, because we could scarcely situate ourselves in one day. But we needed to talk to the staff, get the lay of the land, so we showed up innocently at 8:00 a.m.
	An hour later the kids were in class, and Lynn and I were standing outside the front doors, dazed and bewildered. We didn't even live in the school district yet, but that didn't seem to faze anyone. We just told them our story, showed them our receipts for the marina and yacht club, and they said fine, let's enroll 'em! We were suddenly childless, and would be until two pm, after two years of being with them every minute, night and day. It took some getting used to.
	So we got down to work. We opened a checking account, arranged to wire money from California to buy the car we’d found, bought auto insurance, arranged for a phone, and explored the nearby town of Waldorf, where we would go for our driver's licenses the next day. Then we returned to pick up Roxanne and Tania at school and headed back to DC, where Daybreak was still anchored. Sunset found us drinking beers in the yacht club bar, trying to numb the shock.
	The next day we dropped the kids at school and drove promptly to Waldorf to get our new driver's licenses — and tearfully bade goodbye to the California licenses we'd had for thirty years. We arranged for phone service, received the money from California after a frustrating comedy of bank errors, got a cashier's check, picked the kids up, went across the river to Virginia, and bought the car. Drove it back to DC after returning the one we'd borrowed. Suddenly we were tied to land. A car is an awfully big anchor. You don't just hoist it on deck and leave.
	We had upset stomachs all that afternoon and evening. Words were futile. Cruising was over, a plain fact. Lynn pointed out, though, that given our decision to stay on the boat, in a friendly little backwater yacht club, it did not have the feel of "going back" to life as before. It had the feel of "moving on". It felt like being on track.

	A live-aboard community is not as much like the cruising community as you might think, but there are similarities, and we were looking forward to moving into this one. In the newsletters he wrote in the wake of his book Ishmael, Daniel Quinn spoke of "Taker" economies being based on the exchange of products (commodities and commoditized services) while "Leaver"  economies are based on the exchange of service. He pointed out that Takers (that's us) think of Leaver communities as "primitive", precisely because in our culture we define primitive as "lacking the rich variety of products we think of as 'advanced', and lacking the highly developed technology and infrastructure for producing and distributing them". The word lacking is at the root of our concept of those societies. So are the words "primitive", and "poor". In fact, they are only "poor" in products — in the development of which they have never shown interest. They are, however, extraordinarily rich in ways no Taker society has ever been, nor can appreciate.
	The cruising community was the closest we'd ever been to what Quinn was pointing at. Though of course it is "rich" compared to most places we visited, it is quite poor compared to everyday American life. But more importantly, the interactions among its members almost never involve the purchase or sale of products, but rather the exchange of service. In fact, cruisers who try to make a buck off their fellows are treated as pariahs. While they are politely tolerated, everyone knows that financial transactions among friends is poison — and friends are what cruisers are to each other. A cruiser trying to do business within the cruiser community is violating one of its most basic unwritten rules. He will tend not to be included in the community’s activities, which gets the message across pretty quickly.
	Cruisers take care of each other, in big and little ways. Information, expertise, time, and labor are freely shared. Everyone has a boat to keep floating and operational, and emotional equilibrium must be preserved in a strange and wildly fluctuating environment. Some cruisers have more experience than others. Old hands, who are doing fine on their own, know what it has taken to get there and want the neophytes to be successful — to realize their dream, to make it, to become competent, to not get discouraged by adversity, and to not quit. The sense of belonging, of being wanted and cared for, and of being known, was palpable in that community as it had never been for us elsewhere. We liked it a lot. We wanted it to continue. Yet it was clear to us that "normal" life ashore in this country is not like that.
	Except. Except in that tiny yacht club, upon which we had stumbled quite accidentally. Everyone seemed to know everyone, liveaboards and non-liveaboards alike. Strangers were questioned. There was a mix of retirees and working folks, of families and couples, of older and younger, and of singles. If school were to close early one day and I were not on hand, any one of ten people would take Roxanne and Tania in until I got home. Our "official" school emergency contacts were a local housewife ("boatwife") and the woman who ran the fuel dock. We had no doubts about their reliability. In fact, we had met no one there who seemed sinister, standoffish, or untrustworthy. The whole place was surprisingly forthcoming.
	We were amazed to find such a place so close to an urban area. We were amazed at how finding it had changed our attitude toward "the end of cruising". Everything felt right — the right plan for us, the right path, in the right place, going in the right direction like a greased slide. If this is the way cruising ends, we thought, then that's just fine. Not an ending, or even a hiatus, but a continuation. Like more of what we were already up to.

	On the last day of August, in the middle of the night (of course), we came home at last. For a year and a half I'd carried a destination in our itinerary I called "Daybreak Landing", knowing that we'd find it, but not knowing where. Now we knew: it lay in tiny Swan Creek, a mile-long estuary barely deep enough to let us in at mid-tide. Swan Creek. It had a nice ring to it.
	I wondered if I'd be able to find it, alone, in the dark. It was time to find out.
	With the girls in bed forward, Lynn drove the car down while I raised anchor in Washington Channel. The Wilson Bridge was six miles south, and Swan Creek another six beyond that. The bridge tender let Daybreak and another vessel slide through a few minutes before midnight. Beyond the bridge, the world turned inky black, and I began to doubt the advisability of this little jaunt. As the girls slept, Daybreak and I crept buoy to buoy with radar and a six volt camp flashlight, mercifully without other traffic. The sky was clear and full of stars, but the moon was absent. I could have used it.
	An hour later I found buoy #81, reduced speed to a crawl, and turned timorously toward the Maryland shore while scanning ahead with the flashlight. Sure enough, a pair of tightly spaced day marker posts caught the light, and then, unexpectedly, the second pair lined up perfectly behind them. Then the third. What luck. Beyond that, after a blind bend and a half mile of unmarked shallows, the marina lay nestled among the trees, waiting. The tide was low but on the flood, and conditions were calm and still. If I hit bottom, pretty soon I'd float off, whereupon I could anchor across the river on the flats near the Virginia shore, then dinghy in to pick up Lynn. But the serenity of sleeping in a slip beckoned, and I nudged Daybreak forward.
	The depth decreased from fifty feet to six within one boatlength of the first pair of posts as we passed over the tide-scoured edge of the Potomac deepwater channel. I reversed and parked Daybreak squarely between the posts. I could nearly have touched either one. The depth readout settled. Steady at six feet. Eighteen inches under the keel. Shifting into forward, Daybreak and I crept ahead at low idle.
	  Lynn had taken a handheld radio, and had set her watch for 1:00 a.m. so she could check in. When she did, I was pleased to announced I was two hundred yards from the docks, about to round the bend into the basin. Having seen no depth less than six feet I was gaining confidence, but I suggested anyway that Lynn hightail it down the dock and be ready to fend off. I knew the U-turn into the slip was tight. Daybreak made it with inches to spare, and Lynn took her lines. It was 1:24 in the morning. We stood on the dock and hugged each other a long time. We had sailed 8795 nautical miles in 650 days. Daybreak had brought us to the end of our last cruising mile.
	I had a cold and was exhausted from the pace and changes of the previous few days, so I hit the hay and didn't get up until eleven. Lynn took the girls to school. A delightful day had dawned, warm but not hot, blue sky with fluffy clouds, a slight north breeze rustling the leaves on the . . . trees. All around, higher than our masts. Incredible protection.
	I walked up to the clubhouse and showered. Afterwards we brought some champagne and orange juice up to the bar to celebrate our homecoming with a few mimosas, inviting anyone to join who happened by. Soon several others sat with us.
	We wandered around the grounds, dazed, trying to stop thinking for even a moment about what lay ahead, trying instead just to soak up the place — trying to get our attention out beyond ourselves and our concerns, and see where we were. Lynn took the occasion to deliver herself of another surprise.
"I never thought I'd be saying this, but I am so happy to be here — here in this marina, here in this community, here on the boat, and not in a house. Our welcome here has been warmer than any I can remember, and this marina community is more like what we've wanted than anything I thought we'd actually find." Our new neighbors had been coming by to introduce themselves, see our boat, ask about our experiences, meet our girls, and say "Welcome Home." And they meant it. We really were. Home.

Chapter 22
Letting Go

	The notion of starting a new life just by saying so is popular among my generation. But after the saying so comes the doing, and life doesn’t always cooperate. To borrow loosely from Norman Maclean, when you and life are finding cooperation difficult, almost never is it life that is at fault. Some things are not amenable to settlement by declaration. Completion turns out to be one of them. It takes a lot longer than we think it ought to.
	We considered our cruise to be complete in Swan Creek, but we were wrong. We weren’t ready to let go of cruising, or Daybreak, or being afloat, or any of it. We may have been busy constructing a new life, but the old one had us in its grip. In the end it would take us as long to reconcile ourselves to several more years of landlocked confinement and wage labor as it had to sail away from it in the first place: two years. The cruise couldn’t be over: our original goal had been to continue until we had completed a tour of the Chesapeake, specifically to visit the Sassafras River, and finally to wend our way to the Bay’s northern terminus. Our failure to do so would haunt us.
	Lynn, amazingly, got herself a job within ten weeks. Given that we learned in the process that the two worst markets for her profession are Boston and Washington DC, her success must rank as something of a miracle. Colleagues of hers remarked upon it. I had set two "emergency action points" on our dwindling bank balance. Upon reaching the first, we would cease all non-survival-related spending. At the second, I’d call Los Angeles and ask for my old job back. Fortuitously, Lynn got the job on the day our funds hit the first check point. As jobs go, it would be hard to imagine a better one.
	That left me. I wrote and wrote. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I was clear about only one thing: I wasn’t earning a dime.
	Fall was fabulous, but winter followed. Horror stories regarding the previous winter abounded. Everyone in the marina seemed to delight in relating them to us. There’d been nine ice storms that year. The Potomac River had nearly frozen solid. A pair of foolish souls, fairly inebriated, had walked all the way to the mouth of Swan Creek and back, half a mile each way, on the ice. Hulls froze in. Some sustained damage. Water lines to the docks froze twice and ruptured. The county, it was reported, used more road salt that winter than during any in history. Though snow had been mercifully light, the real problem had been freezing rain.
	We hoped for milder conditions, and got them. The winter was quite cold for DC, and while Swan Creek was solid ice for two or three weeks, snow and freezing rain were rare and didn’t linger. We bought a pair of ceramic heaters and several rolls of bubblepack. We taped four layers over every hatch and port, then draped beach towels over the deck hatches at night to reduce condensation. The hatches stayed reasonably dry this way, but the hull’s interior surfaces dripped and ran. A family of four breathes out a lot of moisture. Some mornings I found crust ice on the girls’ sleeping bags where they’d laid against the hull. Interior lockers had to be bailed out with a paper cup every few weeks. Mildew set in with a vengeance. Everything we owned was being destroyed by it.
	Lynn, whose dress requirements were the most stringent, suffered most. Her morning schedule was: get up, get dressed in grubbies, walk the treacherous docks and stairs up to the clubhouse on snow and ice, take a shower, walk back (with wet hair), get undressed, get dressed in office attire, have breakfast, do makeup, walk up to the parking lot in tennies carrying her dress pumps in her hand, sweep, scrape, and shovel the car as necessary while warming it up, then drive an hour in the dark to her office in downtown Washington. Five days a week she did this. After getting the girls off to school, I’d huddle up in the main salon with a heater under the table and the laptop in front of me, and write, thinking: This will be easier come summer.
	Wrong again. In winter Daybreak’s interior was at least a comfortable temperature, and the humidity hovered around fifty percent. Work in such an environment, while confined, is not otherwise difficult. Come summer, though, the cabin was a hellhole. Temperature and humidity soared, and the surrounding trees, which afforded such superlative storm protection, blocked the breeze on the calm days too. Not being at anchor, Daybreak could not align herself to what zephyrs managed to reach her. Our wind scoop, desperately deployed, invariably faced the wrong direction.
	My productivity plummeted. One’s desire to write tends to wane when drops of sweat are trickling into one’s eyes and dripping off one’s eyebrows onto the keyboard. My laptop spent the summer dying, bit by bit, until it was questionable each morning whether it would even boot up. Lynn spent the worst heat of the day in air conditioned comfort downtown, but returned to a sweatbox each evening. The girls, out of school for the summer, spent most of their time reading or playing in the shade and bugging me every half hour to take them swimming up the creek. This became daily ritual. It may be that we survived because of it.
	We couldn’t swim near the docks. There had been instances of stray AC current in the water there. So we’d load ourselves into the inflatable, anchor it three hundred yards up the creek, and swim off it there. This had to happen at high tide, because at low tide there was only three feet of water over unfathomable depths of gooey, disgusting mud. We therefore timed our lives around the tide — which shifts later by about forty nine minutes each day — even moreso than when we’d been cruising. Our days were steeped in the lunar cycle.
	Matters were aggravated by the fact that the yacht club we’d been so happy to join turned out to be a cesspool of pettiness, political intrigue, and just plain viciousness, covered over by a veneer of sweet amiability just believable enough to suck in a few new members each Fall, such as us. It resembled nothing so perfectly as a dying little farm town in, say, northwest South Dakota, with a full quota of unhappy retired folks who resist any change and pine for the good old days. I say this having read Dakota, by Kathleen Norris, who lived there. Of this marina one local pundit said: "That’s not a marina, that’s a trailer park." He later described Annapolis to me as "a drinking town with a sailing problem". Correct in both cases.
	By June we couldn’t wait to leave the place, and we weren’t alone. Three of the club’s officers resigned: Lynn (secretary), the Commodore (and his wife, who was a past Commodore), and the Entertainment Chairwoman, all of them fed up. Each year, we learned, resignations roughly equaled new memberships from the Fall membership drive, and the average duration of membership (not counting the core power elite, otherwise known as "the ladies" — I’m trying to be nice here) was about three years. We beat those odds by two years, and counted our blessings. We’d made some wonderful new friends, and left the rest behind.
	The upper Potomac River was no place for an ocean-going sailboat anyway, and it was time for a late summer cruise which would complete our Chesapeake agenda, one year late. We got as far as Worton Creek, just a few miles shy of the Sassafras River, when Hurricane Felix formed up in the equatorial mid-Atlantic and made a beeline for Hampton Roads. There was nothing for it; we returned to Kent Narrows, tied up in a marina, sent Roxanne and Tania to stay with a friend, and battened Daybreak down for the onslaught. It never came. We experienced a balmy breeze of ten knots or so out of the northeast, and bright sunny skies. Felix hit the brakes a little ways past Bermuda, spun around in a tight circle, and revisited the island. For us it was too late, though. We had insufficient time remaining for our northern Chesapeake tour. We settled for the Wye and Miles Rivers, and headed south on a glorious fifty-mile run for Solomons, MD, Daybreak’s new home, where the Patuxent River meets the Bay. We tied her up at another "funky little" marina, this one sporting a swimming pool, no yacht club, and damned few liveaboards. She seemed much happier there, though distinctly more lonely, because after driving away from her we moved into a rented house on a golf course three blocks from her old berth in Swan Creek but fifty two miles from her new one. We walked in the front door, turned on the air conditioning, and left it on for the next three months.

	You may conclude, on the basis of how little I’ve mentioned writing so far this chapter, that it was not a happy subject. As far as the book publishing establishment was concerned, I ain’t no writer. I can live with that. Unfortunately, I also ain’t no housekeeper. I can live with that too . . . but Lynn couldn’t.
	Things had not gone according to plan. My own self-esteem was at its lowest ebb since somewhere around my college freshman year. While living aboard Daybreak, and before the world’s publishers had made known their disinterest quite so thoroughly, Lynn and I could still hold our faces up in polite society and claim we were on track, that these things take time. Besides, there was less housework aboard a boat, so Lynn had less to complain about. I did the shopping and cooking, and the girls did the dishes. Laundry got done on weekends. Life was working, more or less, and our surroundings were spectacularly beautiful. We were living cheaply enough that when we bought Lynn a new car for commuting, we paid it off in three months. Things looked OK.
	After we moved ashore, Daybreak spent the winter in the water at Solomons, growing weeds and collecting barnacles. We snuggled down in what for us was the sybaritic comfort of a normal American home. Since the world of books had not revised its opinion of me by Spring (I’m still getting rejections for a book proposal I wrote back then), and Daybreak needed attention, I decided that getting her ready to explore the northern Chesapeake at long last was a higher priority than getting a book accepted by our self-imposed deadline of September 1st. We’d pretty much given that up by June or so. I’d learned just about all I wanted to know concerning how books get published and how publishers operate, and I was plenty ready to stop beating my head against that particular wall. Better, I thought, to just write, and let the chips fall where they might. Perhaps I needed a new wall against which to beat my head. Daybreak, some of whose systems had suffered badly over the winter, provided one ready and waiting. Two things spurred us forward: the fact that we wanted to take her out for one more short cruise that August, and the fact that we had listed her for sale a month earlier. She was scarcely ready for either eventuality.
	Roxanne and Tania will remember it as the summer they spent languishing in heat and boredom while their parents worked on the boat. We worked through all of May, half of June, and all of July while no buyer made an appearance. So be it, I thought, we’ll take this boat cruising at the end of July, and buyers be damned. So naturally, the day before our departure, our broker was on the phone with a live one. Fine, we told him, if he wants to see the boat, he can meet us in Kent Narrows.
	He did. Drove down from New Jersey, and he liked what he saw. However, he brought along his live-in girlfriend, who, having already seen three Freedom 40s before Daybreak, decided, upon descending Daybreak’s companionway ladder, that Freedom 40s didn’t, after all, have a belowdecks layout she could live with. I had thought Daybreak’s arrangement was pretty clearly spelled out in the five-page brochure I’d prepared, which she had in her hand when they showed up, but maybe there was some gender-linked disconnect. I wondered. She was apparently a "late acquisition" of his, substantially younger than he, thin, presentable, and — there’s really no delicate way to put this — she had nice tits. I say that because they were a focal point of interest for him, and therefore for anyone else nearby. Personally I think the price he was paying for them was a bit steep, but in relationships involving sex, every person makes a very personal bargain. Male readers will immediately understand when I say that tits can be a big item in a man’s life. I certainly understood. Purchase or no purchase, this guy and I got along just fine.
	On the other hand, Lynn and I were annoyed at having spent fifty bucks for the slip and a day of Lynn’s precious vacation scrubbing Daybreak for the inspection just to be told that her furniture wasn’t quite right, when the sales brochure had scarcely misrepresented it. After commiserating with the broker, he asked me what I wanted to do about a low-ball offer he’d received from a guy in Orlando, FL (a place with no navigable water, by the way). Lynn and I had already discussed it, and had our response ready. I counter-offered right there on the phone, hung up, and we headed north in the morning.
	Truth was, we still weren’t really ready to sell Daybreak, and low-ball offers weren’t likely to change the fact. Our asking price was more than fair. Even the man with the shapely girlfriend had said so. "Don’t take a penny less!" he’d enthused. Easy for him to say. This Orlando fellow wasn’t making what he thought was a fair offer, he was just offering all the money he could scrape together. Perhaps I should have been flattered, but he was nosing around further down toward the deep end of the trough than he had wherewithal for, which was bound to make life hard for everyone. Our counter-offer would force the brokers to shave their commissions if they wanted the deal. We were ready to sell Daybreak, not to dump her.
	The next afternoon found us once again at Worton Creek, a stone’s throw from the Sassafras River, and this time it looked like we would make it. That far north, the Bay and its tributaries consist of fresh water, which is notable to boaters chiefly because sea nettles, the stinging jellyfish for which the Chesapeake is famous, must have at least some salt. The northern Bay, in other words, is the only place where you can swim. If you have ever experienced the Chesapeake in August, you know how important that is.
	And so at last we came to the Sassafras River, anchoring behind Ordinary Point with several other boats, some with children. The beach there (what they call a beach in those parts, a strip of sand five feet wide at low tide) was a menagerie of happy squealing kids, which our girls swam over to join as soon as our anchor hit the mud.
	I’d have been content to turn around there had it been necessary, but Lynn and I still felt we had to complete this thing so that no one, including us, could ever say we didn’t traverse the entire Bay. We remember the promises we make to ourselves, and such promises, unkept, never quite go away. They leave a shadow in one’s soul. We could feel it in Daybreak’s bones, the need to continue as far up the Bay as draft would allow. The Orlando low-baller by this time had met our counter-offer and wanted to see the boat "right away", and we agreed to cut nine days off our vacation to accommodate him. Daybreak needed to return to Solomons, a good three days away from the Bay’s northern terminus. We had four days remaining. There was just time, if the weather cooperated. We decided to forego the dubious pleasures of the yachting center at Fredericktown/Georgetown on the upper Sassafras and head instead for the town of Northeast, MD, at the head of the Northeast River, eight miles from the Pennsylvania border. We would sail until our keel touched bottom, then turn around and call our cruise over at last.
	When we got there, we found not mud or sand, but a tiny cul-de-sac of water, lined by seawall, with a few modest houses, a small marina full of thunder boats, a mediocre restaurant called Pasta Bay, and a grassy, tree-studded municipal park full of grazing Canadian geese. And a playground. We anchored, and dinghied in for lunch. There’s not much that beats sitting in air conditioned comfort on a hot day, drinking pitchers of cold beer and getting semi-toasted while gazing out the window at your own boat that brought you there across ten thousand miles of ocean. Even in a mediocre restaurant, this is as close to paradise as life generally gets.
	That afternoon, we finally knew we were really done. It had taken two years longer than we thought it should have, but we were done this time not by declaration but deep in our experience. We knew then that we could part with Daybreak. We knew we could buy another boat, a small boat perhaps, just for daysailing, possibly for weekending. We knew Daybreak needed another family for whom to provide the possibility of freedom and adventure, as she had for us, and it was just possible that we might be willing to accept a low-ball offer to make that happen. Either way, our cruising days in Daybreak were indeed over. She was no longer the right boat for us. There was nothing left that we needed to do with her. It was time for her to go. And it was, therefore, time to say goodbye.
	We headed south in the morning and anchored some hours later far back in Main Creek, a tributary of Bodkin Creek, near Baltimore. On a perfect afternoon we swam off Daybreak, spent all afternoon at it. We took pictures of her, of each other, of everything. When we were done swimming we let the sun dry our bodies, dozed a bit, saw that the afternoon was not yet over, and swam again. We practiced swan dives off the anchor platform. The girls invented water games while I lay in the "hammock" of chain looping down into the water below the snubber, my favorite spot. They caroused endlessly, as they usually did. Knowing it was for the last time, we played on until sunset, when all of us took one last dive, stared at Daybreak from a few yards away, admired her sheer, her slender whippy spars, her blue sail covers and tan decks, her name in rose pink letters along her quarters, and her dinghy lapping sweetly on the painter astern. We climbed her boarding ladder, also for the last time. I unhooked it, brought it aboard, and stowed it, watching each motion from outside myself like a movie, so familiar but never afterward to recur. We would not swim from her again.

	Parting from a lover is a grief no matter how it happens, and grief has a life of its own. Grief can linger, sometimes forever if the relationship is incomplete at parting and uncompletable thereafter. Grief in completion, by contrast, can be short and very sweet, even though sad beyond measure. It can turn poisonous if one is not strong enough to release it, festering and spoiling until the festering and spoilage are a problem such as the grief itself never was. Grief must flow through you in its own time, and must be released. It is fortunate, then, since a time of grief is often a time of emotional weakness, that human life provides a way of testing whether the letting go is done. One can look and see if one would yet be willing to fall in love again.
	She came sailing out of the West River as we sailed in, a small vessel of traditional lines and shoal draft, looking so perfect and composed as to take one’s breath away. They used to build such boats all the time, until modern sensibilities resulted in boats more closely resembling stilettos — sharp, metallic, unyielding, and irreverent of the medium in which they float. They are hard, they go fast, they are boy-toys, and they and the water do not get along. The pronoun "she" seems not to apply.
	Her name was Aeolus, and she belonged to another man. I should have spun the helm that instant I suppose, chased her down, hailed her, asked what make she was, how many of them were made, and where, but inexplicably I did not. Daybreak was there watching, I realized later, and she was still mine. I could find out about the other boat some other time. No need to embarrass her by ogling a new young mistress right under her nose. The new boat had come out of West River. Perhaps she would return.
	While we swam in the pool at the Chesapeake Yacht Club, the home of some friends of ours, return she did. Daybreak not being within earshot this time, I made a fool of myself, jumping up soaking wet, not stopping even to slip into my sandals, running barefoot down the lawn and onto the docks yelling: "Hey! Hey! Excuse me! What make of boat is that?" It took three tries and much running from pier to pier before I was heard, but the answer came back finally: "A Bombay Express, built by the Bombay Trading Company." Never heard of it, of course.
	Later that night, after dinner, the four of us went searching up the creek for her in the dinghy, and we found her around the first bend. We stood up and looked in her cockpit, measured her length in lengths of our dinghy, appreciated her sheer, ogled her shapely stern, eyed the rake of her mast and the jut of her bowsprit, took the measure of her beam, estimated her displacement, played our flashlight across her topsides . . . when suddenly the pier lights came on and a voice challenged us from the house. Ooops. "Pardon us, we’re just admiring your boat, didn’t mean to alarm you." Which undeniably we had, as if caught in the act of peering in his daughter’s bedroom window. At least he didn’t come down his dock carrying a gun. In Maryland, that would not have been unusual.
	Once it was clear we were not burglars (having children in your dinghy helps to allay people’s fears), he turned friendly and shared with us all that he knew: twenty six and a half feet long, ten feet wide, twenty eight inches deep with the board up, and 7500 pounds. A tiny diesel so gutless "she can’t get out of her own way under power." She was basically an oversized Cape Cod catboat with a sloop rig, seven of them made in all the world, and the company gone belly up. Some outfit on the Eastern Shore had bought the molds. I told him she looked like the kind of vessel I might be looking to buy in the near future, and he responded that he might be looking to sell "in a year or two." Meantime, he had grandkids to take cruising out on the Bay.
	So he still owns her, and I do not, nor do I know where there is another, but I do know I can fall in love again. Perhaps we’ll find one, perhaps not, and if we do, perhaps she’ll turn out to be a dog on close inspection, so far beyond her prime as to be beyond consideration, or perhaps so poorly built to begin with that nothing of her designer’s original intent is salvageable . . . or perhaps not. When a man is looking for a lover, he can expect he will have to do some shopping around. But if he goes shopping with any seriousness, he will usually succeed, as I expect I will in this case. If I do, it will be the beginning of a new story, as this is the ending of this one.
	We cleaned Daybreak again and buffed her up, stripped her of all of our personal possessions, of everything that had made her ours, and showed her to the prospective buyer. It was no slam dunk, but a painful week filled with trauma and haggling produced a final deal. The buyer, a young family man with no previous big boat experience but a yearning (like we’d had) to take his loved ones away from land, got a better deal than he may ever know. Also as with us, his purchase bought him not just a boat but A Boat — an ownership experience the magnitude of which he could not yet begin to apprehend. Nothing, it seems, can quite prepare you for your first big boat. The reality is invariably a shock. It is in dealing with that reality that the dream comes alive, if it is going to. I hope it does so for him.
	I drove alone down to Solomons to sign the papers, then boarded Daybreak to handle the last few details. I checked her engine oil and topped it off. I adjusted the tension in her refrigeration compressor’s drive belt — it had squeaked during her sea trials. I ran her motor to check on the belt and top up the batteries, and I installed chafing gear on all her docklines. I removed our final few personal items, checked the dogs on every port and hatch, went through every drawer, locker, and cubby hole from chain locker to lazarette picking up what bits of debris and lint I found, and put them in my pocket. I put her dropboards in, closed her companionway hatch, snapped her padlock closed, straightened her sail covers, centered her in her slip, and dress-coiled the tails of every dockline. I walked slowly up the dock to the car.
	Out the driver’s side window I could see her still, but other boats were in the way. I backed down the shore road a bit until my view of her cleared, put the gearshift in Park, and stared. The day was hot and still, as August, three weeks late, finally delivered its usual punch. Daybreak seemed not to notice. I tried to burn her into my mind’s eye, floating happily, three inches higher than she had in years, built by humans for humans, totally dependent on the world of humans for her survival and sustenance, serene in the knowledge that, at least so far, no human had neglected her. There is of course no certainty that no one ever will, but at least I did not. She left my care intact, whole, and happy, as she has left each one of us who has sailed aboard her. Like the best of lovers, the best of friends, she took all of me that I could give and gave back all she had. With an ache in my heart and water in my eyes, I put the car in gear and drove away.
	I will never be done sailing.

Afterword

	If you would like to share your reactions to this book, I would be interested to hear them. You can e-mail your comments to me at:

lane@darnton.ws

	See you in paradise.