Santa Rosalia

Santa Rosalia was way cool.

Back in the day-a long ago day- it was a booming mining town.

Copper was the thing.

It was so productive that a French company bought it (from the Mexican fellows who were running it) and they made it a big operation out of the deal until the mines ran dry.

They built a railroad and brought in timber for the mines and as a result, the architecture of the town is built in the "Old West" style.

Oddly, there's something vaguely reminiscent of Martha's Vineyard or Avalon on Catalina, with the narrow streets and clapboard faceades, with wrap around covered porches, painted in faded pastels.

Only its not at all gentrified. 

It's got a Kurt Vonnegut twist. An alternate universe, where a charming, historical, blue-collar, town stays the same forever.

Starbucks never moved in and no one ever built a gringo lobster joint on the waterfront.

We were the only Gringos we saw in town, on Monday night, after the sun went down and our boat chores were finished and we set out to explore.

The town was hopping.

Beat up old flatbed pickup trucks wind through the narrow one way streets pumping Banda music form huge, stand-up house speakers.

Packs of teenagers roam the streets but in totally separate groups. 

Girls on one side of the street-Boys on the other.

Things are very traditional here and this is a WAY Catholic country...

Shop-keepers stood in the doorways of Mexican shops selling things that Mexicans buy;

Auto parts and Vegas show-girl high heeled shoes.

People were friendly and low key, as they are everywhere we go here.

No one we met spoke any English.

We wandered around, the palest, freckliest, blondest people in town.

We ate amazing street food;

Fresh, sweet corn tamales with pineapple or cheese.

Slices of hand made Pizza with insanely hot local chili's,  

bacon wrapped grilled hot dogs with the works, cheese and chills and crema.

Local ice-creams with chunks of fresh frozen fruits.

The church, designed by Eiffel ( yes, of the Eiffel tower), built in France and then shipped over, was having a service.

The doors were open and you could wander in and out.

The preacher smiled and waved when we did.

The school is in the center of town.

The gymnasium was open wide and groups of men and boys played basket ball while piles of girls giggled in the bleachers.

People watched TV in their living rooms, their doors open to the street.

They were eating dinner, playing cards, sitting on the couch and talking.

Six months ago, we would have felt uncomfortable, walking around a small, un-touristy Mexican town, busy doing its own thing.

We were still under the raincloud of American media.

We see things with our own eyes now.

Of course there is evil in this country.

There are troubles.

But we have plenty of it back at home, too.

This is a working class town.

It is Monday night. 

People are doing the things they do.

We never saw anything scary.

There wasn't even a single bar open, other than in a small, quiet cafe.

And EVERYONE we pass smiles and says "Hola".

When was the last time you saw that in LA?

I remember, it was the two weeks right after 911 when we all felt connected by grief.

In Baja, i think everyone is just connected-all the time.

Some cities remind me of women.

Venezia is a transvestite.

During the daylight hours, Venice is fascinating but gaudy, and tattered at the edges...

But if you wander her streets after dark, when the bus loads of harsh American tourists have departed for the day,

and San Marco is full of the locals again...

She is divine.

She glitters and shines, she's magical and a little crazy.

If you stay up to late drinking with her you might get into trouble.

Santa Rosalia is an Ethnic Mama.

She scares you a little with her yelling and hand gestures

but then she pinches your cheeks and gives you a  bowl of delicious soup.

Her kitchen doesn't  smell like your kitchen back home.

You have no idea what those spices are and all the furniture is covered on plastic and there are religious icons in tacky frames on the walls,

But somehow...

She makes you feel right at home.

dead spotted moray

Eiffel's church

Ferry to the mainland

Funkytown

Gringos

Adios Santa rosalia

The clams of Santa Domingo

Oh, the clams of Santa Domingo...

are renowned as the best in this lingo...

"Alemeja Chocolate" (it is said with a wink),

All you need is some fins and a mask and a Dink...

Hold your breath to the sand and grab with your hand...

I give up. I'm hopeless. I can't write limericks. 

I leave that to my absurdly clever father-in-law.

In the shallows of Santo Domingo...

There be clams by the tonnes don'tcha know

with a mask and some fins 

you can get yourself dins

but with Suki aboard es muy bueno.

Ah. Okay. I guess my husband has inherited the knack.  Jon just jumped in and laid that one down as fast as he could type it.

Clearly, there is a gene in the Scarfe DNA that allows instant and immediate formulation of the jocular rhyme.

Anyhoo...

After Pulpito we jumped North another 38 miles to Dominigo, a small bight at the head of the Bay of Conception.

Our friend Ethan had marked on our chart, CLAMS!!!!, so Jon and Kai were eager to hunt them down.

On their last dive Kai had gotten a rather large lobster ( a monster by our standards) from Terry and we had a few scallops left so they were eager for me to make a seafood pasta out of the bounty.

As soon as our ground tackle hit the sand (by the way our new anchor package and chain is OUTSTANDING) they were in the water with fins and masks, looking for the world's most delicious clams.

Hunter and I headed to the long, white beach to explore and look for shells.

She has the eagle eye and is pretty good now at spotting treasure.

The last beach it was a paper nautilus( or octopus purse) and this round it was a Boobie skull.

We also brought Barbie ( sigh) but we had fun making her be the foreman on a very large construction project which included making a very large and complicated maze for blind sand crabs- but being blind, they totally sucked at  getting through the mazes. They just dug themselves a new hole and escaped.

Back in the Galley on Pura Vida we roasted cumin seeds and ancho chills and made a sauce of cream and Mirin and some homemade fish stock (from all the lovely lobster shells) and sautéed garlic and celery and carrots and I taught Jon how to make a proper sauce base because he taught me how to check the engine fluids-just in case one of us falls overboard we should have a few of the basics down, i guess.

Speaking of the 'Blue" and the "Pink" of boat life...

I know, I always write about how devastatingly romantic it is, our life aboard and it is, absolutely.... but we do have our moments.

While looking at the weather GRIBS and discussing our Northward passages the subject of our up coming night passage came up.

For those of you who traveled ( by Blog) down the long and lonely coast of California last February, you will remember that night passage was a rather trying time for us.

All the aspects of the new and unfamiliar were coupled with the sheer terror of being 50 miles offshore for the first time in this boat - oh yeah, with a newish skipper and two kids.

We managed all that pretty well but one thing that has lingered from that trip that gives me the occasional heebie-jeebies is that it was a dark moon for lots of those long, lonely stretches of sea.

Me, being me and somewhat poetically spooked in nature, does much better with a little moonlight. The howling and the darkness and the blackness of the sea is not ENTIRELY offset by the twinkling of those cold and alien stars overhead.

When the moon is around, she sets the stars all in their familiar places and gazing at them is a lovely and noble pastime you share with the entire history of our species.

When the moon is around the sea is aglow and you see the waves and the outlines of ships and sometimes you can see your fellow creatures as they snort and blow past.

Moon dark is when the ghosts come out.

Strange shapes flutter past and the ocean cries and moans and the world whirls around and things become upside down and backwards and you fall into the black pit of your own perceptions-or lack of.

So.

When the subject of a night crossing- into new and unfamiliar territory -came up I looked outside at the waning moon and thought...

Hmmmm. How many days until moon dark?

Well. I did not exactly THINK that thought. 
I must have mumbled something or other. 
Something that might of sounded...Hesitant? 

The truth is or was, that I hurt my stupid shoulder awhile back and it has been a bit of a bummer. I have what's called an "unstable" shoulder and it falls out of it's socket now and again. It did so recently, twice, and I finally got to experience this Oxycontin thing everyone has been raving about-I downed one while Jon gamely stuck my shoulder back in it's socket.

I passed out -from exhaustion or pain or the drugs- apparently singing Edith Pilaf and laughing the whole time. 

This is the real reason I was scared to sail at moon dark. 
The idea of dealing with my night watches, under sail, at night, in the pitch black, brought to mind a number of ways I might manage to slip that shoulder again.

This is not what I said to Jon, though.

I said something more like...

"Where's the moon? Why don't we like, swim and hang around and wait a few days for the moon so at least we have some light, okay, honey? "

I did not say...

"Jon, listen to me. My shoulder still hurts and I'm scared to sail if its dark until its better"

No. 
What happened instead, was where pink and blue meet and things go... I don't know, purple?

Jon laughed and said, something to the effect of:

"what do you mean you want to wait for the moon? We have instruments, we did it before on the outside, where it was way more intense, this is just a little overnight passage, in calm weather."

And then I think he might of snorted. 
A tad derisively in my recollection.

Then there was something about wishing I would just be stoked sometimes and not always such a chicken.

Excuse me? 
Was I not letting my 10 year old scuba dive to 100 feet yesterday? Was I not with him?!

It was at that moment, I heard for the first time,  a clarion horn trumpeting from the minaret of my female mind. 

The call of my peri-menupausal-hormonal-Jihaad had begun.

I turned to Jon and laid down the war blade.

"You're not being very nice." I said.

Poor Jon. 
Little did he realize a verbal IED had been laid in the road.

"Your not making any sense." he said.

KA-BOOM!

There were bone fragments everywhere.

Well, you know how the rest of this story goes.
Only on a boat you don't slam doors, you just stomp to the foredeck and feel completely uninspired because your alternative is either to throw a fit and jump overboard and go for a swim- it was night so that was out.

Or...

Jump in the dingy and go for a joy-ride but the idea of not being able to start our finicky outboard took all the drama out of that move.

It was back to the cabin to crawl back into the berth-six inches from the face of the person you are arguing with.

As I crawled into the bunk, Jon was staring at me with a confused look on his face-I think he might of been internally bleeding from the barrage of bullets i let loose.

The kids poked their heads in and told us to stop fighting we were interrupting their reading time.

Jon and I sat and stone-walled for a moment or two.

" I don't know what I said..." He started and I burst into tears.

I told him what I was scared of and that my arm still hurt and sometimes this whole adventure just plain scared the shit out of me.

I should probably start eating more oatmeal or something-It wasn't my most brave or Scottish moment.

"Baby..." said Jon. "I would never make you sail the boat at night by yourself if you're hurt."

I looked at him, my glasses were so fogged from the crying and the heat i couldn't see anything.

He took them off and dried them for me and explained his side and I explained my side and gradually, the little black-sashed insurgents in my mind, crept back to their hidey holes.

I looked up and saw my sweet husband smiling at me.

"And we can wait for the moon to come up before we go.." he said.

This is boat-love. 

He finds the clams and plots the charts and pushes the envelope and I make the best thing I can out of whatever we have, knowing that I am always being protected and cared for.

And if I cry, he will always find a way to make it better.

It's not a bad deal :).

Good readers

How big is this kid gonna get?

All dressed up and no where to go- we threw down a lunch hook and made our way through a deserted town to this fancy hotel over looking the bay-only to find it was totally empty-but online they said they were fully booked?Hmmmm. Anyone smell a laundry around here?

Sunrise and moonset

Whuss-up, fish?

Hunter as we enter the port of Santa Rosalia-Sheis excited to explore it because in the cruising guide, they are famous for lots of things. Once a booming mine town and now...a bacon wrapped hotdog stand and a famous ice cream joint!

Pulpito

It turned out to be a chocolate birthday cake- Surprise!

We gobbled it down after ravioli and grilled steak and lobster and lion's paw scallops with seared pineapple and Serrano chills and a precious bottle of red wine, while  we watched the sunset behind Bahia Marquer.

Terry and Dawn made a huge fuss over my birthday-they are BIG birthday people-and for the third day in the row they stopped over with presents.

There was the pineapple cake and scuba lessons and movies made by Terry and his friends that could rival the best ever National Geographic special but he won't ever sell the footage of these magical spots because he doesn't nwant  the animals living there to be exploited. 

The best spots are always kept secret. 

They also brought me two rare and special shells. One of them I had previously  thrown overboard...

While we were diving the day before, Terry had spotted a special shell called a Hairy Conch and had gathered it up and stuck it in our dingy-only he forgot to tell me about it.

We had all headed back to our own boats, exhausted and thrilled from the day of diving. Later that afternoon, I was cleaning all the junk from our dingy; fins, masks, snorkels, snacks, booties, weight belts, collecting bags, spearguns, Hawaiian slings-it's a gear-intensive life we lead-and I found, as I always do, a small stockpile of critters in the bottom of our rubber boat. Kai and Hunter love collecting animals and in the excitement of the day they are sometimes forgotten and left to perish. A petting zoo of oysters and clams, scallops and sea urchins, starfish and periwinkles, usually owe their  small bivalve-lives to me. I rescue as many as I can and toss them back to the sea. I chucked the handful of mollusks and noticed among them, an unusual looking Conch of some sort.  Once inside our big boat again , I scolded Kai about his forgetfulness, he nodded and apologized, without ever looking up from his book.

Later that night, Terry and Dawn had Jon and I over for drinks, while the kids watched a movie on our boat. They have a huge multi-hull. A very cool boat with an absolutely massive deck area and giant net hammocks slung between her three hulls. Several people can lounge comfortably in one of the hammocks. We lay around under the full moon listening to Terry tell one epic story after another-each more amusing and astounding or frightening than the last. Everything from swimming  and riding his pal Williwaw, a manta ray who lives 300 miles off of Cabo and has a twenty foot wingspan ,  to how to out-wit a pack of man-eating Humbolt Squid at 150 feet down on a solo-night dive. I mean, it is probably hard to find a more entertaining person to listen to than Terry-or Dawn for that matter. The two of them are endless movie material.

Anyway- back to the Hairy Conch.

So Terry turns to me and says,

"You find that present I left you in the dingy?" 

"No?" I say, with some trepidation-Terry is really big on practical jokes and more than once we fell for some gag he played on us at 70 feet below.

Like the time he handed Kai a huge sea-cucumber and it oozed sticky slime on him that glued his gloves together.

Oh, he got a good chuckle out of that one.

Or the time he handed me a massive sea sponge and I carried it around for like 15 minutes before Dawn finally signaled for me to put the damn thing down. It had been flaking crusty gunk in my mask but I was carrying it like it was a bar of gold because Terry had handed it to me on the dive and acted like I should keep it as treasure. He got a real kick out of what newbie numbskulls we were. He could hand us a piece of sand and we would take it from him like it was the seventh wonder of the world.

Well, it turns out that the Conch really was something  special and he had given it to me with the intention of teaching us how to kill the conch and them clean the shell and we would be left with a dazzling shell to put on display.

I told them I had thrown it overboard and then yelled at Kai, thinking it was another one of his forgotten finds.

They had a good laugh over that one, too.

So, the next day, my actual birthday, they presented me with the shell- only cleaned and perfect this time.

"How did you get this?" I asked. "Did you already have one?".

Dawn smiled.

 "I went and got it", she said.

I had free-dived under our boat too, looking for the shell,  after Terry told me what I had chucked-but it was long gone. crawled away, i thought.

"You just didn;t know what to look for" said Dawn.

"We put on our gear, fired up our night lights and waited till you all went to sleep..." chuckled Terry.

"You night dived under our boat for it?" we were stunned,

" Yup" Terry grinned, pleased as punch. 

"We practically had to wait till midnight to make sure you didn't catch us!"

Dawn had killed it and cleaned it and the next morning, they brought it and a beautiful spiny scallop shell to me on my birthday.

This time, I did not need to be told not to toss it. 

It was beautiful.

The next morning broke warm and clear like pretty much everyday here that there's not a hurricane warning.

Jon and I listend to Amigo net and got our weather and decided we would go for it.

Head North,

Bay of Los Angeles.

Whalesharks, scallops the size of your hand, huge fish and pelican and blue-footed booby rookeries, sea lion colonies and maybe our friends on Eyoni...

Terry and Dawn came over and invited us for one last dive.

My shoulder was acting up and Hunter was beat from a big few days-all that cake making! So we stayed home and the boys went.

Kai and Jon did another 100 foot dive with Terry and this time it was official, Terry marked it on his dive computer.

We said our goodbyes to Manta and our fairy god-parents Terry and Dawn. 

We will miss them and look forward to seeing them( and playing with them!) on our way back down.

After lunch we weighed anchor and headed North. 

We had no wind-anywhere and no seas to speak of...

 Just smooth glass sea and Ol' Perkie...

Who is running great again.

Our good old girl was back in form and we were off into the unknown.

By that evening, we had anchored for the first time in months, in a new ( to us) anchorage.

Pulpito,  a towering headland of granite, 600 feet high, rises out of the water just North of our well explored, stomping ground, Ramada.

We had often looked at Pulpito in the distance and wondered what might lie around her corner...

Tomorrow we would find out.

Suiting up to dive Pulpito-that's it in the background.

Jon slays dinner...and lunch for tomorrow!

fresh from the sea

A Birthday Jump!

solar chocolate fudge cake

Birthday smiles

good girl....

watch out sea urchins!

Kai holds a "bug"

I want a room in these colors!

Norman was still grumbling...

but he finally let us be.

Hunter's treasure...

A paper nautilus

Searching for fossils in the sandstone

Birthday shells

Kai with the Hairy Conch

Terry tickles Hunter-because Hunter tickles him!

Scuba stud

The Birthday queen of Marquer

Hunter picks on someone her own size

Why I hate Barbie

What the f$&k is up with Barbie, anyway?
I have a boy and a girl, living on a boat and space is at a premium, so ya pick your toys with care, 'cause you can only take a couple.
Out here, when we aren't braving storms or crossing seas or just  generally trying not to die in any immediate fashion, We play all day, everyday.
Our kids aren't exactly gypped in the fun department but as i clean out the tiny cave they share, a forward v-berth they call their "room", I realize how few actual bought in a store toys they have.
But i am constantly astounded at the discrepancy in the fun factor of those toys.
Anyone who has ever bought a kid- or someone else's kid- a toy...will know exactly what I'm talking about.
You better hope your looking for a boy because the girl options suck.
I know this isn't news.
People have been like "oh, ha, ha, i know..."
"what a cliche..."
since, like, the 1950's.
Is that not an issue? Can I write Barbara Boxer about this?
Girls have 2 choices in any toy department.
That's it.
I know there are other options out there- but you will doom the child you buy with these toys.
Why?
Because no one else has them.
They are bought for bright but unpopular children, being raised by  militant home-schoolers, actresses who live in Topanga canyon and the Born agains who believe that God put the dinosaur fossils there "as a joke".
Im talking about those "alternative" toys.
The weird mice that have play houses that cost like a million dollars or those  punishingly unattractive, Amish-looking dolls that are so dull they must be made in some Baltic state that fell of a map sometime during a cold war.
No.
If you want to be " in" , which every kid does, you have to play with what everyone else does.
Or you will be socially curb-stomped in the playground.
Here are your choices, little sisters;
Play with Barbie who looks like a lobotomized ho-bag or something called BRATZ.
(the fact that this last option is spelled phonetically isn't the worst part and why are we spelling incorrectly the name of the toy we are selling to CHILDREN who are still learning to spell???)
Barbie comes in lots of variations and has lots of accessories for her lame endeavors.
Take, say, Malibu Barbie, for instance.
Wait. You say. That's kinda cool, being a Malibu girl...isn't it?
Does she come with a surfboard?
No.  Bitch comes with sunglasses, spray tan and a handbag.
Princess Barbie...
Oh? You say.
Does she come with a castle and run the kingdom and peasants with a firm but kind hand?
No. This floozy, usurper of a phony throne, has a light blue sparkly dress, a wand...and a big-ass, hand mirror.
BRATZ all look like Ritalin addicted, mini psychopathic, prepubescent babysitters, dressed to party at a club in South Central.
At least there not all white, like Barbies- I know there is the one " black" Barbie but she looks like Halle Berry anyway and that's not all that colorful- really, is it?
That's it, cupcakes, make your choice.
Boys?
Totally different story.
So much cool stuff.
And None of it looks like it was made by either pimps or a league of geriatric mormons.
How about Bionicles? Think, Legos but so,so cool.
(I think they are actually made by crazy future anime robots or something).
These things even require reading directions so that the child can assemble the toy themselves before playing with it! OMG! How fun is that? Boys get to make their toys too!
They do not come in 600 feet of plastic wire that you have to remove from the packaging with gardening tools.
Hear that, Barbie?
No.
You just open the top of the nice, REUSABLE container and then it becomes the toys storage box.
It does not need to live on for eternity In a little desecrated pile of pink plastic in some landfill somewhere.
- when Kai eventually breaks or loses his Bionicles, we use the boxes to store everything from rubber bands to hose clamps.
For our boys there are so MANY choices.
How about The endless army of little dudes and super heroes?
This last one is so involved there are literally millions of comic books , wickedly illustrated and written that lay out a full geneology of orgin stories so that boys have a well defined rosd map for their creative play.
Where the hell is Barbie from anyway...Orange County?
Well into adult years, boys will debate the various strenghts and weaknesses of each comic book character and relive the stories and legends of their greatest battles and truimphs and defeats. And then they will make summer blockbuster after summer blockbuster about these characters and they will all be geared towards YOU, my Darlings boys.
Why?
Because...You will eventually become that demographic of the gods...
The 18-25 year old male.
Marketing loves you, boy....and so does Hollywood.
Granted, little dude toys usually are accessorized by a weapon;
machine gun, throwing star, two headed axe, M-90 fully automatic assault rifle with 88 caliber shells...
..I know, it's offensive to us peace-nicks but there is at least a social theory at work here.
G.I. Joe IS representative of the "warrior class", isnt he?
At least, I THINK thats what joseph Campbell taught Barbie, at Sara Lawrence college back in the day.
That the " warrior" is a deeply entrenched role model in the human psyche and not all bad. Aspiring to become a " protector" is part of every boys natural state of development.
Of course, You CAN make the argument, that Barbie getting dressed up in a cocktail dress and F-me heels is the female version of the mating game and part of our Little Miss's developement but come on, that's a piss poor example.
What would be a better, truer rendition of attracting a mate?
Since no human girl will ever have naturally flaxen hair to her toes and geisha sized feet and a 48 DD chest?
Here is my 3 cents, Mattel...
Barbie can still look cute.
She can get funky hair and a hot pair of jeans and some great converse sneakers and she should have a string in her back, that you pull and she let's loose a stream of hilarious jokes from her throaty voice.
That would teach girls how you Actually get a man- and a way better one, than that bleached blond, shaved, weirdo, Ken.
Then, when we all think we can handle it...
Put barbie out to pasture... like in a re-hab somewhere in Arizona.
But wait!
Here comes her way cooler little sister, Alicia.
She's half Turkish and half Mayan!
And Alicia has lots of cool clothes, too!
Like wetsuits and foul weather gear and firefighters uniforms,  because she's a fighter pilot and can operate an underwater submersible.
On the weekend she likes to camp and  mountain climb and do biology experiments so you can buy her the tents and camping stuff and grappling hooks and cool climbing gear so she can repel down your moms fridge.
She does a little roping now and then and has a wicked horse, named Sid Vicious and a shiny buckle she won at the Rodeo.
Oh yeah, and she runs the ranch, too.
She comes with bongo drums and spray paint cans cause she likes to tag a little when she's in the city.
Come on, Mattel, wake the hell up.

Tonight, as Pura Vida swung quietly on her anchor under the waning moon, I tucked Hunter, my scuba diving, fish slayin' , Spanish speaking hija in her little bunk and i asked her what she wanted for her 8th Birthday next month.
She looked at me, her lightly freckled cheeks flushed with the suntan she got while looking for fossils on the beach this morning.
"A feather quill and an ink pot... A slingshot...and a new Barbie."

Oh well, you can't win ' em all.
" goodnight, princess" I said and turned out the light. 

On our way again...

Back to writing blogs on the iPad and hoping -with fingers crossed that the incredibly weak signal we are picking up -we can blast this out there into the blogosphere.

I turned 45 today. 
It's funny. 
Some birthdays just carry such a perplexing reality to them, that your brain simply short circuits.
The number will strike you as hilarious. 
"45! It's impossible! My mother is 45...Oh? Wait. She isn't anymore?"
Everyone's mother is 45 in my brain. 
And all grandparents are 60- forever.
And I am 22...only in a much smarter package.

Tropical storm Norman was the main event last week.
There were models predicting this and that and even though most of the badness of this fellow was to blow itself out before reaching our neck of the woods, things were still shifting and moving and re- developing enough ,that all us cruisers were on alert. Most of the energy of the storm hit the mainland but he did bounce over to our side and several sneaky tendrils of low pressure slunk towards us. We had some winds- nothing above 25 that I ever clocked but holy moly did we get rain...
Down, up, sideways, in your face, up your nose, in one ear and out the other...RAIN!!!

We hunkered down into the" waiting room" of Puerto Escondido. Now I know why it's called that. It's a small,  well protected anchorage outside the actual safe harbor of Escondido. Unlike the mooring field, it is not controlled by Marina Singlar- so it's free. Cruisers hang here and WAIT to see if things are gonna get REALLY nasty and if they do, they will just make a run into the main protected area and prepare for a big one.
We were near Manta and they've been here forever and through all kinds of weather so we just kept making our own predictions but knew we were under the tutelage of some wise folks if things got hairy.
It was just a few days of boat-school- get it done so you can play when the sun comes out!
And the solar oven obviously did not see any action.
Jon tinkered and brought Pura Vida back up to full speed. Even the secondary fuel filters got changed and old Perkie was humming away- fingers crossed and by the grace of Neptune- and sounding happy again.
Four days rain and the weather gods finally moved on to party elsewhere. The wind was blowing unseasonably from the North -solid for the next week- so we could not sail North as was intended. Jon hit a slump and was pretty blue. He had worked so hard to get us back on track and wanted to swim with those whale sharks in the WORST way...
Lucky us, Manta is always up for having fun... At the first sign of a break in the weather they called us up on the VHF.
"Hey you kids, we're heading out  for some divin'...come check it out if you're interested..."
Magic words for captain Juan and the crew...
Si, mas scuba, por favor!

Three days we've been with them, in three different anchorages.
Dawn has been wonderful and let me use her tank and kept Hunter busy diving for scallops and feeding sea urchins to schools of fish as jon and Kai and I follow Terry around the bottom of the Sea of Cortez.
I've never scuba dived in my life before these ventures with Manta- but I do ski. 
In all the years of that sport, I've never been able to afford a guided, back country- glacier heli-ski trip with a pro- but I have always wanted to. 
The freedom of being totally out of bounds just out there having that rush. You and nature.
Just awesome and natural.
This is what we have done for the last week, only underwater.
Back country, extremely awesome,  amazing dives. 
Maybe to a pro these are intermediate dives but jumping out of your Dink on the edge of a wall and dropping straight down a sheer cliff in a free fall to fifty feet and then sliding down the steep slope before the sea floor flattened out again- at 100 feet. 
Let's just say, it sure put the smile back on Jon's face.
For my part, I've never been the "jump out of planes" kinda girl- I like a slope. 
That first drop took some pluck for me. It was also pretty murky the first twenty, so once I lost Terry and Jon in bubbles and noticed that the rock face was sheer and this whole thing was gonna happen all at once, I was a little nervous.
I'm also not used to trusting in gear- other than ski bindings and boats -so I was thinking panicky thoughts and not being totally present.
"what about my mask? Will it pop off? Will my regulator fall out and I won't find it? Jesus...where's my ten-year old???"
At that moment, Kai, who had been ahead of me in our downward procession into the gloom -I could see nothing of him but bubbles-stopped and turned and swam back up to where I was ...pausing at thirty feet having a little minor mom freak-out.
He gave me a huge, beatific smile and reached out his hand.
" it's okay, mom" he mouthed at me, through his mask.
"come down with me."
I took his hand.
A minute later, we were at the bottom of the face in gin-clear water.
Kai pointed up, and smiled.
I looked back up at the geological sky-scraper above our heads. 
Huge schools of fish swirled around it like commuters on their way to work. 
Busy, busy, fish...giant Amarillo snapper, schools of Grunts and Chubbs, bold, enormous and colorful Bump-head parrot fish, Damsel fish, and hundreds of others.
I suddenly forgot to be nervous.
I got too absorbed in looking around.
We swam the slope poking around the rocks and peering in holes with Terry's flashlight, looking for Slipper lobster.
Terry had told me my mission, should I chose to accept it, would be to grab one of these suckers, once he had cleared the hole and determined it wasn't also inhabited by a giant moray.
Are you kidding me? I won't even put my hand down the garage disposal if it's jammed.
"Oh, dear god." i thought. " Just go with it, sister..."
Lucky me, there were  no slippers but we did see a GIANT Moray.
I swear, his head and jaws were as big as some kind of Tolkien dragon.
Kai was so happy with the whole scene down there, he landed on top of a huge boulder and busted some serious air-guitar.
Jon and I almost popped our masks we were laughing so much.
Our kid, happy and Natural- and surprisingly coordinated, in this baby giraffe-state of his life.
Kai swam over to Terry and looked at his dive computer. 
Terry smiled and gave him a "thumbs up".
I glanced at it.
93 feet...
"Holy $&@@!!" I turned to say to Jon but he and Kai were already high tailing it deeper.
Through a cloud of bubbles I watched Kai and his dad high-fiving each other as they got their first triple digits.
Terry had a shit-eating grin on his face.
What did I expect ? He was gonna Take us on a shallow water club med tour?
He's a Navy Seal, for goodness sake...
No way, man. This was REAL fun.
He knew we could handle it.

The next day, Terry and Dawn taught us how to search for lobster ...and scallops...after all it was my birthday- something had to go with those steaks we had thawing.
Kai found a  purple nudibranch and gift of all gifts, while I drifted above the guys, watching them stalk a lobster cave, I turned and was face to face , with a sleeping sea turtle, nested in a crack  right next to me, fiftyfeet below the surface.
Happy birthday, me.
He woke up and I scared him with my bubbles. Underwater, turtles take a while to get going because they shut their heart rate down to hold their breath, while they nap...so we had a good long look at each other befor he got his ticker pumping again and took off.

That was this morning.
Right now, I am lying in my bunk, sipping a margarita and listening to John Coltrane and my family is baking me a pink birthday cake in the solar oven.
I am 45.
Ain't that somethin'...:)

Something wicked this way comes

You just never know...

but go ahead, make all the plans you want.

It won't make any difference.

You ran the numbers, you know the game, the right people and the secret code.

You can pray to Jesus, shake your medicine rattle, fung shui the plants, join the Scientologists and their weirdo brigade... 

but in the end, the House will always shut you down.

Because you are only Human, because YOU are not in charge. 

So, what? 

You evolved a pretty impressive brain to body ratio and a refined sense of reason and a big fat WILL and all that makes you feel big in your boots?

Phooey.

The fact is, Destiny calls the shots.

Fate is Nature's game.

She's been reading your hand this whole time, ready to lay down a full house, just when you thought you had the thing wired.

This is how IT happens in the Baja...

The solar oven dinner was fantastic. The rice was perfectly cooked and the chili was divine and somehow, the whole thing tasted like sunshine.

We dragged Jon out of the engine room at 10:00 pm and made him eat some with us.

After dinner, was the moment of truth.

We fired up the engine and she roared to life.

Good 'Ol Perkie! 

Well done, Captain!

Jon went below to check the high pressure oil hoses and I stayed on deck watching the  engine temp gauges. 

140...160...180.......190...195...

Shit. Piss. Fudge.

I shut her down.

"we're overheating baby," I called down to Jon.

He dropped his head and thought for a moment.

A very long moment.

We all waited, silent as stones.

"Lets go to bed" He said finally.

" In the morning I'll take off the coolant cap and if the water's down, it means that there was an air pocket in the system from when i drained her and refilled her fluids." 

"What if it's not that..." I started, then realized this was a terrible thing to say.

"How about I make us a drink and we watch a stupid movie"  I suggested instead.

We crawled into our bunk with a couple of sippers and watched Army of Darkness and that... is how you handle a skipper who has been in an engine room for four days.

The next morning, Jon was up and out of bed, like a kid on Christmas morning.

We all waited.

"It's the coolant!". He called from the engine room.

Happy news.

We motored over to the fuel dock and watered the boat up and filled her spare water tanks and solar showers and when the cruisers net came on at 8:00 am we tuned in to hear the weather so we could figure out where we would be going today.

The kids were bouncing around, throwing around names of favorite anchorages nearby  that they wanted to go to. 

We haven't been in the ocean here in months, so everyone was chomping at the bit to get going.

Santa Rosalia was our goal and after that a straight shot to Bay of Los Angeles further up the sea- 

We looked forward to catching up with Eyoni and free-diving and hopefully seeing some Whale sharks!

We had been so busy the past few weeks we haven't checked the weather much and we are wondering what we would have in the way of winds for sailing North.

"Good morning...Escondido!' called the net moderator in his best Casey Kasem imitation.

"let's all listen for any emergency trafiic this morning, emergency traffic come now. Over".

There was none. Hardly anyone is around right now.

"Okay Lets get down to business" He continued, his tone more serious.

" I'm sure everyone wants to know about that Cat. 2 Hurricane headed our way..."

Jon and I looked at each other.

" The models we're seeing have her at about 350 miles southwest of Cabo and heading NW at 16knots. She's actually supposed to upgrade to a Cat 3 possibly 4 by this afternoon with sustained winds of 150 mph and some of the predictions have this baby hooking around back on the Baja and shooting the pass just south of Mag Bay-that means she could come howlin' across the desert and hit us oh say... around Santa Rosalia."

Jon and I  are wide eyed.

We just got the boat back together and now a major ass-kicking HURRICANE is headed directly for us?

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING!!!!

The rest of the net was a blur because we were so flabbergasted.

We sip our coffees and contemplate our future, when hear our boat being hailed over the VHF;

'Pura Vida, Pura Vida, this is Manta"

We know of Manta- they're famous.

Terry Kennedy and Dawn. 

Terry is a legendary diver, credited with mapping pretty much every rock and reef in the Sea of Cortez.

He's  also the guy who discovered Giant Manta-riding. 

If you have ever watched Discovery Channel and seen someone riding on the back of one of these underwater winged-behemoths, you were probably watching Terry.

The kids and I had met his girlfriend Dawn on shore-my arm was still in a sling from partially dislocating it and she had given me the name of a Mexican healer in a pueblo near Loreto. I had introduced her to the kids and we chatted. 

She was cool and kinda tough seeming but I could tell she was a seriously nice lady and she gave the kids a sly look when they told her how much they love diving. 

"Are you scuba diver's?" she asked. 

We told her we wished, but time and money had not made that possible but It had been Kai's dream since he was five years old.

"Me and Terry do a lot of diving" she said. 

Big, fat, understatement.

I knew this already. I had read about their finds and exploits in lots of our guide books.

Terry is the reason us new cruisers don't run aground on all the rocks down here. He put them on the charts.

"Stop by the boat sometime and see us" she said.

We had chatted a few times on the radio but we were so busy with heads and fridges and other annoying stuff that there was no time to socialize. 

Meanwhile ,Terry and Dawn had spent the week discovering a whale graveyard off of a  nearby island.

Now they we're hailing us.

"Hey there, Pura Vida, you kids aren't planning on goin' North right now are you?"

He was gently warning us not to be total idiots.

"No, sir" we said.

"Well, where you at?" he asked us.

We told him we were just about to leave the fuel dock but we hated the idea of having to go back to the mooring field and wait around.

"I got a mooring outside here." Terry said in his smooth, friendly drawl. "Why don't you come hook up near us and we can get to meet you all"

This was like being the newbie nerds at high school and having the quarterback asking you to sit at his lunch table with his awesome, babe girlfriend.

"Sure!" we squeaked. "We'll be right there!"

We motored outside and met Terry and Dawn .

Terry is like a cross between the Marlborough Man and Santa Clause. He's the nicest, handsomest guy in the world, wrapped up in this ex-navy seal, total-badass package.

Dawn is a sunset fox and a world class sailor, diver, explorer, skipper and one look at her and you know you are in the presence of a seriously deep and very cool lady.

We loved them instantly and the kids did too.

We chatted for awhile and the they offered to take us diving the next day while we all waited to see what the weather would do.

We told them none of us had ever scuba dived before and we had no gear other than wetsuits and fins and masks-and weightbelts.

"We can pull together what you need" they said. 

Terry and Dawn are life long divers and Terry's ex-Navy seal, a rescue diver with over fifty years of experience, he's a major dive guide for rich cats looking for the ultimate dive experience. 

Even the Mexican navy calls him in when something needs looking at below 200 feet.

-we were in very good hands.

And lucky us, they just love turning people onto diving.

The next morning the net had good news. 

The storm had switched directions and her eye was breaking up. She was gonna bring some rain and wind but no doom to our door.

We met in the dinks at 10 am and were off.

Terry showed us how a regulator works and gave us some do's and don'ts and with that, my family of fish was off.

Ducks to water... Kai to Scuba.

Remember, this is a kid who's first and only word for the first six months of his speaking life was...FISH!

He would look at us with such an urgent, pained expression and say FISH... FISH... FISH!!!!!

So, we did what we could. 

We bought him fish tanks and plastered his room in national geographic photos of whales and groupers, we took him to every aquarium from Canada to Tennessee. He spent every day he could in the ocean -even becoming the youngest polar bear to swim the frozen waters of Bowen Island on New year's day. We had such a hard time dragging our splashing, happy, four year old out of the icy black water that it took us an hour to warm him up by the bonfire.

FInally, we gave up and moved onto a sailboat.

Terry and Dawn smiled and laughed as Kai disappeared and then Jon and then me and before you knew it Kai and I were following Terry and Jon down to 50 feet, having the time of our lives.

 Hunter and Dawn snorkeled up top and later, Kai joined them while Terry took Jon and I to 75 feet to find a black coral forest. 

There were moray eels and the usual assortment of fishy friends and we had a ball with Terry teaching us how to eat raw scallops and feed the fish by hand with the leftovers.

Not to be outdone, Hunter the Great, grabbed a regulator and swam around in the shallows dragging Terry's huge tank. 

Scuba diving at 7 years old!

Fearless and excited to explore her ocean home.

At some point, Terry went to grab his loose tank, floating in the water, and was surprised to discover a little Hunter on the end of his regulator hose, gurgling around, looking for octopus.

There were a lot of laughs and many, many smiles that day.

We will never forget it.

We had them over for thank you drinks and they told us lots of great tales of amazing dives all over the word and then they took us all diving again the next day- Little hunter even had a little "octopus rig" off my tank with her very own regulator, so we swam together breathing underwater at 20 feet while Kai and Jon and the others explored the depths.

So, thank you broken fridge and head and engine and Mother Nature for threatening to storm, because of all those things...this last week held amazing experiences that we never dreamed possible.

This is why it's actually excellent that we Humans are not in charge

As old, Alan Watts liked to ponder...

"Do you do IT, or does IT, do you?"

Well, when you're out here, in the strange and wonderful, in the uncharted and un-schooled...

IT definitely does YOU, amigo.

The wonderful Dawn and Terry of Manta

Off for a new adventure

Terry teaches Kai the basics

The Scuba tribe of Pura Vida