Log of SV Wendaway

49° 15′ 46.80″ N -123° 12′ 36.00″ E

Memories in Wendy's hand

At various times SolMate glided past white ribbons of uninhabited sandy beaches and soon after, almost by an act of psychic levitation, her cockpit filled with seashells of brilliant extravagance. Almost like they got sucked aboard.

The levitator was of course Wendy.  When I first met her 30 years ago she already exhibited the telltale signs of having a full-blown shell collecting syndrome (I remember she showed me some amazing shells she’d collected on the Seychelles during a period in her earlier life when she crewed on a mega-yacht).

What I could not know is that Wendy would become alifelong member of the Shell Sisters, a very loose cadre of fellow mollusk obsessives who fill their sailboat cockpits while scanning the horizon for virginal  stretches of sand to pillage.

Shells are a form of portable memory...
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027° 57′ N
111° 03′ W

I am just catching up on things, having mostly been away from wifi hotspots as we crawled up the Baja coast from La Paz to Santa Rosalia, and from thence to San Carlos on the Mainland side (San Carlos, Sonora, where we started our first season of cruising).

One thing we learned is how cruising changes one’s identity. I have mostly become “SolMate” – the name of our sailboat. This is how people connect with you – quite literally. Other boats hail us on the radio by calling out our boat name, and instead of saying “hello” as one would do over the phone, we repeat our boat name, both acknowledging we’ve received the hailing and confirming our identity.

It’s a bit like having an out of body experience. You begin to hear others on the radio referring to you but not with your usual name – as in, “We saw SolMate in San Juanico” – and it’s us, Mark and Wendy they’re talking about, but it’s also the boat and its past and a complex of other data points that is beyond who I am.

Having “SolMate” as an identity has some very pleasurable, if unanticipated consequences. For example, it does not include my neuroses or a record of social gaffes, such as the time I gave a book review in a grade 9 English class with my zipper down.

There’s a certain liberty that derives from having one’s entire identity encapsulated by the name of a boat. And with liberty comes a certain amount of liberation.

Which brings me to Anita’s noodle chair (you can see Anita, left, in the photo above; another story is coming about Merry, right).

Anita is part of the two-person crew of Liberty Call II, a Hunter Legend sailboat. We started hearing about Liberty Call II long before we actually laid eyes on it, and so when we met Anita and her mate Ron, we had already begun the process of identifying them as the totality of their floating gestalt. They were Liberty Call II, and Liberty Call II was them.

And more so.

After getting to know them better, I have begun to realize that due to this magic transformation of identity, it really matters what the name of your boat is.

In the case of Liberty Call II, it’s easy to grok that it’s something about liberty, which Anita so adroitly demonstrates with her noodle chair. Free-floating, unhindered by stuffy convention, creative, and fun.

But it’s more than that. In the US Navy, a “liberty call” is a whistle (or bugle) that is piped throughout the ship that announces which sailors are free to go off duty. (Btw, Ron is now on extended liberty call from the US Navy.)

When you get to know Ron and Anita, you begin to understand a deeper meaning of liberty call – which you get by inverting the expression into “the call of liberty.”

All of us, at all ages, can hear the call of liberty. All humans have built-in antennas that receive the call, a kind of marine radio hailing your soul’s call-sign. For those of us of a certain age, the call takes on a poignancy – or maybe a kind of clarity.

What are we going to do with our lives as we get older? retreat into the depths of our ships and ignore the pipes calling us to roam? of course, that’s the safest thing to do.

SolMate certainly has sharpened my hearing. She has brought us into contact with wonderful, liberty-attuned folks such as Ron and Anita.

And here’s the kicker. This is the last season of sailing for Liberty Call II with Ron and Anita. After many years afloat, they are off to other adventures. This from LCII’s latest blog entry:

The hardest part of cruising is saying good-bye. We’ve shared some wonderful moments, and started some new friendships that we hope will continue for a long time. People ask us if we are sad to be leaving, and I cannot say that we are. We are both looking forward to new adventures, new places to visit, old and new friends to enjoy.

We have been blessed to have this time and this experience. Life is so good.

Bon voyage crew of Liberty Call II! Fair winds!

(Please visit Liberty Call II’s sailing blog by clicking here. You can hear an actual Liberty Call by clicking here and opening the file with the appropriate application. Warning: it’s loud! )

027° 04′ N
111° 58′ W

Puunto Chivato – We arrived here late last night with a rising full moon hanging over the southeastern sky – the same direction we were worrying about some strong winds that were predicted to blow.

It’s been over a month since we left La Paz and this is the first opportunity we’ve had to update our sailing blog.

The last few days have been remarkable. When we got to Bahia
Concepcion I heard a buddy Garth on the ham radio – haven’t had any
contact for months – and when I hailed him he offered to guide our
boat up the river to Mulege, across a shallow bar at high tide. It
sounded like a great adventure – especially because all the guidebooks
and coast pilot say the route in is foul with rock and shoal and not
for deep draft vessels like ours.

Garth met us just off of Mulege in his panga and spent a fair bit of
time explaining how it would go. He’d previously guided in other boats
with a maximum draft of 5.5 feet but had never done anything as deep
as SolMate (6 feet+). Of course it went well but it was nerve-wracking
for me. I spent the next two days fretting how we would get back out,
since I discovered when we had arrived inside the estuary that Garth
was leaving town and we’d have to make it out on our own.

We had a good GPS track on the way in, so yesterday morning I got up
at the first break of dawn and went out in my dinghy at low tide and
started looking for the route back out, armed with a leadline and my
handheld GPS. I crisscrossed the water making notes, taking soundings
and noting the coordinates of it all (GPS now has a fantastic accuracy
of about 15 feet) when there was a BIG WHUMPH and all of a sudden the
starboard pontoon on my inflatable dinghy popped and deflated in about
10 seconds. I had found a dangerous rock by scraping a long gash in
the dink.

Spent the rest of the day repairing the hole and drawing a little
chart of the route back out. High tide was about 7pm and the wind was
still blowing up the estuary about 15 – 18 knots an hour before that,
so it was going to be a tricky departure. According to my
calculations, at high tide we should have had a minimum of 2 feet
under us but as we crept out the depth-sounder started making ominous
alarm sounds and Wendy spotted a moment when we had just over one foot
of water under our keel.

Whew – we made it out and back into deep water when we got a call of a
sailboat in distress – it’s engine had gone out and it was somewhere
headed across the sea. Chatted with the guy and he seemed ready to
just wait for some wind and hope for the best.

Within minutes of getting off the radio with him, our engine started
making a horrible clattering sound. All too weird – but after some
fretful time of trying to figure out what had happened it went away.