Other goofy awards were given like Worst Boat Bite (injury), Worst Dinghy Diasaster, Worst Snorer. According the the Poobah, the boat bites this year where pretty whimpy. My favorite was the snoring award because people had to get up and imitate them. My captain was nominated but Nikki was the first to present and didn’t know she’d have to do an impression.

From Cabo there are typically three different routes that Haha-ers take: 1) Sail up the Sea of Cortez to La Paz and beyond. Richard and Nikki jumped ship to go there. 2) Sail to mainland Mexico, usually Puerta Vallarta then on down to Zihuatanejo. 3) Sail back up to Alta California known as “bashing back” because you’re going against the wind and current. A forth option would be to park your boat somewhere and fly back.

Right now I’m in Mazatlan. Our next definite stop will be Zihuatanejo but hopefully Puerto Vallarta as well. I’d like to meet up with the super kids on Gypsy that I met on the way down. It seemed most Haha boats going to the mainland were going to PV, including Profligate. Sailing here, however,  we were almost side-by-side with Thumbs Up, so we are not the only ones in Mazatlan.

Too inexperienced to drive in Mexico, which really isn’t dangerous if you know what you’re doing, we parked at the border and the 4 of us taxied to Rosarito. Mike was our guide, being that he went there for spring break already. We crammed into one room at the Hotel California to make it affordable. I looked out the window of the taxi into another world. Everything was dusty. Signs were painted on plaster instead of illuminated plastic and the words I could vaguely recall from my Spanish classes. The cars seemed like they obeyed no man’s law except their own. We drank Sol in our room until the night revelry was ripe. I used my brother’s old ID to gain entrance into Papas & Beer. I didn’t look much like him, but if you’re spending dollars, the bouncers don’t care.

The club was dead. I would have been bored were it not my first club experience. Papas & Beer was like an adult Frontierland. Wooden posts, thick ropes and plank platforms surrounded a sand volleyball course. Multi-colored lights danced around each surface. American gangsta rap as old as five years pulsed from gigantic speakers. The few girls there provocatively stuck Papas & Beer bumper stickers across their chests and asses. There was even a mechanical bull, a legal liability in the States, but it was unoperationable because of the low attendance. In the bathroom there as an attendant too eager to turn on the faucet, hand you a paper towel and sell you chicle. Being my first bar or club experience ever, I didn’t have anything with which to compare. To me, it was Disneyland.

The winter before my first visit to Rosarito, my dad took his family, my sibilings and me to Cancun for family vacation. It was an all-inclusive resort–including drinks, if you had the right colored wristband. I didn’t. I managed to finagle a few drinks from lackluster bartenders, but never enough to walk crooked. We ate dinner at Senor Frogs one night, which was on schedule to transform into somthing like Papas & Beer after the dinner crowd cleared out. Sawdust coverd the floor; I wouldn’t know till I was older that it was for spilt drinks and vomit. I innocently joined a conga line for fun, not knowing at the end that there was a waiter on a barstool blowing a whistle and pouring cheap tequila down each participants’ throat. My family didn’t believe me when I told them I didn’t know that was going to happen.

A year later, I went to college myself at UCSD. In San Diego, there were buses that transported innocent freshmen and sophmores from their campuses to Calle Revolucion in Tijuana (TJ for short). If you were under 21, TJ was your only legal opportunity to go clubbing (not that it was like any club north of the big fence). If you were over 21, you didn’t hassle with customs and went to PB or Gaslamp. It only takes a year or two to mature out of TJ. To further frighten mothers, the clubs in TJ were all-you-can drink*. Guys paid a cover; girls got in for free. Mix inexperienced drinkers, free from their parents’ control, with a fully condoned open bar and you get a bona-fide shitshow. Sweat-soaked coeds gryrated and grinded on each other sometimes sucking each others’ faces. Some long-gone dudes sat alone with their heads between their hands and barfed between their legs. Looking at the poor fellow, you were just glad it wasn’t you. When cellphone cameras came on the scene, perverted guys would snap a photo up some girls skirt when she was too drunk to notice or care. You almost had to be drunk to witness the debauchery. At 3 or 4 at night, the busses carried the survivors home with stories to last the whole semester.

The other Mexican party city I’ve been to is Cabo. Cabo is more like Cancun in that you have to fly to get there. TJ usually draws San Diego kids for one night. Rosarito gets weekenders from Southern California and other Southwestern states. Cabo and Cancun get vacationers from all the States. Mike’s parents had a timeshare at Pueblo Bonita Blanco in Cabo. The suite slept about 10, counting the pull-out couch. Mike’s parents gave him the go-ahead to invite some friends for their timeshare week. After our annual labor at the fireworks warehouse, the same friends from Rosarito and I planned a much farther road trip to the end of the Baja peninsula. His family flew and met us there. I was glad to experience the real Baja that exists between the gringo hubs: San Quintin, San Ignacio, Mulege, La Paz, etc. You won’t find a poster for these pueblas on your travel agent’s wall. After seeing the in-between, I realized how biased my Mexican experience had been and how, after all my time in Mexico, I didn’t really know the country.

I might as well had been to Cabo before. Beside the tropical, desert Pacific climate, it was the same Frontierland I first experienced in Rosarito. Vendors sold the same offensive T-shirts, cheap curios and stale brand-name knock-offs, only, in Cabo, they were more expensive. The resorts had the same corny MCs and waitresses hawking jello shots. The DJs spun the same trite dance hits from last 3 decades. Because of the necesarry plane ticket, the crowd was middle-aged, unless there were children traveling with their parents. I was still young and drunk enough to be amused by the production. We spent every night in El Squid Row (which is somehow related to Senor Frogs) only because it was the most happening place in town. It’s a narrow two-level outside bar. The walls were covered in neon signs with phrases like, “One woman said to her married friend, ‘You have your wedding ring on the wrong finger.’ She said, ‘I know, I married the wrong man!’.”

I’m now my second time in Cabo, years the wiser, and I can’t help but scrutinze it from the outside. What makes this fun? Why do people burn their hard-earned cash on these cheap thrills? Why aren’t there bars like this back home? Vegas is similar but still too native. How can this pass for culture? Who thinks they are soaking up a different culture when their experience is sequestered to a small, pre-defined, tourist district that’s repeatedly trodden by frequent flyers? Who gets their photo taken in an oversized sombrero next to a donkey that’s been painted to look like a zebra? What is it about Mexico that gives US citizens carte blache to behave like obnoxious swine? To proverbably wear their wedding ring on the wrong finger? Is it the warm weather? We get away with it because we pay for it, but from where does the demand sprout? Whole communities throughout Mexico thrive on our tourism. Cabo or Cancun wouldn’t exist without it.

I think it’s because, in Mexico, the priveleged tourists can do what’s prohibited elsewhere and they do it simply because they can. They can blow up M80s on the beach. They can stay out past 2. They can drink before they’re 21. Gorging on tacos becomes merely sampling local cuisine. They can watch a donkey show. They can buy Viagra. They can dance to Bon Jovi. She can let a random guy drink tequila from her navel and it’s a-okay because, “what happens in Mexico, stays in Mexico.”

Photo credit

*You still have to tip the server if you want any kind of service.

We cast our fishinglines to see if anything was biting. We caught a tuna on leg one, which we already devoured. 30 minutes into leg two the line started zipping and Gary reeled in a fish. It didn’t resist much and turned out to be a 20 lb. dorado. I’d never heard of that fish before then Nikki told be it’s called Mahi Mahi in Hawaii, which sounded familiar. Nikki eventually cooked it into something delicious with the random rations we have aboard.

The wind kept going and the waves started to pick up, sometimes splashing over the bow. Crystal Blue Persuasion rolled like a marble maze box that from front to back and left to right. The monohulls were taking more of a beating, rolling left and right, at sharper angles, through the trough of the waves. One cruiser complained it was difficult to sleep unless you had the berth at the very front of the bow where you can roll against both sides of the boat. Nikki left her porthole window open, which was safe when her cabin was on the windward side of the boat, but we gybed and it wasn’t long before a wave gushed in and soaked her and her mattress.

The second day of leg two, we heard on the radio that the Maltese Falcon was sailing through our pack en route to La Paz. The Maltese Falcon is ventur capitalist Tom Perkins’ mega-yacht. It looks like something out of a James Bond movie. It’s a fully automated tripple mast, square rig ship. While building it, Tom became the largest purchaser of carbon fiber next to the US government. I’d seen her arrival in the Golden Gate before I left. It was for sale for $180 million until Mr. Perkins took on an anonymous 50% partner.

The Grand Poobah radioed the ship’s captain and asked all the questions that everyone wanted to know. “How fast are you going?”, “What are your coordinates?” and simply, “Your ship is very impressive. We are priveledged to be sailing next to it.” The Poobah told the captain to say hi to Tom for him and the captain replied, “Why don’t you do it yourself? Hold on.” In a moment Tom and the Poobah, two Bay Area leaders of extremely differnt tribes, were shooting the shit. I was surprised he was actually on the boat. The Poobah, editor of Latitude 38, the sailing rag behind the Haha, told Tom that the Falcon was on the cover of the November issue. Tom replied that he’d already seen it online. The Maltese Falcon came within 2 miles of Crystal Blue Persuasion, offering a once (well, twice for me) in a lifetime opportunity.

Early one evening, after I had retired to get some shut-eye for my 1am shift, I heard a commotion on deck. Footsteps, sails luffing, lines whipping and snapping. Someone shouted “Gary!” (which Nikki says is the best way to wake her up). Then I heard the engines turn on. I stayed below–it wasn’t my shift and I already popped up once for a false alarm that night. I learned the next day that the Admiral gybed in front of a cruise ship. Two hundred feet was the estimated distance between ships. Richard still gets queasy and nervous when he sees a cruise ship, even if it’s 12 miles away. I’m glad I stayed downstairs.

I encountered another cruise ship the next night. We saw it on radar 12 miles out on our port beam. Minutes later it was a mile closer and still on our port beam. It still looked the same size on the horizon. We estimated it was going about 20 knots. 15 minutes later, it was still on our port beam. I felt it was going fast enough that we could keep our course, even though it appeared it was headed straight for us, it was still 10 miles away. After the debacle the night before, Richard insisted we take action to avoid it immediately. I headed up to 90 degrees, such that we were now aimed at her starboard. Several boats radioed the cruise liner, pleading, “Do you see us?” The captain was polite enough to answer but didn’t have much sympathy. He said, “Yes. I see you. We’re not changing course.” I thought it was ridiculous for a cruise ship to monitor every small craft and dodge each one. The captain did, however, state his spead and bearing: 17 knots and 140 degrees. Our estimate was close enough. The closest we got to the cruise ship was a safe 6 miles. At that point, steering towards her made us slowly fall off to our original course. We were safely behind her and she disappeared into the horizon. With vigilence, knowledge and preparation these scary ships in the night can easily be reckoned with.

We crossed the finish line outside Bahia Santa Maria at 4am and sailed into the bay at sunrise.

I returned to the party at 6pm, freshly napped and bathed. I paid $6 to shower at a motel instead of hassling with the shower-in-a-bag onboard the boat.

After 3 days at sea, everyone had a reason to celebrate. The servers dished up Mexican food. Drink prices were $2 for a beer (Negra Modelo, Corona or Pacifico), $3 for tequila (Don Julio) and $4 for a margarita. People were eating, drinking, greeting and talking shop about their first leg experience.

“When did you get in?”
“How long did you motor?”
“Did you catch any fish?”
“Yes, two bonita and a bluefin.”
“How big?”
“This big, 20 pounds or so. We made some sushi and ceviche.”
“I think I reckognize you from the Halloween party.”
“What boat are you on? How many crew?”
“Where are you from?”

Enrique, the Haha’s ambassador to Turtle Bay and local business owner, provided us with a 4-story cake that looked more suitable for a wedding. On top was a big “15″ for the number of Hahas. The Grand Poobah said some words and people commenced partying.

Inside there was a bar and an empty dance floor begging for a feet with American pop and flashing lights. It wasn’t until the party was winding down until the floor’s wish was granted and still there was never more than 6 people gracing it. I was practicing my Spanish with some locals who came to watch the spectacle of obnoxious United States Americans getting shit-faced. One of them called me Nacho Libre and they all started busting up. I’m okay with this nickname. It beats Harry Potter, the nickname I was given when I was last in Cabo. My appearance has changed significantly since then. At midnight the crowd thinned to only a handful so Gary, Nikki and I walked back to the dock and Gary rowed us in the dinghy back to the mothership.

The next day a potluck party was scheduled to take place on the beach at 10am. It doubted it would get going that early so I cooked some banana pancakes and eggs for the crew. After cleaning up, we moved the boat as close as we could to the beach. A few people Richard met the night before stopped by to check out our bucket. Then there were some folks from Profligate, the host boat, a big catamaran like ours. Profligate had been on all 15 Hahas. Gary, Larry and Nikki were honored when they got a chance to board their boat. Nikki came back saying that for 12 people, their boat was much tidier than ours.

When the beach party gained momentum, everyone but Gary took a panga taxi to the beach. Gary swam. For the potluck, Nikki made some gespacho, a cold tomato soup with shrimp and cucumber. I had been worrying that the gespacho wasn’t enough of a contribution and brainstormed what else we could bring. It came to me in a dream the previous night: Peanut butter and banana sandwiches. They turned out to be a hit, or at least they were all munched up. Everything was munched up. Most people forgot utinsels and were sharing and eating off of tupperware lids. The sandwiches had the advantage of not needing any dish- or silverware.

The same bartenders from the night before were in a stand on the beach selling the same $2 beers. Having  adequate rest, people were imbibing more than the previous day. There was a volleyball game and some people were kicking around a soccer ball. The rest were having the same conversations as the night before but with new people. Everyone got together for a group photo. It was the largest gathering of Haha-ers I’d seen yet.

After the party I swam back to the boat for exercise. I went ashore that night but nothing was doing. People must have been exhausted from the beach party and resting for the 8am departure to Bahia Santa Maria.

The bay was blanketed with a soupy gray cloud of fog, limiting our visibility to no more than 100 yards. On our way to the starting line, we stopped at the police dock on Shelter Island to meet Peter, one of the boat’s partners. He brought us some last minute supplies, mostly gallon jugs of drinking water. There’s a water tank and a new (read: untested) Spectra water maker, but my belief is that you can never have too much water.

We motored our way to the starting line and loitered with all the other boats. The so-called “Grand Poobah” of the Haha was on VHF channel 69 doing roll call. 10 of the 150 registered boats never made it to the start line, the first casualties of casualness. The fog was beginning to burn off and the wind was blowing at a pace fast enough to keep you from yawning. I never did figure out where the actual start line was and when the Poobah announced that there were 25 or so boats over the line, Larry reckoned that Crystal Blue Persuasion was probably one of them. While debating what to do and where we were, the Poobah pardoned the delinquent boats and cried, “Bang! Bang!” That was the gun and the race had begun.

The crowded herd of boats quickly dispersed, each  betting on the direction with the best wind. We were running with a northerly wind on a port tack, then decided to fall off to gain more speed at the expense of heading farther West. We planned on gybing to correct any unwanted displacement this would cause. In a matter of hours, we were well off shore, seeing another boat only periodically. Our highest speed at that time was maybe 5 to 7 knots.

We passed another school of dolphins. These ones were more energetic than the first batch we encountered. A few jumped as high as five feet out of the water, giving us a full body shot. Referencing the California Sea Mammal book I bought at Torrey Pines State Park, I guessed they were Saddleback dolphins. Since my camera was out of juice, I failed at getting photographic evidence of yet another dolphin sighting.

By nightfall we slowed to a boring 2 to 3 knots, partly because of wind conditions but also because we gybed to make our way to shore. We pulled the jib back to the starboard and feed the sheet through a cleat on the edge of the boat rather than the normal block that’s a few feet off the center. We also put at preventor on the main sail to keep the boom from whacking anyone in case of an unintentional gyb. With this wing-and-wing set up, it was the best we could sail downwind without at spinnaker. We maintained this tack for another 24 hours, when, after conferencing with other boats, we decided to fire up the motors and pollute our way to Turtle Bay.

On the morning of the second day, while I was in the salon, sipping my coffee, the main halyard got cut and the sail lowered itself, helpless and limp. This happened once before, on the way from Oregon to Santa Cruz, according to Gary. He blamed it on the ratty old halyard. I thought there was more to the pattern than just the same rope. The cut looked smooth and was in the same location as the last one, 6 inches from the shackle, suggesting that something atop the mast was sawing it. Without an extra halyard, someone was going to have to climb the mast and feed the new one down.

The jib halyard could be used to hoist a man 90% of the way to the top but there was still at 7.5 foot height difference between the top of the jib halyard and the top of the mast. Gary, the craziest and heaviest crew member volunteered, which is appropriate because he’s also the most responsible for the boat’s condition, and he did it when the halyard broke the first time.

Gary strapped himself into a makeshift harness and attached it to the jib halyard. Richard and I slowly cranked his 260 lb. body upwards with the winch. Being a catamaran, Crystal Blue Persuasion’s mast doesn’t tip as much as a typical monohull’s. Regardless, Larry was at the helm, steering into weather, attempting to maximize stability. Nikki was watching, praying all parties came out of this debacle alive. After many sweaty grinds of the winch handle, the jib halyard was as high as it could go. Gary would have to pull himself up to the top spreaders at that point to reach the top of the mast on his own. There was nothing anyone on deck could do to help him at this point. I gripped the jib halyard, hoping I’d soon be using it to lower him. Watching his torso curled around the spreaders that he was trying to get his feet on, we realized we put too much line on his harness where it attached to the jib halyard. Had we attached the jib halyard closer to his belly, we could have hoisted him high enough where climbing would have been easier.He wasn’t making any headway and spent most of his time up there simply resting from the energy it took to just hold on. Admitting defeat, he asked to be lowered.

Tired and unsuccessfull, Gary couldn’t go up again. I kept mum, hoping I wouldn’t be selected because of my weight. Richard was the most eligible candidate and even though he was somewhat seasick, he volunteered before anyone asked him. Learning from our mistake, we attached the jib halyard as close as we could to his harness. Gary and I cranked him up with ease. Once at top, it was up to him. All Gary and I could do was give him slack when he asked for it. He managed to pull himself up and stand on the top spreaders, the position that Gary aimed to be in. At 5′7″, Richard was too short to reach the top of the mast from the top of the jib halyard. He tried to shimmy his way up it, replacement halyard in his teeth. I couldnt see in detail his manueverings but he did’t look or sound successfull. Like Gary, he just looked tired, exherting most his effort on trying not to fall. It didn’t make it easier that 12 feet of the excess 3/4″ diameter line from the harness was dangling freely between the shrouds, weighing him down unnecessarily. Richard finally gave up on trying to reach the top, but there was a D-ring, for what I did’t know, that he could reach. It was better than nothing so he feed the replacement halyard through the D-ring. As we lowered Richard and he approached the deck, he kept yelling, “All the way! All the way!.” Gary and I complied and he plopped on the deck like a fish that had been dragged through the water too long to put up a fight on deck.

After two attempts, we had no proper main halyard but felt we learned the hard way how to get it done. From Richard’s position on the stays, Gary would be tall enough to feed the halyard down the mast properly and with the replacement halyard in the D-ring, we could hoist him high enough to get there. The only setback with this solution was that Gary would be suspended from the replacement halyard. We therefore had to send him up with another line to feed through the D-ring and replace the replacement halyard for his support. The plan worked. First we made sure Gary was secure on his new rigging. Then he successfully threaded the replacement halyard. I grabbed it at the bottom and we had a main sail again.

At our current vector we would arrive at Turtle Bay, the first stop, at 3 in the morning. To avoid anchoring in a dark unknown harbor, we eased the throttles. It was my watch that early morning. The ocean looked like a parking lot with all the boats around us zeroing in on Turtle Bay. It was the most traffic I’d seen at night but I wasn’t concerned about collisions because every boat was going about the same speed in the same direction. I was too exhausted to go all the way and retired once the next crew member awoke.

I was awoken by footsteps, clinking, clanking and mixed sentences of Spanish and English. We’d been in Mexican waters for 3 days but this was the first indication of it. From my berth I could tell we were at the fuel dock (the only dock) topping off on diesel. I went on deck to find a quaint Mexican puebla and circular bay with 100 gringo boats anchored behind us. At the end of the dock was a fenced-up rusty tin sardine cannery. I learned later that it closed in 1996 after the last sardine was caught. The population of the town had slowly dwindled since then. The next largest structure was, of course, the iglesia. After viewing our first destination, I became anxious to escape the boat and do a reconnaissance of Bahia Tortugas.