Poorly laid spinnaker almost drowns all-children crew…
Sailing out of Ensenada felt like an accomplishment in and of itself. We had beaten a bureaucratic trap and even though it had been self-laid, more or less, we were moving once again.
Over our decades of Middle Eastern and East African travel, movement had become a drug.
We had to be moving, moving, always moving. From point A to point B. From point Y to point Z. From one impossible task to another. Through Middle Eastern and East African bureaucracies and anarchies and tribal structures that make Mexico’s version look like well-ordered Switzerland.
The more time we spent in the region, the more we simply had to move. It became our raison d’être.
And now we were moving away from blood coffee water that danced disco green at night to bluer pastures, teaching our children that movement equals joy. They were learning the lesson, each happy and playful even though they had been ravaged by beastly mosquitos in Ensenada’s port. Even though they’d been trapped for three full days and three full nights.
They’d run from bow to stern bouncing with the crossed swell, hair blowing in the increasingly strong wind.
Forty miles out we decided we needed more speed in order to make up for the lost day and a half, the most speed, so set out to hoist the spinnaker. The skies above were grey but not menacing. The wind was howling but not fierce.
It unfurled like a gorgeous rainbow, like a symbol of modern ambiguous sexuality and why are all spinnakers so damned colorful? Would a black spinnaker bring bad luck? Would a purple one really turn off the high seas?
It took the both of us thirty minutes to drag the massive nylon beast up to the deck, secure the knots, figure the clew and tack, run the rope through the proper whatever-they’re-calleds and hoist up the main.
It unfurled like a gorgeous rainbow, like a symbol of modern ambiguous sexuality and why are all spinnakers so damned colorful? Would a black spinnaker bring bad luck? Would a purple one really turn off the high seas?
Whatever the case, our multicolored monster filled full and I looked back to the helm to see if we were sprinting. From the look on Captain Josh’s face things were not right. If he adjusted slightly from one way to the other, we’d spill.
We weren’t flying as fast as we should and our children’s lives now depended on him keeping the yacht between 5 degrees of movement. We’d stopped caring about ours long, long ago.
We ran back up to the stern and saw that a rope that should have been brought in tight right away had whipped furiously, eventually tying itself around the radar, bending it at a grotesque angle. To bring the spinnaker down would bust the radar loose. To leave it up threatened the entire ship with capsizing since it was flapping the water.
Our children were having a dance party below. High as kites on Mexican Coca-Cola made with pure cane sugar.
Gusts of powerful wind would fill it full and send me to safety lines, my cream-colored Vans against them. The only thing between bobbing in a lifeboat fifty miles off of central Baja and… I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how to fix the problem which became hypnotic. It was exactly like old times. Like being in a Hezbollah dungeon with Josh who was making me laugh while we sweated on bloody mattresses.
I did my best to grab handfuls of it to hold on deck. Captain Josh tried to keep the yacht moving in a straight line as any slight adjustment could send us heeling so hard that we’d dip all the sails.
Gusts of powerful wind would fill it full and send me to safety lines, my cream-colored Vans against them. The only thing between bobbing in a lifeboat fifty miles off of central Baja and… I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how to fix the problem which became hypnotic. It was exactly like old times. Like being in a Hezbollah dungeon with Josh who was making me laugh while we sweated on bloody mattresses.
After 30 minutes of pure terror somehow, someway, the rope came loose and we hauled the spinnaker down to the deck, collapsing in a heap on top of it.
My body has never ached like that. Every muscle. Every brain cell. My fingers couldn’t stop shaking due the pure tension. Fingernails bent backward with bizarre white creases in their middles.
It took a while to haul back to Captain Josh. With no spinnaker it would be impossible to make it to Cabo in under four days and impossible to make it back in under a week.
The decision was made just north of Baja’s Turtle Bay, to flip and head home. We had moved so far off the coast that we were able to tack all the way back to Ensenada. Even though she was a classic downwind sled we matched our knots going against it and that also felt good.
My six-year-old daughter did a two-hour shift from near sunset to sundown and then another nearing midnight, moving from cute kitten t-shirt to ski jacket and my stocking cap to unicorn onesie and unicorn slippers under ski jacket at the end.
Five days and five nights after leaving we arrived back in Newport Beach.
It should seem like a failure but it doesn’t. All I want to do is figure out what went wrong with the spinnaker and fix the problem.
All I want to do is break the record from LA to Puerto Vallarta with a crew of children.
