SURVIVAL
Keeping the Dream Alive by Brian Jose
The galley table is entirely taken
up with International Chart 502 – it has lived there for three weeks now. We have eaten on top of it, played cards on it, danced over it with dividers and parallel rule, while the boat swam on the Pacific swell. It’s non-essential portions, the California desert and empty ocean of the lower latitudes are stained by coffee mug and incidental food spills. I picked it up at Captain’s Nautical Supply, with a corner clipped off to inform me that it was out of date, and also cheap. It contains concisely, and with little more than a few nautical miles to spare, the entire first leg of our journey. In the very top left hand corner is San Francisco, at the lower right hand corner is the Gold Coast of Mexico, with Manzanillo featured as the last port before the window is
48° NORTH, JUNE 2011 PAGE 34
hemmed in by nautical miles markers. Nearly evenly spaced and following the coastline, are the position fixes of S/V Kayak. My crewmember, Nick, and I
left Halfmoon Bay, just south of San Francisco, March 7, at midnight to maximize a strong northwesterly, logging 170 miles in the first 24 hours at sea. It was the beginning of a new chapter in my life as a sailor. At our intended destination in Mexico, the task at hand was to bring the previous chapter to a close. So, now I write this from the Sands Hotel in Barra de Navidad on the Gold Coast of Mexico. From under the hotel palapa, I can look across the pool, across a short stretch of the lagoon, to where Phoenix, a Pearson Triton 28, lies at anchor in the lee of Isla de Raton.
Clockwise from left: Brian with “Phoenix.” “Shelly B.” ablaze in Bahia, La Paz. The “new” boat, “Kayak.”
Kayak is the third boat I have
owned, Phoenix was the second. I had acquired her inadvertently when my first boat, Shelly B, also a Pearson Triton 28, burned and sank in Bahia La Paz, four years ago now. The sinking of Shelly B had been witnessed by every sailor on Bahia La Paz that night. While I was still in shock, a monumental effort had already begun by my fellow cruisers to turn a derelict sistership, into one that sailed, to replace my sunken Shelly B. Divers had recovered as much gear as could be found from the wreck, including anchor gear and Shelly B’s rudder, which would need to be fashioned to the “new” boat which had lost its rudder in a hurricane. A crew of sailors volunteered their time for ten days in a shipyard, at the end of which Phoenix was relaunched and
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