Sailing the Seven Seas

Whoever wants to go into the world must cross seven seas, each one with its own colour and wind and fish and breeze, completely unlike the sea that lies beside it.

We've sailed out of the Arafura Sea, through the Timor Sea into the Savu Sea. Soon we'll be in the Flores Sea. In the early days of sailing, these seas were part of the seven seas; those enchanting waters on the other side of the world where spice was in the wind. To sail them meant you had sailed as far from staid grey Europe as you could. You'd reached the mystical land of dragons.

For the record, there are more than seven seas; there's more like 100. But these waters do feel different. And it's not just the fire scented breeze that set off our smoke detector, the long slow swells, or the colourful high-bowed fishing boats that swoop close to look at us. Maybe if we'd flown into Jakarta by plane that sense of the exotic would have been more subdued. But we sailed into a port where the numbers of foreign ships each year only numbers in the hundreds (we were yacht # 675) and these numbers make up a good part of Kupang's foreign visitors.

We stand out in the streets. Everywhere we go: getting sim cards for our mobiles, waiting for bemos take us from place to place, shopping in the market, we're surrounded by a crowd. People touch our arms and stroke our hair. Maia is pulled into photos. They offer us help in bargaining for our dinner and laugh when we clearly paid too much. They follow us using a few English words, "Hello madam!" "Ausralie?" "You speak Indo?" We offer back our small bits of Indonesian, "Selamat pagi." "Terima Kasih."

Arriving by boat is an older way to travel. Everything is harder and takes longer. On our first morning we decided to check in using an agent. Stories of three and four day check ins (Maia and I would need to stay on the boat while Evan visited office after office) convinced us that help wouldn't go amiss. Our faith (and $60) in Api wasn't misplaced. After having the customs agent aboard (we served cold juice and lemon squares and he looked for alcohol in our olive oil bottle) Evan made record time visiting four offices (one twice) and making dozens of photo copies. By the end of the day we were officially in. But in the process Evan lost a credit card.

Our second day was spent trying to reconnect to the world-especially with the credit card company. Setting up phones in a foreign place is rarely simple. It took three tries. Midway through we ran out of steam-touched out and wrung out we found a restaurant and had lunch. Lunch brought us good fortune. We met a Canadian expat who offered us a scooter ride and we were off to see monkeys.

seems we found the only polite monkeys in Asia...

It's this: the forgotten slowness of travel that feels uncertain and foreign, that draws us to sailing. To cruise you need to go more deeply into a place, moving beyond restaurants, hotels and tourist highlights. You need to find out how to buy a chicken and how to eat that fruit. You listen as the call to an unknown prayer echoes through the anchorage in the setting sun. You puzzle over your clothes; wondering if it's better to cover chest, knees or shoulders (no one dress seems to tackle all three). And you realize that no matter what you learn today, it won't be the same tomorrow when you enter a new sea that's completely unlike the sea that lies beside it.

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Checking in to Oz

As luck would have it we checked into Bundaberg on the busiest day they’ve had this season (nine boats arrived) on the day after the biggest drug bust they’ve ever made (Bundi is now famous for rum and coke...). The result was the check-in system, which we’ve heard is normally super efficient, wasn’t. And as the sun was setting and we still hadn’t been checked in, and hadn’t slept much since 1 am—I was definitely getting grumpy.

Technically we should have been one of the first boats checked-in, considering that we were first into the harbour… But it didn’t work that way. The boat we were meant to follow was somehow missed in the check-in line-up and as the day went on and everyone else was processed we stayed put in the crowded and insecure quarantine anchorage.

As we sat the wind rose, the current shifted and our anchor dragged. And of course we bumped a brand-new, very posh boat--leaving a small dent on them, a scratch on us and creating an irate skipper (who eventually calmed down and apologized when he realized we really didn’t do much damage).

When we finally got into the dock the process did go smoothly. Customs and immigration had clearly researched us before they spoke to us (which is weird, we forget that some parts of the world are wired in) and they carefully checked our answers against what they knew of us—noting that one of our forms had some incorrect info on it.

Aquis is thorough but not nearly as ruthless as we were led to believe. Considering we worked hard eating everything (and traded a bunch of stuff away) we didn’t lose as much as we expected. Gone though is our lovely French Poly vanilla, my sprouting seeds (which I expected), all our beans and lentils, my oatmeal (which was pretty dodgy anyway). I was surprised that our flour, rice and powdered milk all got to stay. And our handicrafts were also left with us—though we had to swear that a gourd rattle we have has pebbles in it, not seeds. And we also had to pledge that it would never, ever leave our boat.

I did laugh at a few things the Aquis guys graciously overlooked. Shortly after asking us if we have seen any ants, bees or termites aboard an ant walked across the counter. We all pretended not to see it. They also didn’t look too hard at any of our woven baskets—after a brief shake test (where the results were kind of ignored—those tiny beige bugs do sort of look like dirt) they were all handed back to me.

The irony is Barb on WGD told us she’s seen more bugs on the produce here than we saw in the South Pacific—so there you go.

Our check-in was finally over at 7:30 pm--much too late to head out shopping for replacement food. Thankfully we have friends. Barb made us a great dinner and we spent the evening laughing too hard and perhaps over-imbibing. Connect 4 came round for drinks and commiseration and we all celebrated.

We’re in Australia man!

Mexico, finally

We’re in Ensenada, Mexico, which, considering its only about 75 miles from San Diego isn’t much of a feat. Some journeys aren’t measured in miles though—they’re measured in acquired stress. And by that measure we’ve come a really long way.

The Journey:

Seventy-five miles is one of those awkward distances. In a good wind we can do it in day time, but if the wind is light we need to make it an overnighter so we can arrive by daylight. So with light winds forecast we pulled out of San Diego, just as the sun was setting. By the time we hit the channel the night was black. The predicted swell of 7-9 ft was slow and rolling and the wind was too light to sail in. So we motored, me at the wheel, dodging small fishing boats who were tending traps and trying to make sense of channel markers. Then the engine began to vibrate.

Vibration is seldom good and after throttling back we decided to put on the autopilot to try and work out the problem. Then the auto pilot wouldn’t work. So out came the spare and we went back to trying to sort out the persistent vibration. Just as we were about to turn back to San Diego we decided to have a look at the propeller by flashlight—it was dark, and the propeller is well under water, but even through the murk we could see we had caught a very large ball of kelp.

  Evan using the boat hook to remove kelp from the prop - it's easier in daylight

We freed the propeller and rudders repeatedly through the night and were thankful when we finally pulled into Ensenada even happier to see our friends Mike and Hyo from IO waiting on the dock for us as we tied up.

Ensenada doesn’t allow boats to anchor out in the harbour and some of the marinas are ridiculously expensive, so we did our research and made reservations with Baja Naval. When we arrived we called on the radio—they responded they were readying a slip for us and to stand off. Moments later were we waved into a slip, in what later turned out to be a competing marina—Marina Ensenada. We were back in Mexico.

Our Arrival:

We met Mike and Hyo in Coos Bay, where, in the pouring rain, Mike helped Evan to stabilize our mast for the trip south. After that we stayed in touch by email and by blog and were happy when we found ourselves sharing a dock with them again in San Diego. They left a few hours ahead of us for Ensenada and after they told us the story of their overnight passage, which included a nasty holding tank disaster, we decided their night was worse than ours so I cooked us all breakfast and we toasted our arrival before we headed to check in.

I tend to wax poetic about arriving in harbour by boat. In the right moment I’ll tell you how you go through all these unchanging and ancient customs on arrival. How you visit the Port Captain and customs and immigration, how it’s lovely and ritualized and often fun.

Ensenada isn’t like that.

To streamline procedures they’ve centralized all the services into the same building--the same room actually. It’s just a large waiting area ringed with glass windows, each window an office for one or two people. We arrived at 11am and almost immediately it was clear we had problems. Our crew list was missing our middle names and we were told we needed a better document to prove we owned the boat—so Evan headed back to the boat to print new crew lists and find another document. Then Mike and Hyo had their turn. I lost track of what happened to them after Mike was chastised for not having his middle name on his passport and Hyo had to head out for more photocopies of something. By then Evan was back and things started to disintegrate.

In Canada you can have a federally registered vessel or a provincially licensed one. Ours is provincially licensed. Mexico wants the boat’s title document—and neither of these documents is a title document. We don’t have an actual title document in Canada, which we explained, just a variety of pieces of paper, none of which is very grand or official looking. This was a problem we were told, it didn’t matter how we do it in Canada, what matters is what they want in Mexico and what they want is a fancy piece of paper. No matter which piece of paper we offered it was found lacking. But it was only declined after making its slow rounds of the streamlined office, where each person, in turn, faxed it to another office for it to be rejected.

After three hours we were told we couldn’t be cleared into Mexico. When we asked what this meant we were told it meant we had to go home.

Back on the boat we sorted through every piece of paper we have—looking for one that looked formal and said we owned the boat. The next morning we headed back in, new paper in hand. We started at immigration and this time our fancy paper passed. We spoke to one woman who mentioned that in Mexico it’s about appearances—official looking outranks actual official.

From immigration were sent to the banker’s window to pay for our tourist visas, then headed back to immigration to show our receipt, from there we went to the port captain’s window to officially clear in and get more papers for the boat which we needed to take out for copying, then we took all those papers to the banker to pay--for something, then returned to immigration for a stamp on the papers which we then needed to get a copy of, then we headed to get a fishing licence, paid for it at the banker, returned with the payment receipt to get our licence, then we went to customs with all our papers, which he went through carefully, then we pushed the ‘spot inspection’ button and hoped we wouldn’t have to get the boat inspected because we’re sure they wouldn’t like our cat’s papers either.

Each time we moved to a new office window we had to line up, often passing the same people embroiled in the same process (most who were chastised for missing middle names). Eventually we were done—we got a green light so no inspection was needed.

 To celebrate we went for fish tacos.

We’re in Mexico.