Indian Ocean FAQ’s (including the all-important pirate question)

Ceilydh from the sky, thanks to Brian from Delos

About four weeks ago we decided set off for South Africa. When I wrote the post letting people know what we were doing, I promised to share our route and our plans in the next blog post. Somehow repairing a broken dagger board, a shattered catwalk and a leaking hatch as well as provisioning for the next 8-9 months and catching up with a variety of old friends got in the way of actually thinking about the fun part of our plans; the travel. But as we hit countdown mode (we’re aiming to depart mid-weekish) I thought I’d answer a few of the questions have come in from friends, family and the occasional mean stranger (who still write to tell me what a bad mother I am and to ask about pirates…)

So, where the heck are you going and will there be pirates?

The most popular cruising route through the Indian Ocean used to be from Sri Lanka across to Yemen and into the Gulf of Aden through the Suez Canal and into the Med. But after a long civil war Somalia’s government collapsed. With no government (hence no navy or coast guard) local fishermen lost their livelihood to illegal fishing by foreign trawlers. Not surprisingly the fishermen took it upon themselves to fight back and some of them discovered stealing boats was more lucrative than fishing. Piracy soon emerged in the unpatrolled waters off of Somalia and even small yachts were attacked.

So we’re not going that way.

Our plan is to go around South Africa—arriving there in time for their summer (Nov/Dec/Jan). With that as a deadline, we have two basic options. One is the Southern Route—boats leave later in the year and do longer passages to Cocos Keeling, then the Mascarene Islands (Reunion and Rodrigues), on to Madagascar and then Richards Bay, South Africa. The benefit is you get more time in SE Asia and get the whole Indian Ocean done quicker. The risk is you are making longer passages and are exposed to the weather for much longer periods of time. This route tends to have stronger winds and rougher seas.

We’re not going that way either.

We’re departing on the Northern Route. This route will take us eight months, or so, and give us a chance to visit some pint-sized countries and remote atolls. From Langkawi we’ll be sailing about 1100 miles to Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. After a few weeks there, we’ll head on for two months in the Republic of the Maldives—a chain of 1,192 islands that stand in the Laccadive Sea and where they speak Maldivian and spend rufiyaas to buy access to reportedly great 4G.

From there we’ll head another 450 miles to the Salomon Islands—part of the British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos/ Diego Garcia) where no one but sailors who are on their way across the Indian Ocean and sailors who are part of the military are permitted to visit. From there it’s on to the Seychelles, Comoros (which is the third-smallest African nation by area), Mayotte (an overseas department of France), Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa.

Clearly we chose this route as a geography lesson for Maia. We also love the fact that four other teen boats are making the trip at the same time as us.

No, really, what about pirates?

We would never go anywhere we didn’t feel was safe. But that said, from the Maldives to Mozambique we’re technically inside the ‘box’ where our yacht insurance won’t cover us for acts of piracy. We’ve been monitoring the situation though and in 2012 a joint action by several countries and shipping agencies successfully disrupted piracy to such a degree that yachts are beginning to go through the Suez Canal again. The region we’ll be in hasn’t seen any recent pirate activity at all.

We will pay careful attention though—there are a variety of agencies that track acts of piracy. If we feel it’s warranted we may change our route or got into ‘stealth mode’ where we stop reporting our position publicly.

How do you plan to communicate (in case of pirates)?

We’ve been really happy with our SSB. Combined with our Pactor modem we’ve never felt isolated and have been able to participate in nets, get weather and send emails. This said, it turns out there is a pretty significant gap in the Indian Ocean where reaching a Sailmail station (the way we get our weather and email) becomes tricky. This is also the area of the Indian Ocean that we’d want to be really up to date on any piracy concerns.

So with that in mind, for the first time in our lives we’re early adopters and have purchased an Iridium Go (a black box that lets us use our smart phone as a satellite phone and internet device). From what we’ve heard the reliability is emerging and they have a lot of bugs—but between the technologies we feel pretty confident.

In case of an emergency we’d set off our EPIRB.

I saw that beer photo from your friend’s boat, isn’t there any beer out there? Do pirates drink beer?

No idea on the modern pirate’s beverage of choice, but it turns out one of the reasons yachts love Langkawi is that it’s duty free. If you’ve ever bought a bottle of wine in a Muslim country (or a rasher of bacon) you’ll know intoxicants and the pig are both haram and therefore both very spendy.

While there is no help for bacon lovers in Langkawi (you’ll need to carry on to Thailand for that—or spend big in the teeny-tiny non-halal section of the grocery store) sailors who imbibe tend to stock up the way anyone would stock up when they have unlimited access to $11 a litre gin.

What other provisioning have you done?

The countries on our route for the next eight months are very small, isolated and poor. We’ll find the basics; so far every country we’ve visited has had lots of starch options (rice, taro, cassava, pasta, white flour…), onions, green beans and tomatoes have been consistent, as has some sort of tropical fruit, most have UHT milk and some sort of processed cheese, chicken and eggs are plentiful, as is tinned tuna and spam, some sort of bean or legume is usually around (though it may be hosting a protein)—so there’s always something to eat. What we buy are all the things to make a basic diet more interesting; everything from nice cheeses and long life cream, to tinned corn, olives and capers, to baking supplies.We also buy easy 'at sea' food when we find it. Maia insisted we buy out a store's entire stock of American clam chowder.

We also are restocking our medical kit and picking up a year’s worth of prescriptions and contact lenses. For the boat we’re making sure each system is in good shape after the last eight months of constant travel (cruising is like a dog’s year for a boat. One year of full-time cruising = 7 years at the dock.) and restocking the spares we went through.

Last but not least we're also stocking up on eight months of cat food and kitty litter. That's the way to keep a boat light...

Rudder Or Not, We’re Nearly Ready…

This could also have been the Sleepless in La Cruz post. Or the Damn Weather post...

 

The worst part of this getting ready thing is the stress. I’m not sure how many times I startled awake last night thinking of one little task or another that a) I’ve completed but had a bad dream about; b) never planned to do anyway; or c) already have scheduled on my list…

The best part of the process though is the knowledge that we’re not completely on our own. Yesterday we met with the 10 or so boats that plan to jump off this week (something that is suddenly looking like later this week considering the Pacific High just went poof in a weird way…) We compared notes, exchanged info and generally discovered there are many, many ways to prepare for this journey and none of us is ever going to get it all done. The trick is to decide what your boat and your crew needs to be happy, healthy, comfortable and safe. And after all the boat stuff is taken care of—this pretty much means food.

Barb-checking out the produce

 Last night (before the weather report changed and shifted departures to later in the week…) we focused on food.

 There is a little produce warehouse in town that supplies the local restaurants and tiendas. Every Sunday and Thursday the owners head up to Guadelajara to get fresh produce. They return in the evening with lots of unripe, unrefrigerated food—which is exactly what we want for long term storage.

Barb and I headed over at the end of the cruisers meeting—and before the little warehouse knew what hit them, a dozen or so cruisers were swarming the place: squeezing green tomatoes, sifting through firm onions and selecting rock hard mangoes.

Whatcha Gonna Do and us with a bucnh of food and friends

 $996 pesos later ($80 or so…) and we had more produce than a typical tienda… And more than we could carry. Happily we also have friends who never cease to amaze me and with a few extra hands we got stuff home in record time. Now we need to store it away (and potentially share it out,  considering the crazy weather patter which has suddenly developed!)…

The Countdown to Departure

We’re days, rather than weeks, from departure now. For the past two days we’ve had a rental car and have been running around gathering up every item that’s on each of our spreadsheets (mine=five pages, single spaced, not including fresh food…).

If you’ve been reading a few cruising blogs you’ll no doubt have heard people talk about their spreadsheets: About how they inventoried their boats, catalogued what they had, made lists of what they eat and how quickly they eat it, cross-referenced this stuff with other peoples spreadsheets as well as notes about what is and isn’t available in French Polynesia (and at what price), then double checked it all with a dietician (kidding) before creating the perfect personalized spreadsheet…

 I didn’t do this. I’m sort of embarrassed to say our spreadsheets are my friend Behan’s spreadsheets (S/V Totem). All I did was go through her lists (including skimming her recent blog posts about what they had too much/ too little of…) and reduced all the numbers (they have 3 kids and left with crew)—then went for it. We’ll eat what they ate.

On the first day alone I filled five jumbo shopping carts with food. That’s a lot of food. And fortunately I was shopping alone—because it filled the trunk, the back seat and the front seat to capacity.

For the most part provisioning in Mexico is straightforward. There are loads of excellent cheap options and we should have plenty of variety. The problem comes when you start to get into specifics—if you want a certain type of cheese, crackers, canned veggies or sauce (even one you’ve bought a hundred times before) it may not be available today, or this week, or ever again.

Mexico grocery stores are at best unpredictable.

and don't worry--we have way more than two bottles of wine...

 The other issue is language. My Spanish is serviceable, and I can typically get by. But when it comes to shopping, you sort of need to know what things are called--precisely. Hand waving doesn’t work when you want baking powder or are looking for a specific medication… And if you want to avoid certain ingredients, you need to understand how to read the words. All of which can make grocery shopping last longer than expected and can still result in a few unexpected purchases. Who would have thunk that you could even buy reduced calorie sugar with extra fibre…

The good news is our spread sheets are almost completely checked off. The bad news is somehow we need to store all this stuff away. I think the shopping was the easy part...

Cross-Border Shopping—What do Mexico-based Cruisers Buy in the US?

 We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to get almost everything you need in Mexico. There’s so much more available now than 14-years-ago--especially in the the bigger cities with their Costcos and Walmarts. The stuff that’s still hard to get are the specialty items—brand name shoes, marine electronics, good chocolate, affordable wine... That’s the stuff you need to bring down with you—or do without.

Like just about every other sailboat we know, we keep a running list of ‘stuff we want’. The idea is that whenever someone is coming down (or someone from down here is doing a trip up) we can put in an order and stock back up.

This time it’s us doing the border run. I’m off to Arizona for a work conference and Maia and Evan will be picking me up. So for the past two weeks we’ve been ordering up a storm. First on the list is a VHF radio with an AIS receiver. An Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a tracking system that identifies big ships and gives their course and speed. We have a black box AIS receiver we never hooked up thorough our computer—but the simple VHF version has been getting such rave reviews (and it takes a few levels of complexity out of the process) that we’ve decided to go with one.

Next on our list are a couple of spare high power adapters for amplifying shore-based wi-fi signals. We’re not sure if we’re simply really hard on the little adapters (they’re not marinized and the components tend to rust despite having sealed the unit in a watertight box) but we’ve gone through two in the past year. So we’re ordering two more.

We’re also getting a new prop for our outboard engine. Although the goal is to avoid whacking the prop, we’ve clearly hit bottom with it one too many times. We had it welded and pounded back into shape in La Paz—but the distorted prop is taking its toll on our speed and fuel consumption.

While we’re up there we’re also going to stock up on other items where quality is an issue: sunscreen (US sunscreen has better active ingredients than Mexican versions of the same brands), shoes for Evan and Maia, chocolate (of course…), vitamins (because we drink RO water our diet is lacking in trace minerals so vitamins are important) and favourite food items. We’re also planning to pick-up loose-leaf paper and three-ring binders for Maia—for whatever both are nearly impossible to find here.

The key though is that list. It’s all too easy in the land of consuming to get a bit carried away. Purchases that seem perfectly reasonable in the store end up eating up our cruising budget and sinking our water line…

Stocking Up

The last time we spent a year in Mexico, we grew used to shopping in dusty tiendas where stock was limited and finding anything beyond the basics was unlikely. There were a few big supermarkets around, but they carried pretty much the same stuff as the tiendas. They just spread it out a bit more widely on the shelves. Occasionally we would find something fabulous; some chocolate chips, a jar of marmalade or a bottle of decent wine, but mostly we liked the challenge of eating like a local and trying to figure out what the heck to do with chayote and those big corn kernel things.

The bow is filled with goceries

These days we have Walmart and Costco as well as the big Mexican grocery stores like CCC and Mega. Each of them carries the standard Mexican brands, but they also carry a random supply of Canadian and US products, which sell out within days of their arrival. This makes shopping kind of like a treasure hunt, and means every time a friend goes shopping you get a report back, “I found rice noodles and coconut milk!!”

Eating like a local is great—we make our own tortillas and eat plenty of beans and rice (I’m still not sure what to do with those giant kernels…), but there are days when a coconut curry over rice noodles is a welcome meal.

 We won't see produce like this during the summer

Our plan is to head into north into the Sea of Cortez in a few weeks. Once we leave La Paz, we’re pretty much back to the dusty tiendas for the next five months. So today we went and stocked up (actually we stocked up for guests who arrive tomorrow, but we did buy all the rice noodles in the store.)

 Somehow, no matter where we go, there are more choices in laundry soap than anything else

Knowing that our choices will be limited to the basics in the months to come made every purchase a bit more exciting today. And somehow appreciating every loaf of pumpernickel bread and brick of aged cheddar just feels right.

Adventures in Shopping

It’s been a week since our last green vegetables were consumed.

Three days since Maia ate her last apple.

Two days since we ran out of tomatoes.

Every day we go into the little tienda in Magdalena Town and shop. One day we found a few limp carrots. Another day it was eggs and onions. Yesterday it was a small bunch of bruised bananas. Today there was nothing.

We’re headed to Puerto Vallarta soon—there are big grocery stores there. But even if we leave now, we won’t be there for almost five days. Five more days of no fresh food seemed like too long as we ate our cereal with powdered milk this morning. So we piled into the dinghy and set off for Puerto San Carlos—eight-miles.

Eight miles is nothing if you have a car. It's not even a big deal by bus or by bike. But by water it’s wet, and bumpy and far. Made farther by the fact we weren’t sure which part of the town had stores. We asked a fisherman in a panga where to land for shopping. He pointed vaguely at a beach. On shore we found ourselves walking aimlessly along dusty, stinky industrial roads—laden with jerry jugs for fuel and a back pack for groceries. So we asked again--and got another general wave of a hand. So we turned right and headed for a green building.

While we were walking a shiny red pickup stopped beside us, “Are you looking for something?” we were asked by a smiling young man who spoke decent english.

“Pemex-for fuel,” we told him. He waved down the road, vaguely.

“And groceries?” 
Another wave, this time the other way.

Then he offered us a lift.

We were lost and tired from the trip so we climbed in. First we went to the Pemex. But it was when our driver took us to the weekly market and we met his third ‘brother’ that we began to worry.

It’s not uncommon for Mexicans to offer us their services. They’ll fetch fuel, watch that our dinghy doesn’t drift away or scrub the bottom of our boat. Anything, really, for a few pesos. Most of the time the service is fair and well appreciated, but there are moments when it can become quite overwhelming to be seen as rich Gringos who have money to burn. The number one rule of agreeing to any service is setting a price in advance.

We hadn’t done this.

“Me llamo Diane,” I told our cheery driver.

“Gabino,” he told us.

Then I broached the subject of money--and his time. No money, he told us. He said when he has time he likes to make friends. He likes to hear about the world outside of Magdalena. He asked about Vancouver—and if it was true we had no snow for the Olympics.

Gabino runs a whale watching boat, and he’s a fisherman. He’s 35 and has been in San Carlos for 30-years, he says he makes a good life and he likes to give back. He took us to another shop (also staffed by his family-“it’s a small town and my family is big”), and helped us find things that would have taken hours on our own. So we asked him if we could take him for lunch.

We took him to his favourite torta shop (this time not staffed by family). When the (really excellent) food arrived he told us he was a Jehovah’s Witness. I braced myself for his sales pitch, realizing that the true cost of our morning together was about to be paid, wondering if we could maybe just offer him money after all. But then he began to talk about other things; the weather, the recent storm, September’s hurricane, my work. We traded business cards.

After lunch he drove us back to the dinghy—we miscalculated the tides and it was high and dry. Gabino helped us get it the 50 metres down the beach. Then he turned to Maia, took her hand in his and told her he had something serious to say. “Ah, finally, now we’ll pay,” I thought, assuming he would try to convert her.

“Always remember that friends are better to have than money,” Gabino told her solemnly. 
He watched her, to make sure she understood, before he released her hand.

“Friends make you rich..."

Getting Gone

I’ve had a few people send notes asking us to detail the exact steps we’re taking and list the stuff we’re buying while we prepare to leave San Diego. The thing is everyone has different things on their list at this stage. Ours included getting our Pactor modem running (which it now is – so this means I’ll be able to send and receive work emails over single sideband radio networks), getting our water maker running (check), setting up a downwind reaching pole, sorting out our weather forecasting systems (we’ll be listening to Don from Summer Passage) as well as downloading weather faxes, organizing our paper work (still need to order boat cards… sigh) and stocking up on things that we found were either hard to get or too expensive to buy in Mexico:

favourite crackers and cookies, maple syrup, hard sausages and hard cheeses, batteries and software, favourite treats from Trader Joes, movies and school books, jams and chocolate, wheat free flour and pasta, vitamins and guide books, favourite herbs and spices, dry bunk material, boat parts and fishing gear… 

Personally, I also needed to clear my schedule of deadlines for a few weeks--so I was filing stories and sorting pictures.

The thing is the final to-do list can be a never ending trap--and for lots of people it is. I’m always reluctant to tell people what it is that we are trying to get done because when I do it usually elicits one of three responses: they either think we aren’t doing enough (aka less than what they would do), doing too much (aka more than what they would do) or it sends them into a panic as they realize they totally missed a step that may or may not be important.

Last time we headed south, we spent over a month in San Diego working from dawn to dusk trying to plan for every eventuality and making sure we didn’t forget a single item that we might someday possibly need (I even pre-bought birthday and Christmas gifts). We got caught in the trap of second guessing our list and checking with every cruiser and every book for tips on what we may have forgotten (thank goodness we didn’t have blogs to read to increase our anxiety…)

What we discovered is Mexico (and beyond) had people living there, that we didn’t need to carry enough food to make it for months. There were mechanics and hardware stores so we didn’t need to stock every spare part, or to imagine and prepare for every eventuality. All we really needed to do was know our boat and prepare to be self-sufficient for a few weeks – but not for months or years.

I think cruising is foreign enough that we feel safer and more prepared if we can just make enough lists and buy enough stuff. Because it’s all pretty hard to imagine what it’s really like to untie and let go, we grab on tighter, trying to manage an unknowable future.

But it is unknowable, in a good way. So, I’m sorry to the people who wrote and asked for my list—I don’t really have one that’s universal enough to share. There are books and articles filled with suggestions and ideas, but I think my main message is simply to decide what you need to be comfortable and safe, then pare down the list to the things that are unique to you, your boat and your lifestyle. Then randomly cross off half the things on your list with your eyes closed—you’ll never miss the stuff.

But do make sure you stash away a few treats so that at one of those cruiser potlucks, the ones that happen way far from specialty stores, you can be the boat that brings out the cool appetizer…

Fix, Pray, Sail

Leaving seems to happen in slow stages. There’s the getting ready, the goodbyes and then the sinking in.
The getting ready and the goodbyes were almost the easy parts. Getting ready took focus and dogged determination, but then it was done. And the goodbyes, because we’ve done it before, we know those are temporary.

No, the hard part is the sinking in: The slow realization that we’ve arrived in our life, that this isn’t a one or two year voyage with a predictable conclusion, but a capricious journey that could take us anywhere. I’ve been slow to get to the acceptance part. The trip down the coast pretty much sucked, in many respects. We set off with that smug feeling of knowing exactly what we were getting into and were proved wrong.

It’s hard to be terrified.
It’s hard to have stuff break and wonder if we did something wrong or simply had bad luck.
It’s hard to wonder if we made a huge mistake giving up our home.
It’s hard to hear Maia say she’s lonely.
It’s hard to know there really is no easy way to turn back.

But then there are always those next moments. The quiet contemplative ones that make up everyone’s cruising fantasy--watching the moonrise over a calm anchorage, exploring the beach, sailing in perfect conditions and spending time with good friends, old or new, in beautiful places.

Sarah has been sailing with us twice. When she arrived in Newport Beach before Christmas we had spent almost three weeks just hanging out fixing stuff--happy to stay put. But then the three of us were tentatively ready to go sailing again and she was there to help us along.

We’re not religious but, as I’ve mentioned before, when it comes to setting out on a big ocean in a small boat I’ll take all the help I can get. So Sarah, who’s recently back from Israel, brought help. With a small prayer, she affixed a Mezuzah to the door (we figured it would be okay to put it on the inside seems how the outside would be kind of exposed.) Then for good measure she brought a Hamsa, which is supposed ward off the evil eye and bring us good luck, as well as a very special t-shirt for Maia.

And luck seems to be with us – or at least the evil eye has gone elsewhere for a while. San Diego has been good to us, fellow cruisers (but total strangers), Rick and Sue from Panacea responded to Evan’s online plea for technical help with our Pactor modem and drove out to our marina to trouble shoot the modem, then spent the afternoon driving us around so we could stock up on things for Mexico (we’re filling the lockers with specialty items--appetizer foods, favourite treats, wines, hard cheeses rather than staples). Maia is meeting new friends and is loving her home-based pen pals. I am managing to find some balance in the working while traveling lifestyle. The sun is shining. The boat is in good shape. We’re almost ready to head south again.

We’re out here doing it.

Family, errr, dinghy

We gave up our car a couple of weeks ago.
We’ve been carless before and relied on our bicycles for transportation, but this time we’ve sold those too. These days, other than our kayaks, our primary mode of transportation is by dingy. And seems how we’re rarely at a dock, our dingy is even more important than a car. We use it for sightseeing, visiting neighbouring boats, scouting out good places to picnic and go grocery shopping.
It’s a system that works pretty well, when you plan ahead.
It’s less than perfect when you find yourself anchored 8-miles from the nearest settlement and discover you have no cat food.
Seaside villages in Desolation Sound are well set up for boaters. The stores often have more dock space than land-based parking and are well stocked with appies and alcohol. What they don’t have are regular hours or easy anchorages. So when you’re 8-miles away, and you only travel at 8-miles an hour, the best option (after attempting to make something the cat would eat out of brown rice and tinned sardines) is to hop in the dingy (which goes twice as fast as the big boat) and head to the shops.

If you were headed to the corner store on an evening cat food run, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. But when your outing takes you across two channels, past four uninhabited islands and up one sound - it’s called an expedition. It’s something you only do after unpacking three lockers and two cupboards (just in case there’s more cat food stashed somewhere you forgot), checking the weather report, listening to sea state reports, topping up fuel tanks, grabbing the handheld VHF, checking the chart for unmarked hazards and rocks, double checking that the dam cat won’t eat the glop you made, packing a light (just in case sunset happens before your return) and putting on your life jacket.It’s safe to assume that the cat is not the least bit impressed when you make an effort like this on his behalf. But I’m grateful that we went with a motor on the dingy this trip – it would have been a bitch to row all that way.