Turtle Bay

I am currently in the city of Turtle Bay in Baja California. Turtle Bay is a little hole in the wall, or in this case, a hole in the rock that is located in Baja California some 240 miles south of San Diego. Although, I believe those are nautical miles which I learned are longer than normal miles because it takes into account the curvature of the earth. If you were to measure the distance between point A and point B of a nautical mile it would be the same as an American mile, however, for some unknown reason, they thought it would be good to take into account the curvature of the earth when it comes to a nautical mile. In any case, Turtle Bay is quite a long ways from San Diego.

I must say, Mexico is a very dusty, dirty place. I am not even sure I would call it a third world country, but man is there a lot of dirt everywhere. I could not wait to get out of San Quintin on Monday. We did not actually leave San Quintin until Tuesday afternoon. After we set out, things started off really well. I saw a whale and then dolphins were swimming along side of our sailboat for about half an hour. It was not until night when things started to go south (no pun intended).

The skipper of the boat, Walter, got sick almost immediately. He was out of commission for a very long time. That night I determined that I do infact get sea sick, but only when the sun is down. When the sun is up I am fine, as soon as there is no sun I have issues. That night we hit a fair amount of wind and some of our sails got messed up pretty bad. Our front sail got to the point where we could not furl it back in, which basically meant that when the winds picked up at night like they did we did not really have control over the boat. For a couple of hours we were sailing in a North East direction which is not very good considering we were supposed to be going south.

Day number two which was Wednesday, I was happy to be alive. The day went fine for the most part, but we found out our boat was taking on water in one of the hulls. That is not good. Thankfully we have 3 hulls. Although today we found water in the main hull as well. Anyway, that is another story. So we had a lot of water in our left hull going into the night on Wednesday and we were headed South when I was trying to go to sleep. Wind was coming at us from the East and so were the swells of waves. The problem being that since we had water in our left side hull that side of the boat was already sitting lower in the water then it should compared to the other hulls of the boat. Since we had both the wind and the swells of water coming at us from the right side of the boat that put even more pressure on the left side of the boat to sit even lower into the water. The kind of boat we are in is quite reliable except when there is a lot of weight on board. Especially a lot of weight on one side of the boat. If the left side of the boat were heavy enough and had enough force on it, if it dugg into the water on the left it would not have been that hard for the boat to flip over. Of course I am thinking and realizing all of this while I am trying to sleep, our skipper is still out of commision and cannot really think straight and the other two guys on the boat are trying to get us where we were going as fast as boatly possible. I was freaking out a little. Obviously we made it through the night though and came out okay.

We got into Turtle Bay yesterday and we will be leaving tomorrow morning, I believe. Sometime on Sunday we should be hitting our next stop. I forget what it is called but apparently it has no services like Turtle Bay. Meaning I will not have access to things like phones and the internet. Anyway, as long as we keep the water in the hulls to minimum, sickness of those who know what they are doing to a minimum and with a little bit of luck maybe we will make it through this thing alright.

I have never used a computer in a country where English was not the native language. I must say I do believe a Mac would be better in Spanish then this thing I am on right now.

I do have pictures that I need to upload, but I will not do that here because I am getting charged by the second.

I hope you all are doing well.