December 16, 2007
41°29'S 72°58'W
Marina del Sur, Puerto Montt, Chile

Feliz Navidad!
Evans and I have enjoyed another challenging and rewarding year. Since last year at this time, we have sailed almost 12,000 nautical miles, visited four countries and, upon reaching Puerto Montt in Chile in October, closed the loop on our second circumnavigation. Since we were here five years ago, more than 40,000 nautical miles have passed under Hawk’s keel, a third of that in the Southern Ocean. We have now sailed more than 100,000 nautical miles on our two boats, almost two-thirds of that aboard Hawk in the high latitudes.

We spent last Christmas in Bahia Magdalena on the west coast of the Baja peninsula with a wonderful group of new-to-cruising couples who have become good friends. From there, we rounded Cabo San Lucas at the bottom of the southern end of the Baja peninsula and entered the Sea of Cortez. We reached La Paz, the largest town on the peninsula, just after New Year and stayed there several weeks while Beth took an intensive course to refresh her Spanish. After that, we enjoyed a six-week winter cruise in the Sea of Cortez, and then we went on an inland trip to visit the Mayan ruins in Chiapas, the southernmost Mexican state. In April, we left the Sea of Cortez and headed for Costa Rica. We took the offshore route with one short stop in Zihuatenejo to clear Customs and top up with fuel, water and produce. Crossing the dreaded Gulf of Tehuenepec, known for strong winds and big seas, we motored through a flat calm surrounded by pods of dolphins, dozens of sea turtles and hundreds of seabirds. Upon arriving in Bahia Santa Elena in the north of Costa Rica, we were serenaded by flocks of Scarlet Macaws morning and night.

We had planned to spend a month or so in the country and then move on to Ecuador where the climate is much cooler and drier in the summer months, but the authorities changed the regulations there, making it exceedingly difficult to visit by yacht. So we spent three months, from the end of April to the end of July, in Costa Rica. The wonderful wildlife experiences we had more than made up for the unbearably hot and humid weather and the almost daily thunderstorms. Ecuador’s new regulations affected the Galapagos Islands as well, so when we left Costa Rica we sailed nonstop to the Gambier Islands. This is a small archipelago located about 800miles southeast of Tahiti in French Polynesia. We had always wanted to visit these remote islands, but they had never been within reach of any of our sailing routes. This time we sailed a few thousand extra miles to reach them. It took us 24 days to sail close to 4,000 nautical miles from Costa Rica to the Gambiers, and we spent a month enjoying the coral atoll. From there we sailed another 3,800 nautical miles in 24 days to Puerto Montt, Chile, weathering two gales during the last four days of the passage.

We left Hawk in Marina del Sur, the marina where we wintered the last time we were here, and returned back to the States for short visits. While we were there, Beth got notice that her book, Blue Horizons, had won a National Outdoor Book Award in the outdoor literature category (see www.noba-web.org). This is only the second sailing book to win in any category and the first to win in the literature category. The book now gets to carry a handsome gold medallion on the cover to commemorate this achievement.

We have just applied for our cruising permit and, weather permitting, will begin a three-month voyage from Puerto Montt to Puerto Williams (about 60 miles north of Cape Horn) at the end of this week. We plan to spend the southern winter in the Beagle Channel at the very bottom of South America, and in October or November make the passage to South Georgia Island where we hope to spend a month or more. Then we’ll be heading back up the Atlantic and what will likely be the end of this voyage.  We hope that this note finds you in the holiday spirit and getting ready to enjoy time with friends and family. Have a wonderful Christmas and a healthy and happy 2008.

The last few months have been an example of the kind of planning we must engage to live in aboard a yacht. While sailing, we have to think in terms of seasons and plan a year or more ahead of time, and a small departure from the schedule has big consequences. When we arrived in Puerto Montt in October, we had planned to be on our way south within a month. We had intended to reach the Beagle Channel at the bottom of South America in early January, and then to take the first good weather window to sail to South Georgia Island before returning up the Atlantic, reaching the Caribbean just before hurricane season in 2008. That plan required us to keep moving at the same pace that has brought us 12,000 nautical miles in the last 12 months.

But circumstances dictated otherwise. At the beginning of November, Beth flew to the States for a week to be with her father who had just had hip surgery and, after she went through the normal round of physicals and tests, discovered she needed surgery of her own. Evans flew back to be with her in mid-November, and each of us got to spend Thanksgiving with our families. The surgery went very well, and we returned to Chile on December 10th. Beth is still under some restrictions, which will be lifted at the end of this week. We have applied for our cruising permit for the channels, and we hope to leave on Thursday, assuming the weather cooperates.

All of this would have been a problem had we not changed our plans shortly after arriving in Puerto Montt. But within a week of being back in Chile, we knew we could not rush through what will likely be our last cruising in this fascinating and challenging area for many years. We also didn’t want to miss the opportunity to spend time with many good friends we will not see again for a very long time. Before Beth flew back to the States, we had already decided to spend the winter down in the Beagle Channel and save South Georgia for next year, adding a year to our schedule and delaying our return up the Atlantic until the end of 2008 or early 2009.

This has also allowed us a little more time to enjoy summertime before we head south to where it can and does snow year round. While we spent five months here in Puerto Montt in 2002, from April to September, that was wintertime when it was perpetually gloomy and dark, and we had cold, rainy, miserable weather. Now we’re seeing Puerto Montt in all its summer glory for the very first time, and we can hardly believe that it is the same place. The sun is our constant companion. It rises hours before us, and its rays still lighten the horizon an hour or more after we have climbed into bed. During the day, temperatures reach the seventies, and at night we sleep deeply in the cool air. The flowers and trees are all blooming, and a riot of color lines the road into Puerto Montt where vines climb the fences in front of the houses, and trees gaily decorated in their summer finery shoulder their way up above the rooftops.

Our Chilean friends, Arturo and Sonia, who spend four months every summer cruising in the northern part of the channels aboard their Nauticat 35, took us on a driving tour north of Puerto Montt to Puerto Varas and Volcán Osorno this week. The whole area, like Puerto Montt, is booming, and around Puerto Varas there was much construction going on to improve the roads and quite a bit of land was for sale around the lake shore. The area is quite beautiful with low rolling hills of pasture and woodland backed by snow-capped peaks. Because of the volcanic nature of the land, there is very little in the way of foothills, and many of the peaks rise right up from the lush plain. Osorno in particular resembles a child’s fairytale mountain, with a perfect pyramid shape capped by snow and a large lake called Llanquihue (pronounced Yankee-way) at its foot. Though we only drove to the lodge at the base of the ski lift about halfway up the 8,500 foot mountain, from there we had an incredible view of the lake surrounded by the lush, green land with brooding ranks of mountains in the background. You’ll find a few photos of Osorno in the Chile photo gallery.

But further south the weather is the same as we remember. Friends of ours on a sixty-foot schooner got knocked down with just a headsail up in sixty knots of wind a few weeks ago. A few days ago, we got an e-mail from other friends who had 66 knots of wind in their anchorage, admittedly not a particularly good anchorage but the only one available in that area. As we ready ourselves for the next leg of our voyage, we have to remind ourselves that the summerlike weather we are so enjoying will end once we cross the Golfo de Penas (Gulf of Sorrow) about three hundred miles south of here.

When we leave here later this week, we will be leaving behind most comforts and conveniences and head off into one of the most remote and uninhabited parts of the world. The coast from here to the Beagle Channel resembles the coast of the Pacific Northwest from Seattle to Glacier Bay, Alaska, but with almost no settlements. Past Golfo de Penas, there is only one small fishing settlement with 400 people in 700 miles of coastline. It will take us three months to get from here to Puerto Williams about 60 miles north of Cape Horn, and in that time we will have no internet connections or mail or supermarkets or news… The only people we will run into will be Chilean fishermen (who earn an average of $400 per year for six months of back-breaking, dangerous work away from their families) and other crews on the occasional sailboat.

We’re really looking forward to heading back to this beautiful area though these are the most challenging waters we’ve ever sailed. There’s something utterly magnificent about a landscape that has never been shaped by human hands, that is as it was at the dawn of time and has been influenced only by nature. In the sunken valleys flooded by the sea and lashed by Southern Ocean storms, the forces of nature are brutal, and totally unforgiving. It’s incredibly humbling but also exhilarating to be there, a feeling something like having the hair stand up on the back of your neck when a wolf howls or a great cat screams while you’re sitting around a campfire in the dark.

We hope that you have a wonderful holiday season and a happy and healthy 2008.
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk

October 18, 2007
41°29'S 72°58'W
Marina del Sur, Puerto Montt, Chile
 
Hola!
 
We made landfall at Canal Chacao, the channel between the mainland and the large island of Chiloe at the northern end of the Chilean channels, around midnight on Monday, October 15.  The following day, we rode the current through Canal Chacao, averaging 10 knots for close to 20 miles.  The current decreased but stayed with us for the entire 60 miles to Puerto Montt.  Somewhere on that run, we crossed our outbound track and closed the loop on our second circumnavigation.  Since we were here five years ago, we have sailed more than 40,000 nautical miles (and 65,000miles on this boat), a third of that in the Southern Ocean as we passed under all five great Southern Capes. 
 
We took a bit of a zigzag course on our passage from the Gambier Islands, sailing almost 3,800 miles in 24 days to make good the 3,200 nautical miles along the direct great circle route.  Most of the zigs and zags were designed to dodge headwinds and storm winds, and it felt as if we were a ball bouncing around inside of a pinball machine trying to avoid the largest flappers that would knock us off in the wrong direction.  We were still close-hauled or tacking upwind for a week out of the passage, sometimes into winds of 25 knots or more.  As we reached the roaring forties, we had two downwind gales in the last four days of the passage with winds up to 45 knots.  Our basic route had three legs: (1) due south to 30 degrees, in what should have been SE trade winds but we found a favorable weather pattern with NE winds. (2) Running east at 30 degrees until 105W with nice 20kt westerlies under the stationary South Pacific high. We gradually drifted 2 degrees north in order to stay in this favorable airflow.  (3) Turn direct for Puerto Montt, but twice dodging a bit to the south west to go around the back of low pressure systems.  The GRIBS were more accurate on this passage than normal, and routes with a lot of N/S in them give you greater leverage on the weather systems (than E/W routes),  so we did much more useful weather routing on this passage than is typical.
 
The image that will stay with me from this passage is being out on deck when it had been blowing at gale force for more than 12 hours.  The waves were almost on our beam, large and gray, streaked with white spindrift and dozens of moving fingers of water pushed up on the surface of each wave by the wind.  We were surrounded by dozens of seabirds, some close to the boat and low to the water and others far from the boat and gliding high above the wave tops.  Little diving petrels a bit larger than my hand fluttered like bumble bees, sometimes flying right into the front of a wave and emerging again at the back after some 30 or 40 feet underwater.  Painted petrels, also known as Cape pigeons, soared on short, stiff wings.  No two are alike, for they look as if a white paint can splattered over a black bird, leaving them blotched with white splashes like a piebald horse.  And albatrosses!  We had gray-headed, black-browed and wandering albatrosses all around us.  Their wings flex when they glide to form a perfect parabola that ends at the wingtips which lift like fingers from the arc of the wing.  They glide down the face of a wave, compressing the air under their winds as they approach the water, then use the lift that gives them to soar back upward over the back of the next wave before gliding down again.  I could pick one out and watch for as long as I could keep it in sight, sometimes for as much as half an hour, and never see the bird flap even once or move so much as a feather to stay aloft.  These swirling, soaring, gliding creatures added color and life to the windswept tableau of heaving gunmetal gray and frothing white, a world without a horizontal surface or a single stationary point.
 
As we got further south, the days lengthened and the temperature dropped.  We left Gambier wearing shorts and tee-shirts and sleeping under a light cotton blanket.  By the time we reached Canal Chacao, we were sleeping under three blankets and a down sleeping bag and, when we were on watch, wearing three layers of thermal underwear, hats, gloves, sea boots and foul weather gear.  The last three days we had gray, overcast skies and an almost constant, frigid rain – welcome to Chile!
 
If I was wondering why we wanted to come back here, though, the short trip from Canal Chacao to Puerto Montt certainly reminded me.  It all seemed so familiar and felt so inviting.  The fishermen going by in their wooden, bright yellow boats waved at us merrily; the white-headed Peruvian pelicans winged by in large flotillas; rolling, tree-covered hills backed the brightly painted houses on stilts in the small fishing villages along the channel, the dozens of little islands dotted the large sound we were sailing through…  Spring has just arrived, and many trees were in flower, splashing patches of yellow and white across the wooded hills.  It was beautiful despite the overcast and frequent rain showers.  And it was more prosperous than we remembered, with large salmon and mussel farms along the channels and fishing communities with well-kept boats hauled up on the foreshore and new-looking houses painted in every color of the rainbow behind.  When we tied up at Marina del Sur, lots of other memories came to me from our winter here – the tinny honking of the buff-necked ibises as they fly in by in groups of three or four overhead, the raucous roar of the crowd in the football stadium at Chiniquie just above the marina, smiling faces we haven’t seen in five years.  It almost felt like coming home.
 
Now we’re tied up and secure in a berth for the first time since March in Mexico.  We just returned from a foray into town where we could hardly take in the shelves lined with consumer goods and the supermarkets full of fresh fruits and vegetables after more than six months in places without either.  We’ve been gorging on salad, trying to get our fill of green after not having anything fresh on board beyond a few elderly potatoes and onions for the last three months.  We’ll be here in Puerto Montt for the next month, working on the various boat projects that inevitably arise after almost 8,000 offshore miles and provisioning and canning for the trip down the channels.  We hope to reach Puerto Williams by early January, but much will depend on how our time goes here and how the weather is this season in the channels.
 
After now having sailed to Chile from both the east and the west, we can definitively say its much easier from the east.  You can roar down the Argentine coast, reaching in big winds right off the beach with no waves.  From the west, both the coastal and offshore routes have big waves and difficult & complex weather patterns.  Of course, arriving from the east means you have to go up the canals in constant northerly headwinds, but at least that is in flat inshore water with good anchorages in which to wait for favorable weather.
 
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk

August 25, 2007
23°S 135°W
Anchored off Rikitea, Mangareva, Isles Gambier

Bonjour!

We arrived at the archipelago of the Gambier Islands one week ago, and as often happens, we have been busy since our arrival with all the things that need to be done after a 4,000 nautical mile passage. Evans has had a longish list of boat projects, most of them pretty minor, which he pretty well finished off yesterday when the wind finally went light enough for us to drop the roller furling jib so he could tighten the headstay and retune the rig. I finished my list today when we ferried 900 pounds of water in jerry cans (we could have used a hose but decided to jerry jug rather than back Hawk onto a concrete commercial jetty where the tap is) out to the boat and I did a month’s worth of accumulated laundry. In between boat projects and getting settled in, we’ve been enjoying getting to know the island a little bit and taking long walks to get ourselves back in condition after being at sea.

Our passage from Costa Rica took 24 days during which we sailed more than 4,000 nautical miles to make good 3,600. We had expected headwinds on leaving Costa Rica, but we had expected them to be light enough that we might have to motor and to last for about 500 miles. Instead, they were 15-25 knots dead up our course for more than 1,000 miles, to well beyond the Galapagos. Luckily, until the last few days both the wind and seas stayed moderate, so though we were heeled over we weren’t crashing around too much. We had our worst day and our worst week ever on Hawk in terms of miles made good, yet Hawk was sailing really well, making 7 knots through the water 28 degrees off the apparent wind. When we still couldn’t get south to where we knew we would find favorable winds, we took a long tack to the southeast, losing 25 miles 'made good' in 24 hours, sailing under the double-reefed main and the staysail into 25-30 knots of wind, and at the end of that day we finally found winds from the easterly quarter and could free our sheets and head directly for our landfall.

We found the trade-winds on the 11th day at about 100°W, a few degrees north of the equator. From that time on, Hawk sailed between 185 and 200 miles each day, so our average daily miles made good for the second half of the passage were just about double that for the first half. Hawk was flying along at 8-9 knots 24 hours a day sailing initially on a close reach, then a beam reach, and finally a run. Once the boat flattened out a bit, it was lovely sailing, and Hawk seemed to be having just as much fun as we were.

We came through the wide, well-marked past on the northwest side of the lagoon, and anchored just inside the pass for the night before moving to the town anchorage in daylight. We needn’t have bothered – the French have placed buoys and lights all through the lagoon, and we could have safely navigated it in the middle of the night. Coming out on deck the morning after we arrived, I got my first real look at the Gambier Islands. We were anchored behind the largest of the islands in the lagoon, called Mangareva, off a large peninsula at its southern end that extended out from the main body of the island to the northwest to create a large, coral studded harbor. The island was covered with bright green vegetation that ranged from palm trees to some species of pine tree as well as a dozen other types of greenery. From where we were anchored, we could see four of the other five islands that dot the lagoon. The largest of these lay to the south of us, and a sailboat lay at anchor in its lee. The water was that vivid blue color midway between royal blue and purple, a rich, vibrant Technicolor that hardly looked real. We could see right to the bottom through the shimmering blue, where a scattering of coral boulders lay on a bed of sand. As I pulled up the chain, I watched it lift from the sand thirty-five feet below me, raising a cloud of silt around it, and then I saw it take up against the anchor and lift first the shank and then the flukes off the bottom.

After a week here, we’re starting to get a bit of a feel for this archipelago. The town, Rikitea, is amazingly prosperous. Houses are mostly concrete block painted in primary colors with corrugated tin roofs and with brightly-colored curtains flapping to the breeze in the open windows. The two streets that run through the town are both concrete, though at the edge of town the concrete gets pretty potholed and it’s obvious that only in the center of town is there regular maintenance. A variety of trucks, scooters and SUVs made their way along this street, and it seems as if there is some sort of vehicle parked in front of almost every house. A great deal of building seems to be going on, and at the main wharf where the supply ships dock, large slings hold gravel that has been imported from Indonesia. The people are smiling, friendly, well-fed and in good health. Women push babies in strollers down the paved street, and kids ride by on bicycles. It all feels very first world, yet it also has that indefinable air of the tropics – the smell of luxuriant flowers, the brightly colored plants, the palm trees swaying to the tradewind breeze.

The town stretches along the shore behind the anchorage, running for more than a mile. Most of the communal buildings are clustered at its southern end, almost certainly the town center when the town was being developed. The Gendarmarie, the Marie and several small churches are all to be found in this area, along with a half a dozen one-room shops that have a wide range of merchandise. A large cathedral with two towers sits on a slight rise at the base of Mt. Duff, the high volcanic spine of the island, readily visible from the anchorage. Around it, there are several substantial buildings made from stone and mortar. These lovely building are the legacy of the island’s sad and troubled history.

The islands have been inhabited for close to a thousand years, and may have been settled around the time of the Marquesas based on the similarity between the two languages. Estimates put initial settlement at around 1200 AD, and by the fifteenth century, the islands supported a population of many thousands of people and actively traded with Pitcairn, the Society Island, the Cook Islands and the Marquesas. But deforestation and overpopulation lead here, as on Easter Island, to the loss of external trading links and then to civil war, a decline in population and a slide into cannibalism. Population estimates vary a great deal at the time of European contact, but were likely in the range of 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants. While legend has it that English pirate Edward Davis first stumbled upon the island in 1687 (and sealers and whalers may well have known of it after that), the first recorded European contact occurred in 1797 when Captain Charles Wilson from the London Missionary Society found the island while taking missionaries and artists to various Polynesian islands aboard the ship HMS Duff (hence the name of the mountain).

The island was left in relative peace until 1834 when a ship sent by the order of the Sacred Heart in Valparaiso arrived with Father Honoré Laval aboard. He converted the Mangaraveans when the women of the island intervened to save his life to stop the chief’s followers from killing him. From that point on, he created a little fiefdom in the Gambiers, virtually enslaving the people and forcing them to build monumental buildings while adhering to a draconian code of laws. He initiated a huge building program that resulted in some 116 coral and stone buildings, which included churches, chapels, convents, teaching facilities, mills, weaving workshops and bread ovens, as well as wells and stone roads. This building project literally worked the Mangaraveans to death. By the time Father Laval was recalled to Tahiti, the population of the islands had fallen by more than 5,000, and it stood at less than 1,500 of which only a few were pure-blooded Polynesians. In 1988, the archipelago’s population stood at just 621. I would guess now that it might be approaching 1,000 people, but I haven’t yet asked anyone. That means the population now is 20 percent or less than what it was when Laval arrived 150 years ago.

The island has continued to have a checkered history with respect to domination by outsiders. When the French nuclear testing was going on in Mururoa, a few hundred miles to the northwest of here, French military were stationed here, and the nuclear weapons were stored here before detonation. Evans thinks this may be why the standard of housing on the island is so high, and indeed many of the houses look like military style boxes, not barracks but a step up from that. The islanders resented the French and believed that the nuclear testing was poisoning them. The French have carried out soil and air tests of the islands on a regular basis, but they have refused to release the results. The islanders believe that the attack on Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland was to prevent the ship from coming here to take independent samples. Yet, as Evans pointed out, it is not difficult to take such samples and send them to a lab, and you would think someone would have done it by now. In any case, the islanders seem sympathetic to Greenpeace and at odds with the French administration, though they clearly benefit greatly from all the French subsidies.

For the island is prosperous, as our first impressions indicated. Apparently the base of the economy is the black pearl industry. When we were entering the anchorage where we are now, we saw several of the pearl shacks on the reef that we have seen in the Tuamotus. These, however, were far fancier than anything there. One of them is a large house with multiple rooms that looks as if it is in the process of getting a large addition. There are also several small areas of buoys from which the oysters are growing in the water, like the mussel farms we have seen the world over though on a smaller scale. We understand that some of the other anchorages that we might have been able to get into within the lagoon are now covered with pearl farms.

We’ve had several people trying to trade with us for their black pearls, obviously of inferior quality. They have all been young men interested only in hard liquor – we believe the island has only beer and wine for sale in the shops and both are quite expensive. The only liquor we had aboard when we arrived was two-thirds of a bottle of gin that I’ve been trying to get rid of since San Francisco and a bottle of good red wine. Just to get rid of the guy who came by the day before yesterday, I finally agreed to trade him the wine and the gin for half his handful of pearls. But I’ve never really liked black pearls – they resemble nothing so much as ball bearings as far as I’m concerned. But maybe someday I’ll find some use for them or someone who wants them. In the meantime, we’re out of alcohol, which the coconut telegraph will relay far and wide, so we shouldn’t be bothered any more.

We have so far found half a dozen stores along the main road of the town, and I doubt we have yet found them all. We had been to visit many of the stores late last week, and I was surprised by the variety of things available, especially since the bi-monthly supply ship was due in at any minute. The ship came on Saturday, and we went shopping yesterday morning. I was able to buy tinned butter, UHT yogurt, raisins, applesauce, eggs, potatoes and carrots. They had all sorts of other things, from canned goods to cereal, but I’m still stocked up on most things from Costa Rica. Of course, things are very expensive. I spent $18 for three tins of butter and a dozen eggs. But I can get just about anything I will need by the time we leave here. Another ship comes in on the 7th of September, so I will stock up then for the trip to Chile. The only thing I’ve been disappointed in has been the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. At least we can make up for that with canned and freeze dried stuff, but I miss fresh. I ate my last Costa Rican tomato today (it lasted a month – better than I expected), and it tasted wonderful. No more fresh stuff now for some time.

There are five other boats anchored in the town anchorage with us, and two of those are also on their way to Chile. All but one of the boats in the lagoon is metal, and three of them are crewed by singlehanders. It’s been fun getting to know crews that we will most likely see a great deal of over the coming months. We’re enjoying our time here, knowing that the passage from here to Chile, the last 1,000 miles or so of which will be in the Southern Ocean, will be a challenging, stormy, cold one.

Enjoy wherever you are now,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk

July 27, 2007
8°37'N 083°09'W
Golfito, Golfo Dulce, Puntarenas, Costa Rica

Pura Vida!

It seems appropriate to start our last missive from Costa Rica with this universal and extremely versatile term. It literally translates as “pure life” or “purified life,” however, in daily use it can be used as a greeting, a farewell and for “Cool!” The word has a host of other meanings, but in general it has become synonymous with the values of family, community, and the laid-back lifestyle many Americans are looking for when they buy land here.

We have spent our last month enjoying the hospitality of Tim and Kate at TierraMar (LandSea) in Golfito who have shown us by example what “pura vida” really means. Hawk has been tied to a substantial buoy, and we have had access to a lovely clubhouse with a verandah where we have enjoyed several cruiser barbecues, a second story with wi-fi, a lovely shower, a television and a DVD. Kate and Tim sailed into Costa Rica some 14 years ago, and they never got around to leaving. Besides making cruisers welcome, they run tours for the cruise ships that call in the harbor, manage property for absent owners, own property themselves and play parents to a complement of dogs and cats that soon adopt any visiting sailors. Tim and Kate have made these last few weeks extremely enjoyable and given us many insights into Costa Rica and the Ticos.

We have had some very enjoyable day outings from here. Our favorite was Casa Orquedias – Orchid House. Ron and Trudy Macallister arrived in Golfo Dulce in the 1970s and they have been building their treasure garden of orchids ever since. The property is not accessible by road. To reach it, we took a thirty-minute motorboat from TierraMar to the shores of Golfo Dulce. Trudy waded out to catch the stern of the boat as our driver backed in through the surf, and we landed through the waves on a black sand beach. Trudy took us on a three-hour tour which included how to open a coconut, the difference between coconut water and coconut milk, cocoa, bananas, vanilla and a host of herbs and spices. But the highlight was the dozens of species of gorgeous orchids, many of which did not look “natural.” The lovely scorpion orchids look like delicate yellow starfish splashed with red spots on each arm, and the bat orchid was about a foot across, black and dark blue, with a veil of white streamers that came down over the front of the flower – quite extraordinary. We were surrounded by dozens of such amazing flowers, and every view was also a photo opportunity. Check out the Costa Rica photo tab to see some of what Trudy and Ron have spent a half a lifetime creating.

Now the time has come for us to move on. We had planned to sail to Ecuador before leaving for the long leg to Chile, but our plans have changed. Ecuador has changed its regulations, and it has suddenly become yacht unfriendly. New regulations require us to hire an agent to clear in and out, at a cost of from $150 to $500 each way. Marina costs have almost doubled, and foreigners are no longer allowed to buy fuel in Ecuador. Some yachts arriving after these new regulations came into force have not been allowed to enter port, others already in the country have not been able to leave. Of all of the challenges we have to deal with on the boat, unfriendly officials and uncertain regulations top the list of things we prefer to avoid.

So rather than a short passage of 700 miles and a longer one of 3,000 or so to reach Chile, we’ll leave from here this weekend and sail directly to the Gambier Islands, a passage of about 3,600 miles. From there, we’ll sail to Puerto Montt, another passage of about 3,500 miles. We have always wanted to visit the Gambier Islands, but on our crisscrosses through the Pacific we’ve never quite made it. Ecuador’s change of policy has given us the excuse we needed… If you’d like to see why Gambier has always been high on our list, check out 23°S 135°W on Google Earth and zoom in as tight as you can on Mangareva Island.

Hopefully we’ll be able to send another update from Mangareva. Otherwise it might be a few months before you hear from us again. In the meantime, we will be enjoying the challenges and rewards of an open ocean voyage.

Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK

July 7, 2007
8°37'N 083°09'W
Golfito, Golfo Dulce, Puntarenas, Costa Rica
 
Buenas!
 
In the last few weeks, we feel as if we have been privileged to sample a bit of the “real” Costa Rica, and we have been rewarded with seeing some fantastic wildlife and meeting some interesting people dedicated to preserving the country’s rich environmental heritage.  The highlight of our visit was the time we spent in Bahía Drake, an open roadstead of an anchorage on the northwest corner of the Osa Peninsula.  Drake anchored here during his circumnavigation, supposedly to bury the gold he had looted from the Spaniards along the way.  Today, the small community that hides in the jungle just off the beach at Bahía Drake can only be reached by a bone-breaking hour-plus ride on rutted and potholed dirt roads.  Despite its inaccessibility, the backbone of the local economy is tourism, primarily of the adventure/hiker/backpacker variety.
 
National Geographic named the Osa Peninsula the second most “biologically-intense” place in the world.  The Parque Nacional Corcovado covers more than a third of the peninsula, and though it comprises only 4 percent of Costa Rica’s landmass, it harbors more than 50 percent of the country’s indigenous species.  Within the park’s boundaries can be found more than 6,000 species of insects, 400 species of birds, and almost all of its mammalian species including tapirs, anteaters, sloths, coatis, all four species of monkey and all four species of wild cats.  The park has a network of hiking trails and ranger stations that provide food and camping areas for hikers.  We did not dare leave Hawk in the exposed anchorage unattended for several days, but we were able to go on an organized tour that took us by powerboat from Bahía Drake to the La Sirena ranger station, the most remote and least visited in the park.  To get ashore, we made a beach landing in high surf, our boat’s driver backing and filling with great skill to hold the boat in position in the breaking coamers until we were all safely away.
 
The thing that struck me first, once we got ashore and into a clearing where we could don our shoes after the wet landing, was the noise.  I felt as if I could hear the vast majority of the 6,000 insect species from right there.  Some sounded like the whine of a buzz saw, similar to the deafening buzz of our summer cicadas but even more piercing; others spoke in a stuttering chatter, a stream of fast, high-pitched clicks.  Over the insects, I heard birdsong, again in a profusion of varieties.
 
Our guide, Javier, was born in Bahía Drake and attended the one-room school just off the beach that still educates the area’s children.  His English was excellent, and when I asked he told me that he had gone to a five-month English-language program in San Jose, and that since then it had been a matter of using it regularly on his tours.  He had been a guide for more than fifteen years, and he seemed to know every inch of the park.  The paths we traversed were almost always muddy and often partially flooded, and we splashed across a dozen streams, some of them more than ankle deep.  Javier was dressed in rubber boots, which seemed by far the best footwear for the climate, and he carried a backpack and a tripod with a birding glass about a foot long over one shoulder.  When he saw something interesting, he would swing the tripod off his shoulder, spin the glass up and then position it, before motioning for us to look.  The magnification on the glass must have been about 10x, and through it I would see a perfectly framed bird or monkey that I often could not even find in the welter of leaves and branches with my naked eye.  Oftentimes, he would start sniffing, and then he would plunge off the trail while we worked to keep up.  In this way he found a large group of peccaries, boar-like wild pigs that can be quite aggressive, and a Baird’s tapir, one of the most endangered mammals in Costa Rica.
 
We had only been in the park for about half an hour when we saw our first monkeys.  A monkey troupe moving through the forest canopy is anything but subtle.  We first heard them when they were probably 100 yards or more away.  There was a crashing in the canopy and the sound of hard things falling to the forest floor.  They scramble along branches and then leap across open spaces to grab the branch of the next tree, often falling as much distance as they jump, and stopping their descent with a loud rustling and bumping in the branches.  As they move through the canopy, they glean fruits from various trees, and they seem to drop as many as they eat so that there is a continuous shower of small, round projectiles from the treetops.  In their leaps, they quite often pull off huge handfuls of leaves before they get a grip on a branch, and these float down to the ground as well.
 
The first troupe we saw after hearing this clamor in the treetops was red-backed squirrel monkeys, the smallest monkeys in Costa Rica.  They only grow to about 12 inches in length (not including their tails), and they do have a bright red back though the rest of their body is more tawny in color.  But they also have a most distinctive black cap over their heads and a flesh-colored face and ears except for a circle of black around their mouths.  They have a white mane of longer hair that runs from their chin to their chest.  We watched that first troupe for more than twenty minutes as they passed overhead, marveling at their aerial prowess and at the ability of the babies to cling to their mothers through all sorts of acrobatics.
 
A little later we saw spider monkeys, the most endangered monkeys in Central America.  These are the largest of the Costa Rican monkeys, reaching 26 inches in length.  They are chestnut-colored except for black from fingers to elbows and toes to knees.  They get their name from the fact that more than the other monkeys they use every limb and their tail when they move from tree to tree.  While the other monkeys run along a branch like a cat or a raccoon and then launched themselves to the next branch, the spider monkeys always seem to have four out of five “limbs” attached to something.  Hence, they appear to be stretched across several branches or hanging from several different trees at once, so that they resemble a spider spread with its legs on multiple strands of its web.  Unlike the squirrel and howler monkeys, they use their tail all the time, and it seems at least as important to them as their appendages. One picture I have of a spider monkey shows it hanging by its tail and one arm from the branch of one tree, the other arm slung around the branch of another tree, with the toes of one foot linked about the ankle of the other as a person would hold one wrist with their other hand. 
 
We also saw several large troupes of howler monkeys, named for the strange roaring sound they make when defending their territory.  We have heard the howler monkeys almost every night since we’ve been in Costa Rica.  I first heard howler monkeys on the border between Mexico and Guatemala when we were on our Mayan tour, and it had the hair standing up on the back of my neck.  There is a quality to the sound like the low moaning of a Halloween ghost, but at other times I would describe it as deep-throated grunts or harsh coughing or even a heavy-chested barking.  I have finally decided it sounds most like a giant’s stomach growling with all the variations on the theme this comparison brings to mind.  I cannot imagine what horrors the first Europeans to visit these areas must have imagined when they heard that other-worldly noise.
 
Monkeys are about the only thing we would have seen without Javier as guide.  During our five hours with Javier, in addition to the animals mentioned above we saw dozens of species of birds, including the crested owl; crocodiles; basilisk (also known as the “Jesus Christ lizard” because it can walk across water upright on its two hind feet); coatis (raccoon-like creatures with long-banded tails); whiptail lizards and geckos.  We also saw a pod of young spotted dolphins on the way to the beach landing.  On our way back to the boat, Javier told me that they were talking about building an airport on the Osa Peninsula and paving the road to Bahía Drake.  I asked him what he thought about that, and he said, “Like many people in Bahía Drake, I’d rather it stayed the way it is.  Right now, it takes an effort to get here, and the people who come are fit, knowledgeable and interested.  But there’s so much money involved, it will be hard to stop it.” The pressure on Costa Rica’s natural resources extends even to this lovely and isolated spot.
 
Fair winds,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK

June 10, 2007
9°56'N 084°58'W
Play Naranjo, Golfo de Nicoyo, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Hola!
During the course of our travels, we have always been surprised how seldom a new landfall fits our preconceptions.  One of the joys of traveling, has been getting the feel for the real texture of a place, which usually turns out to be much more interesting, dramatic, complicated and beautiful than what we had expected.  But occasionally we approach a country with tremendously high expectations only to be disappointed.  Such has been the case with Costa Rica.

We were very much looking forward to spending time in this country because of its environmental and political records.  Costa Rica has built a sterling reputation for eco-tourism and has shown an amazing commitment to its ecological heritage.  The country has one of the highest percentages of land dedicated to national parks in the world and it refused to drill for the oil that was recently discovered off its Pacific coast for fear of damaging the environment.  Costa Rica disbanded its military in 1958, and perhaps as a result of that, it has avoided the insurgencies, coups and political instability that have plagued its Latin American neighbors.  It has one the highest standard of living south of the US border which has given it the nickname “the Switzerland of Latin America.”  All of this is most laudable, however, Costa Rica is at a crossroads, and we are not optimistic about where it might be going.

With about 4 million people and the size of West Virginia, the country has been enjoying great economic prosperity and growing rapidly based on ecotourism but even more on a real estate boom.  American developers are building massive condo and housing developments for ex-pats along the country’s still mostly pristine shores, and paying fortunes by Costa Rican standards for land and for construction.  The result is that the Ticos (as the Costa Ricans call themselves) are doing well economically, so well that they now have an illegal immigration problem as poor Nicaraguans and Panamanians flood into the country to try to get jobs.  Unfortunately, the rapid growth has outstripped the country’s infrastructure and the huge influx of money has attracted thieves and thugs from as far away as Argentina.  Roads, water systems, sewage systems and electrical systems can not begin to keep up with the demands from the increasing population.  Power outages occur daily in some areas, roads are choked with traffic, and water shortages are becoming increasingly common in the dry region in the north. 
 
Even worse, the police force, all of 5,000 people a few months ago when the new president came into office, cannot begin to keep up with the rampant crime, crime that now includes regular violence against ex-pats.  Strict military control in most countries in Latin and South America where we have spent time meant that, while we might have been uncomfortable with the political situation, as visitors we generally felt safe.  The same cannot be said for Costa Rica.  While most of the crime we have heard about has been non-violent thefts, usually of the pickpocket or rifling the backpack on the bus variety, there has been violence.  The owner of the Oasis del Pacifico resort in Golf de Nicoyo, a long-time friend of cruisers, was murdered in the resort two years ago.  A friend of ours living on his powerboat in Golfito was beaten up and robbed aboard his boat a bit over a year ago.  When we arrived, the papers were carrying a story about an American homeowner being beaten to death in his home a few months ago and the fact that the police did not even respond to the call until several days later.  The country is fighting back, however, and the new president has doubled the police force since he came into office and plans to double it again in the next year.  Whether or not that will stem the tide of crime sweeping the country remains to be seen.  But this is the only country of more than 40 we have visited by sailboat where we keep everything on the boat locked and secured at all times, and where in several anchorages we felt the need to lock the companionway and dog all hatches at night.
 
On the ecological front, the country has done a great marketing job but on the ground the situation leaves a lot to be desired.  We took a day tour from the north of the country to the mountains, and we expected to see lots of wildlife, particularly birds.  What we got was more like Disneyland.  Everything took place in one large resort called Buena Vista, and the day was spent in a series of “outdoor adventures”– a waterslide, a “zip tour” of the canopy, horseback riding and a spa.  It had far more similarity to an American-style theme park or international dude ranch than anything specifically Costa Rican.  A great deal of damage has been done to the rain forest to put in these “adventure parks,” and while there is some debate about whether this is responsible “eco-tourism,” there seems to be no serious attempt to slow the pace of development. During our day in the mountains, we actually saw less wildlife than we see on a daily basis in the anchorage and ashore when we’re on the boat.  But at an even more fundamental level, there is a disconnect between the country’s image and the actuality.  The tourist beaches are kept clean by crews who sweep across them at first light, but more remote beaches are littered with all manner of trash and garbage. 
 Our expectations were certainly too high.  We have seen some wonderful wildlife - parrots, howler monkeys, iguanas, dolphins, sea turtles.  And when we go ashore, we are often surrounded by dozens of brightly colored butterflies that swirl around us in a dancing and weaving rainbow.  Most of the people we have met have been friendly and helpful, eager to engage in a long chat once they figure out that I speak Spanish.  But all of that only makes the challenges facing the country more poignant.  We hope that in the face of overwhelming prosperity and popularity, Costa Rica will find a way to protect its environment and to honor its political system.

We hope life exceeds your expectations,

Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk

May 3, 2007
10°33'N 085°42'W
El Coco, Guanacaste, Costa Rica
 
Buenas!
 
We have just cleared in to Costa Rica after two offshore passages totaling some 1,700 nautical miles.  We left La Paz three weeks ago, and except for a two-day stop in Zihautanejo to clear out from Mexico, we have been basically on passage since then.  These were easy passages compared to many we have made, sailing in light winds and flat water.  Our light air sails got a big workout, with winds under 10 knots almost the whole way and winds under 2 knots about a third of the time (yes, the motor got a workout as well, more than we would have liked).  We only had winds over 15 knots the last 24 hours when we had to beat into Costa Rica against a “papagayo” – a northeast wind that spills over the isthmus from the Caribbean when the trades blow strongly there.  Papagayos are supposed to be confined to January and February, but that seems to be theory, not practice.  We had several days of papagayo winds even after we made landfall in Costa Rica.
 
The highlight of the second, longer passage (a bit over 1,000 miles from Zihuatanejo to Costa Rica) was the wildlife.  Crossing the Gulf of Tehuentepec (pronounced teh-wan-a-pec), I was on watch when the sun rose after a squally night.  As the dawn broke, I found myself sailing across a flat calm sea the color of pewter under roiling gray clouds punctuated by billowing black squalls – surrounded by wildlife.  In the hour and a half that I stood on deck, I had dolphins and sea birds in sight at all times.  Two huge pods of bottlenose dolphins, several hundred animals in each, gamboled about the boat for as far as I could see.  We passed two sleeping sea lions, their fins and tails just above the surface.  Two swordfish leapt repeatedly from the water, throwing their huge bodies skyward in an arc of solid muscle.  I’ve never seen swordfish before, and this was a tremendously impressive display.  Both were large, but one must have been more than ten feet long. 
 
On the other end of the spectrum, I saw a half dozen sea turtles.  Most looked like rocks awash at low tide, and some had birds perched on their backs.  But the first I saw was waving one flipper wildly in the air while spinning in circles.  I’m not sure exactly what was up – perhaps he was doing his slow best to chase down his breakfast.  The only other place we’ve seen sea turtles is off the Galapagos, so this was an incredible treat.  I don’t know my sea turtles well enough to be able to say what species they were for certain.  They were mostly two or three feet long with slime and mud-colored shells covered with algae.  It was hard to see much more than that, though they did have a largish head with a hook on the beak.  They were likely Olive Ridley’s which are the most common in Costa Rica.  I also saw the blows of whales in the far distance a couple of times, but I never got the binoculars up and focused quickly enough to identify them.
 
These were some of the richest seas we have seen since we approached the Galapagos aboard Silk almost 15 years ago.  Throughout the passage, it was rare not to have dolphins in sight (or, at night, sound) from the decks.  We almost always had a few riding in our bow wave, bottlenose dolphins offshore and, as we closed with the Costa Rican Coast, spotted dolphins.  One night I heard dolphins and then saw tunnels of phosphorescence suddenly appear in the dark water on either side of the boat.  I went up to the bow and watched as half dozen dolphins wove and played in the bow wave.  They were wrapped in phosphorescence, leaving a golden trail of light in their wake.  The light made it possible to see every move they took, the sudden S-turns and deeper dives lit up like neon trails in the black water, and the explosion of sparks as they surfaced to get air.  The dolphins themselves look like sleek torpedoes encased in light, the phosphorescence appearing to cling to their bodies like gold lamé.  So beautiful!
 
If the highlight was the wildlife, the biggest disappointment was the longlines set up on buoys as much as 70 miles offshore.  We have been told that these are set primarily for shark, but we cannot be sure.  These were very poorly marked, and we often saw nothing until we were entangled in miles of polypropylene line with baited hooks on monofilament line every 50 feet or so.  We didn’t even realize the first time we got caught up in one of these until I looked over the stern and saw that we were dragging something that looked like it might be a small fender or buoy.  It was red and trailing along about a hundred feet behind the boat.  We rolled up the jib, and I got a boat hook as Evans circled back around to see if we could get near whatever it was.
 
As we turned, I looked down and saw about six small orange and red polypropylene lines trailing out from under the boat.  These were obviously wrapped around the keel.  As we approached the red float, it resolved itself into a small jerry can, maybe a gallon in size.  That was attached to something, something round and brown that was just visible as it bobbed in the swell.  Suddenly, a mottled brown head appeared and my stomach hurt as I realized that the float was tied to a live turtle.  As we got closer, I saw that the float was attached by polypropylene line to a chain wrapped around one of the turtle’s front flippers.  The poor turtle was half panicked, and no wonder – it was a miracle he hadn’t drowned while being dragged along behind the boat.  I would guess that the float tied to him had saved him by keeping him close enough to the surface that he could grab the occasional breath.
 
As we got closer to the turtle, I was able to snag some of the lines coming out from the stern.  With these we were able to pull the turtle in toward the boat.  Evans cut one line, and that seemed to free us from the rest of the longline.  I then went down on the transom as Evans drew the turtle to me.  I didn’t have much time – the poor thing was in a state of shock.  He, quite understandably, was interested in biting me if at all possible, and his mouth had a quite impressive overbite with a scary looking beak that made me wary of allowing him the satisfaction.  We were hobbyhorsing in the swell, and I was worried that the transom would come down on him and hurt him further.  I didn’t have much time to think.  I reached down and took a swipe at the knotted lines holding the buoy to the turtle as close to the chain as I could get and managed to saw through most of them.  But I had also managed to cut the line Evans was holding, and the turtle went into action, swimming away from us at a surprising rate.  I could have cried when I saw that the buoy was still in place, but Evans was urging me to help him cut the last of the lines holding the boat.  I kept my eye on the buoy thinking we might be able to try again but knowing we’d never be able to catch the poor frightened thing.
 
We cut the last lines, then backed down to free the keel and watched as the polypropylene web floated away from us.  I turned to look back at the red jerry can.  It was still there, sitting in one place.  I couldn’t see the turtle, even through the binoculars.  Evans motored over so we could take a look, and I was thrilled to see that the turtle was gone, leaving part of his handcuffs behind.  The chain was not attached to the jerry can, and might still have been around his flipper.  There was nothing we could do about that, though.  Given the fact that his flipper tapered, I hoped that he’d be able to slip the chain off once freed of the buoyancy from the jerry can. 
 
We turned back on our course, both feeling quite satisfied with ourselves.  A hundred yards from where we had cut the turtle free, I saw a flipper waving madly on the surface of the water and I caught a glimpse of a green-brown shell.
 
We’ve both been a bit surprised by Costa Rica.  We had pictured dense tropical rainforest, yet we made landfall on a coast that looked strangely similar to the one we left in Baja.  Some of the islands off the coast even have cactus on them.  The northern part of Costa Rica gets about 200 inches of rain a year, that’s about half of what the southern half gets and is comparable to much of New England.  But in the north that rain all comes in a six-month period – May to November – and for the rest of the year there is very little rain at all.  We are at the tail end of the dry season, and the many trees ashore look like the trees in upstate NY in the early spring – bare branches and skeletal shapes with a few trees starting to carry the bright green patina of new buds and some other types of trees wearing purple and white crowns of beautiful flowers.  As I’m finishing this, I’m listening to the sound of a tropical squall clattering on to the decks, and we’ve managed to fill our water tanks and every jerry can on the boat.  The rainy season has arrived.
 
After going ashore to clear in, we were disappointed to return to the dinghy (beached right in front of the police station), and find that someone had stolen our oars.  After talking with some of the ex-pats it seems that crime is quite high here and the police very ineffective.
 
We wish you all unexpected and wondrous experiences,
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk

March 25, 2007
24°09'N 110°19'W
La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico
 
Buenas dias!
 
We have just returned to La Paz from a voyage of a different kind than we normally undertake.  We left Hawk behind for this trip and, instead of navigating our way across the sea, we were navigating the ancient past.  This voyage took us by plane and van to Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico that borders Guatemala.  There we spent a week exploring the Mayan ruins that litter the lush jungles in the foothills of the La Candon mountain range of Guatemala.   Alonso Mendez from the Maya Exploration Center (www.mayaexploration.org) acted as our mentor, guide and navigator.  Alonso’s adventurous Brooklyn-born mother was working for the archaeologists at the Mayan site called Palenque in the 1970s when she met, fell in love with and married Alonso’s father, a high-ranking Mayan from a nearby highland community who was also working with the archaeologists.  Alonso grew up on the archaeological site at Palenque, and he returned there after graduating from Middlebury College with a BA in Fine Arts to participate as an artist and draftsman in the exploration of the ruins.  Alonso has been directly involved with many of the projects on the site over the course of the last two decades, and he has also spent a great deal of time exploring the other Mayan sites in the area.
 
We had spent the last few months reading about Mayan culture and history, looking at photos of the sites we would be visiting and trying to understand something of the Maya.  But when we first arrived at Palenque and climbed the stairs to the temple-lined ceremonial plaza, we were completely overwhelmed.  Ahead of us, a row of three pyramids standing shoulder to shoulder and each taller than the last were connected by horizontal rows of stone steps so steep and high that we could often touch the step two up from the one we were standing on without bending over.  A rectangular palace larger than a football field was set across the end of the long plaza fronting this line of pyramids, and beyond more temples topped the steep hills.  Lush jungle surrounded these buildings; a jungle that had once twined over the ruins and sent roots deep within their masonry structures, completely hiding them from view.  This jungle still holds captive more than a third of the buildings at Palenque, buildings that have been mapped but never excavated.  The green-hued light filtering through the trees gave the whole scene a fairy-tale feel, softening the strong lines of the buildings and the harsh sunshine.  We felt as we did standing in the Forum in Rome or the Acropolis in Greece, only in this case there was no living, vibrant city surrounding us, only the jungle sounds of exotic birds.
 
Mexico is awash in archaeological sites, and a vast number have never been explored.  After visiting Palenque, which receives 700,000 tourists every year, Alonso took us to Plan de Ayutla, a recently discovered ruin that has yet to be excavated that very few people ever see.  There we came to really appreciate what had been accomplished at Palenque.  We climbed a hundred feet or more up two steep mounds covered with dense jungle, with vines overhead and roots that twined like snakes through the masonry between massive blocks at our feet.  These mounds were capped by temples similar to Palenque, but covered with such a dense growth that they would have been invisible from the air.  We scrambled around pulling apart bushes to pass through tiny openings into large rooms with arched ceilings whose walls were coated with a thick layer of lime.  Those walls could be painted with murals; the lintels we ducked under could be carved with glyphs; the buried staircases we scrambled over could be covered with masks and incense burners; there might well be a tomb at the heart of the mound with jade masks and a carved sarcophagus. 
 
But Mexico has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to archaeological sites and a paucity of resources to explore them.  Alonso told us that if the known sites were excavated and studied at the rate that the current sites have been, it would be 2,000 years before they would all be catalogued – and they discover more every few years.  Once uncovered, the sites are even more vulnerable to deterioration than they were when entombed in lime and dirt and covered with jungle growth, and there is no money to keep most sites up to the level of Palenque.  At Plan de Ayutla, they could no longer afford to keep a few guards on the site to prevent looting, and the locals had begun excavating stones to use in the foundations of their houses.
 
It is very difficult to put the Mesoamerican civilizations into context, largely because as impressive as what remains today may be, it represents a tiny fraction of what existed pre-contact.  When Cortez reached what is now Mexico City in 1520, the city was quite likely the most populous in the world with something over 200,000 people.  Twenty years later, the Spanish priest Las Casas estimated that 12 to 15 million people had died in Mesoamerica as a result of disease brought by Cortez to the New World – he later increased his estimate to 20 million people.  It’s entirely possible that the pre-contact population of the Americas exceeded that of Europe.  Most of the sites we visited had been looted by the Spaniards, who took anything they considered to be of value and destroyed much of the rest.  Just one example: they burned thousands – and maybe tens of thousands – of written codices produced by the Maya on stucco-covered bark leaving only three in existence.  Those three proved essential in unraveling the meaning behind Mayan glyphs, and one can only wonder what we would have learned about Mayan life and culture had the other codices not been destroyed.
 
The roots of Mayan culture extend back to about 300 BC, and many of their achievements built upon an earlier culture called the Olmecs that overlapped with the beginning of the Mayan rise.  Olmec culture dates back to 2000 BC and earlier, and it may have originated in Costa Rica before extending its influence across much of Central America and southern Mexico.  By the end of the Olmec period and the rise of the Mayas, the Olmecs had developed a primitive form of pictorial writing and created a complex calendar based on Venus’s movements as well as the sun’s which was more accurate than Western calendars of the day.  The Mayans refined the calendar and the writing, creating a sophisticated written language that mixed pictograms and syllabic symbols.  The zero date for their calendar has been determined to be in August of 3114 BC, and Alonso told us that he has calculated that this was when Orion, a constellation critical to the Maya, appeared on the horizon for the first time.  Their mathematics included the use of zero as a placeholder, something the Romans never developed, which allowed them to do complex mathematical calculations. 
 
The Olmecs also bequeathed the Maya agriculture, though they too were probably the recipients of the practice rather than its originators.  The first small cobs of domesticated corn found in Mexico have been carbon-dated to 7000 BC, which is roughly the same time that agriculture was developing in Mesopotamia and in China.  Corn is the most difficult of all plants to domesticate because the husk prevents seeds from dispersing – not an adaptive evolutionary trait!  Modern genetic engineers still do not know how the domestication of corn was achieved or even what the precursor wild plant was, though most believe it to be a grass called teosinte.  Corn figures prominently in the mythology of the peoples of Mesoamerica, who believe corn to be a gift from the gods and themselves “people of the corn.”  In Mayan iconography, the corn plant is often portrayed as a cross-shaped man and is shown sprouting from the god of the earth’s forehead.  By the time of the Mayas, complex irrigation systems were used to raise corn, beans and squash in milpas, a mixed agriculture that replenished the soil and provided a balanced diet.  This agricultural innovation eventually found its way throughout the Americas and was the technique the Indians shared with the Pilgrims when the Pilgrims were starving to death.
 
The Mayans were not as bloodthirsty as Mel Gibson suggests, though they did believe in the power of blood in propitiating the gods.  Various forms of self-mutilation were practiced to draw blood which was burned as a sacrificial offering.  As the Mayan city-states came into increasing conflict when Mayan culture started to decline, and as the beliefs of the more blood-thirsty cultures that flourished around what would become Mexico City were incorporated into Mayan religions, blood offerings of all types increased and the sacrifice of nobles taken in warfare became a common practice.  Ironically, the blood sacrifices and the idea of resurrection common in Mayan religion paved the way for easy acceptance of Catholicism with the substitution of wine for blood and Christ on the cross for the cross-shaped corn/man iconography.
 
The Mayan civilization is shrouded in mystery, but the single biggest mystery is the sudden decline and abandonment of city-states we visited like Palenque, Bonampak and Yaxchilan in the southern part of the Mayan empire over a period of about 100 years.  Archaeologists have put forward a variety of explanations for this sudden reversal of fortune.  Jared Diamond’s Collapse attributes the fall of the southern Mayan cities to deforestation and drought; others blame internecine warfare and overpopulation.  All of these factors likely contributed, but the actual causes are probably more complex than we can imagine.  Alonso believed that part of the problem was a lack of flexibility and resiliency in the society.  The leaders had built their power on being able to predict the seasonal cycles, to “control” the elements and bring rain, and the society had become highly specialized.  Drought would have done more than cause crops to wither and die, therefore.  It would have undermined the religious and political beliefs of the peasants who supplied food to the great cities, and broken the covenant that bound them to their leaders.  Their leaders lacked the skills to grow their own food, run the irrigation systems, or make the most basic items.  Alonso painted a picture of the great Mayan rulers, priests and scribes starving to death in a city virtually abandoned by the peasants, bereft of a labor force to maintain the monuments, of worshippers, and, eventually, of food.
 
One of the books we read suggested that if a millennia from now someone asks why the Soviet Union collapsed in less than a decade, it would be overly simplistic to say that it disintegrated after drought caused a series of poor harvests in the 1970s.  While drought might have been a contributing factor, the Soviet Union would have withstood that if other cultural, social and economic factors hadn’t come into play.  We underestimate the Maya if we view their fall as any less complex.
 
We’ve posted some images from our Mayan voyage in our photo gallery on the Mexico page.  Hope you enjoy them!
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk

March 4, 2007
24°09'N 110°19'W
La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico
 
Hola!
 
We’ve just returned to La Paz after six weeks cruising the Sea of Cortez – the 700-mile long gulf sheltered from the Pacific Ocean by the narrow arm of the Baja peninsula.  We spent our time in the southern third of the Sea, an area scattered with large and small islands, many anchorages, a few small towns and imposing scenery.  Despite the fact that there must be close to 500 boats in the three large marinas and the anchorages in La Paz, we met only a handful of other cruisers while we were out, and we had many anchorages all to ourselves.  That seems to be because most cruisers don’t cruise the Sea in the winter.  Many head south for the warmer waters of Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco, and most of the rest leave the boat on the hard in San Carlos halfway up the mainland side of the Sea or sit out the winter in La Paz.  When we were preparing the boat to head out, we were warned repeatedly about the gale-force northerly winds, the cold nighttime temperatures and the 60-65 degree water.  Given that the standard for our cruising aboard Hawk has been frequent storm-force winds, near-freezing nighttime temperatures and 40-50 degree water, it all sounded pretty good to us!
 
And winter cruising suited us just fine.  The northerlies did blow at 25 knots or so for a couple of days about once every ten days.  In between, the winds were light and going north we were able to enjoy some lovely sailing.  When it came time to head south, we waited for those fresh northerlies and had some fast downwind runs on days when the morning forecast called for the “buffaloes to be running” – the steep, gray-humped waves that get kicked up quickly in the Gulf when the wind goes over 20 knots.  The days were warm enough for shorts and tee-shirts, but the nights were cool enough for a wool blanket and a sound sleep.  At any time but midday, we were comfortable walking ashore even when scrambling up loose scree and soft sand to reach the tops of the steep ridges that surrounded every anchorage.  A light wetsuit allowed us to spend time in the emerald green waters.  We had some heavy rain before we left La Paz, so the sparse scrub was blooming, spreading a thin patina of green over the arid brown dirt and red rocks of the desert.  In the summer, the temperatures often reach 100 degrees or more, the winds are generally light and variable, the vegetation withdrawn into a state of suspended animation only one step from death.  Yes, winter cruising was much more our style.
 
There is something almost unnerving about cruising over cobalt and emerald tropical water through a desert filled with cactus.  Here life seems like an aberration on a land desperate for water, parched down to earth tones of brown, red and tan.  In many places, the peaks along the Baja shoreline resemble nothing so much as exposed bones running in horizontal gray lines beneath the flat-topped mesas.  Pyramids of reddish soil and rocks descend in inverted Vs from these bare gray rocks, the flesh sloughed off the skeleton by the slow work of gravity and the fast deluge of rain that comes but once or twice in a year.  As the skeleton has been laid bare at the top of the peaks, so has the soft underbelly of the land been exposed where it joins the water.  In many places, the rock has been undercut by the action of the waves into great curving walls of red, frozen undulations of smooth bare rock the exact negative of the force that created them.
 
The lack of human habitation and vegetation along with the exceptional quality of the light make it exceedingly difficult to judge scale or distance.  There is a clarity to the light that reminds us of the high latitudes.  While on watch, we will often sight a headland and assume we will be past it in an hour or so, but two hours later we will still be heading toward it and it will seem little larger than when we first sighted it, making us feel as if the headland were actually retreating from us.  The exceptional clarity of the light allows us to see every detail of headlands that are 12, 15 or 20 miles away, and, in conjunction with their size and the lack of scale, makes them appear to be a third that distance from us.  Often when we first sight a headland, it will appear to have an island off of it, but as we approach and the curvature of the earth lessens, a bridge of land will spring up between the headland and the island, and they will become one.  On other days, the lightest of hazes hangs over everything like a thin gauze covering.  It is barely perceptible, yet given the abnormal clarity we have become used to it has the affect of making things appear much further away than they actually are.  On those days, we sometimes come too close to headlands and off lying rocks, thinking that we have left plenty of distance.
 
No one could call this land beautiful most of the time.  Striking, perhaps.  Stark and simple.  But when the slanting rays of the late evening or early morning sun touch the rugged hills, they are totally transformed.  The colors in the peaks seem to burst free from the surrounding soil, and look almost as if they exist as a halo over the land.  Rose and pink, orange and gold seem to shimmer in the very air, turning the meanest scene of impoverished shacks, abandoned nets and beached pangas into something so beautiful our breath catches.  We make an effort to be out on deck in the magical hour after the sun rises or before it sets, for at those times the scenery is almost surreal, the clarity heightened even more than usual, the color palette so strikingly original in comparison to the greens and blues of our youth.
 
Despite the beauty of its character, the Sea seems strangely empty and hauntingly bereft.  Would we have felt this had we not been aware of the Sea’s past, of the abundance that once existed in these waters and would have in some way made up for the barrenness of the land?  Perhaps, but we will never be sure.  There is a silence here that seems to ache, an emptiness that echoes with grief.  Steinbeck’s The Log of the Sea of Cortez tells the story of a voyage to nowhere for no good purpose, and recounts the thoughts the crew shared about the world and politics and war and humanity.  Written in the 1940s, the book describes huge schools of dorado and tuna, tide pools full to bursting of anemones, sponges, corals, urchins, crabs, eels, starfish, worms – hundreds and hundreds of species of invertebrates.  Steinbeck talks of catching lobster and crabs by the dozens.  The teeming life he describes no longer exists.  And he knows that the end is coming.
 
One of the last chapters in the book describes going aboard one of a dozen Japanese trawlers trawling for shrimp.  They were proceeding twelve abreast down the middle of the Sea with overlapping dredges and pulling everything from the sea floor up to the boat.  Steinbeck and his compatriots went aboard to collect specimens, and he described the wholesale slaughter that was going on:
 
“The dredge was out when we came aboard, but soon the cable drums began to turn, bringing in the heavy purse-dredge.  The big scraper closed like a sack as it came up, and finally it deposited many tons of animals on deck – tons of shrimps, but also tons of fish of many varieties: sierras; pompano of several species; of the sharks, smooth-hounds and hammer-heads; eagle rays and butterfly rays; small tuna; catfish; puerco – tons of them.  And there were bottom-samples with anemones and grass-like gorgonians.  The sea bottom must have been scraped completely clean.  The moment the net dropped open and spilled this mass of living things on the deck, the crew of Japanese went to work.  Fish were thrown overboard immediately, and only the shrimps kept.  The sea was littered with dead fish, and the gulls swarmed about eating them.  Nearly all the fish were in a dying condition, and only a few recovered.”
 
Steinbeck, back in the 1940s, says that the Japanese on those trawlers were good men doing a bad thing.  Such is the story that we have seen and heard from Newfoundland to New Zealand, from the Sea of Cortez to the Arufura Sea, from Maine to Mauritania, from the Cape Verdes to the Cape of Good Hope.  And here, it seems as if the work is very far advanced.  We have seen only the occasional sea life: a ray in Honeymoon Cove; a dorado in Ballandra; a few whales south of San Juanico.  The tide pools are overrun with a creature that Steinbeck mentions only once as a curiosity – a multi-legged nematode that resembles a cockroach.  Hundreds scattered at our approach at San Juanico and Agua Verde when we walked among the tide pools. 
 
The few small settlements located near the anchorages consist of little more than corrugated tin or concrete block shacks, many in the process of being rebuilt after Hurricane Marty a few years ago.  Each small pueblo has a tienda, a tiny store that carries a limited variety of canned and packaged goods and a few fresh fruits and vegetables that have traveled for hours over sandy, dirt roads.  Each pueblo also has a school and a church, and it is clear that these are where most of each community’s money goes.  The inhabitants have always made their living from the sea, but that has become increasingly difficult.  The cruisers we meet who have been coming here for many years all say the same thing: “The Sea is dying.  Each year we find fewer and fewer fish, see fewer and fewer whales.  The local people cannot catch enough to feed their families.”  But the trawlers are still here, still trawling for shrimp, and now the only way the fishermen make any money.
 
Is it possible to feel the emptiness of a place and to know that emptiness is a gap left by the loss of millions and millions of creatures?  Is it possible for a body of water to mourn for the life that once filled it to brimming?  Is it possible to feel the loneliness of the creatures that remain?  All of this seems fanciful, and yet we have been plagued with a strange sense of sadness and dislocation here, a sense of loss and of grief that we cannot account for within our own lives.  It makes us hope that we are not good people doing a bad thing.
 
Take care of yourselves and of your little slice of the world, if you can.
Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk

January 4, 2007
24°09'N 110°19'W
La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Hola! 

We are now in La Paz in the Sea of Cortez on the west coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.  We’ve had a very enjoyable month of cruising since we left Mission Bay just north of San Diego on December 10th.  We made our way down the coast in a series of two- and three-day offshore hops, spending several days in each of the anchorages we stopped at before making the next jump south.  For most of the trip, we enjoyed fast downwind sailing in 20 knots of wind.  While the large swell and shifty winds made for a bit of frustration at times, Hawk was sailing incredibly well so the little discomfort we had didn’t last long.

 
This is the 41st country we have reached aboard our own sailboat.  Since leaving Chile in 2002, we have cruised Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Canada and the US, all countries we had spent time in before on either Silk or Hawk.  This is the first time in almost five years we’ve been in a country we’ve never visited before, and we’re both remembering all the things we love about exploring a new culture.  This is also the first time in five years that I’ve needed my Spanish.  Most Mexicans working in the tourist industry speak better English than I speak Spanish, but they are more than patient with me while I struggle with my verb conjugations.

 
The Baja peninsula stretches more than 750 nautical miles south from San Diego – Cabo San Lucas on the southern tip of the peninsula lies about the same distance from San Diego as Portland, Oregon.  For most of its length, the Baja peninsula is less than 100 miles wide.  The climate is even drier than in Southern California, and most of the land consists of brown soil and sand eroded into ravines and gulches by the wind and the occasional rain shower.  Cactus seem to be the most common form of vegetation, though many people plant trees and bushes around their houses to shelter them from the sun and share their precious water with them to keep them healthy.

 
We reached Ensenda, a bit less than 80 miles south of San Diego, after a ten hour sail, arriving around 10:00 at night.  The next morning the flotilla of sea lions that lives on a barge in the middle of the harbor woke us at dawn with their harsh chorus of barks and grunts.  We only stayed in Ensenada for about 36 hours, long enough to clear in and take a quick look at the city.  A forecast for strong southwest winds had us heading out sooner than we had anticipated, for the harbor entrance was open to the southwest, the anchorage had questionable holding and several boats had already dragged (one right into us) in the moderate afternoon breezes.

 
Our next stop was Bahia Tortugas, better known as Turtle Bay, which we reached after 36 hours.  As we approached the entrance, dawn was breaking in a pink blush all across the eastern sky.  The sky reflecting in the water turned it rose and pink, and the long rays of the rising sun painted the rugged hills on either side of the entrance in washes of copper and red.  The golden light of dawn and dusk soften the harsh landscape and accentuate the sharp angles of the rugged hills, and it is at that time that the land becomes beautiful.

 
We had a marvelous Christmas in Magdalena Bay, the last large bay on the west coast of the Baja Peninsula about 150 miles north of the southern tip of the peninsula.  We shared Christmas with the crews of ten other boats, all new cruisers who had left from ports on the west coast anywhere from three weeks to three months before, and all of whom had hoped to be in Cabo or La Paz or even Puerto Vallarta, where many had had plans to meet family or friends.  But it had been a tough slog down this coast for most of them, and they found themselves days or weeks away from where they had hoped to be.

 
Once everyone decided we were going to be in Magdalena Bay for Christmas, we threw ourselves into making it a Christmas we would all remember.  Everyone dug deep into lockers already picked over more than once to find something special for the feast and small gifts for the two children left stranded far from the treasures of shopping malls.  At 1:00 on Christmas, 24 people climbed aboard Festima Lente, an Island Trader 45 owned by Greg and Nancy Hershman.  While there was no roast turkey, stuffing or apple pie, we filled our plates with crab-stuffed chicken, turkey roll with gravy, canned ham, jambalaya, baked beans, mashed potatoes, yam and apple casserole, green bean casserole, fresh hot rolls and more.  By the time we’d all sampled the brownies, cherry cobbler and yellow cake with chocolate icing, the boat was down another inch on her waterline.

 
It was a very special Christmas, one that reminded us of how little we really need when surrounded by the goodwill of friends and the magic of the Christmas spirit.  When four of the crews headed south for Cabo San Lucas the day after Christmas, several of the voices on the radio were husky as they said their goodbyes.  We had known one another for only a few days, but a half dozen of our new friends told me that they felt closer to those other crews than they did to people they had lived next door to for twenty years ashore.  That’s the magic of this cruising life, and one of the many things that keeps us out here.

 
We hope all of you found that holiday spirit and are looking forward to a healthy and happy 2007.

Beth and Evans
s/v Hawk