400 Miles

I heard them first, the dolphins, blowing out air like men swimming alongside Habibi. The moon wasn’t up yet, and I was motorsailing a cautious four knots while keeping an eye out for shrimpers, tankers, and fishing boats. The Big Dipper was clear above the mast, pointing out north.

A dark dolphin shape leaps ten feet out of the water on the port side. Now the starboard! and again, two this time, on port. They splash sideways into the ocean, again and again, cannonballs of marine mammal spraying geysers all around them. Showing off. Because you know they can slide into the sea without a ripple if they want to. Their gleeful exhibition lasts fifteen minutes and startles laugh after laugh out of me. And just like that Fear ebbs away, to be replaced by Calm.

Night sailing again, but this time without a buddy boat in the area, or so-called expert onboard. Finally, enough space! The auto-pilot keeps us on course, and the consistent northwest wind fills the sails. The three-foot swell from the west bounces me around the cabin when I go below to scrounge for food. (Turkey dogs again? Ah, yucca bread from the kind mothers in Matanchén. I bought three loaves from their stand on Mothers’ Day after exchanging ¡Felicidades!) This is another leg of the voyage I began on May third. I settle in a corner of the cockpit with my snack and sloshing tea, eyes on the horizon, the sails, the sky. Comet! It’s almost thirty hours until I find a safe anchorage.

“You have bigger balls than me,” said a dock-mate a few days later in Mazatlán.

“Quite possibly,” I replied. 

I have now completed 400 solo sailing miles, two years after my first sailing lesson. Habibi and I are both a little beat up. Her varnish is peeling and the rigging is rusty and the pelicans in Bahía Banderas insisted on using her bowsprit for their fishy feces. I am more wrinkled, with more silver hairs, and many bruises and scrapes, including a painful blister from dealing with the truculent jib. A bump from bashing my shin might be permanent.

But we are still floating. We are still upright. We are still in love with the ocean and its creatures. The honeymoon ain’t over. Yes, these 400 miles were intense. Because I did them despite Anxiety and occasional Terror; despite exhaustive and constant Vigilance; despite naysayers, the biggest of whom lives in my brain. Are you out of your mind?

I also sailed those 400 miles with the Ancestors, with tears, with joy, with dolphin tricksters and sudden turtles (you can swerve a 37-foot vessel, it turns out). With breaching whales and curious birds. With billions of bright stars, followed by creamy sherbet sunrises. With cruise ships in the distance like birthday cakes, and cargo carriers with funny names (Dauffelgalgang?). It’s a hard life, boat life, solo sailing, and while anchored at Isla Lobos one morning, the body (with no input from the tired head) removed the helm cover, fired the engine, hauled anchor, and motored into the marina we left last October. Enough, said the Bod. I need to rest. Shore power sounds good, along with running water. It’s been six months. In we go.

This is the same Bod that bought the boat and prefers to sail single-handed.

And so it goes. I do my best to listen and follow directions. Every day is a miracle. Who knows where the next 400 miles will take me? Or even four? Stay tuned.