Baja Bloopers
November 20th, 2008“Cruising” - Waterborne pleasure journey embarked on by one or more people. A cruise may be considered successful if the same number of individuals who set out on it arrive, in roughly the same condition they set out in, at some piece of habitable dry land, with or without the boat.
Hello Everyone,
Our waterborne pleasure journey meets all the criteria for success! We’ve returned to Ensenada, without our boat, nineteen months to the day since I first wrote about sailing across the border into Mexico. While Balena awaits our return from the Thanksgiving holidays in a boatyard in Guaymas, we continue to bumble our way through Baja in roughly the same condition we started out. The pattern begun the first day of our journey, with shattered glass and spilled coffee in the cockpit, hasn’t abated in the least. Here are some of our most memorable bloopers, in order of expense.
Baja has plenty of salt water, but limited fresh water supplies. Without ready access to washing machines or fresh water, our American standards of cleanliness have fallen by the wayside where clothes are concerned. This has hardly inconvenienced Randy, a dirt-challenged male. He once wore the same pair of socks for three weeks! Of course, it was summertime and he seldom wore shoes. I on the other hand, wash everything in sight when I get near a self-service Laundromat. It was during one of these frenzied episodes that I washed all Randy’s jackets (over his protests) and evidently forgot to check the inner pocket of his windbreaker. Two months later, we needed our passports and couldn’t find them anywhere. We searched for two days without success. On a flash of intuition, Randy dug out the jackets from their storage locker and searched all the pockets. Sure enough, inside the hidden windbreaker pocket he found a ziplock bag with something inside. Something black and horribly disgusting. That’s when we discovered ziplock bags aren’t waterproof when subjected to a typical washing machine cycle. Also, passports and visas mold nicely after two months in a dark, damp place.
Though you could no longer tell who the passports belonged to, they were distinguishable as passports. Incredibly, we were able to cross the border with the help of the Xerox copies we’d made of the passports before their spin through the washing machine. It cost almost 300 dollars apiece to get new passports made in the USA. At least we like our pictures better. Randy’s no longer looks like a mug shot.
Oops, time to go. Pretty Bird has an appointment with the United States Department of Agriculture this afternoon. (We’ve discovered birds are the most expensive pets to transport across international borders. It costs $108 every time we bring him back into the USA. Too bad we can’t train him to fly across!) I have no time to write about the blown “mofler” incident, the runaway dinghy or any of our REALLY embarrassing bloopers. Maybe next time. See you soon.
With love and laughter,
GinaBalena
