The Bash Must Wait

Olive Lydia Lawson  August 27, 1925 – March 19, 2016

This is not a usual blog posting but a way of sharing why we’re back in Victoria instead of doing the Bash north towards San Diego.... My mom, Olive, passed away peacefully on Saturday, March 19.

Jim and I left La Paz last Tuesday morning, March 15 and had a great day motoring and fishing on route to Los Muertos, arriving near 7:00 pm while watching the pink tinge of sunset glowing to the west.  As we turned off the engine we heard a ringing noise from the InReach satellite device. I received two text messages about my mom, who had been taken to hospital and it wasn’t looking good.  Jim and I motored through the night to Puerto Los Cabos Marina where we moored Falcon VII and booked urgent flights home that evening.

We flew into Sidney at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, rented a car and headed for Victoria where we spent nearly an hour with Mom til 1:00 a.m. She was happy, relatively lucid, knew exactly who we were and even made little jokes about Jim snoozing at the end of the bed.  When we told her it was time for her to sleep and for us to go she took our hands in hers, looked up at us with a steady gaze and told us how proud she was of us for living our dream.  It doesn’t get much better than that!

At 9:15 p.m. Saturday evening, March 19, 2016 my Mom, Olive Lydia Lawson, gently drifted off.  I had the honour of being with her for the last two hours of her life.  I held her hand and told her how much we all loved her but it was ok if she wanted to go towards the white light.   I like to think she heard me and was at peace. She had held on long enough to see Jim and me, my sisters (blood, step and chosen), Cousin Jan, our son, Brendan and niece, Taralee and her partner Davey.

Olive, or Brixie to her closest friends and family, was born August 27, 1925 in Jeffrey, Alberta.  In 1928 Olive’s parents, Joe and Ivy Baker, moved their young family west to become pioneers in Metchosin where Joe started a successful egg producing chicken farm.  After Ivy’s death from TB, Joe married Margaret, who was a feisty but devoted step mother.

The youngest of three, Olive, along with her older siblings Eric and Daisy started their daily routine gathering eggs before walking to the one room school house in Metchosin and later driving the long, winding highway to town to attend Victoria High School.  After graduation the country girl transformed into a young city woman who made a living delivering groceries before applying to the Jubilee Hospital to be a switchboard operator, a job she loved.  That's her with the dark (auburn) hair below.

She married Yvo Patrick Vesey in 1948, had my sister, Maureen in 1951 and me in 1954.

During the 60’s she was also an active Mom, often driving Maureen to synchronized swimming in Colwood or Esquimalt or picking me up from the Y.  She was widowed at 45, raising two teenage girls with a firm but loving hand.  In the mid 60’s she was promoted to Manager of Switchboard and Information at the Jubilee Hospital, Memorial Pavilion and Eric Martin Institute where her greatest accomplishment was overseeing the enormous task of transitioning from the old fashioned cord boards to the first modern switchboard system for the three hospitals.

Mom and long term friend, Art Lawson, started dating when she was 48.  A few years later they married and had 25 wonderful years together. Mom retired from the hospital in 1978 and never looked back, taking up golf, ballroom dancing, canoeing, world travelling and camping instead.

Her continued enthusiasm for life and love for her family were evident in everything she did.  She was always happy, whether it was weeding the garden or playing crib with anyone who would challenge her.  She rowed her lap straight cedar row boat from Gonzales Bay to Clover Point until she was 82, often accompanied by ‘her’ seal, nicknamed Smarty Arty.

Over the 60 years she resided at Gonzales Beach she took daily walks from one end of the beach to the other, wearing her old black gumboots and happily petting every dog she walked by.  She was content outdoors in her waterfront garden, fishing from their motor boat and even walking the Galloping Goose Trail until well in her 80’s. Below is one of our wedding pictures from 1992.

Mom had a generous spirit and taught Maureen and me the importance of volunteering and helping those less fortunate.  She was a regular Red Cross blood donor, an annual door to door canvasser for the Heart and Stroke Foundation and weekly volunteer at Fairfield Activity Centre New Horizons for many years.  She knitted everything from fair isle sweaters to patterned afghans, played with her grandchildren as often as she could, whipped up enormous pots of homemade soup at the drop of a hat, and always had a space at her dining table for one more person.  Never one to sit idle, she remained active when she moved to Amica Douglas House and never missed a beat until five days before her death.

Mom on her 90th birthday, August 27, 2015.

We thank Dr. Rosenberg, Dr. Manning and Home Team Medical for providing such personal care to Mom in her later years; the nursing team, staff and management at Amica Douglas House where Mom loved living for the last five years and the caring and compassionate staff in both Emergency and North 4 at the Jubilee Hospital where she spent her last few days on this earth.

For those of you in Victoria….A celebration of life will be held on Sunday, April 3, 2016 at 2:00 p.m. Location: Fairfield Activity Centre New Horizons, 380 Cook Street.  Flowers are gratefully declined; donations in Olive’s memory may be made to either the Heart and Stroke Foundation of BC or the Alzheimer’s Society of BC, Victoria.

We anticipate returning to Mexico before mid April where we will resume our adventure cruising north of Victoria. Until then….

Peace

Tricia and Jim Bowen
S/V Falcon VII
email: tandjbowen13@gmail.com
 

DE-MYTH-DEFYING THE CRUISING LIFE

March 8, 2016

I was chatting with some other cruisers about blogs.  Lots of us write them.  Personally, I enjoy keeping friends and family up to date with what we’re up to and where we’re going. I know that some of you are living vicariously through our crazy adventures but we realized that there are some aspects of cruising that are usually left out of blogs – the more mundane and stressful parts of cruising.  So I thought I would give you a glimpse into our everyday cruising life.

Myth #1 Everything is always wonderful and we’re always having fun adventures.  Well, it would be nice to think so but, in reality, we are two human beings living 24/7 on a 46 foot boat.  Lots of people are on even smaller, more cramped boats.  Sometimes tensions mount, stressful situations creep up and we just want to get away from each other.  We want to get off the boat but that’s not always possible.  Fortunately Falcon VII is big enough that we’ve each learned to find a corner or berth to crawl into, to get away and think.  We’re pretty resilient and always manage to figure out how to get back to being partners again, to being thankful for where we are and grateful for the opportunity we have to cruise in these amazing places.

Myth  #2 Cruisers sit around drinking tea and reading books all day.  I actually ran into someone on the docks in Port Angeles who thought that!  And we had just finished many months of preparation for our big trip down the coast, usually putting in 10 – 12 hours per day prior to leaving for Mexico.  Now that we’re in Mexico the work doesn’t end.  There are ALWAYS boat projects to be done, daily, weekly and monthly maintenance, sewing canvas projects needing attention, varnishing wood, polishing stainless, etc.  When we can, we choose to ignore it all and just enjoy our surroundings and the wonderful cruisers we are hanging out with.  We have lists upon lists of things to be tackled… sometime.

Myth #3 There's nothing to leaving the boat and flying home to BC for the summer.  We didn’t even know that boats needed to be ‘put to bed’ or decommissioned before the summer heat arrives and you fly away to stay cool.  In 2015 Jim put together a spreadsheet with 186 items on it that we had to deal with.  Some took only a minute but others took many hours!  Like washing and stowing all sails, washing all woodwork below decks, chucking out all fresh food and dumping out open containers, giving away canned goods, covering all exposed plastic with aluminum foil, putting out cockroach poison, and so much more that you don’t want to know about.

Myth #4 – Staying on the boat in Mexico for the summer is easy. The first time we heard about summer marina preparation was at a casual cruisers’ meeting in La Cruz in May 2014.  We had no idea what living in the tropics in the humid summer would be like.  We had to spend hundreds of dollars on additional mooring lines to macramé ourselves into our slip so the swells didn’t beat up the boat. We purchased and installed an air conditioner and Jim built a plywood box to shelter it over our main hatch.  It successfully maintained low humidity and kept the temperature at an even 84 F below decks while it was well over 95 F and extremely humid outside.  We lived in our 'cave' during the days, becoming nocturnal animals and venturing out in the evenings when it was cooler. We sewed a 21 foot long sun / rain awning to deal with extreme sun and hours of torrential rains.  We started unplugging the boat every evening to prevent inverter/charger damage due to power brownouts and blackouts when lightning struck near the marina. I dumped out food when we found crawly little bugs in the flour, oatmeal, cereal and my popcorn.

Myth #5  Owning and living on a sailboat is about going sailing.  The reality is that although we‘ve never actually made the calculation, we think that we put in somewhere around 100 hours of work for every hour of sailing.  For any other endeavour in life, if you worked with those odds, people would call you crazy! I guess we are.  Having said that, those rare moments when we are out at sea and turn off the engine and hear the non-sound of the boat under sail, are absolute magic.  We are addicted to them.

Myth #6 Naw, I’m not going to keep going.  You get the idea.

We love our cruising life but sometimes living on a boat is just like living in a house.  You can’t ignore things or things go wrong, equipment fails, feelings get hurt, etc. So we learned to take things in our stride, maintain a balance, help others when we can, take each issue one at a time and breathe. Always breathe!

We own a little book about gratitude. A couple of quotes are.…
Be grateful for the chance to follow your dreams.  Strive to conquer your fears of the unknown with each step. 

When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.

Keep smiling!

Jim and Tricia Bowen
S/V Falcon VII
email: tandjbowen13@gmail.com

TURNING SOUTH

After three glorious days at Coronados Island we said goodbye to Doug and Martha, Gay and Brad. They continued cruising north towards Santa Rosalia while we regretfully turned Falcon south once again.

Over the next week we stopped at a handful of now familiar anchorages like Puerto Escondido, Agua Verde, San Evaristo and Esprito Santos on our return trip, taking in all the beauty, charm and nature of this amazing place.

We spent two nights tucked into the small northern bay
at Agua Verde in perfect, if a bit warm, conditions.

The village is spread out between the Gigante mountain range and the protected bay and is a favourite destination for many cruisers.  Fishermen in their pangas ply the surrounding waters, often leaving before dawn, coming back in during the day to drop their catch off in large ice filled coolers then heading out again for the rest of the day.

We dinghied to shore for a walk around ‘town’. While we sweated profusely in shorts and tee shirts with the heat radiating off the dusty paths, the locals were wearing jeans and sweaters.  The 30 C temperatures were too hot to us but since they’re used to 45 C in their summer!

Feeding time and the gang's all here!

This little boy was telling his pigs to get down or no food for them!

This is a well maintained home.  Most are cinder block construction.
Very sturdy.  Not a lot of lawn to water.

The local hall

The little yellow bulding behind the tent is the local tienda.
It's the only grocery store in town and we were impressed with all it carried.

Future shade.  A big black water pipe runs on top of the ground to all houses
 in Agua Verde, fed by a natural spring up in the hills.

The catholic church

The little school and cement basket ball court.
There's a bit of a playground as well with a couple of swings and a slide.

Yes - there are a few gardens like this oasis someone has maintained
around their house.  The soil is so dusty that it must be hard to grow stuff.

There are lots of goats that wander about Agua Verde.  Last year we visited
an elderly woman in her shelter/home and bought fresh goat cheese for next to nothing.

We met up with Scott and Tanya from Kialoa while in San Evaristo for the night. The four of us had a wonderful meal out at Lupee’s Beachside Restaurant.  The cinder block building had a covered veranda where plastic tables and chairs for 12 were mostly filled with gringos.  We were all entertained by Garfield, the fluffy Siamese/tabby cross, huge gulls fighting over fish gills at the shoreline and a beautiful golden lab that wandered around the tables demanding to be petted. Preparation of our dinner was delayed when Lupee excused himself for a few minutes.  Seems he had to back his truck and trailer down to the water’s edge to load his panga up for the night.  When he returned he whipped up fresh ceviche for Jim, cheesy shrimp quesadillas for me, beef tacos for Scott and savoury fish tacos with rice and beans for Tanya.  This was an expensive meal….cost per person, including tip and beverages was $11 CAD!

Throughout the week, the inviting waters were warm enough for swimming without a wetsuit and we took full advantage.  The aqua coloured depths at anchor revealed schools of tropical fish and we often saw our anchor resting below us.

We had heard from other cruisers in Puerto Escondido that the whales were bountiful in the area and sure, enough, we found them swimming between Isla Danzante and Isla Carmen.  None were close enough for photographs but we counted a dozen that day feeding, tail slapping and diving gracefully below the surface.

We also cruised by three big pods of porpoises who were intensely feeding.  A few peeled off to play in our bow wave but most were happy to be chowing down on masses of small fish.

Throughout the week spotted many huge mobula rays about 4 feet across heaving themselves out of the water, flipping over and crashing down again.  While anchored in the protected waters of Puerto Escondido I even spotted a tortoise coming up for air!  Sea birds were plentiful – gulls, pelicans, frigates, least grebes, and the ever present turkey vultures.

After four days of motoring against light southerly winds, we arrived back in La Paz on Saturday, March 5.  We’ll stay long enough to handle a few necessary boat jobs and preparations, get in a bit of socializing, and provision food for our journey up the outside of the Baja.  We expect to leave within the week for Cabo San Lucas. The length of that trip depends entirely on the weather and it will dictate how fast we can make it to Ensenada then on to San Diego for a leisurely trip up the west coast of the US. Next blog will likely be once we reach Ensenada, the entry and exit port city just south of the Mexican / US border.

Our final stunning sunset from Espiritu Santos before returning to La Paz.

Until then….

Tricia and Jim Bowen
S/V Falcon VII
email: tandjbowen13@gmail.com

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A SOFT PLACE

Travelling north with Doug and Martha was something Jim and I really enjoyed since our friendship over the last few years had solidified so well.  Other friends of theirs’s, Gay and Brad on Abby Normal we already in the islands cruising.

We all met up in Los Gatos and the six of us spent the next couple of weeks together.  This was our second time visiting Los Gatos.  Last year we bought fresh lobster from the fishermen.  This year the only fishermen we saw were cutting up sharks and hauling them away in the back of a pick up truck.

During the days we hiked, cruised and sailed.  In the evenings, we often got together for cards after dinner since it was easier than organizing a meal for four or six.  We even managed a couple of beach fires, thanks for Jim, who went to shore ahead of everyone else to collect firewood and get it started.

Los Gatos' crazy moon-like landscape

After a few days waiting for a weather window we left Puerto Escondido and cruised an easy three hours north to Coronados Island just off of Loreto, which would be our most northern anchorage on this trip.   We had enjoyed Coronados in 2014 and 2015 and were happy to return.

Yikes! The hikes!  We did 7 hikes in two weeks of cruising with Doug and Martha. The almost 5 hour hike to the top and back of Coronados Island’s extinct volcano was the most arduous hike again this year.

We dinghied to the beach on the south side around 8:00 a.m. to avoid the afternoon heat.

Coronados Island from our anchorage at the southern end.
The extinct volcano is over 900 ft high.

Thea, Abby Normal and Falcon VII at anchor, early morning at
Coronados Island so we could start our hike before it was too hot.

Terrain started with a long, hot white sand trail lined wih shells and coral.
It ran along the desert then cut up and across the trecherous
jagged boulder section.

We wore our hiking boots and each footstep was carefully placed.

We tried to keep track of the trail, barely distinguishable from the
surrounding obsidian and lava rocks, by following piled rocks or
 cairns erected by other hikers.  

This part was very slow going but we kept at it and eventually started

 the third phase of the climb, right up a steep gravelly slope that

 seemed to go on forever. Each footstep tossed fine red dust into
 the air  and sent pea size gravel tumbling down the slope.  

We were all determined to make it to the summit but it was a push!   

Next day we took the dinghy to that small white
sandy beach at the far end of the hook.

Just after we reached the summit we were joined by a couple who were staying in Loreto. They had come over to the island via panga for the hike.  We always have a day pack with 3 litres of water, a first aid kit, tp, snacks and a hand held radio.  They had nothing! Martha and Doug gave them a drink of water before they headed back down the slippery slope ahead of us. I think they were probably pretty dehydrated by the time they got back to the panga.

We stayed up there for a good half hour break before we began our slow descent back to the beach where we paddled our hot, sore feet in the cool water.

Jim and his new prickly best friend.
We're only half way down!
My feet are killing me!
How much farther!

Even climbing back onboard Falcon seemed like an extreme effort!  The rest of the day was spent resting and recovering by all of us!  Nothing like an extreme hike to remind me that I’m over 60 now!!!

The following morning Jim and I took speed run along the south shore the
 into a “C” shaped bay where we walked along a deserted white sand beach
with turquoise waters.

We had a different view of the mountain we climbed the day before. 

Both of us stood in awe of the place we were in, knowing that we would
soon be returning to La Paz and would likely never visit Coronados again
or any of the other anchorages since we were taking Falco VII back to BC.

That evening the six of us shared a campfire and dinner consisting
 of crab and artichoke heart dip and chips, Caesar salad, chicken fajitas. 

Dusk looking towards Loreto six miles away.

 Just after dark we had a visitor join us…a hermit crab climbing one of the rocks near the glow of our fire.  One of our cruising books talked about having a pet hermit crab on board their boat for a few days.  They named it Peppe.  I named our little friend Peppe II in his honour!

Peppe II

Tricia and Jim Bowen
S/V Falcon VII
email: tandjbowen13@gmail.com