SOUTHBOUND SHAKEDOWN — W
his self-taught education should be to make an overnight interisland passage 'down island'. Because I'd learned to sail in college
ALL PHOTOS LATITUDE / ANDY
hen you're working toward making an ambitious offshore cruise, it's only natural to fret about whether you're adequately prepared. Even if you buy a brand-new boat, there's always plenty more — newer, faster,
was sound and had adequate safety gear, we were all young and fit, we more or less knew where we were going, and we were smart enough not to attempt entering St. Maarten's Marigot Harbor at night — to our untrained eyes, the fixed nav lights seemed impossible to find against the maze of brightly lit streets and buildings ashore.
I
If you crave solitude, sail the coast of Baja in wintertime. This is one of a half-dozen cruisers we saw between San Diego and PV.
safer, smarter — gear you could add to your inventory. So, for many sailors who enter the cruising life after years of procrastination, it's a matter of being 'ready enough', rather than thoroughly prepared. After all, as I learned during my first offshore passage decades ago, preparedness is a relative term. Back in the early 1980s, while living in the Virgin Islands, I got to know a vacationer named Donnie who became so thoroughly smitten by the magic of sailing that he canceled his return air ticket, quit his job as a high-stakes Hollywood litigator, bought a 36-ft sloop, and announced to his successobsessed parents that he was growing a beard and had developed a deep affection for reggae music. Having learned the basics of sailing during a few tourist daysails, Donnie quickly figured out how to get on and off the hook and maneuver his new ride safely. So he figured the next step in Ironically, these Baja fishermen live a tough life, but they could eat lobster every night. Note the customized Ullman Sails engine cover.
— and actually knew the proper names of most of the boat parts — I was recruited as first mate, while Steve, another eager neophyte, rounded out the crew list. None of us knew how to navigate — this was years before GPS — so we took an hour-long lesson from a local charter skipper who showed us the basics of reading a chart, then explained the principles of set, drift and magnetic compass variation. When he looked up and saw our befuddled expressions, he said, "Don't worry, guys. This ain't rocket science. It's only about 80 miles from Virgin Gorda to St. Maarten. So leave Gorda Sound early in the morning sail east-southeast, and by afternoon you'll see the silhouettes of St. Maarten and Anguilla. From there you could sail by line of sight all the way to Grenada." With that, we soon set sail with blind confidence. Along the way we ran out of wind and drifted over a shallow bank where we bobbed like a wayward cork all night. That caused both of my boatmates to become seasick, and their misery eventually inspired me to put on a scopolamine patch. But when I rubbed my right eye shortly afterward, my vision went so wonky that I thought I was going blind. Nevertheless we eventually arrived safely at St. Barth, where we beamed with pride about our accomplishment as we ordered our first frosty Heinekens at the island's most famous watering hole, Le Select. Were we properly prepared? Pfft! No sailing instructor worth his salt would say so. But the boat
thought back on that adventure recently while my wife Julie and I were doublehanding our Cross 45 tri Little Wing from San Francisco to Mexico. We'd spent the months leading up to our exit in a frenzy installing all sorts of expensive new gear, which would ultimately make our cruise safer, faster and more comfortable. But as summer turned to fall, and fall morphed into winter, we felt ever-increasing pressure to shelve our remaining projects and head south, whether thoroughly ready or not. Although we'd done only a rudimentary shakedown of several new systems, even in our semi-ready state we had more safety gear, more redundant navigation and communications devices, and newer sails than on any boat we'd previously sailed offshore. That said, our rapid succession of installations left us with a daunting stack of owner's manuals to read and digest. Today, months after departure, we're still sorting out the subtleties of some of our new gadgets. For us, like many southbound sailors before us, the cruise to San Diego, then Cabo, then Puerto Vallarta has served as the shakedown we thought we'd do in our home waters. But in the enduring words of Miles, Tom Cruise' mischievous sidekick in the 1983 blockbuster Risky Business, "Sometimes you gotta say 'What the F---', and make your move . . . Saying 'What the F---' brings freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future." Not that we normally take life-altering advice from fictitious film characters, but in this case
