SisterShip Watches ...
By Amy Alton
SV Juliet LeeAnne, along with her partner Charlie and dog Bubba, has been sailing the coast of California and Mexico for the past few years. She shares her adventures aboard their 1990 Mason 44. Amy: Your plan has been to cruise Mexico for a few years and then head across the Pacific. Has the pandemic changed your plans at all? LeeAnne: Yes — HUGELY! Our first season of cruising began in late 2019, prepandemic. In March 2020, while cruising in some pretty remote areas in the Sea of Cortez, with no access to cell service or the internet, we started hearing rumors from other cruisers about this scary coronavirus. We were able to use our satellite phone to access some news headlines to get the basics of what was going on, but information was still pretty sketchy. So, we returned to the city of La Paz, which by then was completely locked down. We weren’t allowed off our boat except for essential activities, we
couldn’t walk our dog, Bubba, anywhere but the gravel parking lot of the marina. The whole situation scared me so much that we buttoned the boat up and flew back to California where we isolated for six months. By October it seemed like the world was figuring out how to move forward with COVID, so we flew back and started cruising again... but it was all very different to what we’d envisioned cruising to be. There were far fewer boats out here and lots of areas were still shut down; beach palapas were often closed, and there wasn’t much interaction between boats in an anchorage as we were all still socially distancing. As a social person, I’d been looking forward to meeting other cruisers, having sundowners in the cockpit with new friends, and experiencing the community aspects of cruising. All of that was severely curtailed. Fortunately, we connected with another boat, Boundless, and began buddy-boating with them, so the four of us spent a lot of time together. Now that we’re back to full-time cruising, however, we feel like we haven’t been able to really enjoy the full Mexican cruising experience. So rather than spend only two SisterShip 40
