Yesterday we left San Diego to finally get into Mexico through the port at Ensenada. Today, we are in San Diego sitting at anchor at La Playa. Without an anchoring permit. Oh well.  Breathing a sigh of relief as the anchor hit bottom, I realized I had to write about the Rule of Four and how we came to have that thrust upon us lately.

Our battery project having gone almost aggressively well, we were feeling pretty chuffed about that success and although I was not really ready to leave San Diego, having had too much fun here, we had to go. Fueled up, we waited for the huge sailboat race to be done and then motored out, into the sunset, as it were. I took a few videos and realized no one would really want to see those. They meant more to me than anyone else. I just hated to leave, I guess.

Maybe we had to come back to see Santa and his helpers paddling through the anchorage.

The first issue with the Rule of Four was that the folks at Cruiseport Marina in Ensenada have never gotten back to us to confirm a slip. This gives me reasonable pause because word on the cruiser’s forums was that the guy there who was in charge got back to everyone in a timely manner; sometimes within the hour. Mike had sent our documents a week ago and we had heard nothing. They also did not pick up the phone when he called repeatedly.  Even though this is Mexico and sometimes you just accept this kind of thing, it didn’t sit well with either of us, especially when this was not the experience other cruisers’d had recently. Mike finally got the guy at the marina on the phone.  Turns out Mike’s emails had ‘not been received’. Now, generally when an email doesn’t go through, your email program lets you know. However, Mike sent them again, with our documents. Mike still has not heard back and again, phone calls go unanswered. Sometimes one just gets tired of trying. We figured we will just show up. It’s not that far down there if we have to turn around and come back. We left San Diego.

This beautiful K50, so identified by my friend Roberta Darrow whose family had one all the while she was growing up. I can’t even relate but that is so cool I can hardly stand it.

Just past the headland, before the channel markers even gave out, the second of the four issues began. Big swells on the beam made the ride so uncomfortable all I could think was ‘Great. I don’t even want to be out here in this crap’. Coming from the flat water in San Diego’s anchorages, it was a bit of a big comeuppance. With no wind at all, we were destined to spend a pretty uncomfortable night at sea. And why, you might reasonably ask, did we have to leave on that day? Because of a schedule. A schedule is the worst thing you can have on a sailboat and we almost never have one. But we are flying home and the airline doesn’t hold flights for sailboats. They just leave when they say they will, more or less. Honestly, we wanted to leave the boat in San Diego since we are flying out of this airport,  but the only slip I could find for our boat would have set us back 3K for a month. For. A. Month. We just could not do it, so onward to Ensenada. And now things begin to get interesting.

Nothing more fun than sitting in a cockpit watching small boats racing around the anchorage. Unless you are on one of the small boats. That would be more fun.

As we motored out the channel, Mike decided to take a look at the charts of the course we’d be motoring. The charts of Mexico were not there. They HAD been there earlier in the day. But now, nada. There was actually a line at the border between the countries and the screen was completely white underneath that line. Huh. This was not great. I mean, we don’t trust the Mexico charts that much, but it’s nice to have SOMETHING that represents things like land masses. And we recall that the chart to the entrance at Ensenada was pretty good. Where were our charts? Why were we not seeing them? It crossed my mind, honestly, that this was the final straw. Clearly we were not meant to go to Mexico on that day. But I rarely do myself justice when I have those intuitions. I mean, what am I supposed to say? “Honey, I just feel like we shouldn’t go today. I don’t know why.” I mean, to be clear Mike would almost certainly listen to me on that. We’ve been married too long for him to ignore these little things. But in the absence of evidence that is firmer than missing charts, we carried on. He had to go down and retrieve the little sim card holding the charts, reinsert into the chart plotter, and download them again. The little hairs on the back of my neck were becoming more alert.

I went below to cook dinner. I had just decided that the conditions below were absolutely not conducive to cooking dinner and it would be cold pizza for all when we heard a small thump from beneath the keel. It wasn’t a big thump and ordinarily it would barely even register on our internal radar. But still, we were in an area where there are way too many crab pots. Mike went below to check things out. He found nothing. He looked over the back of the boat and saw nothing. We shrugged and we motored on, wary of the big war ship steaming down the channel.

Our friends on S/V Copacetic. We just can’t seem to leave them behind. Hopefully we will see them in Ensenada in a day or two.

A few minutes later I felt like we were going more slowly than we should. We had the engine at about 1500 rpm and the current was with us, but we were making only 4 knots. That seemed wrong. About the time I realized that our speed seemed wrong, something gave a god awful screech/rattle kind of noise. I leaped across the cockpit from my position in front of the autopilot controls, hurriedly throttled down and threw the transmission into neutral as Mike popped up the companionway like his pants were on fire and yelled to throw the transmission into neutral. Great minds, and all that.

Pants may not have been on fire, but brains most definitely were as I spun the wheel and yelled, “The steering! I have no steering!” Crap, man. What a comedy of errors, almost. I was already saying, ‘Where is the Boat US number? We may need a tow!’ and practicing my radio skills in case I needed to call for help out there. I am not a fan of zero steering and big swells pushing my boat towards Warship #4 sitting right outside San Diego Harbor, and Warship #7 bearing down on us in the channel. No, thanks. Having leapt from my seat to get the boat out of gear and throttle back the engine, though, I had failed to take the steering out of automatic. Breathe. Just slow down. That’s usually the important thing in these situations. Slowing down.

We tested everything we could. Engine sounded fine. Steering was working. Transmission was working. I gave the transmission a little bump in reverse a couple of times in case that might help anything that was wrapped around the shaft spin off and float harmlessly away. Still, we were definitely, MOST DEFINITELY going back into San Diego and dropping anchor so we could check the prop and shaft in the light of day. Nothing makes me sigh more deeply in resignation than having to enter literally any port with a lot of lights at night. Fortunately, in this case, we could just follow our GPS track. Babying the boat and our jangled nerves, we went dead slow and stuck hard to the right of the channel. We dropped anchor, back at La Playa, with a sigh of relief, poured some wine, and hit the sack shortly afterwards.

This morning Mike geared up in his wetsuit and found weed and kelp wrapped around the small amount of shaft that is exposed to the elements. What a relief that it was just weed and not nylon rope that could have melted itself onto the metal. The working hypothesis is that enough weed got wrapped that it slowed us down and cut off the water supply to the shaft, causing that ungodly noise we heard.  Possibly we hit something under the water that was trailing weed to in a big bunch, allowing it time to get good and wrapped around our shaft.

A few pieces like this floated free under the tender influence of the diving knife. Such innocuous looking weed.

Now we are in a bit of a pinch. I’ll have to reschedule some of my work for tomorrow as we need to have some flexibility worked in. That irritates me but I still need to do it.  I made one more pass at trying to find a place to leave the boat stateside, but on a Sunday, and with such short notice, it’s not to be.

So let’s regroup: First, the marina fails at communicating. Then, sea conditions are disgusting and uncomfortable. Then, our Mexican charts disappear. Then we get weed around our shaft and decide to call it quits. What a day.

Now here’s the other thing. It really gives me pause, and I’m not yet ready to make it a Rule of 5 because it will probably be ok. But still it niggles my mind. There are at least 5 boats stuck in San Diego because Mexico turned them away due to a paperwork issue that Mexico, itself,  invented. It has to do with their Temporary Import Permits, which are basically their way of keeping track of foreign boats in their waters, which they have every right to do. The problem is that when you leave with your boat, you are really supposed to cancel this permit upon checking out of the country. And many people do not do that little thing for whatever reason. Then they sell the boat to an unsuspecting new person who then tries to enter Mexico with the boat. The TIP, which may be expired but has not been “CANCELLED” (And why these two things are different is beyond me) has old owner names which do not match new owner names. Maybe even the boat name is different, so the name and the hull number are not the same anymore.  In the past there has been a way to fix this issue. Apparently that is no longer the case. They have switched systems, and these systems do not talk to each other. Not only that, but apparently there is no go-between. If you have an uncanceled TIP, apparently there is no way to cancel it and so you don’t get to enter Mexico with your boat. One less cruiser with a (probably) older boat to deal with?

Is this absolutely ridiculous? Yes. It is.  I have not been one to criticize how Mexico does things because it’s not my country and they can do things however they want to. But, frankly, I believe in the power of the Mexican authorities to fix this problem if they had the will to do so. Why they haven’t wanted to is well beyond my powers to understand.  There is at least one boat that has been waiting for over a year to have this issue fixed. At that point, I may just sail to Hawaii.

We have met some of the folks waiting for movement on this issue here in San Diego. They have spent a lot of time and money preparing their boats for their adventure, only to find, upon arrival, that a previous owner didn’t do what they were supposed to and now they are stuck because Mexico doesn’t want this fixed for some reason. I feel so sorry for them. They have literally done nothing wrong but here they sit doing the ‘anchor dance’ in San Diego.

Why is this on my mind, aside from feeling bad for other sailors? Because our boat has been to Mexico before we owned it and I am fairly sure that the folks who owned it back then did not cancel their TIP.  That would have been, I think, in the 1990’s or early 2000’s. When we checked in before, we just didn’t mention it and we got a TIP with no problems. We also cancelled that TIP when we left Mexico, although we cannot seem to find that paperwork for some reason. It’s not where it belongs.

Although no old TIPs were found in their computer system when we checked into Mexico before, they have upgraded part of their system. Just part of it, apparently. So even though it’s unlikely they will find any uncanceled TIPs for Galapagos, who knows? It’s also possible that they will. And if they do, I just will not be surprised.

The tall ship California sailed by, wowing us on the way out today.

We are sailing along now in much more pleasant conditions than yesterday, just slowly making our way down the coast. We’ll cross our fingers Mexico doesn’t have a record of an uncancelled tip with our hull number on it. But if they do, well, I really like San Diego, even with the anchor dance issue.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 16. Avoiding all kelp.