Sept. 15, 2015-Big Motors and Taco Fest

Big Motors

wingssail images-fredrick roswold
Big Motors

I’ve always been impressed by the size of the outboard motors on many of the sports fishing boats seen around the marina. Big V6 Mercury Verados and bigger V8 Yamaha’s with 300 or more horse power are common, and I know from my powerboating days that one of these would be sufficient to push a 30 open boat at 30 or 40 knots and out on the water they are usually seen chuffing along with wives and kids going about 25. So why all the power? Ok, there is a safety issue at work: dual motors gives a “get home” security if one fails. But if it was just about safety how about two 175 hp motors? Nope you never see that. You see twin 300’s or twin 350’s. I guess it’s just machismo. Apparently no self-respecting Mexican boat owner would settle for less than two huge motors as long as his buddy down the dock has two. So we see rows of these boats with dual monsters on the back.
Top Dog

But I was blown away to see the yellow Everglades 32footer with THREE Yamaha 350 V8’s on the back. Now that’s some lot of power, 1050hp, $60,000 worth of motors, and they weigh 800 lbs each! I have no idea if the owner has them set up and prop’d to extract all that power, but if so I’d image we’re looking at a 100mph fishing boat. Hardly seems likely.
But it’s toppable.

Wow!
When in Malaysia I spotted in Telaga Marina a big rib purportedly owned by Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s Prime minister at the time, which went one bigger.

Taco Fest

Blue Dress

Puerto Vallarta staged a taco festival in old town last Sunday where local restaurants set up booths to sell samples of their tacos. It was going to be free admittance, featured some folk dancing, and lots of good Mexican beer would be on hand. The taco prices were to be 10 pesos ($.55) so we thought we’d go and sample some of our favorite Mexican street food, drink some cervesa, and shoot photos of the dancers. It was also a good excuse to go to old town, which we love and don’t get there too often.
Well, we’re glad we went, the expedition to old town was nice, but the taco fest was a bust. First of all it was packed and the lines were 20-30 minutes long. Even then they could not keep up with the demand. We picked the place with the shortest line, and got what we deserved: second rate tacos. Plus it was an unbearably hot evening, the sun absolutely stung us, and there was no place to sit down. We fled to a nearby bar, ordered two pints of Modelo, and sat in the shade until the sun went down.
Oh, the dancing? Well, it was pretty nice, but the light was bad and the photos were pretty much impossible. One thing I could have done was to shoot photos of the crowd and the taco cooks, but the heat just put me out of the mood. We went home early.

Click here for more photos.

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, La Cruz Huancaxtle

January 25, 2015-Showing the fleet our heels

jl digital media imageGreat Start

Down at the leeward end of the line Wings slides out into the lead. After a few races here in Puerto Vallarta we are now seeing some results; we haven't won yet, but we are improving.

It feels good.

The best part of it is that our crew is really coming on, we can call for whatever we need to do on the race course and the crew can get it done, and they are having fun doing it.

This is the best part of racing; the teamwork and camaraderie that comes when you work together well. We love it, we love them and they seem to be having fun.

More later.

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, Puerto Vallarta

January 13, 2015-Liveaboards, not Cruisers

jl digital imagesWings sailing off Nuevo Vallarta

It's been a month since we arrived in Puerto Vallarta. This has been a month of transition for us. We've transitioned from cruisers to liveaboards. We've found a permanent marina berth in La Cruz Huanacaxtle, a delightful, laid back, Mexican town near Puerto Vallarta, which we love. We've moved a lot of cruising equipment off the boat. We've got our car here, which we planned all along. We're making friends, and we've started local sailing. There is a low key racing program and we've lined a crew and have already done two races. We didn't win, but we have time to get better.

So we plan to live here, on Wings, do local sailing, and not do any more long distance cruising.

Pretty major change for us after 18 years of cruising.

I don't know what kind of interesting stories we'll be able to write about this new life, but we'll try.

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, Puerto Vallarta

December 9, 2014-Vallarta

Just a quick note to keep our followers up to date:

We sailed for Barra de Navidad on Dec 3, spent a night anchored in Melaque after a quick reunion in Barra with Gene and Sue and our sister Serendipity 43 Peregrine and then on to Puerto Vallarta, arriving in Nuevo Vallarta on Dec. 7 and moved to La Cruz on Dec 8, 2014. We had another two great sailing legs. The last section up the coast to Cabo Corrientes was amazing; 20kts of wind on the nose and some healthy waves but it was wonderful sailing and Wings went to weather like the thoroughbred she is. We wound up doing two sail changes as the wind lightened again as we crossed Banderas Bay at dawn. It's great to be back in Puerto Vallarta after sixteen years.

In La Cruz we've run into some old friends and the new marina, Riviera Nayarit, is truly luxurious.

Tomorrow we fly out to return to Huatulco to fetch the car.

Sorry, no photos yet.

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, Banderas Bay

Rafael Ambroce and his crew

Rafael Ambroce and his crew in MEXORC
wingssail-Fredrick Roswold

Febuary 1, 1997 Four Mexicans I Met.

I have met some Mexicans, and there are four of them, sailors, who particularly stick in my mind. There is Ambroce, the attorney, and boat owner, Franco, his son, the young sailor, Felipe, crewmember, the struggling entrepreneur, and Noe the working class teenager.

Rafael Ambroce is a fit, wealthy, intelligent, arrogant 45 year old attorney from Mexico city, and the owner of the boat I sailed with in MEXORC. He keeps his boat in Acapulco and he flies in from Mexico City to race. I think he also flies the crew in. He told me he is a litigator and has his own firm and I heard he does work for Senior Chata who I met and who is purported to own Mexicana Airlines. Ambroce is also separated from his wife, but that I can understand; Senior Ambroce would be one helluva hard guy to live with. For one thing this guy is a Type A of a Type A. He is either on his cell phone in intense conversation with God knows who or he is going 900 mph on whatever activity he is doing at the moment. Sailboat racing, OK, he does it the same way. He sits on the foredeck with his phone inside the 10 minute gun then takes the wheel for the start and luffs up the whole fleet, yelling “Up! Up! Up!” On the course he is giving orders a mile a minute except when someone fucks up then he is swearing just as hard at them. After the race, motoring back to the marina, he drinks rum in one hand, drives his boat with the other hand behind his back, chews a cigar, and chases the other competitors all over the bay as he careens directly at them under full power so that he can taunt about the day’s racing. He brings a beautiful eighteen year old girl to the awards dinner as his date and he entertains the whole table with his cigar waving stories. Ambroce lives hard.

Franco is Ambroce’s son. He is about 18 and he lives in the shadow of his dad. Franco is a different kind of a sailor. His father is macho and fearless and totally self confident but Franco is more knowledgeable. When they get in a tight spot, like when a boat lee bows them in a race, Ambroce wants to know from the crew what to do but Franco knows. Only since he isn’t steering he can’t do it, and his dad won’t listen to him. Poor kid. But he is intelligent and gentle, and yet he is not afraid to yell at his dad for endless pinching or for a poor job driving through a jibe. And Franco hangs on every word from the mouth of the hot shots from the “Norte”, even when they are really retired bankers masquerading as hot shots. And when that retired banker told Franco that he’d love to have him as crew on his boat it seemed to make Franco’s day.

Felipe is a recruit. I don’t know Ambroce’s connection to Felipe but somehow Felipe got roped into sailing with him for this regatta. Talk about punishment. Felipe knew the least on the boat and got yelled at constantly. Beyond yelling, it turned into insults, but Felipe’s good humor kept the situation from getting tense. Felipe ran the pole on the down wind legs and I was constantly coaching him on when to let the pole foreward and when to pull it back. But Felipe always pulled it back when I said “pole forward”. I wondered aloud if I should learn the Spanish commands but Ambroce said I might as well stick to English since Felipe couldn’t understand Spanish either. Felipe’s other life was selling “Paddle Tennis” courts, which I never heard of. He sells them, sets them up, and promotes “paddle tennis” tournaments. He also is setting up a web page to sell Tequila. In a few months you should look for the “Tequila Page”. He wants to sell the rare brands and deliver through overnight delivery services like DHL. The biggest problem so far he said was overcoming the rules and regulations from 50 different states. For a young Mexican from Mexico City to even be able to find out all the applicable rules and regulations related to Tequila sales via the Internet I thought was pretty impressive, even if he probably hasn’t scratched the surface yet.

Finally there is Noe. (pronounced “No-Way”), is the one guy in this piece who didn’t sail with Ambroce. But he is a sailor. He sailed with us on WINGS one day and I can tell you, even though it was his first time on a sailboat, he can do just fine, thank you. He is bright and amazingly observant. He sees every thing and he can put it all together. On the boat he had only to be shown or told once. We put him on the helm and showed him the tell tails and from then on he steered upwind perfectly. He seemed to sense when the boat was pinching or too high and corrected without looking at the tell tails. He works in the Canvas Connection and does boat tops mostly but he is also repairing sails there. He asked to go sailing because he wanted to see what the sails he works on do for a living. I was happy to take him and suggested Sunday which was perfect at first but then he remembered that he has agreed to take his girl friend to her Grandmother’s house on Sunday. I could see him struggling with how to get out of that and I quickly switched to Saturday after work. Noe reminds me of my son Ken. Both of them are bright and observant. Both of them understood the sailboat almost instinctively. And Noe even dresses kind of like a USA teenager with those funny sunglasses and baggy pants and even a gang-banger bandanna on his head almost all of the time. But Noe is a responsible and mature young man, and I was impressed with him both on the boat and at work in the loft. And Noe shared with us his dream for old age. He wants a “Ranchita”, a small ranch, up in the hills behind Vallarta with enough land and animals to feed himself and his wife, and that’s all. Away from the tourists; where it is quiet. He said the kids, they can get out of there and go to work, he’s just going to work enough for himself and his wife, and eat some frijitos, some carnitas, and drink some Tequila.

Of course there were other Mexicans I met and liked, like Emigdio, Noe’s father who is wise and humorous, and knows when to joke and when to keep his mouth shut, and who gave Noe his value system. Also Jesus, the marketing manager for the big Disco near the marina who always has a beautiful young woman with him, hardly ever the same one twice or another Felipe who waxed our boat one day for $25 after starting the bargaining at $100, or Alexandro who works full time for Lupe keeping her stable of boats clean and well maintained, and who it seems, is willing to try to fix anything, even if it is exotic sailboat hardware which he’s never seen before, or Lorena, the dark beauty who married a Canadian cruiser and who runs a office supplies store in La Cruz. Other than Lorena, it’s been mostly men that I’ve met; it is a male dominated society.

The Mexican women I met were wonderful too, either the centerposts of their households, hardworking and accepting of what seemed to me like tough lives, young working class girls on the busses who I never met but watched with admiration, or the fiercely proud upper-class women who always dressed immaculately, spoke with excellent English, and treated me with the utmost kindness and graciousness, but seemed to be teeming with ambition and drive that the men lacked.

Fred Roswold, SV WINGS, Mexico

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Water level view of Marina Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
wingssail-Fredrick Roswold

Marina Vallarta

We've settled in to dock life in Puerto Vallarta
wingssail-Fredrick Roswold

January 5, 1997-Settled into Puerto Vallarta

We are tied to a dock in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Our anchored out friends call us “dockies”. It’s a demeaning term; we’re not real cruisers because we are in a marina.

But we like it. It’s comfortable. It’s what we’re used to; after all, we spent ten years tied to a dock in Seattle. We’ve been enjoying all the convenience that comes from being able to step off the boat and walk to the store, and we’ve been enjoying Puerto Vallarta sunshine.

This day was different however; it rained.

Not a tropical rain, a downpour like you’d expect, but a drizzle. A long slow dripping drizzle. It started with a few drops and I looked at the sky which was gray and full and I knew it was going to rain. I moved my sewing machine and the mainsail I was sewing on down below and closed the hatches behind me.

I read a book, cover to cover.

Now it is 1:30 in the morning. I can hear drips on the deck and it sounds like we are back in Seattle.

I am listening to other sounds from outside too.

When the wind blows the wrong way the Mexican flag bangs against the rig.

Once in a while I hear a voice, a youngish male voice, a shouted Spanish word or two. So who are these young Spanish males who walk through the marina late and night and yell?

And from midnight to about 4:00 am we can hear the disco over by the highway.

In the morning I often hear one of the Mexican workers who walks through the marina whistling. I recognize his whistling, but I’ve never seen him.

As you can probably tell, we have settled into this place.

Fred & Judy, SV WINGS, Puerto Vallarta

Religious Festival

Festival to welcome the fishing fleet
wingssail-Fredrick Roswold

December 2, 1996-Radio Wars

December 2, 1996-Radio Wars

“WINGS, what do you have down?” the voice crackled through the radio without prelude.

We’d just arrived in Turtle Bay and after motoring around the anchored fleet had dropped our hook. Apparently one of the other skippers wanted to talk about our anchoring technique.

Something about this guy’s tone set me off, so my response was sarcastic.

“An anchor, why?”

“What type of anchor?”

“I have a sufficient anchor.”

“Hey skipper, this is serious so I’d like a polite reply. Several of us here have been here a couple of days and you’ve just arrived and it has been really blowing. Last night it was blowing 35 and we were up all night worrying and watching. We’ve all got about 200 feet of chain and we are concerned about you. You are pretty close to us. So what is your ground tackle?”

“I have a plow and chain.”

He gave up on us but soon he was on the radio talking to his friends and they were talking to each other about how concerned they were, about how difficult some people were to deal with, (meaning me), and the others were congratulating the guy on his diplomacy.

Obviously Judy and I had stumbled into an established fleet, and we’d offended them by anchoring within their territory. I’m also sure my radio response to the “Alpha Male” wasn’t properly deferential. Who knows in what other ways we had offended them. Right at that moment we were feeling pretty unwelcome.

So that is how our stay here at Turtle Bay got started. Judy and I both felt that we’d been in an argument and lost. Maybe I should have just told the guy to go to hell, or maybe I should have licked his ass. At any rate, we don’t like being the cause of continuing bad feelings so we raised the anchor and moved completely around the whole anchored fleet to the back of everyone, which ended the confrontation, but it sure left a bad feeling with us.

We learned two things from this encounter: One, be very careful what you say on the radio; everyone is listening. I came off badly in that exchange and we knew we’d have to live with the opinions that the members of this fleet had formed of us because of that radio conversation for a long time. Secondly, winning an anchoring dispute just isn’t worth it. People don’t have to be right to be territorial and aggressive. If you argue with them, you automatically lose, because even if you win the argument, the hard feelings will remain, and the cruising community is small.

We also learned that this guy on the radio is a jerk. Now that I know what kind of a guy he is I think I know how to bug him. Someday I’m going to really yank his chain real good..

Fred & Judy, SV WINGS, Baja