Saltbreaker

Costa Rica. Finally. The idea of this trip came to me months prior to us actually showing up, starting with the Saltbreaker crew and I exchanging several emails. Alex was finally able to nail down, with apparent little to no confidence, that they might be in Costa Rica around March. This was good enough for me, and with Michael now on board to leave Chicago for this adventure as well, we booked our flights and immediately took on a kind of blank stare which we…

Gigante is the kind of place I could end up hanging around for a while. It’s beautiful, for one: a crescent of beach curves around a bay, with a rickety dirt path leading to a longer, windswept beach known for its surf. It was also the first place we came to land after four days of wind-tossed sailing. The creature comforts immediately made themselves known: cold beer! Flushing toilets! SALAD! You may be wondering about the last one. But I am a professed and vocal…

This blog will be a lot more interesting if you take a second to get a shared sense of what its like to sail/motor into 45 kt head winds. Start by consolidating the entirety of your belongings into your bedroom, you might want to strap everything down. Now take the room, tilt it 30 degrees and give it a good shake. Every once and a while pick the entire room up a foot or so, then drop it. While you’re doing this turn a hose…

“Chinandega! Chinandega! Chinandega!” The woman with the caramel colored skin and unnaturally tawny hair was yelling the destination of the minibus with a vigor I couldn’t help but admire as I stood in the center of the dusty market, chickens scratching at the ground by my feet and my backpack pressing into shoulders. Dazed and sleepless, I’d arrived at the Mercado Israel Lewites moments before, after a 3:45 am wake up call, a cab ride through empty Brooklyn streets, a flight to Miami, another flight…

If you’d been listening to channel 19a in the Gulf of Tehuantepec earlier this week, you may have overhead a conversation that went something like this: “Artillery blast hits BRAVO 9.” “Nothing there … HOTEL 7?” At which point you’d probably be thinking to yourself, “Mexican naval practice?”. But the next line would give it away. “PBCHCHCHCHCHCH, damn you just sunk my battleship!”. It was, in fact, Ustupu (good friends we’ve been buddy boating with) and us in the middle of a heated game of…

When leaving a country by plane, I hardly even remember the exit visa process. Its painless. Hand your passport to a drowsy looking official who stares blankly at you, flips to an empty page and bids you farewell. Clearing Mexico by boat involved five acts. Act 1 — From The Boat To The Office. This act began with a dry bag. In the bag: a pair of dry pants, the classiest shirt I have on board (the one with the fewest stains), passports, boat registration…

You wake up. 7:00AM. Wait for the sun to rise. Dive in the water. You snorkel in the place you first learned how. Back to the boat. You turn on the motor. Head to Zihuatanejo. Whales. Humpbacks. You pop it in neutral. Tail slaps. You turn around. Tandem dorsal slaps. You get out your camera. Broach. Happy New Year’s. You anchor in Zihuatanejo. Dinghy to Ustupu . Dan, Sylvie, Jeff. You blow out candles on your belated b-day/timely New Years cinnamon bun cake. Rum and…

Once again it’s been proven to me that it’s not the places, it’s the people. We arrived in Barra Navidad on Christmas Eve morning, after a day and a half of motoring. When we motor it feels like we’re in a submarine, or some old tug or something. The diesel is all. The engine’s so loud and so hot that it’s just omnipotent when it’s running. You can’t escape it anywhere on the boat. The radio is turned louder, conversations are amped up to low…

During our two weeks together, (it started with Nick’s birthday and evolved) a small toast for celebratory events was developed. Here is a revised version for my dear friends on the Saltbreaker for 2012: May the winds carry you swiftly and safely, while the sun shines on your shoulders (and legs) Let the sea’s feed you it’s delicious fruits, without asking for the same in return. Please keep problems on the boat from arising (i.e. parts breaking) faster, than you can fix them! Hopefully each…

As we drew closer to the island, it became clear that the black haze hovering over Isla Isabel wasn’t smoke or clouds, but an insanely dense flock of frigate birds. A few minutes later, Linus spotted a spout in the distance, and Alex began to lose his cool as two 20 foot whales surfaced just 100 feet off our bow. Alex is constantly afraid an Ahabian encounter will send Saltbreaker down to the depths. We pulled unscathed into the collapsed and flooded caldera of a…