We knew it would happen sooner or later — a medical emergency while we’re away from civilization and emergency rooms and doctors. Well, now it has.

We have a lot of stuff on board for emergency situations. That includes a rather large and complete medical supply kit. And it’s part of the reason we have a satellite phone — so we can call for medical advice no matter where we are.

We haven’t gone as far as one couple we read about, who learned how to remove each other’s appendix, just in case. In fact, we never got around to taking the wilderness medical course that we really, really meant to.

But you never know what the emergency is going to be or when it’s going to occur. In this case, it happened in Bahia los Frailes. And it happened while Suzana was taking a shower, so I was on my own. Coming out of the aft head, I… Oh, it’s painful to even say it… I stubbed my toe!

OK. OK. It’s not exactly a life threatening emergency, but in fairness, it did turn black and blue, and it did swell up. It wasn’t just a little stub, it was a big, painful stub!

But now that we’ve done the “medical emergency” thing, we’re hopefully that it’s out of our system and will never happen again. Just like we got running aground done with early in our sailing career and have never felt the need to do it again.

Some people sail single-handed. I’ve done it. But mostly, sailing involves two or more people, especially cruising. Where do these extra people come from? It’s one of those questions with thousands of answers.

Someone commented the other day on the number of couples cruising where the husband is significantly older than the wife. My immediate reaction was, well, yeah, it’s always better to have younger crew.

One of the Baja Ha-ha rally boats is crewed by a father and daughter, who’s taking a break after college. They seem to get along wonderfully.

At the kick-off party for the Ha-ha, the day before everyone was to leave, there were a number of boats still looking for crew, and people looking to crew. Nothing like trusting your life to someone you just met yesterday…

Our friends on Epiphany had their daughter along for crew. After the Ha-ha, she switched boats, to crew for one headed to Mazatlan.

One captain we talked to over drinks said the best crew are those who pay to do it. By which he didn’t mean than it’s nice to get paid, but that having that sort of formal, financial relationship solidifies what everyone expects from the experience.

For us, although we could have done the Ha-ha with just the two of us, we decided — for safety and to make things easier — that we wanted at least one more crew. We started out talking to some of our long-time sailing partners. But none of the “usual suspects” could make it. Then we talked to an instructor from Tradewinds, but he backed out, choosing instead to do missionary work in Africa. Really.

So we ended up sitting around one day in our cockpit back in Richmond, wondering where we’d find someone, when this guy showed up, completely out of the blue, and asked if we were looking for crew for the Ha-ha. That was Wes.

Turns out, Wes was building his own boat (literally, but that’s another story), was planning to do the Ha-ha on it, but it wasn’t ready for this year’s Ha-ha. So he wanted to go with someone else for the experience. He’d been talking to people in the marina who knew we were doing the Ha-ha, and they pointed him in our direction.

Our first reaction was caution, not knowing anything at all about Wes. So we invited him to a day sail or two, which went very well. Then a trial run to Monterey and back. By then we were convinced that he was the right crew — easy to get along with, knowledgeable about sailing, willing to do it “our” way, even when he thought there were better ways, but also willing to share the better way with us.

Having now completed the Ha-ha, we can say definitively that Wes was just about the best crew we could possibly have hoped for. We got really lucky that day he dropped by the boat in Richmond.

Just a quick post to let everyone know that we arrived safely at La Paz.

Here we are, in one of the “big slips”:

They’re double slips, 60′ long, and wide enough to fit two catamarans. We have cats on three sides, and a giant power boat on the fourth.

We plan to be here about a month, maybe more if we like it.

I hope to catch up on blogging over the next couple days, so more to come…

Everyone has trouble talking on the VHF radio to start with. You have to push a button on the microphone and say your thing, not knowing who’s hearing you, or just how you sound. And so it was with Suzana before we started cruising, indeed even after that and before the Ha-ha.

But during the course of the Ha-ha, she blossomed as a radio operator, not only becoming casual about using the radio, but downright witty and generally helpful to others in the fleet. So much so that she got the chattiest VHF operator award, by popular vote.

She say that it’s not that she talked more than others, but that her accent made people remember her more than others. I say it’s not because she talked more, but because she had more style than the others. And she wasn’t talking just to chat, as the award’s name suggests, but nearly always to spread useful information or help someone with a problem or needing to connect with someone else in the fleet.

Anyway, I’m really proud of her expanded and expanding prowess as a radio operator.

The first leg of the Baja Ha-ha, from San Diego to Turtle Bay, was the longest one, lasting three days and three nights. Over night, we (Suzana, Wes, and Harry) did watches of three hours each, with half hour overlaps, which seemed to work well for us — enough time to get a couple four hour sleeps each night, but not terribly long stretches on watch. During the day, we didn’t do formal watches, but as it’s pretty boring being below, someone always seemed willing to take the wheel.

Unfortunately, this year, there was very little wind, so most of it was done motoring. And even when there was some wind, it was pretty much dead behind us, not the best point of sail for a boat without a spinnaker.

Anticipating this, we had set up preventers on both our main and Hoyt boom staysail, letting us do wing-on-wing without worrying about accidental jibes, and allowing us to use the Hoyt boom as a pole to keep the staysail out.

We arrived in the middle of the night. Not wanting to go into a strange harbor full of a hundred other boats in the dark, we sailed back and forth for a few hours, and went in right after sunrise.

All these boats were with the Ha-ha:

As advertised, the bay is large enough for the entire Ha-ha fleet to anchor and then some. Local fishermen provided a shuttle service to shore ($2-3/person) with their small fishing boats (pangas), so we didn’t even bother to deploy our dinghy. A lot of other people did, though:

There was a party on the beach, seen in the background above.

Suzana took a panga to shore and went for a run one of the mornings. Unfortunately, the five other people who said they’d come running at 9AM all slept in. But Suzana enjoyed her run anyway.

We also wandered around town (about 4,000 people), and stumbled quite accidentally on a religious service taking place outdoors in the local cemetery, on the Day of the Dead. It was very interesting, even if we could’t understand a word of it. At one point, everyone turned to the people nearby, shook hands and said “la paz,” including with us. Afterward, everyone was setting up food near their relative’s graves. We slipped away.

We made it all the way to Cabo San Lucas, without loosing a single member of the crew!

Will post more stories later. For now, just wanted to let everyone know we’re safe and sound in Cabo.

After a very pleasant two weeks in San Diego, doing rest & recuperation & repairs & reprovisioning, we’re now (finally) starting the Baja Ha-ha. For the next two weeks, we’ll be sailing down the West coast of Baja. You can follow us on the blog, where our position will be updated every four hours.

Here’s a picture of the Ha-ha fleet leaving San Diego:

Wondering where Gardyloo is right now? Wondering where it’s been in the past? Here’s a tracking map: