March 19
San Juanico
Sashimi and Kuub: The Dude Abides
Sailing down to San Juanico, we snared a Kawakawa on the fishing line we've got trolling out behind us, a beautiful, hefty tuna-beast. Absolutely delightful. So we did the only natural thing and that's to kill and eat it, the meat's fine enough to eat raw,
dipped in soy sauce and wasabi, the rich meat melts in one's mouth with every bite. I can see why the cruising crowd returns every year to the Sea of Cortez. And when we pulled into anchorage at San Juanico, crowded, those were the other cruisers we met.
The further south one sails in Cortez, the more cruisers one meets. Here though, it's an older crowd, regulars for years or even decades, all aboard Catamarans or real nice 50-foot monohulls . One of the couples pulls alongside us in their dinghy and invites us ashore for beach games.
It's a cool contrast to our time spent with Eric & Pam, Cliff and & Giselle, twenty-something cruisers like us. Their spirit here is the same: jovial, friendly, and ballasted by drinking. It's a youthful way to live, and we play bacci ball and some sort of old Norseman's game, Kuub. While Patrick and David get serious about Kuub, I join forces with an older photographer named Jeff in the hunt for what they call Apache Tears, smooth chunks of obsidian buried in the sands around here. Jeff looks like if the Dude were skinnier, and references The Big Lebowski in the first five minutes of our meeting. He once was assigned a gig to photograph for a book about the Nevada desert, expected it to take a few weeks, roaming the deserts off-roading. After five years he finally finished, with a house in the
Mohave. in the beach-side desert now, picking burrs from our bare feet and flicking them back in the sands, heat and the winds and the ancient geography, stratified layers of crumbling and unforgiving rocks in turn, and it's impossible for me to say whether the hills are coming down or climbing, all at a scale imperceptible to our short-lived eyes. I don't know if I've got words better than cliches for the desert, so I won't try to describe it. But I will say that, if one is patient and carefully observant, you can get a taste of the ecological richness so often totally missed behind car windows on drives through to Las Vegas or Phoenix. We find our Apache Tears, and although I can't tell if it's really all that good luck for white guys to be hoarding the supposed tears of native people (according to the myth), the obsidian mesmerizes us. We shake hands and will probably never meet again; quite literally two ships passing in the night, sans romance. The cruising life is curious in that regard, a long stretch of insular living with one or two companions, punctuated by a series of brief and fulfilling encounters with others living in the same distinct and quirky way.
Back at the shore, the older cruisers are departing, see you here next year, they say, shaking hands, hugs going round, stories they've told before and all heard before winding down. As they leave, the wife in the couple who invited us flashes us from their departing dinghy, with the world's fattest boat-dog weighing down the bow, and on the shore some of the guys moon back. I get the impression that maybe they've got the youth thing figured out better than I do, and they're all 3 decades or more ahead of me. Maybe it's a learned skill, and reassuring at that.
Patrick and David gather up the hollowed, skeletal pale wood of dead and dried cacti to make a Kuub set of our own, and we head back to the boat around sunset.
San Juanico
Sashimi and Kuub: The Dude Abides
Sailing down to San Juanico, we snared a Kawakawa on the fishing line we've got trolling out behind us, a beautiful, hefty tuna-beast. Absolutely delightful. So we did the only natural thing and that's to kill and eat it, the meat's fine enough to eat raw,
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| Sea caves near Punta Pulpito |
The further south one sails in Cortez, the more cruisers one meets. Here though, it's an older crowd, regulars for years or even decades, all aboard Catamarans or real nice 50-foot monohulls . One of the couples pulls alongside us in their dinghy and invites us ashore for beach games.
It's a cool contrast to our time spent with Eric & Pam, Cliff and & Giselle, twenty-something cruisers like us. Their spirit here is the same: jovial, friendly, and ballasted by drinking. It's a youthful way to live, and we play bacci ball and some sort of old Norseman's game, Kuub. While Patrick and David get serious about Kuub, I join forces with an older photographer named Jeff in the hunt for what they call Apache Tears, smooth chunks of obsidian buried in the sands around here. Jeff looks like if the Dude were skinnier, and references The Big Lebowski in the first five minutes of our meeting. He once was assigned a gig to photograph for a book about the Nevada desert, expected it to take a few weeks, roaming the deserts off-roading. After five years he finally finished, with a house in the
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| David and Patrick learning Kuub |
Back at the shore, the older cruisers are departing, see you here next year, they say, shaking hands, hugs going round, stories they've told before and all heard before winding down. As they leave, the wife in the couple who invited us flashes us from their departing dinghy, with the world's fattest boat-dog weighing down the bow, and on the shore some of the guys moon back. I get the impression that maybe they've got the youth thing figured out better than I do, and they're all 3 decades or more ahead of me. Maybe it's a learned skill, and reassuring at that.
Patrick and David gather up the hollowed, skeletal pale wood of dead and dried cacti to make a Kuub set of our own, and we head back to the boat around sunset.
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