Sail Agora

Well now! Been a while. It’s amazing what happens to time when traveling by sail. Days blur together like drops on a watercolor painting, and a week goes by too quickly, deserving only a single sentence description. (It was hot). And yet, an action packed 5 minutes may be the story you tell for the rest of your life. We might relish getting doused by another wave or jamming a finger in the anchor locker if we knew. Such content is priceless.

This uneven value of time carried Steph and I through a new chapter. Our highlights range from seconds to weeks in length and give us a totally new perspective and appreciation for life. The hype is real. Sailing really is the best way to travel. We are changed because of it, closer now to each other and the world. But I’m skipping ahead. Let’s get back to where we left off: Isla Espíritu Santo, the gem of the Sea.

Mid March, we rode light northerlies from La Paz to the island while close-hauled and double-reefed. Agora sat down perfectly in 20+ knots, and skipped gingerly over the tops of wind crested waves. It was a measly 3 hour sail to the island, perhaps our shortest venture yet.

We selected a small anchorage that would provide some protection from the infamous Coromule Winds, which slam the island from the southwest at night. From this protected spot, we could use the dingy to explore beaches and reefs further north. We could drop the dinghy’s anchor and flop overboard to peek at tropical fish nesting among vast coral gardens. Jacques Cousteau described the Sea as the Aquarium of the World, and this became apparent to us as soon as we jumped in.

The island is an absolutely astounding example of an astonishing biome. Under the water, it is seemingly tropical. The colors are almost neon, and the diversity is intense. But when you come up for air, or to get sunscreen out of your eyes, you see giant old growth cacti, 40 ft tall, ensnared by pink granite and circled by red-feathered vultures. In the distance are white beaches with sand as soft as pastry flour, and out at sea are mobula rays masquerading as birds as they jump out of the water and flail about.

Steph and I couldn’t get enough. We left our first spot and continued along the island to a ridiculously protected anchorage that sits in the mouth of an ancient volcano. I dove on the anchor and nearly fin-fived a turtle by accident. We spent a couple days there, unsurprisingly running into our good friends aboard Cygnus yet again. “Bound by the whims of fate!” we declared. If we were building an igloo in the North Pole and ran into Cygnus we wouldn’t be surprised.

The following evening, we sailed off anchor and tucked into a neighboring bay which promised a rigorous hike and a chance of seeing the mysterious endemic feline known locally as the Babisuri. We made it to the ridge line and saw plenty of scat and prints, but no cat. (Though I swear I felt the gaze of the mysterious gato from time to time.)

They say cruising is made of high-highs and low-lows, and they’re right. When we returned to the boat, I spent a couple days in a dark place. Steph was leaving in a couple weeks and we’d barely scratched the surface of the only destination I’d wanted to explore. What was to become of the trip when she left? Solo travel was never my interest. What was to become of our lives when I returned? We can’t sail full time. Would I go back to job hunting, making empty plans for the weekend, and grinding for cash? The prospect of exchanging money for time seemed insane, and I couldn’t justify the trade off.

The truth is I had spent 7 years wanting nothing but this, and its eminent ending was taking a toll. Before the trip, every friend I made or job I worked had an element of impermanence that I couldn’t shake. Now, sitting in the ship of my dreams, in the place of my dreams, with the woman of my dreams, a new impermanence surfaced and was backfiring tenfold. In just a few short weeks, we would turn in the keys to paradise. What then?

But if there’s anything this trip has taught me, it’s that cheesy Disney-flavored takeaways have a place in this world. For 7 years, my perspective on sailing was all or nothing. Sailing was the ALL and landlife was the NOTHING. I’d put off making friends and deepening my career for a sailing trip that, turns out, is more fun with friends and a career. Talking it through with Steph in that little anchorage, perhaps under the watchful eye of el gato, I resolved to live my life like a sailing trip, where every day is an adventure. We will sail when we can, and in between we will honor Agora’s name by deepening our permanent community, which is now a mixture of cruisers and landlubbers. Though we can’t cruise full time, it’s not necessarily all or nothing. It could be something else.