Son of a Booby

Quite a while ago I mentioned some problems we'd been having in the Sea of Cortez, with boobies landing on our boat and…causing problems. Well. Boobies have continued to cause us distress. Allow me to elaborate.

We were doing a long-ish crossing of the southern portion of the Sea of Cortez late last December 2009. This route took us from La Paz to an anchorage 45 miles east and south on the southern Baja peninsula, called Bahia de los Muertos (a typical spot to jump off from Baja eastward to, for example, Mazatlan).

Our southern-crossing route from Muertos to the mainland took us much further south than Mazatlan: we headed for Isla Isabela or Banderas Bay (the greater Puerto Vallarta area), whichever the wind decided for us.

The wind decided for Banderas Bay. Eventually.

We had a 61-hour, 342-mile passage from Bahia de los Muertos on the SE "toe" of the Baja peninsula "boot", past Isla Isabela, past the prison islands of the Islas Tres Marias, and in to our first anchoring opportunity in Banderas Bay, the extremely rolly Punta de Mita. But that's not the point of this post.

The point is: when the job at hand requires a precise landing on a sailboat's expensive and fragile masthead instruments – while said sailboat is underway – Baja boobies are rank amateurs compared to the precision flying of Banderas Bay boobies. These southern birds must be used to a lot of vessel traffic, because the booby that landed on our thin, delicate, masthead wind arrow as we were closing in on Banderas Bay, did so with precision. On the first pass. In the middle of the night as our boat was sloshing around in 20 knots of wind with 4-foot beam-to seas. As if he'd done it a million times before. Which he clearly had.

How to dislodge his heavy self from the delicate, $250 wind arrow to which clung his webby feet?

Oh, we yelled. We cursed. We shook halyards. We blew air horns. He ignored us. GB – an excellent shot thanks to his Ozark hillbilly heritage – took aim with a slingshot using garbanzo beans as ammo…and the booby simply flicked them aside with his feathers. He looked like a perverse Mexican eagle, sitting there atop our mast in the night, lit from below by our masthead's tricolor light: his beak glowed red, his belly feathers shone white, and his tail feathers flashed a brilliant green. We could see a lovely show of patriotic color each time he squatted.

Lucky for us, the 20-knot winds blew his…jetsam…sideways off the boat and into the sea.

Eventually the wind and seas became so uncomfortable even the booby could not remain on the boat. So off he flew, into the night. Leaving us thinking about other cruisers' suggestions for keeping birds off one's boat instruments.

Next time I can force GB to climb the mast – like, to bend back into place the wind indicator the booby sat on – he will be tying clear fishing line about 6 inches above the level of each spreader, so that future boobies cannot land on the spreaders. For the mast head, perhaps we can find a single, flexible spike that GB can tap in to the top of the (repaired) wind indicator. If all else fails, to deter the booby we'll probably follow the advice of the Nostromo's First Mate, Ellen Ripley:

"Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

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