27 March 2013; Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

With the absence of the regular Carnival ship, we were assigned anchorage nbr 1, which is always nice. It offers the best shelter from the ocean swell and it has the shortest tender distance to the shore, unless you stay on the engines and creep all the way in. If you want to anchor with a ship which needs a reasonable size swinging circle, you have to stay further out as the water near the Cape is very deep. Even at anchorage nbr 1 it is over 150 feet before the anchor touches the ground. I have been staying on the engines, e.g. drifting, here but only when I had been assigned anchorage nbr 3. That is so far out, that unless we start sending guests ashore at 5 am in the morning it is impossible to get them all ashore in time for their tours.  In such a situation I drift in, south of anchorage 1, and stay there until all the tours and the rush is gone and then slowly move towards my assigned anchorage. If you do that very slowly you can continue your tender service safely, as you do not increase the current/flow along the tender platform that much. It is often even much easier for the tenders to remain alongside the platform as there is a steady flow for the tenders to sit in.  Today none of that was necessary and we dropped the hook at 06.30 and were in operation, five minutes later.

Anchorage nbr 1 at Cabo San Lucas.

The 2^nd ship into today was the Sapphire Princess with over 3,500 guests on board. On average younger than my clientele and that resulted in the fact that by 11 am the whole bay was full of jet skies, parasail boats, banana boats, glass bottom boats, a booze-cruiser and a lot of shuttle boats taking guests to the beaches around Los Arcos which is the natural archway just inside the Cape.  To rent jet skis, you do not need a license and it also looks like most of the time that you do not need brains either.

So the skis are playing around the ship and are constantly in the way of all the ships and shore tenders; and they cannot always be seen from the tender wheelhouse. That means that our tenders have a sailor standing outside the wheelhouse as soon as we get closer to these jet-skis.  When you rent one, you are required to wear a lifejacket, when you own one, nobody forces you to. Thus I saw the scary sight of a father having a small child sitting in front of him, neither wearing a lifejacket, and thinking it was fun to go all the way under the bow and around it. Maybe very cool to do, but you cannot see what is sitting or moving on the other side of the ship with all the inherent dangers.

So on the departure I needed one quartermaster to stand behind the ships whistle and honk the horn at the appropriate moments.  Most of those in the water do not have a clue what five shorts honks mean (international danger or “I am confused about your intentions, get out of my way” signal) but it normally results in everybody moving away from the ship as fast as they can.  As it was nice weather with very little swell, it was not until we were well outside before we got rid of the last ones.  

It meant going slow; and if there is one port where I always try to make a flying start, it is Cabo San Lucas. It is a tight stretch to San Diego anyway but I am trying to get there as soon as I can on request of the ships agent. CBP seems to have changed their procedures again with the result that the clearance time takes longer. What it exactly is I do not know but the agent is asking for as much time in port as possible. No doubt we will find out on arrival what is going on. I have to go through the circus as well, as it will be my first entry by ship into a USA port since I joined the ship in Fort Lauderdale but then I had come through an airport and that is a whole different ball game as far as the CBP is concerened.

So tomorrow we will be at sea, sailing along the coast of California. This afternoon, as soon as we came around the corner, the outside temperature dropped significantly as we are now under the influence of the colder California current. Still the weather is supposed to remain good and it is forecast that we will have a beautiful day in San Diego.

Sunrise over the Pacific. Courtesy of 4th. Officer Martijn Schultz.