Magical Christmas comes to kids sailing along Baja

Thursday, December 22, 2005
To this day, Barry Wright thinks of Dec. 25, 1961, as "the magical Christmas."
"It's when my understanding of the words, 'It's more blessed to give than to receive' changed," the Lake Oswego man says.
Barry was 17 in 1961, growing up in Southern California. That December Barry's aunt, Thyrza Pelling, invited him on an excursion into the tropical waters of the Gulf of California. "She owned a 62-foot staysail schooner named Destiny, tied up in San Diego," Barry says.
He couldn't turn down the offer. Thyrza was his mother's twin sister, 41 years old, widowed "and living as though life were both an adventure and a duty."
Today Thyrza is 85 and lives in Lake Oswego. She's traveled the world, climbed many mountains and still recalls Christmas of 1961 as one of the best in her life.

Early Sunday morning, Dec. 17, Thyrza, her sons Rodney, then 20, Trevor, then 15, Barry and a hired captain powered Destiny out of the harbor and headed south. "We ran diesel all the way down the coast of Baja because our vacations were short and warm seas were 900 miles away," Barry says.
On Christmas Eve they rounded the tip of Baja and entered the tiny harbor at Cabo San Lucas. "Cabo in 1961 consisted of seven adobe houses painted white and arranged in no discernible order," Barry says. "Between and around them was nothing but white sand and an occasional cactus."
There was a rickety pier with a wooden shack where local fishermen took on fuel and water. Along the pier was space for only one boat, and another boat was ahead of theirs.
It was a 40-foot ketch, Barry says, named The Maori. From a distance Barry and his cousins could see "three young, totally naked children playing tag in the rigging." A "large man with thick, dark hair and a beard" was at the helm as it moved slowly toward the pier.
Thyrza wanted to meet the folks on the other boat; she had Rodney take her over in a dinghy.
She learned the man was Howard Taylor, brother of Elizabeth Taylor. He and his wife and four children, ranging in age from 9 years old to 11 months, had been inching their way south from California for several months. They'd run out of water a few days before, Thyrza says. "They'd been drinking milk and fruit juices," which had caused digestive problems. "They were very nice people, and they'd had a terrible time."
The water in Cabo was good, clean rainwater. "They got water and got cleaned up," Thyrza says.
But here it was Christmas Eve, they had a boat full of children and no gifts to give them. "Because they'd run out of water and become sick . . . that meant they wouldn't reach Mazatlan and its stores by Christmas," Barry says. "They explained to the children that Cabo was too small for Santa to find."
Barry, his aunt and his cousins felt like they were watching a fable unfold before their eyes.
That night Thyrza assembled Barry and her sons. She'd brought a small Christmas tree from San Diego, she said. "I said, 'Why don't we give this to the children. They'll get much more fun out of it. You're all so grown up,' " Thyrza recalls. "And they all just lit up. They thought it was a great idea."
Thyrza woke the boys early Christmas morning. "They went over the side into the dinghy," Thyrza says, "and I handed them everything very quietly." She included boxes of candy canes and some small treats.
"I didn't have toys," she says. "I hadn't bought anything for little children. We thought the tree would be an emblem of Christmas. It was all I had, so that's what we gave them."
Barry, Trevor and Rodney took pains to be silent as they boarded The Maori. "The fear was you'd wake them and ruin the magic," Barry says. They set up the tree on the fantail, hung candy canes from its branches and set small food gifts at its base. Then they rowed back to the Destiny.
"We stayed below deck," watching through portholes, Barry says. "We had binoculars, and we waited for the moment to come."
Barry remembers what happened as though he were watching a silent movie: "A little girl, 3 or 4 years old, emerges, actually rubbing her eyes. As she takes her hands off her eyes, she sees the tree. She's jumping up and down. Then she runs below deck, then comes back up on deck. The hatchway is crowded with kids and mom and dad. Everyone gathers around the tree, it's a melee."
Finally, Howard Taylor "looks at us and just raises a hand very slowly. And that's all. Then we left for Mazatlan."
Days later, Barry and his cousins flew north to return to school. His aunt Thyrza ran into the Taylor family in Mazatlan. They were beginning a trip around the world, they told her. Later Barry read they'd made it to Tahiti, but he never learned if they made the full circle.
"I've always thought it was an awfully sweet Christmas story," Thyrza says. "It happened so spontaneously."
Barry believes "my life took a large step toward adulthood" that day. "You run into so few really magic moments in your life," he says. "And that was one where all the magic pieces came together."

Margie Boule: marboule@aol.com, 503-221-8450.

Hunting/fishing report

Cabo San Lucas: Very good billfish action, with some boats reporting big days of four and five fish. Mostly striped marlin, but a few blue marlin showing. Yellowfin tuna and those big Humboldt squid also biting.

$19M for repairs to Cancun beachers

Wednesday 14th December, 2005 Posted: 15:45 CIT (20:45 GMT)
CANCUN, Mexico (AP) – Crews will begin working in mid–January to replace the powder–white sand Hurricane Wilma stripped from Cancun’s beaches and plan to finish the job by the last day of April, President Vicente Fox said on Tuesday.

The federal government has pledged 200 million pesos (US$19 million) to dredge the ocean floor and replenish the beaches, estimating it will take between 2 and 2.8 million cubic meters (70 to 100 million cubic feet) of sand to finish the job.
"The idea is that in the end, we are better than we were before the hurricane," said Fox, addressing a group of business leaders after a regional energy summit he hosted with Central American leaders.
Belgian maritime engineering and construction firm Jan De Nul beat out four other bidders to win the rebuilding contract, and will be charged with maintaining the sand after it has been replaced, Fox said.
Major coastal developments, including large U.S. resorts like Miami Beach, often bring in outside sand to bolster beaches and dunes and protect against erosion. Hurricanes can displace huge amounts of sand, stripping some beaches while making others bigger.
Packing 145 mph (235 kph) winds and 30–hours of relentless rain, Hurricane Wilma walloped Cancun – the country’s premier resort – in October, destroying homes, businesses and hotels and blowing away large swaths of beach. Most of the city’s normally glittering resort hotels, restaurants and U.S.–style mini–malls remain closed nearly two months later and don’t plan to open until January or February at the earliest.
Tourism Secretary Rodolfo Elizondo called rebuilding the beaches "very, very, very important for all of us."

In addition to governmental efforts, private tourism firms have pledged to finance an independent project to rebuild 2 miles (3 kilometers) of beach adjacent to 25 hotels in Cancun’s hotel zone – a strip of coastline dotted with high–rise resorts and flanked by the Caribbean on one side and a lagoon on the other.

Fox also promised Tuesday that work would begin next year on the construction of a new airport for the "Mayan Riviera," a collection of resorts that includes Playa del Carmen and stretches along the Caribbean coast south of Cancun.
Tourists visiting the fast–growing area currently fly into Cancun, then take buses or vans or drive rental cars the rest of the way.

Though Wilma roared through Playa del Carmen, the damage there was not as extensive as in Cancun and life is largely back to normal. Tour operators report that many visitors unable to travel to Cancun have headed to the Riviera Maya, where Wilma’s winds actually caused the beaches to get bigger.
Fox said that increases in the number of tourists visiting Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas and other resorts on Mexico’s Pacific coast in October and November has softened the blow of Cancun’s problems for the country’s tourism industry.
"Fortunately, those who could not come here have stayed in the country in nearly the majority of the cases," the president said, citing hotel occupancy rates elsewhere, but failing to provide concrete statistics.

Neil Morgan columns - Voice of San Diego

By NEIL MORGAN
Monday, Dec. 19, 2005

Flying northward low over the Baja California wilderness in the co-pilot's seat of a small private plane, I listened as my friend the pilot flicked on his radio.
"This is Aero-Commander niner-three-niner-two Romeo," he said. "Any aircraft over the Baja peninsula please come in."
No voice responded, not even any crackle of static. There was only the smooth easy drone of the engines.

There was no human sign: no village, no road, no boat, no ranch house, no cow; only the Sierra de la Giganta.
Yet the heading along which we traveled is one that is in frequent use between San Diego and the tip of Baja California below La Paz. Especially at this holiday season, Southern Californians and tourists have been seeking out the smart resorts of Las Cruces at Cabo San Lucas.
Below us was the impenetrable Sierra de la Giganta: mountains and canyons building up in tiers from the Gulf of California in a tight pattern of increasing height and depth that might have been created by a lunatic devil instead of a god, and put there in a frenzy so that each deeper canyon and sheerer precipice dwarfs the previous blunder.

The pilot tried again.
"This is niner-three-niner-two Romeo 20 miles southeast of Concepcion Bay. Any aircraft please come in."
No answer.
"Not much traffic today," he said, and replaced the microphone in its bracket.

Off to our right, the Gulf of California shimmered turquoise, with jade green swirls close in to shore where the shallows lie. Across the gulf a hundred miles, the Mexican mainland rose faint and hazy.
It was from a point south of here, in the village of Loreto, that Franciscan priests set out on foot in 1768 to walk to San Diego and launch the mission chain from which California grew.

"It's strange," the pilot said. "Over this 800-mile long peninsula you can often see the sea on both sides. Yet there's not a pilot alive who can resist picking up the radio and looking for company."

Flying southward two days before from San Diego to the Cape San Lucas resorts, we had talked over the radio to a distant voice that grew clearer as our planes came closer.
Soon we had recognized the voice as that of Abelardo Rodriguez, son of a former Mexican president, who built three resorts on Cabo. Now we talked, along this lonely route suspended over violent mountain peaks, of the weather, of our families, of marlin fishing, of the resorts and its famous chess games.

The radio in our plane came suddenly to life. It crackled and a faraway voice with Mexican accent spoke in English.
"Any aircraft over Baja California, can you hear me? This is Mike, in a DC3 departing Scammon's Lagoon for Tijuana." Static drowned out some of his words.
At my left, our pilot responded quickly, introduced himself and gave our position. Five minutes later, he and Mike were calling each other by first name, and the Mexican had promised to visit him at his bank in La Jolla.

The canyon of Santa Rosalia's once great copper mines opened up below us, and we gazed down at the isolated village that refused to die. In the 1920s, this was the world's richest copper mine; but then the veins of copper grew scarcer and scarcer. The French owners abandoned the mines.

When several thousand of the townspeople could not or would not leave, the Mexican government opened the mines again, and a U.S. mining expert went to Santa Rosalia under the Point Four program, and now smoke was rising again from the copper smelter of Santa Rosalia.
The village faded out of sight and we were over the great flat central desert of Baja California. The swooping arc of Vizcaino Bay, midway the peninsula on the Pacific side, made the sea look like a massive inland lake, bounded on the outer west by the freakish woodlands of Cedros Island.

Far to the north, as the setting sun from our left purpled the Sierra de San Pedro Martir at our right, little green valleys began to creep up from the Pacific side of the peninsula. Dry-land farming began around San Quintin, and the subtle tints of the Baja barrenness gave way to greens of cultivated areas and to earth reds heightened in their intensity by the slant rays of the sunset.
There were more planes in the air now as we drew closer to the border cities. Radio voices grew gradually into a babble. There were more people below, and the hunger for contact was gone.

In earlier decades, the mysteries of this sparsely peopled peninsula captivated the authors Erle Stanley Gardner and Max Miller. More recently, they have become the scientific focus of an enlightened management at the Natural History Museum of San Diego, which released the museum from its century-old provincial research. It made itself -- through change of name, budget and goal -- the natural history museum of the two Californias, Baja and Alta. It is evidence of the closeness of the land of north and south California, divided only by an arbitrary political border that was drawn to ensure inclusion of San Diego Bay as American property.

In 1697 Loreto was the capital of both Californias. Now it is a dusty and remote Mexican town deep in the wilderness over which we had been flying.
Mexico gave up Alta California, that part from San Diego northward, in 1848, and a window in the national military academy at Mexico shows a map of Mexico as she once was, her border snug against that of Oregon. The only revenge of the losers is in the heritage of names the Mexicans gave to Southern California: names like Azusa, Cucamonga, Malibu, Ojai, and Pismo.

For San Diego, it is a humbling footnote of history to learn that San Diego and Tijuana were separated, long before their existence, by an incidental clause in the treaty ending the Mexican War in 1848. All that the U.S. negotiators considered significant was the natural harbor of San Diego, then barely settled. The international border was therefore drawn in a straight line across the desert from the Fort of Yuma to a point just south of San Diego Bay. Today, the crossing between Tijuana and San Diego ranks as one of the several busiest in the world.

Neil Morgan is Voice's senior editor.