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  • A Baby Flyer and the “Hansen Sea Cow” Revisit the Sea of Cortez
  • Gregory MacDonald (bio)

June 1, 2003
Dear Katie,
I've just returned from a trip to the Sea of Cortez and since it involved the Baby Flyer and the Hansen Sea Cow, I thought you might like to hear about it.

The idea was to visit as many of the Steinbeck/Ricketts collecting sites as I could get the Baby Flyer to. I left three weeks ago in my "Travels With Maggie" rig with the Baby Flyer in tow. Since I knew that my 1936 Sea Cow would no-doubt find pleasure in playing mind games with me — and since there were to be some long stretches to cover — I took along a more modern and reliable outboard motor: a thirty-year-old 15 hp Evinrude that had been salvaged from the bottom of the Willamette River in Oregon. Indications were that the motor had spent at least a year on the bottom of the river.

As for the Sea Cow, it was extremely important for the motor to be running for at least part of the expedition. A friend of mine, David Vaughn, is perhaps the remaining guru of the really old Johnsons. After explaining where I was taking the motor and why it was critical to have it run, David took pity on me and agreed to take the project on. A few weeks later he called me to say that he had gone through the entire motor "and now it runs like a fine Swiss watch. You won't have any problem," he said. It was then that I knew I was in trouble. The Sea Cow had snookered my friend, made a chump out of someone who really cared. I thought of this motor's brother when Steinbeck referred to the latter: "It loved no one, trusted no one. It had no friends." [End Page 161]

On my way down through Baja I tried it out on the Mulegé River to make sure it was ready for the ocean. Sure enough, by filling the carburetor float bowl, tickling the primer needle, pulling ten or twelve times with the rope starter, turning off the gas, drying the fouled plugs, taking off the motor and turning it upside down, then remounting it and pulling another ten or twelve times it would start, but quick, turn the gas back on! I think that if Steinbeck had followed this simple regimen, he would have had a great deal more affection for their Sea Cow. And just think, mine is sixty years older than theirs was at the time.

I had the Baby Flyer in the water at seven of the collecting locations. This was not as easy as it would appear, as the Gulf experiences some of the most extreme tides anywhere, especially in the upper Gulf, home to one of the world's greatest tidal rushes. Tides like these, and the absence of launch ramps make every launch and re-loading problematic. Although not in this order, the sites I visited were Cabo San Lucas, Cabo Pulmo (Pulmo Reef,) La Paz, Puerto Escondido, Loreto, Bahía de la Concepción, and Bahía de Los Angeles. Most outings involved some sort of threat to life, limb, or personal property. In the mornings over coffee and bananas I would try to imagine what sort of hair-raising experience was on tap for me that day. It was a given that something terrible was going to happen, but what form it was going to take was the wondrous mystery of it all. A couple of examples? How about when the Baby Flyer had to be left in the incoming tidal surf because the 4 X 4 pulling it out got stuck? Oh, I should mention that it was on the trailer in the surf. This is without doubt the trailer boater's worst nightmare. Another time I was coming back from Isla Angel La Guarda toward the Bay of L.A. when the wind suddenly kicked from 0 to chubasco status in a matter of minutes. Fortunately it was abaft and I all but surfed back to terra...

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