I've always agreeded that the only difference from adversity and
adventure is attitude.

Here's proof.

Joe


Rough Waters: Billings couple loses sailboat off coast of Mexico
By LORNA THACKERAY
Of The Gazette Staff

Fear gripped Leslie Downing every time the swells threw her sailboat's
bow 30 feet above the churning waters off the Mexican coast and slapped
it down again.

A pre-Thanksgiving dream voyage the Billings woman and her husband,
Dennis, were making from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas at the tip of
Mexico's Baja Peninsula had turned into their worst nightmare.

Waves 20 feet high washed over the deck of the 41-foot sloop she and
her husband had named Christabella. Only a tether attached to his life
vest kept Dennis from falling into the storm-roiled Pacific Ocean.

Then the boat's 9,000-pound keel pounded an uncharted reef 300 yards
from shore. "I'll never forget that sound, the feeling you get," she
said. "I tell you what, I did a lot of praying."

The couple had been fighting the storm for eight hours and was nearly
spent.

"You hear about people becoming so exhausted they just give up," she
said. "That's about where we were."

"The adrenaline was way gone," Dennis said.

The engine had blown and the mainsail had crashed to the deck from its
56-foot mast as a chubasco - a sudden, violent tropical storm -
overtook them. The forecast before they had left Ensenada, Mexico, the
day before called for smooth sailing and 9 to 10 mph winds for the next
10 days.

The chubasco formed about 10 miles out at sea. To avoid the worst of
it, they had moved to within five miles of shore. Even there, winds
were stirring 15-foot waves.

Dennis, who had taken advanced training at a top sailing school in San
Francisco, had learned what to do in all kinds of emergencies. His
chart showed a bay not far from their position and he maneuvered the
craft into waters where he believed they could ride out the storm.

He hadn't counted on the unmarked reef - or the two rocks "the size of
a house" that suddenly rose from the crashing swells behind them. The
waves were dragging the sea anchor, and with it the Christabella,
toward those rocks.

"My insides got all hot and liquidy," Leslie said. "I believed we were
going to die."

Dennis had her get on the radio and issue a "pan" call.

"That's a step lower than mayday, but it means you've got serious
problems and need help," Dennis said.

They fired their emergency flares, trying to attract attention in the
small village they could see on shore, but the flare, "about as bright
as a match stick," made a disappointing arc into the ocean. Then they
tried the bullhorn, broadcasting their cries for help at ear-damaging
volume. Nobody heard them over the crashing waves.

Finally, they decided the time had come to set off their emergency
locator signal.

Leslie, who doesn't speak much Spanish, eventually got an answer on the
radio. Almost giddy with relief, she told Dennis the Mexican Navy was
on its way and would be there in 10 minutes.

"The Mexican Navy turned out to be three fishermen in a 15-foot panga
with a 75-horsepower engine," Dennis said with a laugh at home in
Billings. A panga is a small open boat, Dennis said.

The fishermen tried to tow the crippled sloop, but their own craft was
too small. They told the Downings to jump in the water and that they
would pull them out. Leslie balked.

"There was no way I could make myself jump," she said. "The wind was
blowing and the water was churning and I was like, 'Are you crazy?' "

The fishermen, battered by the waves and the larger sailboat,
maneuvered alongside. As Leslie was almost aboard the panga, a swell
knocked her inside and on top of the fishermen. Dennis was able to just
step aboard as the fishing boat rose on the breaking wave.

"Those Mexicans were heroic," Dennis said.

At great risk to themselves, people in the fishing village tried to
free the sailboat, but she sank in 30 feet of water, her mast the only
thing visible in the bay. A local diver tried to retrieve some of the
Downings' belongings but was interrupted by the arrival of great white
sharks. He slowly made his way back to shore, avoiding paddling or
splashing that the sharks could mistake for food noises.

As traumatic as the sinking was, the Downings say that overall, they
had a good experience.

"We had thought there was no more kindness left," Leslie said. "What we
have found is there is kindness out there in smaller pockets."

From the minute the fishermen arrived, the Downings received nothing
but kindness and sympathy, they said. Everyone - from the poor people
in the fishing village to strangers willing to lend credit cards -
rekindled their faith in the human race.

The matriarch of the village of about 300 - a woman named Adella -
offered them a fishing cabana and brought them fried clams with rice
and corn. The cabana was a cinderblock structure with a concrete floor
and bunk beds, "but it looked like heaven to us," Leslie said.

They were safe on dry land but had no money, passports or clothing,
other than the tattered togs they were wearing when Christabella
foundered. The villagers brought them some clothing to supplement the
diesel-saturated items the fisherman had retrieved from the sunken
boat.

A group of sport fishermen from Bakersfield, Calif., lent them $200 and
gave them food. One of the native fishermen offered to give them $200
he had saved.

"Nobody would take money for anything," Dennis said.

"We asked Adella how much we owed and if there was anything that she
needed that we could send," Leslie said. "All she kept saying is that
she was just glad we were safe. She told us to send her a picture of us
with our family and friends smiling. She said nothing else matters."

Once the Downings decided their boat would not be salvageable, they
signed a legal document turning it over to the town for whatever the
fishermen could retrieve.

Then they had to find a way back home.

Adella and her husband drove them up the peninsula to Ensenada, where
they could catch a bus to Tijuana.

"We looked like a couple of street people with our borrowed clothes and
what was left of our belongings in two plastic garbage bags," Leslie
said.

At Tijuana, the only document they could show was a police report of
the boating accident. Sympathetic border guards allowed them to cross
into the United States.

They took a trolley to the train depot in San Diego, but were unable to
get on a train that would have taken them to Santa Maria, where Dennis'
sister lived and where they had left their car.

A stranger at the station collected their belongings, got them a taxi
and called a hotel. After paying the hotel bill, they had $7 left, and
had a hot dog at a 7-Eleven.

Broke and bedraggled, they got a taxi to a Wells Fargo Bank in San
Diego. Looking as they did, and with no documentation, the Downings
didn't know how they would be received.

They showed a bank officer the police report and told their story. She
cancelled her appointments for the day and set to work helping the
Downings. Before they left the bank, they had $5,000 from their Wells
Fargo account in Billings in their hands.

The bank officer advised them to go to the California Department of
Motor Vehicles and see if the department could get them copies of their
Montana driver's licenses so they would have some identification.

They took a taxi to the DMV. None of the cab drivers they rode with
that day charged them, they said. A clerk at the DMV told them he
couldn't help, but a well-dressed man mingling among the customers
heard their story and asked them to step into his office. Dennis said
the man turned out to be the DMV director. He got the DMV in Montana to
fax copies of the driver's licenses to California.

From there, the Downings caught a train to Santa Maria. It was 1 a.m.
when a bus dropped them off at a hotel. Although they had cash, the
desk clerk said she couldn't let them in unless they had a valid credit
card.

They were sitting in front of the hotel when a car pulled up. The
driver, a tourist from Scotland, took them to the hotel and put their
room on his credit card. The next morning Dennis paid the bill in cash
and they were on their way.

His sister spent Thanksgiving in Arizona, but left the Downings a key
and the run of her house. After purchasing the necessities and
regrouping, they drove to San Francisco to have Thanksgiving with
Leslie's brother. He gave them some luggage.

The Downings made it home to Billings on Nov. 26. Leslie, a nurse, went
back to work Dec. 11.

They lost the sloop they had bought for $20,000 and spent another
$20,000 and months of labor refitting. Their homeowner's insurance has
agreed to cover personal property that went down with the boat,
including a computer, cameras and telephones.

The Downings put together a Christmas box for Adella and the villagers,
including a VHF radio for communicating with vessels on the ocean,
boxes of chocolates, and clothing, pens, pencils, crayons, paper and
coloring books for the children.

Despite disastrous results on their first attempt at an extended ocean
journey, their fascination with a lifestyle that began six years ago
when they traded a horse trailer for their first sailboat has not
diminished.

Leslie, who said she could barely swim when they got their first boat,
was hooked her third day of a trial run in Puget Sound.

"I loved everything about it," she said, and now considers herself "a
pretty good first mate."

Not even two months after the Christabella sank, they are ready to go
again. Dennis, a retired pharmaceutical representative, went to Puerto
Vallarta to check out a 45-foot sailboat for sale there. If it doesn't
seem right, there's another likely prospect moored in Tobago in the
West Indies.

Dennis would like to live on a new boat for the winter. Leslie wants to
sail it through the Panama Canal.