Sailing into a half-submerged container is every sailor’s nightmare. On Saturday, April 3, the 65 boats that sailed out the Gate in BAMA’s Doublehanded Farallones Race came close to living that nightmare because of an accident the day before.

Weather conditions Friday morning had been severe. Rain cells rolled through the Bay, bringing driving rain and gusts to 40. Outside the Gate, off Bolinas, a container ship lost five empty containers — two sank immediately, one was barely afloat and two floated high. The Coast Guard responded to the scene, monitoring the containers, while Tim Parker and his crew got suited up for the ride out.

"It was rougher than a cob," Parker recalls. "We were on Oscar Niemeth Towing’s 90-ft tug American Eagle taking green water over the cockpit." By the time American Eagle reached the coordinates given them by the Coast Guard — they left the scene to aid a boater in distress — only two containers could be found. "We assume the one that was barely floating went down," Parker said.

"One was already in the surf — it wound up on the beach — so we monitored the other one," said Parker. "It went across Duxbury Reef, close to shore, got caught in Bolinas Lagoon’s eddy, then circled south." The skipper of American Eagle then carefully edged up close enough to the container for the crew to get a line on it.

"It had a large tear on the top and already had a lot of water in it," Parker said. "We didn’t have it under tow for more than 100 yards before it took a roll and started taking on a lot of water, so we cut the tow and stood by to make sure it wasn’t floating near the surface. It took about five minutes for it to go to the bottom."

The following week, Parker Diving was contracted to remove the container from the beach, which Tim Parker said went smoothly — even though the public had pried open the container’s sealed doors, allowing water, sand and gravel to get in. "We had to tip it to pour it all out before we could move it," he noted.

Parker says his company gets, on average, one call a year to salvage a container, and it’s just bad luck that they had two such calls within one week (see March 29’s ‘Lectronic). An investigation is underway to find out why the containers fell off the ship in the first place.

As we post this, the exhibit floor of the Strictly Sail Pacific boat show at Oakland’s Jack London Square is bustling with frenetic activity in anticipation of tomorrow’s opening. National, international and local boat and gear manufacturers, as well as a broad range of service providers, will be on hand to share their expertise and sell their wares throughout the four-day event (tomorrow through Sunday, beginning at 10 a.m. daily).

Among the highlights of every Strictly Sail show are one-hour seminars on a impressive range of topics — everything from on-board yoga tips to surviving a shipwreck. If you’re interested in either of Latitude‘s big cruising rallies, the Baja Ha-Ha and the Pacific Puddle Jump, you’ll want to attend one of our informational gatherings: Ha-Ha How-To, this Friday at 2 p.m. or Saturday at 3:30 p.m. (both in the Windward room). Our presentation on Tahiti and the Pacific Puddle Jump will be Saturday at 4:45 p.m. (in the Regatta 1 room). Thanks to our Tahitian partners, we’ll be giving away an authentic black pearl bracelet, in addition to other items of swag, at the Tahiti seminar. See the website for a complete listing of seminars, exhibitors, and special events.

If you’ve been longing to take a look at the actual America’s Cup in person, but missed your chance during its Bay Area stopover during the victory tour, you’ll have another opportunity at the show tomorrow. The oldest trophy in sports will be on display from noon until 7 p.m., where it will be joined by BMW Oracle Racing Design Coordinator Ian Burns and sailors Brad Webb and John Kostecki (a Bay Area native). At 5 p.m., the trio will sign free posters before giving a multimedia presentation — with some killer video — and a Q&A session. It’s definitely worthwhile.

This ‘Lectronic item is being brought to you, in a large part, by the little black thing sticking out of the port side of the Mac computer sitting in the main salon of Profligate. It’s a Banda Ancha, or modem, we bought from TelCel in Puerto Vallarta.

The little beauty cost us about $80, which included the first month of service. The cool thing about the Telcel program is that you can sign up for service by the day, week or month. There is no need for any of those ‘lifetime’ contracts, as required by most U.S. service providers. So after this first month, we won’t be charged anything until we want it fired back up in November. Sweet. Meanwhile, we’re paying about $45 a month to our masters at AT&T for a modem we haven’t used in four months. Why, we wonder, does the U.S. government let service providers get away with seemingly anti-consumer programs like that?

Anyway, no matter what the cost, a modem is only as good as its speed. As we sat at the Palomar Marina in La Paz, which is within 3G-tower range, we can tell you that the modem honks like a duck. We, as well as many others, can testify that it gives us faster internet access than we have at the Latitude offices in Mill Valley. What’s more, based on our recent outing to Caleta Partida, we can report that very high internet speeds are also possible at some spots almost all the way out to the island, a distance of more than 20 miles from La Paz. In fact, we’re currently gathering lat/long positions from Sea of Cortez participants regarding where they got good internet access close to the Caleta Partida anchorage.

According to Bill Lily of the Newport Beach-based Moontide, depending on what cell towers are around and what kind of modem you have, there are four internet speeds. As a result, you can sometimes get a couple of bars, but the internet access is painfully — if not worthlessly — slow.

The current Telcel programs aren’t as good as the original ones, which offered unlimited access. So just because the folks on the boat next to you can happily bit torrent all the movies they want, it doesn’t mean you can without big additional costs. So read the fine print of any offered contracts.

While the situation isn’t perfect — which would be high-speed, low-cost, unlimited internet access everywhere — for sailors such as ourselves, who first sailed to Mexico without any electronic navigation back when it was almost impossible to even make a phone call home, it’s a delightful mind-blower. The only downside is that some folks — we won’t mention Doña de Mallorca by name — seem to have a crack-like addiction to the internet. That’s not a good thing when cruising.

Check out the May issue of Latitude 38 for the GPS coordinates for the most honking internet connections off Isla Partida.