Heading South

We just spent 2 days in La Paz doing last minute details. My anxiousness has subsided and turned in to just another departure. Whether on this boat or at the airline. We are well prepared, have a better equipped boat than most, and the season is right for the crossing. It's a one way street however. There will be no easy way to come back this way.

We will miss Mexico. Great people, great food. Oh, I will miss the flavors of the chiles.
Cheers, Dave and Booker


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On the Road Again

We are back in the water. 11 months for the boat on land, 153 work days for us living on the hard, and we are finally back where we should be.

This was the launch from hell. The Travelift that belongs to Marina Guaymas is too narrow for us so we have to use one that belongs to the neighboring Shrimp Boat repair facility.  It showed up about 3PM with hoisting straps looked like this, covered with mud.

I was not about to let them touch the boat with those so I made them wash them.   Of course they had to use my pressure washer and were not so happy about this.

The sailboat next to us came in after we did using the small yard lift.  Now there wasn't enough room between our boats to bring the big lift in to get us.  So the small lift had to take them away.

Time is ticking away







Finally we get the big lift in place.  Still dealing with the crap on the straps, with the help of all our boatyard friends, we covered them with plastic.


Notice the long shadows.  It's getting late.  Probably after 5PM by now.

And off we go.  Driving down the road over to the shrimper facility things went fine but the workers were now on overtime and still had to haul out a shrimper after we launched.  Not my problem, but I should have been more wary.

Finally in the water, the engines had trouble starting.  I had replaced all the fuel lines and there were some bubbles in the system that had to work their way out.

Now it's getting real late and these shrimper guys were giving me the bums rush out before I got a good test on the engines.  I thought they were just moving me back further from the lift but the next thing I know it they are pushing me out into the channel.  This is BS.



So I put the engines in reverse and the right engine dies.  I stopped the backward motion with the other engine but now the wind had pushed the back of the boat sideways and it was a mess.  Yelling in Spanish, I finally got the boat back into the slip to deal with the engine.  I was pissed that they did this too me but was so exhausted by this time that it really didn't register.

Now, with everything running properly, I put the engines in reverse, cast off the lines and backed out properly.   Anyway, we picked up a few scratches from this fiasco but nothing that can't be fixed next time around.

This is our last view of Marina Guaymas as we departed the next day.   What a great place it was to get work done and what an incredible community of boaters that are living there in their boats on land making the best of not sailing.  Adios amigos.

Livin' The Dream

It doesn't get any better than this. Ready to attack the barnacles.

At our last haulout, we had nothing growing on the bottom, so a pressure wash and scotch-brite scrub was all that was necessary to prep for the anti-fouling paint.

This time, we had barnacles on the bottom that had been scraped off by the yard guys when we got here last March..

The place where the barnacles grew to the boat had the remains of it's shell and glue, or whatever makes them stick so well. I was hoping that 10 months of dry Sonoran desert climate or searing summer heat would have loosened them up.  Wrong.  The entire bottom had to be sanded.

In Grenada I dry sanded and the dust was atrocious.  It went everywhere.  This year the plan was to wet sand so I made a dust shroud out of fiberglass, mounted a hose to one of the handles, and used wet sandpaper.  It was still a mess but at least I wasn't breathing the toxic dust.  After two full days of water spraying, paint flinging sanding and it was ready to paint.  I had two gallons left over from Honduras and we brought 3 new gallons when we drove here in May.
That gave 2 full coats and plenty of extra coverage at the waterline and other turbulent areas.

Booker's Birthday

We planned and had a bonfire down by the water for Booker's birthday. It was a Mexican Night Potluck. Go figure.

A boat recently came in with a family from Austria. The 2 boys, Noah and Jan, are 6 & 8 but the 8 year old's birthday is Feb 4 so we also made the birthday party for him.

 They left Austria 2 years ago.  They sailed the Northwest_Passage over the top of Canada and then spent last winter in Seward, Alaska.  They were the only boat in the marina.  The water was frozen around them and the snow was level with the deck.

They will be going to the South Pacific this year so we look forward to seeing much more of them.

The Lid

The freezer has been working like a charm.  The big problem is that the lid that came with the unit was only an inch thick and not so well insulated.

I started with 1/8" G10 Epoxy Board.  Basically circuit board material.  I used Ted's table saw and started cutting and epoxying. 

Once I made the lid piece, I used it as the form for the surround.  7 days, start to finish.  If I was charging myself US yard rates, this would be about a $2000 lid.  Good thing I work for free.

Return to the post-Sandy Shore

This is our driveway, the sand does not belong here

We flew back to Philly December 16th.
The mess from Hurricane Sandy was about as we expected.  Lots of sand everywhere.  All the boardwalks floated and were either moved, washed away, of ended up with debris under them.  After 3 days of digging out and the help of Davey Gdzinski's back-hoe, we are ready to start filling and leveling.  Then reconstruct/repair the boardwalks and bring in landscape stones to finish it up.

Our Christmas Tree

It's not really possible to have a Christmas tree on our boat but we did put lights around the cockpit and we do actually carry around this tree with us to use once a  year.  At least it doesn't weigh that much.