If this is a marathon (and it is) then in week four we hit the wall.
The sun comes up; the sun goes down. Every day could be any other day. Sometimes the wind is up, and sometimes the swells are up. Sometimes both the wind and the swells are up. Huge forces are constantly acting on the boat. We hear them and feel them, and we see the results in the things that break; the screws that haven’t moved in years that now unscrew themselves; the head door that unlatches itself and swings open at the most inopportune of times. But we know that if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other (so to speak) the miles remaining will eventually reach zero.
We are hand steering the boat. The Saye’s Rig doesn’t work well (or at all) when sailing downwind in swells. The autopilot is also acting up. Either it can’t handle the heat (constant 90 degrees inside the boat), or the swells, or both. We do not have a good downwind sail. We’ve sort of poofed out the jib in front and are using that to pull us along. We’re not the fastest boat in fleet, but we are doing all right.
The mood became a bit more animated a few nights ago when a flying fish flew into the cockpit and right into Robyn, who was steering at the time. She calmly picked up the flopping fish and tossed it back into the ocean. Things were more lively and upbeat for a while after that.
We crossed the equator under sail a few minutes after midnight GMT on Thursday, April 27, 2017 (4 PM PDT Wednesday).
The week was characterized by some frustration at the lack of steady wind, especially since a current was doing its best to push us back north. Since we had run the center fuel tank dry unexpectedly the last time out, and had not determined the exact reason why yet, we were a little reluctant to run the engine for any length of time. Doing so would require switching to the center tank, and if we had a clog in the fuel line, we would run the risk of going through the whole Mazatlan-to-Banderas Bay exercise again. Since the center tank was refilled in La Cruz with almost the exact amount of fuel we thought we had used, it should not have been empty yet.
Finally, we spent a good part of last Monday disassembling things and determining that we could not suck any fuel (or air) from the center tank-the only reasonable explanation being that the fuel line to the tank was clogged. Once we got a bicycle pump (every boat needs one?) inserted into the end of the fuel line and gave a couple pumps, whatever was in there popped right out and is now floating around somewhere inside the tank. But, we were able to run the engine for 36 hours until the wind picked up some.
I woke up on Monday morning with the realization that we were a thousand miles from anywhere. This is an odd feeling. We check in on the Puddle Jump net every night, but otherwise have not seen or heard anything manmade for days; not even a contrail in the sky-except for a helicopter. Out of nowhere one evening, an unmarked helicopter came and circled us at close range a few times, once at a very low level, lingering around our stern, and then flew off. The whole thing was kind of creepy. One of the other Puddle Jump boats reported they also had a helicopter encounter, and assumed it was a spotter for a nearby factory trawler.
We are anxious to get to shore and walk on solid ground, but we still have several hundred miles to go.
We had a good couple of days of wind, and then got almost too much. It wasn’t so much the wind, as the swells. The word swells doesn’t always describe undulating water so well; sometimes swells are like pyramids. Going across them tips the boat in all directions, slamming things, and people, first in one direction and then another, like gravity gone berserk. We don’t as much go across them as they move under us. We lost a package of eggs purchased at the La Cruz farmer’s market-completely crushed. We lost a bag of rice-ripped open and spilled down the cracks. We lost the plastic jug of distilled water for topping off the boat’s batteries-punctured and drained.
The combination of wind and relentless slamming also caused damage on deck. The mainsail topping lift, needed for reducing sail and keeping the boom from landing on our new solar panels, failed due to an unsecured shackle pin (how’d that happen?). The mizzen sail topping lift, needed to keep the mizzen boom off of our self-steering gear, failed due to extreme chafe somewhere inside the boom. Our mainsail lazy-jacks, for keeping the sail from flying away when it is lowered, failed due to being old and neglected. And in all this, my knee failed, somehow. It swelled up and could not hold weight for a day or two. It still hurts to bend it too much.
Then things changed. The wind went away. The swells got less confused. The Spanish chatter on the radio faded away to wondering if the radio was still turned on. We found flying fish on our deck every morning (What kind of games do they play in the dark?), and nervously watched lightning at night. With slow progress it will take longer than planned to get to Nuku Hiva, but that really doesn’t matter.
We checked out of Mexico in Nuevo Vallarta. Three officials boarded the boat-two Customs and one Immigration-and a fourth stayed on the dock looking important. One Customs inspector looked quite young, with braces on her teeth. Forms were filled out, documents signed and stamped, hands shaken, and then we were off. Our time in Mexico was over.
We started off in good wind, looking for our sea legs again. But then the wind died. We had a really nice wind on our third day and made 126 miles, but otherwise, with mostly light winds, we’ve been getting around 50 miles per day. That’s not good enough.
Our electrical power consumption has been higher than our power generation. That’s not good either. It’s also been difficult to make and hold a SailMail connection long enough to empty the outbox and download the inbox, so not as much communication as we would like.
On the sixth day we had both improved wind, and got our self-system working adequately. That let us turn off the electronic autopilot, improving on the power consumption.
Note: since we are leaving Mexico soon after this is posted and will be away from civilization for a while, we have set up a new tracking option with map. Please see our “Where are we Now” page for a map and details.
Once we were settled into the marina at La Cruz there was a strong sense of one thing ending and another thing beginning. Many of the boats that we’d met on the Baja Ha-Ha, and others whose paths we’d crossed the last few months, were here. Robyn ran into some of her friends from Turtle Bay and Cabo San Lucas. The owner of the Westsail 42 “Danika,” who we’d met at the Westsail 2008 Pacific Northwest Rendezvous in Port Townsend, stopped by to say hello. All up and down the docks, boats were preparing to cross the Pacific to the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia.
At the same time, with winter over and the summer approaching, many other boats were leaving to go back home up north or at least going northward into the Sea of Cortez. Some were preparing to be hauled out and put into storage for the season. There were many good-byes and see-you-next-years taking place. It all added up to a sense of change; an ending and a beginning, like a kind of graduation, maybe.
We had a long list of things to do while here, including figuring out how to leave Mexico. That sounds easy, but there is paperwork. Besides how to get us and the boat out of Mexico, we had to figure out how to enter French Polynesia. We signed up with the Pacific Puddle Jump for help with that. We are using an agent in Tahiti to process the documents and make our entry easier.
We also had several shopping trips to make before we left. The places we needed to go were spread along Banderas Bay and so to make it easier to get around, we decided to rent a car—if we could find one. We ended up taking a sweaty bus out to Punta de Mita at the north entrance to the bay to pick up a car. Once we were in the office, we had to sit around and wait for the car to be driven out from Puerto Vallarta. Why we weren’t directed to rent it there instead, well… we don’t even question those kinds of things anymore. In fact, we’ve been in Mexico long enough now that we usually don’t even notice.
We got the new solar panels installed that we had bought from Carlos in the laundry room of the El Cid Marina in Mazatlan. The two new panels produce more power than the four old ones. They work great with the wind generator, but the wind generator requires a shunt-type battery charger rather than a series-type, and that has led to some new electrical hiccups to work out because the engine alternator and AC shore power charger are series-type and the two types don’t work well together. It is always something.
Another project is to make new “stack-pack” sail covers for the main and mizzen sails. Instead of putting these covers over the lowered sails when they aren’t in use, the covers are attached to the booms and open at the top rather than the bottom. The sails are raised out of them and lowered back into them. For rigidity, we are sewing PVC pipe into the upper edges along the opening. It took a while to find the pipe and have it delivered to the marina (didn’t fit in the car). Now we are looking for an 18-foot zipper.
All of these searches, shopping trips and driving around are quite the little adventures. There are a number of stories to tell. I’m not going to go into them all now but, for example, we went to Home Depot (they call it Home Depot Mexico for a reason) and then took what we thought would be a shortcut to get us back toward Costco (which is freakishly identical to all other Costcos, right down to the free samples, and pizza slices you can eat while sitting at red and white tables under umbrellas). The word “shortcut” should say it all, but you’d also have to include ruts, potholes, mud, chickens and cattle. A few days later, after we drove all the way out to Punta de Mita to return the rental car, we flagged down a sweaty bus to take us back to La Cruz. The driver blasted loud music the whole way, while driving with his arm hanging out the window. You won’t see that very often on a public bus in the US.
A short list of things we’ll remember about Mexico:
1) The sometimes bizarre and stunning topography of Baja California
2) Boating among dry hills covered with cactus
3) A serious lack of rain
4) Watching Seahawks games on TV with Spanish play-by-play
5) Live Banda Music
6) Random fireworks displays popping up without explanation
7) Ever-present (and rarely landing) frigate birds and their nearly bat-like wing silhouettes
8) Dog sitting Rover in La Paz
9) The creepy birds that lurk around the docks at night
10) Mazatlan Pulmonias
11) “Mysticeti, Mysticeti; Slainte—got a copy?” Joe’s voice on the radio
12) Free outdoor movie nights at El Cid and La Cruz marinas
13) The daily radio nets and the information and assistance you can get from them, including ideas on who might have an 18-foot zipper
And of course, all the people we’ve met, boat names we’ve come to know, and the voices and faces we associate with them.
One big surprise in Mexico, for me anyway, was the number of Americans who live here either full time or part time, the communities they’ve built and the fact that many of them originally arrived on their own boats. Kind of gives some irony to the term “boat people.”
Highway signs in English are a sure indicator of Americans nearby.Driving in Puerto Vallarta after buying a piece of wood from Home Depot and with a Costco run loaded in the trunk.Some stores just call out to come inside, assuming it is a store.A ubiquitous sight in Mexico: black plastic water tanks on rooftops.Typical side street in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle with very rough stone paving. It’s usually just called La Cruz because, I assume, no one knows how to pronounce Huanacaxtle.On the bus to Punta de Mita.The Sunday market in La Cruz extends along the shore near the marina.More of the Sunday market.And even more of the Sunday market.
A funny thing happened on the way to Banderas Bay. We ran out of fuel. Or maybe we didn’t. Maybe we just had clogged fuel filters. For whatever reason, which we still don’t know absolutely for sure, the engine just up and quit sometime around 3 AM on Tuesday. We were left going nowhere, in the ocean, at night, with zero wind. It was nine hours before we got on our way again.
Both Puerto Vallarta and La Cruz are on Banderas Bay. It’s a popular starting point for the Puddle Jump and others going to French Polynesia. There is a large cruising community there, a sailing school and many boating related businesses. We had ordered some flags made by a woman in La Cruz and needed to pick them up, and we wanted to meet up with some of the Puddle Jump boats. Some of Robyn’s friends from the Baja Ha-Ha were there. We emailed the La Cruz marina asking for a reservation, but hadn’t heard back before we left Mazatlan.
Back when we were in Puerto Escondido, Robyn swapped a paperback that she was done with (some teen fantasy) for a paperback copy of The Martian that had been on the bookshelf in the laundry room. I’m not convinced it was a fair trade, but the deal was done. We already had the DVD, now we had the book, too, so I read it. In The Martian, an astronaut is mistakenly left behind on Mars and has to figure out how to survive until the next Mars mission can rescue him. It’s one thing going wrong after another. Just when he solves one problem, another one pops up. I’ve felt a lot like that for this entire trip.
We did not get fuel before leaving Mazatlan at 7:30 AM. We had last filled our main tank in Puerto Escondido before crossing the Sea of Cortez. With zero wind on that trip across to Mazatlan, we ran the engine continuously for 53 hours. We have three fuel tanks. The center tank holds somewhere around 100 gallons. The port and starboard tanks hold about 50 gallons each. At an average burn rate of about one gallon per hour (we think), we planned on switching to the starboard tank around 3 AM. There should be another 20 to 25 gallons left in the center tank as a cushion. We know from experience that the center tank gauge will read empty, but there will still be 25 to 30 gallons in the tank. We’d hoped to sail at least part of the way to Banderas Bay, but again, there were very light winds and some fog so we were burning through our fuel.
The fuel gauge for each tank is mounted directly on the tank. The center tank is the easiest to read. It only requires pulling back a small rug on the floor, opening a hatch in the floor, and reading the gauge. The starboard tank is a little harder to read. It requires opening a storage cabinet, pulling out much of what is stored in the bottom of that cabinet, opening a panel in the floor inside the cabinet, getting a flashlight and maybe a magnifier, and reading the gauge. Due to the location of the port tank gauge, we very rarely even try to read it. Let’s just say that a small mirror is most helpful, and so is the ability to bend your body in ways it normally does not. To make it more difficult, the plastic face of the gauge is clouded so only the relative position of the needle is discernible through the haze.
Pre-purchase survey photo from 2005 of Starboard tank gauge inside a then mostly empty storage cabinet.
Slight digression: I’ve been experimenting with radio email for almost a year. I’ve been trying to use Winlink, which is run by ham radio operators. I had a frustrating time finding stations to actually answer and accept my email, and finally learned that I might’ve been locked out of the system for six months. That might explain the disconnections I was getting on the rare occasions I could connect. We decided to stop messing around and opened an account with the commercial SailMail system. For several reasons, we held off trying to transmit in the marina and waited until we were on our way to La Cruz. It was early Tuesday morning, right about the time I should’ve been checking the fuel gauge on the center tank, when I sent the first email. My email connected and sent on the very first try and I was excited about that. That email produced the previous post about email at sea. Except for not knowing how to handle an “o” with two dots above it and messing up the word, it worked! But I didn’t know that at the time. It was my turn to sleep, but instead I was awake and thinking about the email—not the fuel tank—when the engine quit.
I immediately checked the center fuel tank gauge. It read empty. I went into the engine room and switched the fuel to the starboard tank. The engine and engine room were both very hot. We tried to start the engine again, but it wouldn’t start. If the tank truly was empty then there was probably air in the fuel lines. It would need to be bled out, but I’d never tried that on this engine before. On the other hand, we hadn’t run the engine long enough —according to recent experience—to go through all 100 gallons in the center tank. A blockage, such as a completely clogged filter seemed like it would also be a good reason, as would a fuel pump that wasn’t pumping anymore.
Fuel manifold for selecting supply and return tanks and transferring fuel. Sight glass on lower right just above yellow handle allows for visual confirmation of flow when transferring fuel.
The fuel line between tank and engine is quite long. Each tank has a supply line for drawing fuel out and a return line for running excess fuel back in. Diesel engines are fed more fuel than they can use and the excess fuel is returned back to the tank. Our manifold (which we custom built) can select one of the three tanks as the supply, and one of the three for return. We also put in a fuel transfer pump so that fuel can be pumped from one tank to another, either directly or maybe through external polishing filters, and we can either take a sample of fuel, or put in an additive, simply by opening and closing valves. We can even pump fuel out into a jerry jug if another boat really needs it.
Once out of the manifold, the fuel on its way to the engine first passes through a centrifugal water separator, then one of two Racor filters (only one is used at a time, if it should need changing, the fuel flow can be switched to the second filter and the first one changed while under way). Then it passes through a small electric fuel pump that was installed by a previous owner for the purpose of helping to bleed air from the lines, then on to the engine lift pump which is mounted on the engine and driven by a cam. The lift pump pulls fuel all the way from the tank, through the manifold and filters, and pushes it through the final fuel filter, mounted on the engine, and on to the injection pump which feeds the injectors. That is just about all I know about diesel engines, this one in particular, except that there is a lot that can go wrong in the fuel’s path from the tank to the cylinders, including no fuel in the tank to start with. One of those things was most likely preventing the engine from starting, unless it was something entirely different and far more serious and beyond my simple understanding.
Sitting in the engine room, completely covered in sweat (did I say how hot it was in there?) and looking at the manifold, I noticed that no fuel was visible in the sight glass. I had put a sight glass in the manifold for the purpose of being able to see if any fuel was being pumped by the transfer pump (Sight glass purchased from MSC Industrial Supply). I ran the pump and it easily brought up fuel from the starboard tank into the sight glass. The engine still did not start (I had to try). Then I switched back to the center tank and ran the transfer pump again. I was hoping to get nothing but air, proving that the tank was, indeed empty, but the sight glass filled right up with fuel. That would mean that the center tank was NOT empty, wouldn’t it? I switched back to the starboard tank anyway.
Next up was the centrifugal water separator. Water separated from fuel collects in the bottom of a canister, which then can be drained through a valve. When was the last time I had done that? I found a container and drained whatever was filling that canister. It was very dirty and smelled like diesel, but I couldn’t tell how much might be water. I began to wonder what happens if that whole thing fills up with water. I don’t know. I looked at the Racor filters. The bowl on one of them looked amber, the one actually in use looked black. I switched the valve handle to the amber-colored filter.
Then I realized something. When designing the fuel manifold, I worried about the transfer pump sucking fuel back out of the filters and engine. It probably wouldn’t if there was no air anywhere in there, but to be safe I had installed a valve to close off the supply to the engine so the transfer pump could only pull fuel from the tank. I had forgotten to close that valve when I’d just run the transfer pump, so maybe, maybe, the fuel I saw in the sight glass had not come from the center tank, but from the filters and engine itself. Then I thought, if that supply valve had been left open, couldn’t air get into the system through the fuel return and I could, indeed, suck all that fuel back out? It was too much to think about at this time, but it meant to me that the possibility of the center tank being empty was again the most likely problem. After all, the gauge needle was below empty. I just didn’t want to believe that I had let it run dry.
We have three old Perkins 4-236 manuals onboard. All three of them describe pretty much the same fuel line air bleed procedure, but with slight differences in terminology. There are three ports that you open to let the air out as you push fuel through the lines, closing the ports each in turn as fuel squirts from them. I tried this much of the procedure several times using the electric bleed pump installed inline after the primary filters, and also verified that the lift pump worked with the manual lever, at least. Each time I thought I had made some progress I tried to start the engine. The battery was getting weak. It still didn’t start, but there was still more to the procedure that I hadn’t gotten to yet. I was beginning to wonder why we had never practiced bleeding the fuel lines before we left home.
What I had trouble with was the rest of procedure. After those three ports were closed again, it said to loosen the pipe between the secondary filter and the high pressure pump and manually pump some more until fuel came out of that loosened connection. I could not get any fuel to come out. I even removed the connection nut entirely, and never saw any fuel. So, thinking that perhaps the secondary fuel filter might be clogged (it didn’t make a lot of sense, but I was running out of ideas), I changed it out with our one and only spare. This filter is not meant to be changed often. It is not entirely easy just to get to it. I had to remove the fuel return pipe from the injectors just to have room to get a wrench onto the bolt to get the filter off. After changing that filter, I also changed out the black Racor filter (as good a time as any). By this time it was well into Tuesday, we had sails up, and we were slowly making progress toward Banderas Bay, albeit at less than two knots with some 60 miles left to go. I really wanted to go to bed and “call the guy” in the morning, but there was no guy to call. Joe, the engine mechanic on Slainte, was hundreds of miles away. I wished we were still buddy boating so, if nothing else, he could give me some guidance. Perhaps if we could eventually sail close enough to La Cruz to make contact with the marina, they could send someone out to tow us in and then we could find a mechanic to take a look. That sounded like a good plan, but when I went through the mental image of the whole process, and what it would cost, it just didn’t sound all that good anymore. We already had a full schedule in La Cruz if we were going to leave with other Puddle Jump boats.
I went through the bleed procedure again, and again got nothing out of the feed pipe connection on the high pressure pump. It made no sense. How could I bleed fuel out of ports that were before and after this connection, but get nothing here? I got tough with it, yanked on the pipe connection, and it popped off—and there was the fuel—a lot of it. It had just been a tight connection. Who knows when it may actually have been last taken off.
My next problem was putting that connection back together again. I could not get the screw threads to line up. I was now angry that the procedure had made me take it off when clearly it hadn’t been loosened in years, and there obviously was no air in there blocking things. I bent it this way and that way, in a very limited space, and finally, with even more sweat and bashed knuckles, got it lined up and the threads started. By this time everything—tools, the engine, my fingers, even my face (from wiping sweat) was very slippery from being covered in diesel. I know people who like to work on cars and engines. I think that’s great. It just isn’t my thing.
The last step of the procedure none of the three manuals had any illustrations for. They simply said to loosen the connections on the two high pressure pipes at the atomizer ends (spelled atomiser since it’s British), which I assume were the fuel injectors, and turn over the engine until fuel runs out. But there were four injectors, what are the two pipes? Then, after reading it several times, I finally noticed that it was worded “…two of the pipes…” It did not say THE two pipes. It didn’t actually say how many there could be. So I loosened two of the pipes and cranked the engine, but the battery didn’t have the strength left to turn it over.
When we put in the golf cart batteries for the house bank last year, we kept the two batteries we had been using previously. They are the same type as the starting battery we still use. We had recycled the weakest one and kept the other one as a backup starter battery. I swapped it with the now dead battery. Checking everything one last time, I cranked the engine, and I kept it cranking. At last, not only did a fair quantity of fuel start flowing from the loosened injector pipes, but the engine almost started. I retightened the pipes, cranked one last time, and, after nine hours of trying, the engine finally fired up.
One more problem had been solved in our continuing journey so far, and as a bonus, I finally got some practice bleeding the fuels lines.
I can almost guarantee we will never run a diesel tank dry again. But I will also be very curious as to how many gallons it takes to refill that center tank. There should’ve been as many as 30 gallons left in there.
We actually made it to Banderas Bay and La Cruz before the requested start date of our reservation, which we learned had been accepted to begin on Thursday. We spent all day Wednesday anchored near the marina, wondering why our nearly drained backup starter battery was not automatically recharging. Once safely in a marina slip on Thursday, we did some troubleshooting and discovered we’d blown a 50 Amp fuse (really) in the charging circuit. We’re just not sure yet why that happened.
If you’ve read this far, then you deserve to know that I purposely did not make this a “long story short.” I just wanted to give a sense of some of what takes place onboard. Maybe somebody reading this who is thinking about cruising will actually try bleeding their fuel lines before they are forced to in the middle of the night. We were lucky that the engine didn’t quit at a more critical time.
This post also kind of balances out the idea that we spent the last month living in a tropical beach resort, sipping Mai Tai’s by the pool and playing shuffle board.
Mysticeti (left of center) in La Cruz marina. Also a good view of the wind generator up on the mast.Finally installing the wind generator in Mazatlan.Yes Dear, I did sneak one in when you weren’t looking, but where’s the Mai Tai?
We have one more stop before leaving Mexico and are currently on our way to that last stop, in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, north of Puerto Vallarta. We had to wait an extra week in Mazatlan for new solar panels that we ordered at the last minute. It was one of those typical Mexican deals: sitting in the marina laundry room, counting out and handing over a pile of cash to Carlos, who promised he’d try to have them to us from his supplier by Friday. We will try to install them in La Cruz but we have to figure out how to attach them to the boat since they’re a different size than the old ones. That will be another project. We finally did get the wind generator installed before we left Mazatlan.
This blog post exists (or doesn’t) as an experiment to test our ability to do two things: 1) Send email by radio to one of several receiving stations which are set up to receive it and forward it to its destination; 2) Use such email to remotely post to the blog without an actual internet connection.
This is our last chance to try this while we still have an opportunity to check the results before turning westward away from civilization. If you read this before we get to La Cruz, then you’ll know something we won’t. For us it will be kind of like Schringer’s cat. We won’t know until we get to La Cruz and find some Wi-Fi to check the results.
If it does work, we’ll be able to post updates as we sail toward French Polynesia. And we’ll have email access. However, it will be text only while at sea. (I am curious if the umlaut in the above Schrodinger comes through.) We won’t be capable of sending or receiving large files such as photos. Think 1980’s dialup modem on an intermittent party-line phone connection that sucks huge amounts of power from limited batteries that power your remote cabin in the woods-or in this case, a boat at sea.
The crazy thing about staying for a few weeks at a resort hotel in Mazatlan is that every day all around us people are on vacation, but for us it’s just another normal day.
We have things to do while everyone else sits by the pool, goes fishing or for a boat ride. There are even staff-led activities for those who just can’t stop watching the clock (I wonder if anyone actually shows up for aerobics at midnight—oh, we know what they mean). Everyone else gets their rooms cleaned and beds made, but not us. We brought our house with us and tied it to the dock. On the other hand, most people are here for a week and then go back home. We’re still here.
Early each week a new crop of kids (or adults) discover the lizards on the rocks.
We came to Mazatlan for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that it felt like we were moving forward from Baja California. From Puerto Escondido, we considered going back to La Paz for a while. There was plenty of good internet access available there. The phone always worked. There were banks and stores; everything we needed. We already knew where most of it was, and most of it was either within walking distance or a cheap taxi ride away.
As much fun as we were having just dinking around with Joe and Cathy in the dry, dusty remote places with the cactus, weird rock formations and sudden, swirling winds, we had a few things to take care of if we were going to actually take the next step in our planned journey.
From Mexico to French Polynesia is not a trip down the coast. It is a month at sea crossing the Pacific. Once started, there are no harbors to pull into out of the weather; no evenings at anchor to relax and regroup while the boat is not in motion. There would be no internet and no cell phone during the crossing, and availability of either at the other end can, we’ve heard, be iffy. We had things we needed to do before we could just take off, such as fix what was broken, both on the boat and at home, as well as find insurance.
The problem was, going back to La Paz felt like, well—it felt like going backwards. We’d already been there and done that. The next logical step, therefore, was to move onward to the Mexican mainland.
Mysticeti (yellow kayaks), with hotel curving around behind marina.
Mazatlan is a much bigger city than La Paz. Whatever we had found in La Paz, such as the Bagel Shop, English language bookstore, marine parts stores and pizza delivery must certainly have counterparts in Mazatlan. The problem we found when we got here, however, is that the city is more spread out, and the places we were looking for were not easy to find. It takes time to learn your way around a new place.
We’ve learned that you can buy produce from the produce truck, fish from the fish truck and donuts from the donut man.
One thing Mazatlan does have, which factored into our decision to come here, is an airport with direct flights to the USA. We had already decided that someone had to make a quick trip home to get our remaining ducks in a row there before we headed out over the horizon. We also made a decision to send the wind generator mounting adapter we ordered, as well as the replacement boost pump for the water maker, to our Seattle mailing address instead of taking the risk and expense of trying to ship them to us here. And once that decision was made, the door opened for all the other things we wanted to get from there as well. Julie went home to get stuff done and bring stuff back while Robyn and I stayed with the boat.
To avoid potential import duty on the things she was bringing back, the El Cid Marina office was nice enough to type up a letter with copies of all the paperwork to show that the boat parts were for a “yacht in transit” and already covered by our boat’s Temporary Import Permit. Going through customs at the Mazatlan airport with two fifty-pound bags of miscellaneous boat parts attracted a few extra customs agents to come have a look, but the letter did what it was intended to.
By the time Julie came out of the customs area of the airport terminal, most everybody else waiting for arrivals from her flight had already met their passengers and left. But then, finally, the doors opened and there she was, accompanied by a worker with a hand truck loaded with her bags. If I’d known there would be hand trucks, I would’ve thought of more things to ask her to bring back.
Once we got everything back on the boat it was just like Christmas; so many new things.
So, left alone for a week in a foreign country waiting for arrival of the parts we needed for our projects, what could Robyn and I do? Well, it was Carnival time, and there were parades. Who doesn’t like a Carnival parade?
We didn’t know what most of the floats were about. But we certainly thought about Julie at home driving around in the rain and snow, especially when we grabbed an open-air Mazatlan Pulmonia to zip us back through the crowded streets after the final Carnival parade.
We are currently working on a few different projects. We can keep track of the time of day by the aerobics music or bingo calls or volleyball shouts coming from the pool area. After three weeks we’ve finally learned that boaters in the marina get issued a different color of pool towel than do the regular guests (who knew?). With the new boost pump in the water maker, we are contemplating a couple of changes to the plumbing (should’ve brought more valves back from Seattle). The wind generator is all ready to be hoisted back up the mast, and we’ve gone out and ordered new solar panels to replace the well-aged ones we have. The wind generator and new solar panels mean some changes to the electrical system. We’ve already converted our water heater to run on 12 volts DC instead of 120 volt AC shore power, primarily to act as the “dump load” for excess power, but I really don’t see how we’re going to have any excess power to worry about. I’ve recently learned that there is supposedly still several bottles of Red Hook ESB ale stashed away in a compartment somewhere onboard, although the Mexican Indio beer is a new favorite. And, we signed up for the “Pacific Puddle Jump,” run by the same organization that did the Baja Ha-Ha. The Pacific Puddle Jump is less of a “follow the leader” down Baja thing, and more of an assistance with the paperwork getting into French Polynesia and bond-posting thing. There is no strict schedule, and boats leave from many locations at different times.
So, with all that, from here we plan to move farther down the coast, to La Cruz, or Puerto Vallarta. We heard there is a Costco there, which is always handy for stocking up for a month at sea. Then we plan to head west, sometime in April, as soon as we are ready.
On February 14th we said goodbye to Baja California. It wasn’t that we wanted to. In fact, we were getting used to the place and what Robyn calls “desert sailing.” I asked an expert once why there was no air filter in our boat’s engine and he said it didn’t need one because there are no dusty roads on the water. I’d have to disagree. Sailing in the desert with virtually zero rain, our boat was covered in dust all the time.
Before we left home, when looking at pictures of some of these areas we’ve just been to, the dry hills did not look all that appealing. But photographs do not tell the whole experience. They don’t show the changing colors throughout the day, or the fantastic shapes of some of the rocks and mountains, or the contrast of the land and the sparkling water. They don’t show the stars at night.
The terrain is like a painted backdrop on a stage. It is a still life painting. Nothing moves except a few birds. On its own, it is eerily quiet. Even when the wind blows, there are no tree branches to sway; the cacti stand perfectly still.
The longer we stayed in Baja, the longer we felt we could stay. In many ways it is a rustic place: dirt roads, few people and long distances. The locals we met are all some of the nicest, friendliest, happiest people we’ve ever met. All of them, with the possible exception of the La Paz Port Captain (a different story for another time), were extremely patient and helpful with our attempts to communicate. We keep thinking that a little house built on a beach at the end of a dirt road, twenty miles from anywhere, with a front yard full of collected seashells, would not be a bad place to just hang out and let the world do its thing somewhere else for a while.
Saying goodbye to Baja also meant saying goodbye to our buddy boat, Slainte, and Joe and Cathy. They’ve been our traveling companions, who were never too far away (although, somehow usually ahead of us), since last June when we moved out of our house, onto the boat, and dropped anchor near them in Port Ludlow Bay.
We had been planning to stick with them a little longer, to keep moving north for another week before finally breaking off and turning south toward the Mexican Riviera. But talk of a cold front coming through by the weekend, with 35 knot southerly winds and rain (RAIN?) kind of spooked everyone. Joe indicated that he and Cathy wanted to stay inside the protection of Puerto Escondido until the system passed. We had planned all along to be in Mazatlan by the end of February—for Carnival—but that was negotiable.
From the additional weather forecasts we managed to get online through an intermittent cell phone hot spot, it looked like if we left immediately we could beat the first system and make it to Mazatlan before a separate system was predicted to hit there on the weekend. So we said our goodbyes, skipped a birthday dinner, and left.
Except for a serious failure of part of our brand new water maker, it was one of the most mundane passages yet. It was 52 hours of droning on and on under power for 325 nautical miles through calm seas with not enough wind to bother putting up a sail. We read second-hand books that we had bought at the ex-pat American-owned bookstore in Loreto. We took turns sleeping. We ate. Between the three of us, we saw a few whales, dolphins, a turtle, a couple leaping billfish and two other boats: a commercial fishing boat and a Baja Ferry. At times, the sea surface looked more like a calm lake.
We arrived Thursday afternoon at the El Cid Marina (part of the El Cid Resort) in Mazatlan. As we came in the narrow channel through the breakwater, we could already hear loud, unfamiliar birds in the trees. As a guest in the marina, we are entitled to all of the amenities of the resort hotel, including a very large hot tub spa that’s actually hot, and multiple swimming pools, multiple restaurants, and just about everything else you can imagine being available at a vacation resort. This will not be a bad place to take care of some business before the next major leg of our journey, as well as to figure out what the heck happened to the water maker boost pump. It has completely quit boosting, which really disappoints me. But by now I realize that if I let these things get me down, we’ll never get anywhere.
Joe sent us a message saying that the storm came and the wind hit Puerto Escondido with gusts swirling down the mountains at over 60 knots. Slainte was heeled over to the rail, even while sitting there tied to the mooring. At least one boat broke free, and several dinghies flipped. The sailboat, Shannon’s Spirit, from Victoria, B.C., who we had spent a Sunday afternoon with at Lupe Sierra’s Restaurant in San Evaristo, arrived here from La Paz a couple days after us and reported that they had just made it out of La Paz before the Port Captain closed the port to departures due to the weather. We are feeling lucky that we made the decision that we did, and that we had such a boring trip.
As far as the second system forecast to hit Mazatlan: it came on schedule two days after we arrived. We received a tropical deluge that, if nothing else, removed the last bit of Baja dust from our decks.
Leaving Puerto Escondido and the canyons of the Sierra de La Giganta.I have not been able to adequately, photographically capture the bizarre shapes bulging out of the ground that are formed by some of the rocks in this area. That island in the center is covered with bulbous protrusions sticking out at all angles.This sunset just wouldn’t fade and we watched it for quite some time before finally getting out the camera. The land to the left is our last view of the Baja peninsula.Approaching the Mazatlan area, we are now officially in the tropics—again.A page from our own “Log of the Sea of Cortez” tracking our progress from Puerto Escondido to Mazatlan. The chart on the left is simply a grid marked off with latitude and longitude, with our position plotted every couple hours from start to finish.Marina El Cid. Iguanas sun themselves on the rocks around the marina basin.These heavy wooden rocking chairs, each with a different first name carved on the backrest, are one of my favorite, if curious, amenities.One of the swimming pools. The “caves” in the background lead to another section of pool on the other side.
Water maker failure update: The boost pump motor quit working because it was full of water. This appeared to be due to a missing seal around a screw that did not get assembled properly during manufacture. See photo below.
Disassembled pump chamber. The upper long bolt in this photo is unsealed. The seal for it was loose inside the pump chamber and is the small cone-shaped rubber washer to the right.
Water worked its way from inside the pump chamber to inside the case of the electric motor. Cruise RO Water has suggested that during fresh water flushing of the system, our boat’s pressurized water pump (we take flush water from our pressure system) may have forced the seal out of position from around the screw by causing too high of a pressure inside the boost pump chamber. This does not seem likely however, since the cone-shaped seal should’ve been pushed in tighter, you would think, if the pressure was too high inside the pump chamber. Our own usage experience and evidence suggests that the seal was knocked out of position as the bolt was inserted through the pump chamber during factory assembly, but of course, I don’t know for sure.
To be on the safe side, we are adding a valve to bypass our pressure water pump when flushing the water maker so that the water maker boost pump is pulling water from the tank rather than having it supplied under pressure. The boost pump itself is being replaced under warranty. We will get all this completed at such time when we are not floating around in a pool or sitting in a rocking chair.
Puerto Escondido somehow became what we were aiming for after leaving La Paz. We knew it was a large and almost landlocked bay capable of holding many boats. We knew that it was near Lareto, the second largest city in south Baja after La Paz, and home to many retired Americans. We heard that a marina was being built, or had already been built. There was a fuel dock. There was a boatyard for repairs and bottom painting. We also heard that recently, anchoring had been banned inside the bay and permanent moorings with a charged fee had been installed to be used instead. And we heard a rumor that taxis into Lareto from the marina were prohibitively expensive.
What we actually found when we finally got to Puerto Escondido was all of that. And a round-trip taxi to Lareto and back, twelve miles away, was 1,200 pesos, or about $60 U.S. In Mexico, you can buy a lot of groceries for $60, but not so much if you have to double that each time you go into town to shop.
There is a marina, with nice offices and friendly, helpful staff, and dock space for a few boats (I really do mean a few). The “marina” really is more than a hundred mooring balls which have been installed in the bay. It is a hurricane hole. There is a fuel dock, free showers, free self-serve laundry and a few garbage cans for boat trash. However, there is not even one snack or drink machine. There is a restaurant, open in the evenings, but no café or bar & grill or snack shop like you’d expect. There are a couple of new glass and steel buildings, and nice landscaping, but the buildings have lots of empty space. Several nearby buildings are still empty shells. What has been built has obviously been built with big plans in mind. It just hasn’t reached its potential, maybe. There is also a solid cruiser community with a local morning radio net.
Although we were technically not off-grid anymore, the public Wi-Fi for the marina was not operating most of the time. Even our Mexican cell phone had trouble holding a connection. Cell towers (tower?) appeared to be some distance away.
We hired a couple of young guys to come out to our boat to dive it and clean the bottom. Afterwards, their boat wouldn’t start and we towed them back to the marina dock with our dinghy and its little 2 HP motor. Their boat greatly outweighed us and I wasn’t sure it was going to work until we gained some momentum. A few days later we saw the same two guys using their boat to tow a 40-foot sailboat. One guy was towing, the other guy was steering the sailboat. They saw us, and you could tell they were making sure we saw them.
We had an odd experience in a grocery store in Lareto. Sometimes I’ll go into a store and feel like I’m in another country. This was true in a Costco we used to go to in south Seattle where it seemed like most customers were speaking Chinese or Vietnamese, and it was especially true of a Costco we went to in Chula Vista, California which even had a Mexican currency exchange window. But at the Pescadora in Loreto it was the opposite: we were in a Mexican store, yet it seemed like nearly every customer was an American speaking English.
I think there might be some kind of deal between the local taxi company and the rental car companies. It can actually be cheaper to rent a car for a day than to take a taxi to town and back. So we rented a car—twice. We made two shopping trips to Lareto, and shared a car with Joe and Cathy from Slainte for a sightseeing trip.
The plan was to go to a 300 year-old mission built in the mountains. That sounded okay, but who knew it was 25 miles up a narrow, winding mountain road, over a pass, and part way down the other side? For a while, we thought maybe we’d gone so far that we’d soon catch a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, but we didn’t. We met some friends of Joe and Cathy’s there for lunch. It was a fun trip, and nice to get off the boat and above sea level for the day.
San Javier Mission, built 300 years ago, somewhere in Sierra de La Giganta.
We had a tour guide, and Joe’s friend’s wife spoke Spanish, so we got the story, pretty much. Apparently, the mission failed because they couldn’t make it self-sufficient, but not for lack of trying. There is still an original 300 year-old olive tree on the grounds.
The natural spring water and lush vegetation gives the place an oasis feel.Back at Puerto Escondido, teaching Robyn how to relax and contemplate the future.The entrance to the bay is through the low gap on the left, to the right of that is the marina and buildings. This was a very calm day. We also endured a couple of days of winds gusting over 30 kts and whitecaps in the bay. This is the farthest we’ve regularly dinghied to shore yet. It’s nice not having a leaky dinghy anymore.Fuel dock, with boat yard behind.What we really wanted was a holding tank pump out. We waited over an hour for the pump to be brought, the hose primed and the connection to the sewer made. We also topped off the fuel tank. It was a nice day to just sit there for a while. They could make some money if they put in a little store with cold drinks and ice cream.
Way back in April last year (seems a lot longer ago) we bought a wind generator to sit on the bracket that came already mounted on our mizzen mast. The idea was that it would provide some battery charging current when the wind was blowing, whether the solar panels were getting sun or not. At the time, we were thinking simple things, like radar and GPS and lights. Now we have a water maker (battery killer), rudimentary refrigeration, electronic toys that constantly need charging, and other things that use far more power than we needed a year ago.
We had identified from Google image searches the particular model of wind generator that the bracket had been made for. Unfortunately, the company had gone out of business but we found a generator available in a warehouse near Seattle. We bought it, and it has been taking up space in the aft cabin since Day 1 of our trip. We’ve since heard that it is back in production again, as was expected, by a different company after it bought the tooling and manufacturing rights from the original maker.
I had envisioned installing the wind generator on the mast some sunny, unhurried day, maybe while anchored in a calm bay in Mexico surrounded by dry hills and a gentle breeze. That time and place turned out to be now, in Puerto Escondido. It was becoming a running joke that we needed to spend a few days to work on our wind generator, but something always interrupted us. So, already staying longer in Puerto Escondido than we had originally planned, and with the joke getting old, we dug it out, assembled it into its very awkward and heavy shape, and went about getting it up the mast.
We had had months to come up with a plan—I’ve spent oh, so many lazy afternoons lying in the cockpit gazing up at that bracket and imagining how we were going to get that thing up there. We executed the plan nearly flawlessly, except for one minor problem. The generator has a pin that fits down into the vertical pipe on the end of the bracket. It didn’t fit. The inside diameter of the pipe is 2 mm smaller than the outside diameter of the pin. That’s just one silly millimeter all the way around the hole, but there was no way it was going in.
When we had the masts and rigging off the boat two years ago I had measured the bracket. My measurements were in inches. The inside diameter of the pipe was measured at 1.5 inches. When we figured out that we were looking for an Ampair 100 wind turbine, made in England, the published dimensions we found were in millimeters. I converted all my measurements. Everything was right on to the published specs, except the pipe diameter. But I had measured that with a tape measure, probably rounding to an even 1.5 inches, or so I assumed. Perhaps there was some room for error there. But no, it is actually a 1.5 inch pipe, and 1.5 inches comes out to 38.1 mm. The 40 mm pin is actually 40 mm. It must be a metric standard pipe size. My measurement was surprisingly accurate the first time. A 40 mm pin does not fit in a 38.1 mm hole.
We lowered the wind generator back down to the deck. Then I went back up the mast and removed the bracket and brought it down for a closer look. Sadly, the inside diameter of the pipe was, really, truly, 1.9 mm smaller than the outside diameter of the Ampair pivot. How could this be?
I spent a long, mostly sleepless night going over all the possible solutions in my head, and rejecting most of them. One of the most intriguing to me, in the pre-dawn hours, was to disassemble the wind generator and remove what I had convinced myself was simply a chunk of anodized aluminum which was the pivot that fit into the pipe, find a machine shop in town, and have the guy skinny it up by 2 mm.
But then, as the sun came up on another day, one of the fundamental differences between me and Julie came into play. While I had spent all night fuming over it, even considering cutting our losses and putting the whole thing up for swap & trade on the morning net, she looked it up and found that there was an adapter available at the same warehouse near Seattle where we had bought it. The adapter is specifically for mounting a post-2001 Ampair onto a pre-2001 Ampair mizzen mast bracket. What do you know? Just like that, problem apparently solved—if we can get one sent to us here in Mexico.
In the meantime, after being here for two weeks, we’ve decided to leave Puerto Escondido and soon will be going our separate way from Slainte. They are heading farther north, eventually storing their boat and going home for the summer, while we will be turning back south and crossing to the mainland side of the Sea of Cortez. After coming so close, completion of the wind generator installation will have to wait until we can get the adapter.
The Ampair wind turbine all rigged up for hoisting and nowhere to go. The black pin on the bottom with the wire sticking out has to fit into the pipe that’s welded through the bracket.The bracket after it was disappointingly removed for closer inspection.
Eventually we expect to be in Mazatlan for a while. We should have consistent internet access there.
