Back at the anchorage: Day 1

Sat. Mar 13, 2010  11:20 am CST

19° 8.835 N 104° 43.010 W

A month to the day I left San Carlos, I left Barra de Navidad for places south. This time aboard the sailing vessel BLISS. 

This morning I got  up at 6:30 and spent three hours doing final packing, loading (extra chain, fresh water), and saying goodbye to friends. Fred came to the marina and helped with dock lines, and with the high tide I had plenty of room to motor slowly through the canals of Barra to the sea.

Close in (within 4 miles of the Barra headland) there was a lot of confused currents with an occasional large wave, but it's always like that, and my practice is to motor out to the big Pacific rollers before hoisting sail. Today the wind was almost right angles to the waves and trying to bring BLISS' nose to the wind meant lying abeam to the sea (bad idea). I split the difference by swinging the boom as far starboard as it would go, moving the lazy jacks to the mast and hoisting. That worked well, and my thoughts are that I might keep the jacks there until I drop sail.

I'm currently motorsailing SE at 4 knots for the the anchorage at Santiago.

5 pm Update-

Settled into anchorage at Santiago Bay, took a few minutes to find an open network, but I did. This evening I'm going to pick up the boat a little. In my hurry to get out of the Cabo Blanco marina on the tide, I just threw stuff onto the v-berth. CB was driving me crazy.

I'd spend two days scrubbing the boat and the next day some guy upwind of me would start a trash fire and then leave it to smolder and die. That would usually take all day, smelling the smoke and the boat would be filthy again.

Here in Santiago it's the waterski boats who throw in a tour of the anchorage to whomever they're towing. There's three big power boats and three jetskis here towing people through the cruising fleet. But it's better than the smoke and it looks like they're having fun. At sundown they'll leave us in peace.

Thanks to the 1st Mate for introducing me to Hunt's boxed tomato sauces. They're good, easy and fast. Hard to beat.

Finally, boating for the couch potato...

When I saw this on GIZMAG, one of my favorite websites, I just HAD to post this. Now it doesn't matter who you are, if you can sit, lounge or lay down on a sofa, we've got a boat for you! For those of you who might feel just a little guilty about cruising in the sofa-boat, I should mention that it has all-electric propulsion and can come with add-ons like a wet-bar and stereo.

Poor Mexico... except for Carlos, that is...

Today Forbes Magazine named Mexico telcom owner, Carlos Slim, the "World's Richest Man," edging out Bill Gates and Warren Buffet for the honor. Poor Carlos has only 53.3 billion dollars to rub together.

Carlos Slim, 70, world's richest man. At 64, I am not.

But I've got 6 whole years to catch up to him.

And since we're on the subject of Mexico and money, I was enjoying an imaginary scene in my head where, Mexico and Germany are having a conversation. Mexico says to Germany, "No thanks for the work ethic, but we like the polkas!"

In other Non-News:
I've been sewing up a storm down in Barra, putting in long days to recondition the dodger that we had made for us in San Carlos. The threads are breaking from the sun and abrasion by the boom as it swings across the top, sometimes dragging an unhoisted mainsail with it. Also there was a place where I put my elbow through the sunbrella. It didn't bother me so much at the time since it kept me from falling overboard, but the unsightly hole has been repaired with some white naugahyde I had onboard. I did both sides with the nauga so it looks better. The entire aft portion had to be rebuilt because of abrasion, accumulated crud, and a switch from snaps to zippers for the sunbrella awning I built as part of the cockpit enclosure. Also I'm building a screen windshield that will zip into/onto the front to knock down the wind. It's a dark green and is a lot easier to see through than the tan colored stuff I used for the enclosure... and the enclosure itself will need some restitching and webbing replacement (nylon webbing turns into dust in Mexico's glaring sun), but the enclosure has done a fine job of keeping the sun off my lily-white (not really) skin. There's really nothing to photograph now, just piles of green fabric laying around a sewing machine. Whereas Carlos has piles of green money just laying around. Wanna' trade?

Enough.

I've been spending more and more of my time deleting comment spam from my blog... I'm implementing "Word Verification" now because my time is more valuable to me than it is to spammers and their machines. The world is host to some scum, and that's all there is to it.

The Good, the Bad and the Costly

Starting off with the Good, I have my mid-morning break on the boat: an Almond croissant and expresso...

The French Baker, those of you who know Barra can attest, is a fine man. He gets up at O-Dark Thirty and bakes lovely things for his admirers throughout the anchorage and marinas. Around 8 am, he jumps into his panga and motors out to these places, selling his baked goods to us at reasonable prices. Once he's made his rounds, he returns his panga to Cabo Blanco, where I keep my boat, BLISS. So if I miss him at 8 (because I'm usually on the ham radio, getting weather reports and forecasts) I can catch him when he returns.

The Bad is the Cabo Blanco marina, which is largely occupied by sports fishing boats and some panga fishing charters. The marina charges about one fourth the rate of the Big, Rich Marina at Grand Bay (which is home to several megayachts). Because these are the cheap seats, nobody pays much attention to the infrastructure of Cabo Blanco. One of the main uses of the marina is as a water ferry station between one end of town (the barrio) and the Grand Bay Hotel, wherein stay the likes of the Governors of various US and Mexican states (Arnold comes here). The cheap labor from the barrio gets their ride to work here at Cabo Blanco. As long as the docks don't totally collapse, the rest of it is ignored. The marina manager is middle aged woman who knows nothing about boats or marinas and sits in her office eating and watching soaps on Mexican TV and once a month, collects the money for the slips. Don't take her a problem, she'll just shrug, if she's even there. A sweet job. So, like most places in Mexico, if you need a job done, you do it yourself... like when the electricity goes out.

The costly.
Following that train of thought is the repairs on the Nissan Quest I drove down this year. When I go over a tope (speed bump) in this car it tends to bottom out. I took the car to a shop in Melaque, gave them 1,000 pesos for a deposit on the parts (MacPherson struts on the front, shocks on the back) and waited for two days while they didn't touch the car. When I went back to pick it up, they gave me the 1,000 pesos back... an ominous sign (you NEVER get refunds in Mexico).

So I drove to Manzanillo with the part numbers I got off the internet from Autozone. I found the best thing to do is search Autozone US for the part, get their stocking number, write it down and take it to the store in Mexico. They punch the number into their computer and the part pops up. No complicated translation.

Autozone had the rear shocks for the car so I bought them: 900 pesos for the pair. The struts, though, can't even be special ordered. They say they don't exist in Mexico... so I got directions to the big Nissan dealer in Manzanillo. Their parts department says they can get the struts in 5 days at a cost of 3,525 pesos +16% IVA EACH ($323 US). I laughed and walked away. They're available on eBay at $63 each, and evidently Northern Auto Parts (eBay) will ship to Mexico for around $83 for the two. They also sell an install kit that I should consider as well, for about $50 each delivered to Mexico. I just need to have a visible address to ship to. And I'm thinking that since Grand Bay Marina runs Cabo Blanco, sort of, maybe I can have the parts shipped to a "vessel in transit" in the marina, bypassing Aduana (customs) and the snares of imported parts. Today I'll buzz over and talk to them if I can get the outboard running. But no hurry. The other thing I could do is call Autozone in the states and see if they'll ship the part to their Manzanillo store. It would be safer that way.

And I still haven't checked with the Ford dealerships, since the car was also made as a Mercury Villager... but now I see why the shop in Melaque returned the job and the money. The whole thing turned out to be too hard to do for the price he quoted. I would still prefer that he do the job at least on the front of the car. I also realize the car has to be completely empty when the final adjustments are done and the nuts torqued down. So, if I can get the parts delivered here, I'll take them to him to do.

Use it, or Carry it Around

My horoscope today:
Even if there are lots of things for you to have to take care of today, you probably won't mind all that much. You should have the energy you need to handle everything right now.

*     *     *

I'm getting ready to take a trip south, maybe 400-500 nautical miles, to somewhere near the Guatemalan border with Mexico.


And I have a lot of stuff that I wanted to work on this year, like getting the dodger patched up and work on some of the screened enclosure I built a few years ago. When I built the enclosure, I used a lot of nylon webbing and the sun has pretty much turned that stuff into powder. Also the polyester thread I used has been pulverized by UV and turns to dust when you clean it.


 So I brought replacement materials with me when I drove down, as well as the (very) heavy duty walking foot sewing machine and 20 yards of sunbrella fabric, snaps, buttons, scissors, 10 yards of new screening, needles, all that stuff.

It takes up a lot of room and it's heavy, so I thought I would do the large sewing jobs before I left so I could leave a lot of the materials behind in the car instead of dragging it around Mexico with me.


I'll still have stuff with me (I need to sand and varnish all the wood, and finish up some formica installations), but with most of the fabric work done I'll have a lot more room to lay around and watch cheap movies.


Yes, today I went to tianguis and bought five  dvd movies for 100 pesos. So, between those and my "Burn Notice" downloads from the iTunes™ store, I can kick back and check out the films on my new in-dash dvd player while I stand watch on my overnight legs down the coast. Vampires, and Sci Fi, and Action flicks.

By the way, I wanted to show off my new Alfa wifi amplifier- here's a photo of the wifi connections I can see with just the laptop:

and here's the connections I can see with the Alfa amplifier... notice the elevator bar indicates there's still more on this list. I love this thing. Since I bought it, I can count on one hand the places I've been that I couldn't get on the internet. I could probably sell 50 of these every season on the local cruiser's nets.

Frequent Provisioning=The Good Life

This morning I had a fruit salad made with a perfect cantaloupe, a fresh pear, banana, and fresh strawberries covered in dried, shredded, sugared coconut and cream (or crema, down here) and a pot of espresso French Roast in the cockpit as dolphins frolicked around the anchorage. I wore a bathing suit and freshly applied sunblock. Monday morning aboard BLISS.

This week I got my first Social Security check deposited to my account in Tucson. Wasn't a whole lot, but I don't own a partnership in a business so I can declare and pay excessive taxes to make my SS high. What the government doesn't take goes toward buying, among other things, sailboats (three in the past 17 years).

Eatin' good in the Neighborhood. Here's the neighbors...

The partnership, because it's seasonal, allows me to run off to places like Tenecatita Bay, Zihuatanejo and other tropical paradi (plural of paradise?). It even allows us to do our parts in the business from Mexico or, for that matter, anyplace in the world that has Internet and automatic teller machines... and that covers a lot of the globe, or at least the parts I want to see, and stay.

Today I'm going to sort out the boat a little. When I packed for this shakedown cruise, I wanted to catch a rare (this time of year) southerly, so it was a bit fast and sloppy. It needs to be more organized than it is, and then I'll take the boat out for a sail this afternoon during the sea breeze (usually a westerly) to check out all those systems including a new snuffer for the spinnaker/drifter if it gets light (it will near the end of the day).