Summer Days

 

The days pass slowly, repeating the same routine day after day. The heat and humidity make it impossible to work outside except for brief periods in the morning and sitting inside all day has sapped the energy out of us. We vow we will not spend another summer like this again. Next summer will be different, we just don't know how.

Despite our gloom, we've had some major projects done on the boat by the local workers who seem able to work in the heat. They recaulked the upper deck, steps to upper deck ,and forward hatch, two additional solar panels have been installed and the hull has been polished making it look like new (see previous post).

And we count the days until we can get out of here ( target departure date is November 1st).

Mid August to mid September seems to be the rainy season here as storms form inland and work their way out to sea and the occasional tropical storm passes north a couple hundred miles to the west. Last weekend we got 6" of rain in a 36 hour period and it rains overnight most days.

Our current plan is to head south to Banderas Bay and then further south to Tenacatita and Barra de Navidad. We hope to find a quiet bay with warm water and stay for weeks on end only coming back to port to reprovision. This will recharge our spirits and perhaps provide us with some clarity on what to do next. We feel like the victims of too many options; sell the boat/stay on the boat, stay in Mexico/go to Panama, find another summer activity/who knows what. Poor us, we know, stop your whining and just enjoy life.

Another Tucson Road Trip

Technorati Tags: Mazatlan,Tucson,road trip

Another road trip to Tucson to pick up project supplies and parts. This was a big haul with 26 packages for us at the UPS mailbox store and another 10 items waiting at West Marine in Tempe. This time we house sat in Tucson at a very nice and comfortable home of some friends who were travelling up north. It was nice to stay in a house rather than a motel. It's like really living on land like everyone else and gives you a taste of what your missing. Love that high speed internet.

I guess you can tell you're not ready to move off of the boat when you are in a hurry to return to your home on the water after spending a week in a nice house. We're still boat people.

It's 850 miles from Maz to Tucson and another 175 to Phoenix so it's over a two thousand mile trip up and back. Going north we stayed in San Carlos at the Best Western, like last time, but I don't think we'll do it again. They've got a new "boss" and we had to make a 500 peso deposit because we paid in cash and they put us on the second floor and the a/c was located right next, like 6 inches, from the bed and blasted cold air on Linda all night despite her efforts to build a barrier out of a luggage rack and bath towels. We also had dinner at Tequila's restaurant that we used to like a lot when we had the boat here 4 years ago but now that place didn't seem so good. Maybe it's us. When we had the boat here we were newbies and enjoyed the place. Now after 4 years in Mexico San Carlos seems like a gringo town and not like the rest of Mexico. It's all a matter of perspective.

On the whole it was a good trip. The roads up north seemed beat up and the tolls get higher as you go south but they are working on the roads so maybe the money is going to a good cause.

Now that we have a boat load of parts the real work begins just as the hot weather kicks in.

It's a Gift

It’s getting hot! The heat and humidity are going up in Mazatlan and it’s only June. Days are now in the low 90's while the humidity is in the 70's, sometimes into the low 80’s. We keep at least one a/c on 24 hours a day and sometimes 2 in the afternoon. We have three ac units on the boat but we try not to cool the areas where we are not. The heat and humidity really effect you outside so we have slowed down on our outside projects and curtailed our trips around town.

We made a run up to Tucson already to get some project supplies and see some friends. It's about an 18 hour trip and we make one overnight stop along the way. Highway 15 is fairly nice and there are plenty of places to stop for food and gas and lots of good motels. The roads in the northern half in Sonora are the worst but the highway in Sinaloa are very good. The car stopped running while in Tucson, just refused to start one morning, and we took it to a shop recommended by some friends. It turned out the 'computer' that controls all the electronics had died and because the car is 20 years old they had to get a replacement out of Pennsylvania that took 3 days, so we sat in the motel watching TV waiting for the car. We've had the car since new, 20 years now, and it has 220K miles on her. As the mechanic said "After all this time and miles it has paid for its self and she owes us nothing. Every time she starts it's a gift". It was 108⁰ (but dry) in the afternoon, so without a car we couldn't walk around too much except in the evening. We'll be making another run up north in late July for more parts and do a little house sitting for our friends Jennifer and Dean.

We're trying to keep busy inside the boat without going too mad but we're already looking forward to leaving in November.

It's going to be a long summer.

The picture is of the beach off of Paseo (avenue) Clausen with the Mazatlan skyline behind. There are statues all along the city beaches throughout Mexico.

Maz to Banderas Bay

We departed Maz at 8:30 AM and arrived at Punta Mita, the anchorage on the outer end of Banderas Bay, at 10:30 AM the following day after a very quick ride down the coast. We had a .5 kt current pushing us with gentle seas from behind and we arrived nearly a day before we planed. The boat performed perfectly, as usual, with the only problem being the Si-Tex AIS unit continually losing it's USB connection to the PC. We've talked with Si-Tex about this and they said we need to return the unit to them for a software upgrade. It pisses us off when companies think nothing of requiring you to send the product back to them so they can fix a problem that should have not been there in the first place. For most people in the States, daily FedEx deliveries happen all the time, just try that from Mex and have it get lost in Custom's black hole, on both sides of the border. So the AIS fix will be another summer project. Enough of that rant...
There are a lot of large fishing boats along the coast that you need to watch out for but that gives you something to do on night watch. They are lit up like a Christmas tree and are slow moving or stationary and have a strong radar image so they are easy to see and avoid. They look like they are fishing for shrimp with large baskets hanging from outrigger poles.
The anchorage in Punta Mita is spacious with good holding but rolly from swells wrapping around from the point. It was windy when we arrived, 10 to 20 kts, which was higher than any winds we saw on the outside. It seems Mother Nature does not like anchorages and makes them windier than any area around them.

The next morning we pulled anchor and went into Marina Vallarta, an older marina located close to downtown PV. The marina is ringed by an older development of condos and timeshare apartments with many shops and restaurants around the parameter of the marina. We were here 3 years ago and enjoyed the older feel of the place. We had read that the place was starting to run down and people are advised not to go there but that just made it more attractive to us. We called the marina and they said to pick any open slip on H dock, there are many open slips so just pick one. When we arrived and pulled into a slip we were told by the security guard that there was no power in the empty slips and to go to N dock. So we pulled out and went to N only to find it was in worse condition with missing finger piers and no power either. In frustration we tied up at an empty slip and went to the office where they assured us they would send out an electrician and get the power working at our slip. 3 hours latter the electrician showed up and fixed our power so we decided to stay and settled in. The marina is the kind of place that people describe as 'having charm' and despite the run down state there are a lot of mega yachts here and we kind of like the place. We may never return here in the future but we're here now so we'll make the best of it.
We had a good week here, eating out a lot and just walking around. PV is a fun place. One thing we found out in talking to other boaters is that Marina Vallarta might be the most expensive marina in the bay. Paradise Village Marina, a resort marina will all the extras, is renting for $0.50 a foot per day and the La Cruz Marina is similar. We're paying $42 per day for our 46' boat in Marina Vallarta which comes out to around $.75 per foot plus tax.

One thing that Marina Vallarta has that we’ve never seen before is a Donut Lady. Everyday she walks the docks with a tray of fresh donuts for 10 pesos each, less than a US dollar. You gotta love Mexico.
We’re heading south this week to spend some time on anchor, out of the marinas.

Tucson & Plans

Life has thrown us another small curve. Two months ago we were planning to leave for Panama, then our departure from Ensenada got delayed by a couple of weeks and then the weather turned to crap and we had to wait another 3 weeks to get some half way decent weather. The trip to Panama started to look like a rush so we decided to spend another season in MX and summer over in La Paz. Not a bad plan, go down to Mazatlan and then Puerto Vallarta for a couple of months and then return to the Sea in the Spring and be in La Paz by July. Then Linda's son and wife who live in Tucson decided to move to Indianapolis (Indianapolis???) where her family are. Great, but we stored our Jeep with them in Tucson and they kind of act as our home base up north. So we need to do something with the car and it would be nice to see them one more time before they leave so lets go to Tucson now, say our goodbyes, get the car, drive it to La Paz and store it there until we get back in June. Oh wait, did I mention that we decided to stay in Mazatlan for the summer, not la Paz., so we'll drive to Maz and store the car in the Marina until summer. The boat is in Maz and we can leave it there while we hop back to the States. Change of plans happen and we're getting pretty good at this last minute stuff. Ok, lets buy some tickets, tell people when we'll arrive and hope things don't change again in the next 2 weeks. Oh boy.

So we flew from Mazatlan to Phoenix, rented a car to drive to Tucson where we got our Jeep. We spent 2 days at Linda's sons house where we tried not to get in their way while they packed for their move to Indianapolis and drove to Phoenix to see some old friends. The next day we headed south, stopped at Tucson to see how the move was going and then continued to Nogales and Mexico.

Some thoughts and observations along the way.

Flying sucks. Drive whenever possible. The two hour flight from Maz to Phoenix is expensive, $360 each, and the hassle of airports and TSA should be avoided whenever possible.

Heading south it took us awhile to get to the border and then some more time to get our visas and import permit for the car so we didn't make it very far the first day. We stopped in Santa Ana at the Elba hotel which is very nice but noisy being right on the highway, with our room overlooking the road, and with a late arriving and early departing family on either side of our room. Oh, the bed was as so hard we might as well have slept on the floor.

The plan for the second night was to stop in Navojoa south of Obregon but there was a national basketball championship going on and there were no vacancies in any of the nice hotels along the highway. That was too bad because it looked like a very nice town with plenty of hotels and restaurants. So on we went to Los Mochis arriving at 5 PM and immediately got totally lost in the city trying to find a Best Western that was advertised on the highway. We eventually stopped at a City Express hotel that was a very clean 7 story building with plain but functional roomswith very hard beds.

Los Mochis is an attractive city of 250,000 people with at least 2 WalMarts. We know because we drove past both of them while looking for a hotel.

Sinaloa is known to some as the headquarters for the 'Sinaloa Cartel', one of the largest drug cartels in Mexico. What we didn't know until we drove through it is that it has a large agricultural industry that looks very prosperous. Linda said it reminded her of driving through Iowa, mile after mile of corn fields.

The road trip down highway 15 was very pleasant. There are plenty of services along the way and the roads are ok, not great, with some construction along the way but nothing that slows you down too much. Highway 15 is a toll road all the way, it costs us $65 USD in tolls to get from the border to Mazatlan.

Now that we're back in Maz we are getting ready to head south to PV and try to find some warmer weather. We plan to return to Maz in June for the summer. We are leaving the car in the marina parking lot and we still need to decide what to do with the car next season when we head to Panama. That's a long time from now so we'll see what happens then. No use making plans now.

The good life in Mazatlan.

The good life continues in Mazatlan. We've added a location map to the top of the blog that will have our current (and past) locations as we travel around. Thanks to Eric & Sherrel at www.sailsarana.com for the code snips.

We use a Dell mini desktop computer for our navigation computer and purchased a mini-keyboard to use with it 3 years ago when we upgraded Discovery's electronics. Well the keyboard has started to cause 'wild mouse' syndrome on the computer where the mouse just mysteriously starts randomly moving and clicking. Not good when you're using the navigation software and the mouse closes the nav software and opens file manager, 5 times over. Smacking the keyboard with your hand seemed to solve the problem for awhile but that didn't seem like a good long term solution so we went looking for a new keyboard. At Office Depot we found what we thought was the perfect keyboard. It's a flexible type that's water proof, not too big, and cheap (around $12 USD). So we bought it. When we got it back on the boat and took a closer look at it we thought we should have taken a closer look at the store before we bought it. It has some strange characters and no Home, End, Page Up or Down, or Delete keys. And other oddities like the keys marked + and - don't really enter those characters but the keys above them do. Other than that it's great and we're going to keep it. Anyhow if we tried to take it back I'm not sure how to explain to the clerk in the store that we didn't notice all the strange and missing keys before we bought it. It works fine for the nav software, although a Home key would be nice to center on the boat on the chart but there's a way of doing that with the mouse which has now stopped it's random movements and clicking. Click on the pic to see a larger image of the keyboard.

We bought fuel in Maz today. We have 4 fuel tanks on Discovery and we only run off of one tank and only put fuel in that tank that has been cleaned (polished) by running through a fuel filter to remove particles and water. When we fuel up we keep the new fuel isolated until it can be polished then it is moved to tanks that may have fuel in them to balance the boat out. That is what is causing the list (listo in Spanish) in the pic below. We bought fuel in the morning and polished the fuel in one tank for 6 hours before it was shifted to a tank on the other side of the boat to level things out.


We discovered a site for those that like reading boat blogs. It's www.trawlerblogs.com. Take a look, it even has our site on it.

Southern Crossing

After 10 days in Marina Mazatlan we had a good weather window to make the 190 NM crossing to the Baja Peninsula. We departed at 7:30 AM on March 30st. There were 4-6' swells for the first 10 KM but once we got clear of land the seas calmed and we had a beautiful crossing with a full moon. The nicest thing about a calm sea is that you can get some sleep and you do not get as tired when on watch. We arrived well rested in los Muertos at 2 PM on the 31st to find 4' seas coming into the anchorage from the south so we decided to leave los Muertos and head north overnight to Isla San Fransico north of La Paz. With the waves coming from the south into the anchorage at los Muertos we didn't think that we would get much sleep so we might as well keep going with the following seas and hopefully get some sleep along the way.

Our experience with the passage from los Muertos through the Cerralvo Channel is that it's one nasty piece of water. The waves funnel through the north-south channel and then collide with the out coming current and waves from San Lorenzo Channel to make very steep, straight sided waves. So this time we thought we would try something different and go up the east side of Isla Cerralvo and Isla Espiriu Santo to try to avoid the strong currents and resulting waves. Well, it worked on the outside of Isla Cerralvo but as soon as we cleared the north end of the island we got hit by steep 6' waves on our beam coming out of San Lorenzo Channel. There was a strong west wind coming out of La Paz, known as a Corumel, that was creating a mess of the seas and we were stuck in it for the rest of the passage. It was right on the beam and every few minutes an above average size wave would hit us so hard on the beam that it sounded like someone had tossed a bowling ball against the side of the boat. At times we took spray from the port side all the way over the top of the pilothouse. No sleeping that night!

We passed Isla San Francisco at 4:30 AM and could see at least 8 anchor lights in the bay and the waves were entering directly into the anchorage so we continued north first thinking that we would go the 9 KM to Punta Evaristo but then stopped short of there and went into Bahia Amortajada. This is an anchorage off of a lagoon lined with mangroves and there is a large anchorage with protection from the south so we decided to stop here and we dropped the hook and then went directly to sleep. Six hours later, around 1 PM, we were awakened, actually Linda was awakened, I'll sleep through anything, by a voice outside the boat saying "Hola, Hola, Discovery, Discovery." By the time we got up we saw the local park ranger motoring away in his skiff. We're sure he just wanted to check our park permit, which we have, so we weren't too concerned. The wind had started to pick up out of the north and the waves were coming straight into the bay so we pulled the anchor and motored the 6 KM to Isla San Francisco where the bay is protected from northerlies. We spent 3 days in "The Hook" and had a wonderful time but the water was still a little cool for swimming, 72°, so we headed north into the Sea to find warmer waters.

Mazatlan

We do enjoy Mazatlan. This time we started out by anchoring in the old harbor on the south side of town. There's room for 15-20 boats there and there's easy access to buses from the dinghy dock that only costs 30 p a day. There's also a lot of entertainment with the traffic in and out of the port (cruise ships, ferries, fishing boats and every other kind of boat you can think of). The only downside to the anchorage is that right across the street is the city sewage treatment plant and when the wind is out of the north it does stink! Unfortunately for the 4 days we were there the wind blew out of the north. It stunk so bad that it would wake you up at night. So we moved in Marina Mazatlan into the same slip we had when we were here before.

Our mail that was sent to PV is still MIA but we got lucky and the mail sent to Mazatlan arrived the day after we did. Wow! It didn't contain our boat documentation apparently because the mail packet was sent before the copy of the documentation that we ordered from the Coast Guard arrived in Anacortes. So we had our mail FexEx'd from Anacortes to our daughter in Nampa and she scanned the boat documentation and emailed it to us in Maz. Now we have all of our important mail so no more waiting around for the never arriving mail. We also got the last financial document we needed so we could complete our taxes and file them electronically while we had wifi here in the marina.

As we talk to family back home and hear of their challenges and heartaches in dealing with the economic downturn and other issues of regular life we are very thankful that we can live the life we do. While family members struggle with health, family, and financial issues our biggest daily problems are trying to catch the right bus to get downtown and to pick the right weather window to move on. We are truly lucky to be able to live our care free life in Mexico although we wish there was more we could do to help family back home. And that's not to mention the political sh*t that is going on in the states. What's with all the hate and anger? People should just turn off cable news and talk radio and take a breath, life is too short for all this crap.