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.

Six Years On the Boat and Still Afloat

The last six years on the boat have been great for us. In 2006 we sold our house and sold, gave away and then stored what remained of our stuff and moved onto our boat which at the time was a 44 Defever. In the Fall of that year we fell in love with and purchased a 46 Nordhavn then moved aboard and put the Defever up for sale. Six years later we're still living on our Nordhavn, Discovery, and have cruised twice to Alaska and down the coast to Mexico where we've been for 4 years. Life has been good to us for a lot of reason.

• In Mexico everyday has a touch of adventure to it. Just going to the grocery store can be an adventure.

• Life can be so unexpected. When we started this we had no idea we would end up here in six years and we have no idea where we will be 2, 4, or 6 years from now.

• We survived the worst economy and market crash since the great depression and we still have enough money to keep going. Not sure exactly how we did that but we're glad we did.

• We enjoy the warm weather of Mexico and there is nothing more fun than jumping off the back of the boat into warm water and swimming around a quiet anchorage. We have lived most of the last 4 years in t-shirt, shorts, and sandals.
• Riding a bus around a Mexican city is the best entertainment available.

• Our boat has become a very comfortable home. We have not wanted for bigger or newer. It fits us perfectly.
• After spending 6 years together in a small boat in calm and rough seas we're still talking to each other and still very much in love.

Technorati Tags: Mexico,Nordhavn,Alaska

Christmas Cheer

Merry Christmas to all and be careful out there.

Mexican Nautical Charts – this is getting fun

We’ve always been interested in nautical charts and in particular, electronic charts. When we first came to Mexico we had Maptech charts on the PC running Coastal Explorer (CE) and C-Map charts on Furuno. Both are based on surveys done around 1890. That’s right, over a hundred years old. Here’s an example of these charts in CE -

If you click on the image to enlarge it, you can see that our waypoints where we anchored are up on land with this chart and there is a dreadful lack of detail.

Fortunately the Mexican Navy has been doing a new survey since 2005, using borrowed US equipment they say, and have published new vector charts that while not up to the standards of US NOAA charts, are a substantial improvement over the older charts. Here’s the same area using the new vector charts -

At least the land is in the right spot. Now we can add a third type of chart to the collection, charts from Google Earth satellite images. I’ve started playing with a program ChartAid that makes it very easy to capture images from Google Earth and geo-reference them so that chart plotting software like CE knows where to place them. Here’s the same spot with the addition of the photo chart -

These Google Earth photo’s are not perfect, they don’t show depth for example, but outside of the US, Canada, and Europe they might be a great improvement over existing charts. They certainly enhance areas in Mexico. Will we rely exclusively on photo charts? No, but they are another tool, along with existing charts and guide books, that we can use to stay out of trouble.

What We Did Last Summer

We've been in Ensenada for nearly 6 months without posting any blog updates so it's time for a quick overview of what we've been up to before we leave and head south.

To start with, it was nice to be in one place for longer than a week. We got our car out of storage in Tucson and started living somewhat like 'regular people'. Going to the grocery store, renting movies, going out to dinner, etc....

We did many trips to San Diego to buy stuff and to just get back to the US. It takes about 3 hours to get to SD going through Tecate, where the boarder wait time is always under 30 min., while going north through TJ can take hours in line. No thanks. We went north via Tecate and south via TJ. Most of our trips were one day, up and back by dinner time. We spent a lot of $ but had fun doing it. If you're in SD and need a clean, inexpensive room for the night look up the Dolphin Inn in Point Loma. Nice place in a great area for $55. Every time we came back south across the boarder we were glad to be back home. Once you've been out of the States for awhile it's strange to return and it seems to be getting stranger all the time.

Boat Projects. 2 new heads (Tecma), new paravane rigging, boom winch cables, SSB radio upgrades (more later), haul out for bottom paint and cosmetic touch ups, having the rugs cleaned, cleaned and reversed the anchor chain, and many more too numerous to mention.


Discovery drawing a crowd during her haul out.

We both got our Mexican Residence Visas known as a FM-3. This is a long term Visa that gives you some additional rights in Mexico, but it's main advantage over the Tourist visa is that you don't have to leave the country every 6 months to renew it. You can hire an agent to do all the paperwork and standing in line for you but we did it ourselves. It's not that difficult and it gave us some first hand knowledge on how the Mexican government works. Linda compiled a list of all the steps, forms, and documents (including the number of copies of each) required to get the visa and passed it on to the local cruiser community. It's not difficult and certainly something that a gringo can do on their own without using an agent.

We traveled a lot around Ensenada and northern Baja. Having a car, we drove all over town. Sometimes looking for some parts for the boat, sometimes just for fun. Linda wanted to check out every large grocery store in town looking for those elusive items you can't normally find in Mexico. We also took day trips to the north, east, and south. It's amazing how much construction is underway on the highways trying to keep things in shape. Northern Baja is very hilly with a cool marine environment so there's a lot of wine and olive groves in the area to visit.

Ensenada is a working class town trying to become a tourist center but still rooted in it's working class base. It's not the prettiest town in Mexico but like all of the places we've been in Mexico the people are very friendly and helpful and we always felt safe wherever we went. Ensenada has all the shopping you could ask for; Costco, Home Depot, Walmart, Starbucks, and all the major Mexican grocery chains so you don't want for anything and there is the best fish taco stand in all of Mexico at the corner of Floresta & Juarez.

We stayed at Cruise Port Marina while in Ensenada. We liked the proximity to down town and it was cheaper than the other marinas. The staff at Cruise Port could not be more helpful. Jonathan and Vanessa will do anything to insure you have a great stay here. The marina is extremely well maintained by a full time crew and we never had problems with the infrastructure here and the bathrooms were always very clean.

The downside of staying in Cruise Port is it is in a very dirty area, the dock water is almost salt water, and there is no WiFi. The cruise ships tie up right next to the marina and run their engines and generators continually covering the boats in the marina with a fine coating of gray dust. The commercial port is also upwind and adds to the dust and dirt cloud. You need to wash your boat weekly or it will start to stain the gel coat. The interior of the boat also gets coated with dust and needs constant cleaning. Which brings us to the dock water. Cruise Port has it's own well and it seems they didn't dig it deep enough to get to a clean water table. The water has a ppm (parts per million of solids) of over 700, anything over 500 ppm is not potable according to the World Health Organization. We tried running the water through multiple filters but could not get the ppm below 600. For drinking water we started running the dock water through our water maker at 200 psi and that produced clear water with a 50 ppm. Washing the boat with dock water is like using sea water. All the stainless fittings start to rust and everything is streaked unless you immediately wipe it down. The boat never seemed very clean after it was washed and within a few days you could start to see the dirt build up from the dust cloud surrounding the marina.

When we first arrived at Cruise Port in June they had a commercial WiFi service that cost $35 a month. The marina then went to a new "free" service that never did work right. The service seemed to only support 2 or 3 connections at a time and even those were painfully slow. Complaints didn't help, it seems the new service was ordered by higher ups and the local management didn't have any control over it. We ended up getting a Telcel Banda Ancha WiFi USB card.

That about covers how we spent our summer. We had a good time in Ensenada but will we come back next summer? No. It's a long distance from the Sea and it's cold up here, even in the summer. By Thanksgiving we were running our diesel furnace every night. This was the first time we ran the furnace while in Mexico. I guess we've grown use to the heat and we're eager to get back south.

Bahia Magdelena, aka Mag Bay

Date: 3/24/2009
Location: Bahia Magdelena, aka Mag Bay
Lat/Lon: 24 38.064 N 112 08.171 W
Weather: windy, mostly sunny, low 70's

We've been hanging out in Mag Bay waiting for a weather front to pass through on Sunday and Monday, which it did. The winds died down Monday evening and we're going to give it another day for the sea to lie down a little more before we head out so it looks like we'll be out of here Wednesday at first light.
We arrived at Mag Bay on 3/19 after a 28 hour, 160 NM cruise. The weather and seas were fair so it was a pleasant trip. Along the way we passed through a group of fisherman in pangas (large rowing boats with outboard motors) and one of them pulled up parallel to our boat about 30' off the beam and yelled 'Sodas, sodas!', gesturing with their arms drinking a can of Coke. I pointed to the aft of the boat and with out changing our speed or heading they pulled in behind us and I tossed them two cans of Coke. They waved and smiled and went back to their fishing. Within 10 minutes another panga pulled up next to us and we repeated the same process.

After arriving in Mag Bay at 9 AM and setting the anchor we went and laid down for a short siesta. A half hour later there was a knock on the side of the boat and someone saying 'buenes dias'. It was the Port Captain. We welcomed him aboard, offered him a cold Coke which he happily accepted, showed him our papers and filled out his simple documents. Now this is a village of maybe 30 people who live in simple shacks next to the shore, yet they have a Port Captain. He was very nice and although he spoke no English and we no Spanish we managed to carry on a simple conversation for 15 minutes. We understood that this is a peaceful village with no crime yet if we went up the bay to San Carlos they had mucho crime and banditos. We'll stay here, thank you.

There have been 2 sail boats here with us and Saturday the three of us hired a panga to take us into San Carlos at the head of the bay to get some groceries. The panga let us off on the beach near the center of town and a friend of the panga driver took us in his Jeep the next 6 blocks to the grocery store. There are some 5000 people in San Carlos and I'm not sure if we were in the center of town or on the edge but the grocery store was not that large. We did find a few things but they didn't have much. There was a lady selling fresh strawberries across the street out of the back of her truck, a newer Chevrolet 4 door, 3 pints for 20 pesos, just over a US dollar. We bought 3 pints. We tried to find an ATM to get some cash but couldn't find one and the driver didn't know of one or didn't want to spend the time to look for one. The streets all looked like sand but most of them were paved roads just covered with sand. It reminded me of a place that just had been blanketed with snow. Even the noise of the cars was muffled by the sand. The area around the town is all sand and dirt so I guess that the winds just keep blowing the sand onto the streets and they don't try to remove it.

We put the dinghy in the water and the motor started right up and ran for about 10 minutes before it stopped, for good. It seems to be a fuel problem so I'm going to take the dink to shore and remove the carburetor there so if I drop anything I can easily retrieve it. The last time I removed the carb in Nanaimo I dropped a part in 50' of water and it took over a month to get a replacement, and that was after we came back to the states! I don't want to take any chance repeating that here.

As we travel south we are also going east. We learned that south of Turtle Bay you move ahead one time zone so we are in the equivalent of the Mountain time but we aren't on day light savings time yet. They do go on DST sometime, we just don't know exactly when.

The photo above is of 'Punta Entrada', Entrance Point, at the entry to Mag Bay taken at 6 AM.

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Turtle Bay ++

Date: 3/13/2009
Location: Turtle Bay
Lat/Lon: 27 41.210 N 114 53.236 W
Weather: Windy, overcast

Worked on water maker leaks with good success. We did not run the water maker because we are not sure of the quality of the water in the bay and we did not want to clog up the filters unnecessarily. We have enough water to wait to run the water maker until our next trip off shore.

In the afternoon we called the water taxi and went into town. You call the water taxi on the VHF channel 16 and he comes out in a panga, a large row boat with a powerful outboard motor, and takes you to the pier where there are stairs treads leading down to the water with one ladder type step at the bottom. At lower tides the bottom stair tread is 3' above the water level and the bottom step is well above the water. It's navigatable but it takes some courage and just closing your eyes and moving forward.

Once we were off the pier we walked down the beach 50', the only path available, and up onto a small dirt road that leads directly into town. The town has a few blocks of paved road but all the rest is dirt. All of the dirt roads are one lane plus some parking on either side. As one person on another boat put it 'the town is at the end of a 50 mile dirt road that leads to a gravel road'. This place is at the end of the road and the poverty is extreme here. The people are very friendly and helpful and the nicest looking building in town is the church. There are many little grocery stores, more like mini mini-marts with a few can goods, rice, beans, beer, and coke. There are 2 or 3 internet cafés that have multiple computers connected to the internet and you can take your own laptop and connect to their network. We're going back into town tomorrow to buy some beer and a few less important items.

I think I have my laptop problems figured out. The small panel on the top of the keyboard that has the On/Off switch, volume controls, and various lights to indicate if the power is on or hard drive is turning has a plug at one end that plugs into a a receptacle on the main board. The problem is that this plug is not going into the receptacle far enough to make contact so I put a small folded piece of tape under the plug and that seems to help. It still needs a small push from a well placed finger to work every time but at least I know where the problem is and how to fix it.

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Turtle Bay +

Date: 3/12/2009
Location: Turtle Bay
Lat/Lon: 27 41.210 N 114 53.236 W
Weather: Windy, 30+ kts

I worked on the sump pump for most of the day. You wouldn't think that a simple pump would take so long to fix, especially since we had a backup pump that I put in and it still didn't work and yes, I did check the voltage at the pump, a good 12.6 vdc. The real frustrating thing is that when I brought the pump up to the pilothouse to test it worked just fine but when I took it back to the engine room it didn't work. Very strange voodoo stuff going on. It had to be the wiring so I connected the positive wire to the + post of the engine starter motor, still nothing. I then tried connecting the negative wire to the engine block and it fired right up. There was a bad negative/ground wire for the pump. I've never seen anything like this before. Next thing was to try to figure out how to fix it. I traced the wire as far as I could trough the engine room, nothing suspicious looking there. From the engine room it disappears into a hidden wire run up to the electrical panel in the pilothouse. Checked the panel connections but there was no way to tell which of the dozens of black grounding wires was from the pump. Out of frustration, and the need to get the sump pump working so I could take a shower, I used a wire that I had run from the pilothouse to the engine room but never used. I connected it to the ground strip on the panel and to the pump and it ran great. I still need to sort this out but at least it's working for now.

Now it was shower time with some Ibuprofen, My back was aching from crawling around the engine room on my hands and knees and I didn't want to end up like last October when I could barely move due to back pain. This is not nearly so bad so I stopped for the day before I made it worse.

I forgot to mention that the day after we arrived the Mexican Navy came out to us in their 30' panga with 6 armed shoulders onboard. It was too windy for them to make a safe approach to us so they just came near and asked what our last port of call was and if we were the owners of the boat. At least I think that's what they said, they only spoke Spanish and we don't. We're working on that.

The photo above is the Mexican navy patrol boat.

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Bahia Asuncion

Date: 3/16/2009
Location:Bahia Asuncion
Lat/Lon: 27 08.214 N 114 17.414 W
Weather: Winds NW 5-10 kts until 3 PM then became NW 25-30+ kts

We left Turtle Bay at 6:30 AM and had a pleasant cruise all day with sea under 3'. As we came around Isla Asuncion the wind picked up to 30+ kts. The bay is not protected from the wind but there is no fetch so the waves were only 2' wind chop. We anchored off of the old pier well off shore in 25' of water so that we would be well clear of the other moored boats and have plenty of room to let out 200' of chain. Facing away from the village at night it was so dark that when I casually threw a rotten banana off of the aft of the boat before we went to bed, it disappeared in the darkness before it hit the water. It's a little spooky being in a small boat in a strange place in such darkness but it can be very beautiful also, if you look up into the skies you can see a thick blanket of stars above you, more than you can imagine.

From the water, the town of Asuncion looks newer and slightly more prosperous than Turtle Bay. Asuncion lacks a pier that the pangas can tie up to so they must launch from the beach. The Mexican Navy did launch a panga and circled around our boat writing down the boat name and home port but they did not try to board or talk with us, just a courteous wave which we returned.

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Bahia Abreojos

Date: 3/17/2009
Location:Bahia Abreojos
Lat/Lon: 26 43.974 N 113 32.307 W
Weather: Winds NW 5-10 kts until 3 PM then became NW 15-25 kts

The weather Gods are smiling on us, the 50 NM trip from Asuncion to Abreojos had light winds and calm seas. We arrived in Abreojos just as the 3 PM winds were starting so we headed for the 'more protected' anchorage in the East end of town. The West anchorage off of the village is more open to the N winds where the East anchorage has slightly more protection from the winds and W swells. The winds blow every evening on the coast due to the warmer air over the land pulling the cooler ocean air on shore. By 9 PM the land has cooled enough that the winds subside and it's very calm over night.

Abreojos looks to be a nice little village built on a very barren point (punta) of land. Believe it or not tourism is the main industry here due to the whale breeding in the Laguna San Ignacio during winter. The logon is a protected area and only licensed guides from the village can take tourist to view the whales. We are a little late in the season so we only planned on staying here one night.

We plan on going 26 hours to Bahia Magdalena, a large and well protected anchorage 2/3 of the way down Baja. The forecast for the next 3 days is for fair weather do we thought we would make as much distance as possible. There is a small front moving through over the weekend so we'll be in Mag Bay for a few days. Next stop, Cabo San Lucas.

The photo above is of the light house at Abreojos.

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Turtle Bay

Date: 3/11/2009
Location: Turtle Bay
Lat/Lon: 27 41.210 N 114 53.236 W
Weather: mostly sunny, windy NW 20-25 kt, after sunset 5-10kt

We did a 7 hour run from the anchorage at Isla Cedros to Bahia de Tortugas, Turtle Bay. The bay is well protected from the seas but not from the winds. The winds in the anchorage blows up to 35 kts but there is no fetch so there is just a small ripple on the water and the anchorage is large with lots of room. There are 7 other sail boats anchored near the village but the bay could easily hold 10 times as many boats.

The weather is forecasted to blow for the next 4 days and we have some maintenance projects to complete so we're settling in here for a few days. Yesterday the water maker started leaking for 3 different fittings and couldn't hold the high pressure needed to make water so that's high on the list to fix. The pump in the sump from the head sinks and shower stopped working so the sump in overflowing into the bilge. Add that to the list.

Our main radar, we have 2, started to act up and needs some attention. It has started repainting its screen frequently, sometimes every sweep. It makes it nearly impossible to read. I'm going to check all the connections and hope to find the cause. If I'm not successful I'll send an email to our tech in Anacortes.

We should keep busy for the days that we wait here for better weather.

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Isla Cedros

Date: 3/9/2009
Location: Isla Cedros
Lat/Lon: 28 14.048 N 115 10.217 W
Weather: Mixed starting fair and building to winds NW 15-25 kt and seas 6-9', Full Moon with broken clouds

We completed an overnighter of 28 hours from Colonet. The plan initially was to go 45 NM to San Quitin but the weather was so nice and the seas so gentle that we decided to take advantage of the good conditions and go overnight to to Isla Cedros, a total of 185 NM. The forecast was for increasing winds overnight with building seas but we hoped that it would not be too bad and we could make some good distance down the coast. The weather was good to us for most of the night but the wind picked up and the seas started to build as we made the 120 NM crossing of Bahia Sebastian Vizcaino. Around 4 AM the seas were 6-9' feet from behind us, we weren't pounding into the seas but the boat was moving a lot as the larger waves moved under us. As we got behind Isla Cedros the seas calmed and we found a so so spot to anchor at the above Lat/Lon. The wind would gust down the hills on the island up to 35 kts pushing us broad side to the low swells so we left the fish in the water to slow the boat motion. The night was rolly but we managed to get some sleep.

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We're Going

Date: 2/15/2009

Location: Chula Vista, CA

Lat/Lon: 32°37.406'N  117°06.101'W

Weather: Overcast, 65 °

"I am going because I would have no peace if I stayed" - Donald Crowhurst

It's off to Mexico by the end of February. We've given our notice at the marina, we're finishing our provisioning and this weekend we're taking our car to Tucson to put in storage and it's off we go.  We're storing the car in Tucson because 1) Linda's son lives there and 2) this summer when we're in San Carlos in the Sea of Cortez for a few months we can easily get to Tucson and take our car back with us. 

We were not sure if we were going further than San Diego but as Crowhurst said, we'd have no peace if we stayed after doing all the preparations for the last 2 years and coming all this way. If we didn't go we would regret it for the rest of our lives. And what's to return to? We can't sell the boat in this market and there are no jobs to be had, so we might as well spend at least a year in Mexico and have some fun. 

By the way, Crowhurst did go on the around the world sailing race he was referring to and went insane and committed suicide before he finished, but that's another long story.  Read the book - The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst 

Road Trip - Ensenada

After Christmas we thought we would take the bus down to Ensenada and spend a couple of days. We made hotel reservations on the internet at the  San Nicholas hotel that looked good and in the area down by the marinas. We drove to the boarder and parked the car in a lot on the US side, walked across the boarder. Walking south the boarder is open with no check points, the Mexicans don't seem to care who enters their country or what they bring. The bus depot is just 3 blocks from the boarder, right next to the MacDonald's, and the bus to Ensenada runs every half an hour. US$42 for 2 people round trip. The bus is comfortable, clean, and mostly empty. The trip is about 90 minutes and we got off at the first stop in Ensenada which was a mistake, we should have stayed on until the bus depot and been a mile or so closer to our hotel. No harm done though, we got to see more of the town this way. After finding our way to the tourist section we stopped for lunch and to catch our breath and use the restrooms. Lunch was good and we continued our trek to the hotel which we found without much difficulty. The hazard with using the internet is that you may not be getting exactly what you think you're getting. The hotel was older than we thought and it was further from the waterfront and shopping area of town than we could have been if we had chosen a different hotel.

We spent the next two days playing tourist and walking all around the central area of town. On the evening of the third day I started to feel a little off,  like I was coming down with a cold, fever and aches and pains, but some aspirin seemed to overcome it and the next day we caught the bus back to Tijuana and returned home to the boat. Crossing the boarder on foot took less than an hour once we figured out  how to get from the bus depot to the boarder crossing. There are no signs for directions so we just walked in the general direction and then followed the crowds as we got near. The line was long but moved fast. The line for cars crossing into the US seemed to go for miles and did not seem to be moving, people were standing next to their cars and vendors were walking up and down the lines selling all sorts of goods. Tijuana is not the place to cross into the US in a car.