Monthly Archives: November 2018

Splish Splash!

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“So long you guys! Thanks for everything, it’s been so much fun. We’ll see you soon, somehow. We’ll just make it happen.”

These were our final parting words to our friends the Brownlows and the Baergs as we stood outside of Hammerheads, a local watering hole close to Marina San Carlos. We’d started the evening at JJ’s Tacos down the road, but the music was too loud and the band’s groupies weren’t really our crowd. We wanted to visit with each other; an impossible thing at JJ’s that night. S/V Blue was heading across the sea the next day and we were taking their slip in Marina Real for a couple of nights to wash the boat down. We planned to leave this side of the sea ourselves in a couple of days. S/V Slow Motion was still stuck in Marina Seca Guaymas, awaiting a new water tank; one of those unplanned expenditures that seem to happen all too often with boats. We didn’t know when we’d all be together again.

All the cool kids hanging out waiting for Galapagos to splash.

One should be very very careful of the words they use when saying goodbye to people. It’s almost like throwing wishes out into the universe and asking for trouble. When I said, “ See you soon, somehow. We’ll just make it happen.” what I really meant was “We’ll find you in a nice anchorage soon and have a great snorkel together.” Instead what the universe granted us was something altogether different.
It went like this. The day before we had successfully launched Galapagos on a windless morning at highish tide. With the Brownlows and the Baergs in attendance, Curt and Kevin got our big boat turned around, walking her stern into the slip adjacent to the dock. Cressie and Lynn stood by on the other side of the fairway, just in case we went crazy and needed help on that side. You never know. Shit happens sometimes. I love a lot of support at the dock.
With her nose pointed in the right direction, we were off. Within 15 minutes we were lying at anchor in the bay, breathing sighs of relief and drinking champagne in the cockpit.

I’ve gone to full on real glass here.

It was great being back aboard and remembering how we do things around here. I thought I had probably forgotten a great deal, but it all came rushing back: how to get off the boat and into the dinghy safely, how to tie the dinghy off on the davits so it doesn’t swing around, how to move around the boat without falling and stumbling into things, which toilet to use when, the dance of anchoring, watching the weather, so many little things that become second nature when you live on a boat. It’s just a completely different way of living. Yes, I thought. It’s really time to get going. It felt great to be out on the water once more.

Here we go! Thanks for the photo, Curt Brownlow? Kevin Baerg? Who took this? How did it end up in my photos file?

Not that houses are bad. We love houses, too. We’ve really enjoyed having a house to live in with friends while Galapagos was in the boatyard, but San Carlos was starting to grow on us too much. I think we’ve been here too long. We are getting familiar with all the places to eat and shop. The folks at the local grocery think I live here; just another gringa looking for canned stewed tomatoes and ice cream made with actual cream, items which do not exist in these parts.
Driving to Guaymas no longer terrifies me, although I prefer not to go too deeply into town. There are many one way streets that are not marked. Ask me how I know. I know all the largest potholes around here by heart and work to avoid them in advance. That’s how you know when it’s time to go: you know the potholes personally, by name, and driving is no longer terrifying. That level of familiarity happens alarmingly quickly.
After our fond farewells last night, we were ready to head over to Marina Real early this morning; our final stop before crossing the sea. We planned an early morning departure to stay ahead of the wind that builds during the day. I was enjoying my morning coffee watching the sun shine on the surrounding rocky hills when Mike popped his head up the companionway.
“Well, we’ve got another problem now.” I love how he says that stuff, all deadpan-like. “The starter battery is dead.”

Well, damn it all to hell and back.

Our yard neighbor had some extra blue bottom paint, so… why not? And how about the repair on that bottom, huh?  Go Team Galapagos!

I knew things had gone too well. We had got Galapagos’ bottom repaired beautifully, got the new boom painted and deployed, the bottom job was spectacular. And those were just the big jobs. If you know anything about boats you’ll know that there are unlimited smaller jobs that happen at the same time. It’s a quantum physics thing, the amount of jobs that can be squeezed into one day at the boatyard. Science has not yet devised a way to measure such things so we chalk them up to the unlimited mysteries of life.

Mike puts a paint roller to the area where she was supported on the hard. Thanks for the cool photo, Kevin Baerg.

Galapagos was shiny and ready to go, all systems great. Or. So. WE. THOUGHT.
So now, the start battery. Once more it’s important to be grateful for the timing of such things. We are in port, we have a car, we have friends. Mike has known that replacing this battery was going to be a pain because it’s really big, heavy, and located inconveniently. Mike has determined that one cell in the battery is bad. That means the entire thing is toast.
So we’ll see how quickly we can get this replaced. He plans to replace this flooded wetcell 8D battery, an Armor Plate 36,  with two smaller more nimble units. The battery, by the way, is about 6 years old. It was installed by the previous owner. Apparently one cell has gone bad. And if one cell is bad, the whole thing is bad.

No bueno. See the water line? It’s in the red.

Why is this man smiling? He just looks so satisfied here! You’d think he enjoyed this kind of thing. Wait a minute…

So that “See you soon!”? Yeah. Soon as in TODAY.  Mike and Curt now have a special date to muscle this baby up and out of the boat. We’ll get to say farewell to them all over again! Hey, maybe we’ll get another go at those tacos at JJ’s after all.
We’re paying 33$ US per day to stay tied up in this beautiful marina, meanwhile, so I cannot complain. After all, we already know all the great places to go eat. And what could be more important than that?

I’m not complaining. Not even a little bit.

We’ve decided to go south with the wind this year. When all systems are ACTUALLY a go and the weather looks good, we’ll sail back across the Sea of Cortez towards Santa Rosalia and try to catch up to S/V Blue. Maybe S/V Slow Motion will be close behind. And then go south from there. We are both positively stoked to get snorkeling again. We’re coming for you, fish!

Wild Welding Times

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Today was a banner day! Months after breaking our boom in a following sea, we finally have another one. In our last post, we talked about how we located and purchased a used boom here in Mexico, right down the road from our location in San Carlos. That was a stroke of good fortune but we still needed to splice part of this new old boom onto our old old boom. Capiche? For the mathematically inclined (not me), the metal extrusion on our boom is exactly 17’4″ long. We had two pieces of extrusion; the new ‘old’ boom which was 14′ long, and the good piece of our previous boom with a jagged end where it broke in two. We had plenty of material now, but we needed a metal worker to marry two pieces of aluminum extrusion together for life. And we wanted someone who had experience. We wanted someone who was at the top of the pyramid of life among machinists.

Not a very happy face, really. He’d rather ride in the back of a pickup truck than tool down a Mexican road with metal sticking out the back of the van.

Word around the boatyard was that we needed a man named Luis Hernandez. He was said to be the best metal worker in Guaymas/San Carlos. His reputation is such that we should probably be giving out autographs since we have not only met this man, we have touched him. We have shaken his hand, have conversed with him, and have paid him the fine sum of $15000 pesos (About $750 US) to fix our boom.  Luis is at the point in his career where he picks and chooses his jobs; where potential customers seek audience with him in his workshop in Guaymas, and where you have to have a job that is interesting enough to him to make it worth his while. We approached this man with caution and humility.  The man is a legend around here.

Getting the boom to Luis’ shop was an exercise in caution. I guess this is what cruising memories are made of: tooling down the road with heavy pieces of metal hanging out the back of the car, hoping not to hit a pothole. Fortunately, this is Mexico. People drive with much worse than this all the time. No one even gave us a second glance as we slowly swerved around the road, avoiding the worst of the holes. The trip was a non-event, but we were dead happy to get those things out of the car and to see both the windshield and our dashboard plastic Jesus in one piece. We’ve been relying on our Jesus on the dashboard way more than I thought we would. Hey, we will accept all the help we can get. We’re not too proud down here.

Why we have a cheap car.

Amazingly making zero wrong turns, we cruised up the narrow street looking for anything that looked like a machine shop. Noticing a couple of guys ( one with only one leg and a crutch ) standing in front of an opening in a wall, Mike rolled the window down and gave them a nod. ‘ Luis Hernandez?’, he asked out of the side of his mouth,  in his best imitation of a guy who speaks no Spanish. The one-legged guy nodded back and waved his crutch in the general direction of the open space. We pulled over and they guided us to back up by using the international hand signal/hand waving that everyone knows means ‘back up’.  Mike walked into the shop and greeted Luis.  I stood by as the men unloaded all the metal from the back of the van.

Can we just stop here for a moment of and recall our heros of yore: Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler?[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de2TWo8NTCw[/embedyt]

I know this dates me, but I can’t help but recall all those episodes where Marlin says, ‘While Jim wrestles the (insert wild animal here: angel shark, white tiger, unicorn, pretty much any wild thing will do)’, I’ll just stand by and hold the cage door open’. Honestly, it was something of a joke that Marlin was always staying safely in his crisp safari uniform, probably having a cool drink,  while Jim did the most death defying animal wrestling known to TV land at the time. Jim’s down there wrestling with snakes and alligators, and where is Marlin? Maybe taking pictures. You see where I’m going with this.

Photo courtesy of Intobirds.com

It’s almost exactly like that for me. These kinds of places like machine shops, while interesting, are pretty much like wild kingdoms. I have absolutely no idea what goes on in there. Not only do I not speak Spanish very well, I also do not speak the language of machine shops so I’m two down. It’s a little like walking into some kind of wild world; a world where I’m just going to stand by and hold some random door open while Mike goes mano a mano with an artist named Luis and we come out $15000 pesos poorer, but with an entire boom that almost certainly will never break in the same spot again. It’s that kind of kingdom. And we needed the king to gift us with his time and attention to our problem.

The men carried our material into Luis’ kingdom and placed them carefully on a table full of assorted metal things. I stayed out of their way. Luis was quick to see our issue as Mike described our breaking of the boom and what we wanted. Worried he was getting lost in the explanation I stepped out from behind a tall drill press (??) and usefully created a small drawing, not to scale, of a long, skinny rectangle. Now in my element, paper and pencil, I wrote the numbers 17′ 4″ in strong black writing above the rectangle, clearly indicating that was the total length we wanted. By the way, Luis speaks English. All he really needed to know was that we needed one piece of boom 17’4″ long. No more. No less.

Luis pulled out his phone and showed us photos of many of the projects he has going on currently. I’m not sure if this was just to give us the heads up that he’s a very busy man, or if he just is proud of his work (and justifiably so). Was this a part of this machine shop animal’s natural behavior; some sort of display of prowess that would prepare us for the price he was going to charge? I may have been lurking safely behind a table full of steampunky equipment, but I got the impression that it was going to be awhile before we got our boom back. This was further locked down for us when Luis told us he might be able to get to our project in about 2 weeks. Then it might take him a week to finish it. Oy vey. Our heads hung metaphorically low.

By that time we really didn’t want to 1) find someone else to do this job 2) put the big metal sticks back into the van and drive away with them.  We agreed to his time frame and asked the price. He hedged on that one, too and then, accepting his status as the most alpha animal in the machine kingdom,  we did the unthinkable. We left our booms with this man purely on the promise that he would text Mike the following day with the cost for the repair. We did this because of his reputation. Everyone knows this Luis. Still, I was uneasy.

Luis shows Mike some of his recent work.

He did follow through and text us the following day. His charge of $15000 pesos was way more than we thought it would be, but take a look at the work Luis did. It’s really good. Plus, he got this boom back to us in less than a week AND he delivered it to the boatyard. That was a bonus we didn’t expect. We figured we would have to hire someone to get it for us so this was a huge relief. When he delivered it to us, he said that this boom might break again in the future, but it would not be breaking in the same place ever again. And I think he’s right.

Luis has owned this truck for 29 years. It’s pristine.

What the welds look like on the outside.

Luis took this photo of the work in progress. That’s 1/4″ aluminum plating he used to build the sleeve that fits inside and is welded into place. Seeing this amount of work makes me feel like we got a good deal for that $15000 pesos.

We got to work on the boom right away sanding around the old holes where gear was attached and filling those with epoxy. Next I’ll prime and paint the part that was repaired and then she’ll be ready to deploy. Galapagos will sail again. And I’ve survived yet another foray into the wilds of Mexico.

There she is. The fiberglass repair on the bottom is coming along as well. This photo makes the bottom look like it’s freshly painted, but we still have to do that. Lots of work left for the boatyard, but it’s coming along nicely and we are trying to just live this way and not be in a hurry.

We’ve got a lot going on right now and life is nothing if not entertaining. As our boatyard time drags on, we are grateful to be sharing a house with S/V Slow Motion and enjoying the time we have with these friends. A hot shower after a dusty yard day is an excellent thing. Today perhaps I will paint stripes on that boom. Until next time, S/V Galapagos, out.

Would You Buy a Boom From This Man?

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Muy guapo!

I sure hope you would buy a boom from this man because we just did! Only in Mexico can you have the kind of experience we had yesterday; Mexico where people are resourceful as heck and will surprise you with what they have stored on top of their houses.

Our story began with a broken boom back in May, and continued with the trials of finding a fix. Ours is a story of denial of the seriousness of our issue, followed by the realization that a new boom would be upwards of 2000$ plus shipping to Mexico, and then the dogged determination that comes from simply refusing to pay that much money when there are many other things Galapagos needs. Our tale is one of reading the signs of the universe when they say ‘stop, this isn’t the right thing’ and then waiting for that green light when the pieces begin to fall into place. You never really know for sure when you are riding the waves of the universal green light until you have the boom in the back of the pickup truck and you’re barreling down the road with your husband riding in the back, arm lovingly draped around his new piece of metal.  Frankly, we won’t be completely sure that some cosmic trick isn’t being played on us until that boom is installed on our mast. But anyhoo…

This is legal in Mexico. All Mike’s dreams were coming true. A boom, AND a ride in the back of a pick up truck. If it weren’t for all the dust, that would be a big grin on his face.

We got hooked up with the cowboy in the photo, Chuey,  by the magic of the internet. Mike and I had posted all over the web that we were looking for a boom, knowing there was one out there somewhere and we just needed to find it. After many false starts and dead ends, we had come to terms with the fact that we were mistaken. There was no boom to be had and we surely would not have one when we went back to Mexico. Having several other things to deal with at the time, we just accepted that and were prepared to move on. Perhaps we would order one when we got south to the La Cruz area.

Then in early October I got a text from a woman named Lauralee from Sandy, Utah. She knew a guy; a guy who had salvaged a few boats back when Hurricane Newton came through. One had been a Moody 44 or some such larger boat and he may still have parts from that boat. She knew he had some booms in his yard so she sent him a message and he replied with some photos of the boom she had asked about

. When I got those photos I could not believe it. The boom looked just like ours, down to the fittings.  Turns out it was the very thing we needed! Right manufacturer, right size! Just the length was wrong, but that was OK because we really only needed about 8 feet of length. This boom was 14 feet. Could this be ‘the one’? 

Hitching a ride with friends and truck owners Lynn and Curt Brownlow on S/V Slow Motion,  we showed up at Cheuy’s house with high hopes of boom ownership. He lives on the outskirts of Guaymas in an area of farmland and modest houses. There’s a dragon fruit farm down the road. Mangos and bananas grow by his house.  Goats wandered down the street, chickens and turkeys scratched, and a serious guard dog announced our arrival. He announced and announced and announced, the cute little ankle biter.

Seriously guarding everything. I think he bit that tire.

One of two cocks in cages.

As we knocked on the door and took in the local surroundings I wondered where Chuey was and why I didn’t see any boat parts lying around in the yard. Just about the time we began shaking our heads wondering if he was going to keep the appointment, a cowboy on a horse came tearing around the corner, little cattle dog in his wake.  You can’t make this stuff up. Was it the stars in my eyes or perhaps the burning Mexican sun that took me straight out of my own life and into a western film set? With an absolute flourish, he ripped off his dark glasses and dust mask announcing, ‘Hola, amigos! I am Chuey! You want to see the boom?’.  My mouth hung open as I missed the photo op of the century.

After hand shaking all around and talking cows with Mike (Chuey and his business partner have about 30 of them), Cheuy led us into his yard and leaned a ladder up the side of the house, motioning Mike to follow him. His boat yard? On the roof.

Mike went up. I do not like ladders unless they are absolutely necessary, especially when you have to climb around them with no handholds. Nope. Plus, I would have just been in the way. Mike and Chuey would bond, as manly men on a rooftop filled with boat parts often do. My woman voodoo magic had no place up there.

It was absolutely necessary that I climb the ladder to take a photo of the top of this roof for posterity. It’s pretty smart to keep stuff up here. That’s a lot of real estate up there not being used for anything else.  See anything you need? Chuey’s your guy. He stores the smaller stuff inside the house. I believe that might be much to his wife’s chagrin.

The boom looked like it was in very good condition, with the caveat of a small dent in one side. But even so, there was plenty of material for our needs and the fittings looked like they were in good shape. Extras! After their male bonding time, Chuey and Mike struck a deal that was agreeable to both and about $200 later that boom was securely tied in the bed of Curt and Lynn’s truck. 

I had a nice chat with Cheuy, who showed me his boat skipper’s license. He also works on boats and that’s how Lauralee met him. He’s done work on her boat and she’s been a very satisfied customer. Business concluded and needing to get back to his cows, Chuey saddled up, gave the horse’s rump a slap, and rode off in a cloud of dust. Farmer, cowboy, boat skipper, and dealer in used boat parts, Chuey is a man of many talents.  If you’re relating this story to your friends and in the telling you let slip that he bounded into the saddle in one super-human leap, I wouldn’t say you lied. 

Next stop: the metal shop. Until then, S/V Galapagos out!