Author Archives: Melissa

Searching for Jesus

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We’ve been in Ecuador a bit over a week now and almost the whole time we’ve been here I’ve been searching for Jesus. It’s not what you think. I mean, Jesus is everywhere here. You can’t walk down the street without experiencing Jesus in some way or another. There is the begging woman with her hand out, the street vendor touting the latest in fruit, the blind singer busking on the corner, the father loving on his tiny son, the mother with her baby tied firmly to her back, and all the churches and the little statues of Jesus that are more common than Starbucks and MacDonald’s back home. This is a vveerrry Catholic country and they do love their Jesus (and, my personal favorite, Mary), especially during the Christmas season. If you are, like me, a traveler who loves religious art, Ecuador is pretty heavenly what with all the Spanish colonial influence and all.

The beautiful Virgin of Guadeloupe church in Banos de Cuenca

But in spite of all these opportunities to experience the Jesus energy here, there is one particular ‘Jesus’ I really wanted to see. He’s a life sized polychrome statue at the top of Iglesia de Todos Santos, a historic church. Ecuador is famous for it’s polychrome religious statuary and they are truly magnificent works of art. (Really. Click on the link there to read a  great article about the history of this technique.)  If you are lucky you get to climb up and be with a life-sized Jesus and look out over the city. Maybe even say a blessing or two.  I was intent on seeing that Jesus. You’d think a little thing like that would be simple, but that’s never how we roll.

I think we set out to see the statue three different times. We’d wake up in the morning in our nice one bedroom apartment, the one with unlimited hot water for the big shower, and I’d announce, ‘Let’s go find that Jesus today.’. Mike would agree, and then we’d get dressed and go out, only to get distracted by one thing or another as we made our way around the historic area of Cuenca. There’s a lot to see in this city and most of it is within easy walking distance of our apartment.   So one day we went to the Parque Calderon, the big park by the big new cathedral, and wandered around there for awhile. I took in the last part of Mass in the ‘new cathedral’, which is incredibly beautiful and overwhelmingly large. We didn’t find the Jesus. We saw a lot of other Jesuses, but not the one we were looking for.

One of the blue domes of the new cathedral. This cathedral can hold about 10,000 people. And I bet it gets filled on Sundays.

One photo of the interior of the new cathedral. It just seemed rude to be taking photos there so I left the big camera in my bag and got this one quickly. Those are TV screens where the congregation can see the priest performing the Mass way up front.

Another day we walked in a different direction. We came upon another park and another church. This time there were families enjoying a teenage ‘dance off’ in the square and kids playing in the fountain. We were enchanted to see kids being allowed to play in the town square fountain, as they should be allowed to do on a warm day. We stuck around to watch and listen, then noticed the Museum of Modern Art and decided to explore that.  We loved the building more than the artworks. It was built over a hundred years ago by monks who wanted to help alcoholics get off the street.  Then it was a hospital for mentally ill women. Now it’s a museum and the building outshines the actual art: Long outdoor hallways with small rooms that open onto courtyards of lovely statuary and plants; rooms historically  used for patients, now used as artist’s studios. The feel of the place is serene; peaceful. Again we were not disappointed in our discoveries, but there was no life-sized polychrome Jesus.

Just another beautiful day in Cuenca with families out enjoying life.

A courtyard at the museum of Modern Art. Each little yellow door hides a studio.

Yesterday we wandered way down to the end of Calle Large, the street Claire and Dan live on. At the end of the street we walked through an open gate.  It was just a gate in a fence, no big deal. But we stumbled into a lovely park with an aviary filled with the birds of the region.  Enchanting! The place is a large park dedicated to flora and fauna of Ecuador, and attached to the considerable Inca/Canari ruins referred to as Pumapungo. We’ve never seen a ruin we didn’t want to explore. This ruin included the foundations of the housing dedicated to the Canari virgins who served the priests. Hmmm. Apparently those jokes about ‘sacrificial virgins’ are actually true.

Commonly called a Buzzard Eagle. He’s a stunner for sure.

These ruins of an ancient Inca/Canari city, right here in town.

This city knows how to do great parks.

Turning back for home we wandered along the street and suddenly, there was the church with the life-sized Jesus! It is part of the Todos Santos complex, which includes a working garden and convent. This small church, no more ornate than any other church in Ecuador, had a tall bell tower and by squinting just the right way into the sun, you could almost see the hands of Jesus waving at you. We went in through the open door into the cool vestibule.

A lovely young woman welcomed us in Spanish, of course, and we nodded and smiled because really, we didn’t understand a word she was saying. After asking her to speak more slowly, a phrase that gets a lot of use with us, I used Google translate to inquire about climbing up to see the Jesus. She looked crestfallen. We had noticed that there was  scaffolding around the tower and hoped against hope that didn’t mean Jesus wasn’t accepting visitors that day. She gave us a long explanation that, again, we couldn’t understand, so we just said ‘oh, ok, no problem’. But we must have looked especially disappointed, or maybe she thought I was going to cry if I couldn’t see that statue. Whatever her reasons, she suddenly just told us it would be 1$ for the tour. We slapped the money on the counter right away, before she could change her mind.

Although I’m not Catholic, I have always admired polychrome statues of Mary, the Divine Feminine, like this one on the landing in Todos Santos.

She closed the doors to the church and led us up small wooden stairs that smelled of care and polish, stopping at every landing to open windows to a view of her city. So far, this tour was pretty good what with small, creaky staircases and a fantastic statue of the Virgin on the landing, but it was about to get better. At the next landing she opened a small door and gestured us to follow her out to a ledge on the roof. That’s right. We followed this woman onto a ledge about 2 feet wide with no railing. She cautioned us to take care not to fall. That was the safety speech. It was great! The view was expansive. Photos were snapped. Then we carried on up the stairs, which got smaller at each landing.

View of the red tiles of Cuenca from the roof ledge with absolutely no safety railing of any kind.

Into the bell tower we emerged, and there was more opening of shutters and expansive views of the city and river. She gave us a tour guide version of the story of the church, in Spanish, telling when everything was built, when the bridge below was destroyed by the river, when the tower was added and repaired. She said the dates in English and the rest we figured out by her hand gestures and some limited Spanish words we understood. Since I don’t retain verbal information anyhow, the fact that we had a language barrier didn’t matter at all. I was absorbing the whole feel of the thing at that point.

I’m always struck by the sheer artistry of these church interiors.

Opening the shutters to reveal the view. This lady was very proud of her church and her city.

Just one more level to go!

The next level up was the statue. I could see Jesus’ red robes from below. And this, unfortunately, is where we stopped. As she had told us, the bell tower was under repair and the repairmen had tied a rope across the stairway, limiting access to the top of the tower. Our tour guide went as far as to try to get underneath the rope to see if it was safe, to no avail. I had to give her much kudos for trying. She clearly didn’t want us to be disappointed. She let me climb up the tiny, narrow steps to stick my camera up through the opening for a photo of Jesus’ back. I had found the Jesus. But he was not receiving visitors, after all.

Our valiant guide tried her best to get past the rope across the staircase, but in the end, she was worried about crossing that barrier.

I got this glimpse of the statue’s back.

Mike asked when the repairs would be finished and it looks possible they’ll be done before Christmas. We were too tired to explore the entire Todos Santos complex and so when the scaffolding is down, we’ll try again. I really do want to see this statue. And besides, climbing up these little wooden stairs, ducking my head to pass beneath the low ceiling, views of the city…all for 1$? Yes, please. I’ll do that again.

Detail of interior. All the churches we’ve seen have this level of artwork inside.

I spotted another statue down below. Alas, the sanctuary was locked.

 

 

 

Those TIPS: Temporary Import Permits

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This will be a test post from the land of slow interweb connections. Yes, we’re in Mexico. Didn’t see that coming, did you? We took the plunge and decided to leave early Thursday evening so we could get to Ensenada early in the day today and get cleared in before the weekend. We are starting to feel a little rushed as we have a plane to catch to Ecuador on December 7 and we would like some time to get the boat buttoned up. So here we are in Cruiseport Marina, and you won’t have any photos in this post because: slow and unreliable internet. What an interesting place this is already.

Let me be honest here: I’m having a number of what I’m going to call ‘American Moments’.  I’ve decided that term aptly describes the assumptions that I, as an American, make about how things will go when, in fact, my assumptions will cause me to not ask the right questions or even know what questions to ask!  The marina is not what I expected it to be in some ways, but it’s more than I ever dreamed in other ways.

For instance, I have been looking forward since September 26 to doing my laundry. That is the last day we did laundry in an actual laundry machine.  We have a lot of laundry to do and this marina was supposed to sport a nice laundry facility where for $1.25 American per load I could walk away with freshly cleaned and folded clothes. (I prefer to do my own laundry, not turn it over to strangers.)  The true part of this statement is that yes, there is a laundry room and it’s very nice and that’s the correct price. After that, things start to get dicey. The laundry room, and the rest rooms and showers, will be closing December 4 for renovations and to enlarge them. Ok, now I have 3 days to get all my laundry done. It would have been very nice for someone to have alerted me to this at the time of my reservation, since these are amenities that people are looking for in a marina. Added to my list of questions for future marinas: “Do you have a laundry room, do the machines work, and will you be closing them in the near future? ”

So we take two loads of salty sheets and blankets down to the facility, which, by the way, is about 1/2 mile away. We arrive to find only 1 washing machine that works. The other two have ‘out of order’ signs on them. Mike could probably fix them if we knew what was wrong; alas it’s a mystery. The entire marina has 3 days to get  laundry done. Also, do not use the second dryer. It does not get hot and will eat your money. After sailing all night to get here, checking into the marina, then being whisked through immigration, customs, etc,  I felt a bit like a wilted flower taking my semi-moist blankets out of the drier to hang over the safety lines on Galapagos.

Now. Another thing. There are no pump out facilities for holding tanks here at Cruiseport Marina. (Holding tanks hold your poo until you dispose of it properly.)  I mean, how American of me to simply assume that there would be! I know better than that and yet I didn’t even realize I was assuming it! That’s how assuming works. You don’t see it until you’ve made an ‘ass out of u and me’, as they say. No. Pump Out. You know what that means? Surely it means that people take their boats down to the newer Marina Coral down the water way and use their pump out? Or they take the boat out to sea and pump overboard? No, it does not mean that. It means I better look first before putting my hands in the water around here. I know, I know. I will have to get used to that. We have a clean holding tank right now and I wanted to keep it that way so we could leave with it empty, but darn it if those bathrooms are not closing December 4.

So those are the irritations, but the good thing is this: if you come stay here to check into Mexico, the marina will have a staff member drive you to the one-stop immigration processing office and in less than an hour you will be cleared into the country.  No muss, no fuss. This is part of their service.  I mean it, this marina guy was amazing. Considering that clearing in to Mexico by boat is a multi-step process involving several different offices and we don’t speak Spanish yet, this was a huge relief to us. We were in and out while other cruisers who arrived before us were still waiting. I’m not exactly sure how that happened, but I also didn’t ask questions about it. Marina man pointed and said ‘sign here’ and ‘pay this amount’ and we did. And it was done.

The biggest relief was when they issued us our Temporary Import Permit (TIP) for the boat. These are good for 10 years. Here’s the hitch: the permit goes with the boat. When you check out of Mexico you are supposed to cancel that TIP but lots of boat owners don’t bother. Then they sell the boat and the new owner inherits a head ache when they apply for a TIP to go to Mexico and are told that the old one still exists and must be cancelled first, preferably by the previous boat owner. I’ve literally read that you have to hunt down the previous owner and get them to have some kind of document notarized…blah blah, no way.  Our boat had a TIP issued as recently as 2008. It’s not 2018 yet, and they are good for ten years. You do the math.  I figured we’d have a problem and the previous owner wasn’t forthcoming with any information. (This was two or three owners back.) We’d kind of hit a wall.

When you research how to cancel a TIP there is no definitive answer to be found. It’s all very wishy washy. There have been days where the Mexican government, knowing this is a problem, has sent representatives to some of the consulates to cancel TIPS for people. They have been surprised by the number of people who show up. We never showed up because I never heard about any of these special events until after the fact. Also I just didn’t see why I should have to spend time and money traveling to another city, like Phoenix or Sacramento, to cancel something the previous owner should have done.

So we threw caution to the wind and just went to Mexico believing it would work out. I mean, we certainly wouldn’t be the only people to show up with an old TIP still attached in the system to their boat. I imagine that happens all the time. Surely the good Mexican people had a way of dealing with that. Our plan was to deny knowing anything about it and throw ourselves on their mercy if necessary. In the end, it never even came up! I spent months stressing about this, emailing the Port of Ensenada, contacting people at the marina who never returned my message, talking on the phone to the people at the Mexican Consulate in San Fransisco (who told me I would have to go to Sacramento to deal with it), hitting dead end after dead end. That’s why we just threw up our hands and rolled with it. In the end, no one even asked.  I’m not sure they even checked in their system to see if one existed for our hull number. They just took our documentation, processed our fee, and gave us our beautiful, holographed permit! Yippee! We’re imported!

So it’s been a long day and night but so many people are confused about this TIP thing I wanted to get this information out there. Just stay in the Cruiseport Marina when you check in. Wash your clothes before you come and look the other way when your neighbor pumps out overboard. Maybe you’ll get lucky on that Temporary Import Permit, too.

Oh, and about that furler, Mike fixed it in less than 2 days. I do have a post on it but can’t get it to load because of the photos. I’ll get to it.

S/V Galapagos, Out.

Well Dang It!

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We try to keep things family friendly here on the blog site. There are a lot of words I could have used in the title, but ‘dang it’ pretty much sums it up. While we’ve been playing ‘musical anchorages’ in San Diego, other things have been happening and not all of them involve sitting in the cockpit drinking wine with friends. Some of them involve frustrating turns of events that could, if we had worse manners, have resulted in words being thrown across the water in frustration, only to land in someone’s tender ear. So even though I thought my next post would be about the Cruiser’s anchorage in San Diego, it’s not. It’s about this episode, which is filed under ‘it ain’t all pretty sunsets and tequila, people’. If you follow us on our Facebook Page you’ll already have been among the first to know this story.

My point here is that shit happens when you are busy living life. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

Newsflash: There are always projects going on aboard Galapagos. It’s a big boat, it’s an old boat, and some of the systems on board are getting a bit long in the old tooth. Even though we are kind of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ types, sometimes that’s not the best way to go. Today, it looks like we paid a price for putting off something we should have done back in June. I say ‘looks like’ because I’m still not certain it wouldn’t have happened anyhow. Here’s our tale of woe.

Our boat has an old Profurl headsail furler. For the non-sailors, that is the thing you see on the pointy part of the boat that allows you to pull a string to unfurl the big sail in the front, then pull another string to roll it back up. The idea is that you then have your sail ready to go all the time. It’s supposed to make things easy. And generally it does. Until it doesn’t. Lately Mike had been noticing that the furler unit was a little stiff; it was hard to get it to turn. He’d look up at the top of the forestay but couldn’t see anything amiss. That’s because the mast is more than 50 feet from the deck of the boat, so it’s a long way up. Even with binoculars, it’s hard to see that one small little area on a moving boat in the glare of the brilliant California sunshine.

Yesterday (while he was sick enough to cough up a lung) he was putting on the new jib lines (see, we really DO keep upgrading things) and he needed to unfurl the headsail a bit so he could reach the old lines and untie them. The thing didn’t want to unfurl. Hmmm. He looks high and low, then notices he can now see with his naked eye some fraying at the top of the halyard. The NEW halyard. That’s not a good sign. “We’ve got a problem”, he says. “What else is new?”, I think. He puts ‘go up the mast and look at that dang fraying’ on his never-ending list of things to do before we get to Mexico, coughs up his other lung,  and goes about his business getting the new jib lines attached to the sail. I sigh deeply and go back to whatever I was doing.

There used to be a very pretty splice here.

A few minutes later he pops his head down the hatch and says we now have a REAL problem. The fraying he noticed was the harbinger of doom that was REAL problem: The halyard has just snapped while he was standing there. Literally. He hadn’t touched anything. It just snapped and popped down into the mast. Let’s just pause for a moment of silence while all the sailors who read this heave a huge collective sigh. I know you’ve been there when it comes to halyards in the mast. So now we have a broken BRAND NEW halyard, an unscheduled trip up the mast to trouble shoot this,  and possibly more parts we need to get before we can leave for Mexico. By the way, that’s just a few short days away.

On the one hand, DANG IT!  And other more forceful words. But if you are going to survive this lifestyle, you have to look at the bright side of things and the bright sides are considerable, including that we were anchored at La Playa and rafted up to friends on S/V Blue when this happened, not racing across the water on a nice broad reach. Also we are not in Mexico, land where finding parts for sailing boats is not easy and importing them from the U.S. is expensive and not for the faint of heart. Not to mention the usual language barrier.

See that hook on the right? It’s not supposed to exist. Mike found fibers caught in that gap.

So we hoist Mike and his deadly cough up the mast to assess this latest turn of events and he sees that somehow the halyard has wrapped around and rubbed against the halyard swivel at top of the furler. The friction created has actually melted the side and created a sharp edge. In a Hercule Poirot moment, he found tiny pieces of shredded halyard caught on that little hook in the photo. This sharpened edge sawed through just enough of the splice for the entire splice to let go. Oy.

These Profurl units have a ‘wrap stop’ that is supposed to keep the halyard from getting wrapped around the forestay and this is where our powerfully bad decision making came in. (Also in reading on the interweb about this problem, I see that it’s a common problem with the Profurl units and that leads me to surmise that it’s a poor design. Which leads me to mistrust it in the future. Which leads me to want a new furler, which we probably need because this one has been nothing but trouble and Mike has had to fix several issues with it on this trip already.  I see a newer furler unit being carried in a suitcase in our future because we can’t really get one right now.)

The new unit, which is basically a piece of plastic.

This summer we had a rigger climb the mast and to have a look around. He told us that ‘wrap preventer’ was worn and would need replacing. So we ordered a new one. But we didn’t replace it right away. Why? Let’s not even go there. The ‘why’ gets lost in all the other things we were doing at the time, all the projects and details and all that stuff. We probalby could have used a project manager for all the projects we had going at once. It wasn’t broke, so we didn’t fix it. Now it’s broke, and so is our halyard. Pretty much that sums it up. Dang it. Do we feel like rubes? We do. Oh well. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last.

So here’s where we are at: we have the part. We pulled the halyard down, reversed it, and pulled the good end  back up the mast so now Mike can do the eye splice on the end and it will be ready to go again. He’ll install the new ‘wrap stop’, and when everything is put back together I’ll pull the headsail out while we are tied to the dock and he can watch the unit working from his perch at the top of the mast. We still cannot figure out how that halyard had enough slack to get against that piece of plastic and create that much friction. The angle must be all wrong. And this is what he will observe in situ. Then he can decide if further action needs taking.

Yes, we are at the visitor’s dock at Shelter Island until this is sorted. It’s 1$/foot, no matter what size slip you get. So we got the slip where you can pull straight in with no turns and it’s terrific. There is zero security here, and apparently some nefarious goings-on happen here. But there is electricity, which we needed for a different issue I’ll write about later. And there is unlimited water. Our decks are looking grungy and could use a rinse. Galapagos is sparkling in the sun with all the salt on her.  S/V Blue pulled in next to us. So it’s all good.

So far, we’re still on target. S/V Galapagos, out.