Category Archives: Living Aboard

Afternoon Gin

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I’m sure there’s a name for the drink I’m having here in the cockpit, watching the Terns hunting small fry in the fairway. A delicious concoction of pineapple juice, gin, and TopoChico, shaken, not stirred, it’s a fine way to end the day. Heavy on the gin, please.

I’m sprinkling this post with photos of the remodeled house. Because I don’t want to do a whole post on that.

Back in the day when Paul Bryan wrote his blog about life aboard S/V Kelly Nicole, he used to write these posts he called Morning Tea. I stole the idea, except called mine Morning Coffee. But unfortunately, I still have a job for a couple more weeks and I don’t have time to write in the morning while I drink my Nescafe’. So Afternoon Gin will have to do. These are going to be posts where the mind wanders with little restraint. It’s hard to tell what will come up but I will try to manage a loose theme. Maybe there will be some mild ranting and expressing of opinions. We’ll see. If I get to the point where stomping around and spitting is called for, I’ll try to dial it back.  It’s a little like dreaming on paper; a way to get back into the swing of writing. And I really need that.

Get yourself a drink of some kind and sit back for this post. Relax a little.  I feel the spirit moving in my hands so here goes.

Do you ever wonder how living aboard a sailboat, sailing from port to port and across the wild blue sea would change a person? I tell you what: it’s hard to explain. There’s a longing to be away from all people, from all land, from all the telenovelas of life. There’s a bone deep, visceral feeling that to not ever sail on the open sea again is to die a poor death, with a life truly unfulfilled. I have stopped expecting anyone to understand that if they’ve never found themselves drifting through a high pressure zone, sails down, just loving the flat, clear water. I know I personally did not understand it when other people talked about their experiences, until I, too, had been across the ocean on a smallish boat. It’s so far outside most people’s boxes of life that people just cannot relate to it. And that’s just fine. In the end, this experience is deeply personal anyhow.

A different view of the living room. Want to see what the house looked like before? Go Here.

As a rule I feel like if I ever die at sea, so be it. I’m not predicting it will happen, and I will do everything I can to mitigate that, but at the end of the day, if it does I hope people will shout for joy that I didn’t die in a hospital bed hooked up to all kinds of shenanigans. When you are in your 60’s you start thinking seriously about your own mortality as it stares you in the face from the bottom of the hill you’ve crossed over. And when you are on a long voyage, you have a lot of time to think while staring sightless into the deep turquoise of the water. Maybe too much time.

The kitchen was a complete tear down. I salvaged the original fir floors in here. We love a kitchen with workable spaces that are small enough to keep clean; another thing learned while living on a boat. For more on Edison House, go HERE.

Here’s another thing: after our years of cruising, and there were not even that many of them so I imagine this will only get worse after our next go around, my bullshit meter has a hair trigger. Office drama? I do not have the bandwidth for it. People looking to gain a little power in their otherwise powerless existences by lording it over me or my kin and/or coworkers? Sorry. Go bother someone else. Just get the heck out of my energy field. Be gone.  Personal drama? It weighs me down in a way that makes me wonder if I’m just over drama of all kinds.

Honestly, the finesse with which I used to put up with interpersonal BS on all levels is now replaced by a zero tolerance zone. As I type that last line I realize it’s a lie. I have never put up with that stuff willingly. I learned at my father’s knee to call bull crap when I saw it. And the idea that I would have some finesse at dealing with small but power hungry people in a work situation is kind of laughable, actually. So maybe it’s just that I had a little more tolerance for it before but now, I absolutely do not. I understand what drives it, and I ‘get it’ why some folks need to exert control over others. But I simply don’t have the bandwidth to tolerate it anymore in my own life. I think it’s kind of related to the dying at sea theme (again, not throwing down any gauntlets for the Universe here. Just making a point.)  If I have X number of decent years left on this planet, being around people whose way of being in the world doesn’t align with mine is not how I want to spend that time.

This has made it sometimes very hard to work for a corporation that contracts with a school district. (Read: Two huge layers of expectations and needs, not to mention the layer of the school itself.)  But all corporations are the same under the skin. They are made up of people. And I am so appreciative of my supervisors and colleagues during this arduous time of having an extremely easy job for which I am very grateful but also for which I am completely unsuited. This is the only job I have ever had where I threatened to quit more than one time and I actually meant it and would have been relieved had it come to pass.

The last time I offered to quit my team lead didn’t even respond to my impulsively scribbled email offering my head on the proverbial platter. She knew to give me time for that bullshit meter to cool down. She’s great.  I learned a lot during my tenure at this job. Mostly I learned that I am still living the emotional trauma of my military upbringing. I thought I was a bit more resolved about that. Not totally, but a bit.  Apparently I was wrong.  I think it’s hardwired into me. That’s kind of unsettling. I believe in reincarnation, so I hope I can get that resolved before I die. I really don’t want to repeat that lesson again.  Maybe cruising will help.

I have two more weeks to work and as easy as this job has been on the actual ‘work’ level, I’ll be glad when this part is over. My only caveat is that I really loved working with the high school students. I can take or leave the middle school (mostly leave, if I’m honest), but I feel like many of the high school students I counseled really benefitted from our relationship and that makes me glad. I am proud of them. Most of them are personally courageous and as a group they know way more about life than ever did at that age.

On another note, newly back in land life I quickly discovered that shopping for clothing is almost the most boring and absurd thing on the planet. I cannot believe I ever loved it as much as I did. What a lot of wasted time and money. The buying of clothing is WAY over rated. And this is a shame because at the tender age of 63 I can wear clothes I could only dream of wearing in my 40’s, even in my 30’s. It should be true that I dress for the geriatric runway each and every day possible but I feel really resentful that I even have to wear clothes, much less that they would need to somehow be pleasing to others. This entire year of working I have worn maybe 4 outfits. A year of in-person work. 4 outfits. Just let that sink in, all you clothes horses. It’s possible 4 is an exaggeration. I can’t be bothered to really count. I could go cruising for at least a year on the money I have literally thrown away on useless clothing, most of which I wore only a few times.

And don’t even mention makeup to me. I have discovered tinted mineral based sunscreen. Hoo Rah! SPF 50, baby, and an evenly toned complexion. Moving on.

View of the living room from the kitchen. The plant’s name is Fred and he has lived with me for decades.

When I got my current job, I immediately hit the Goodwill  to find stylish over-priced used clothing. I am always amazed at what people get rid of.  I bought some really cute skirts and envisioned myself being the cool counselor, dressed for secondary school success. I would be fashionable and kicky and fun. I would wear skirts and leggings and arty looking flats. I would look French, but I would not necessarily BE French. The students wouldn’t be able to wait to see what I wore that week. I would be both professional and approachable, which, as a woman, is damned hard to pull off at any age, much less the age where your bullshit meter shows on your face, with or without a mask. That plan did not work out. The skirts still have the tags on them. Glad I didn’t pay retail. (As if I ever would.)

Before we went sailing you could not have pried me away from my vast wardrobe. It filled the closet AND the chest of drawers!  I tell you what: that is not the case at this time. I have one shelf of clothing and one drawer. I have one smallish basket of overflow because the clothes we wear in cold weather take up more room and God knows we may not even have summer this year so I have to keep those handy. I have, I think, 6 pairs of shoes, including tennis shoes, everyday winter shoes, and a few pairs of sandals. That is way too many shoes and I look forward to ditching at least half of them. I’ve already started. I probably have too many socks as well. Those will be going. Laundry is not how I want to spend my time. While some people may pity me, I assure you I absolutely do not miss having a lot of clothes. I do not want to take care of lots of clothes. It bores me and wastes vasts amounts of what time I have left on this planet. These kinds of belongings that I have to care for day to day weigh me down.

The little dining room off the kitchen.

Also, why do people wash their clothes after wearing them one time? Is it just easier than putting them away? Try wearing the same clothes each day for a week. I bet it reduces your stress. It’s ok. Just throw them on the floor at night and put them on the next day. I guarantee you that no one is going to say, ‘Hey there, Bill. Did you just throw that shirt on the floor and put it on again? Are those the same exact grey pants you wore yesterday?’. I mean use common sense. You don’t actually have to go feral.  If you’ve soiled your clothing in some way, go for the washing machine. But as a rule, I bet you are over washing your clothing and wearing it out faster. Oh wait! Then you have to go shopping sooner! I see how that works now. That’s very clever! I wonder if the washing powder people and clothing manufacturers are in cahoots somehow?

And in that same vein, how many showers does the average person actually need? The amount of time and resources wasted taking daily showers is tremendous! If you smell bad after one day there is something wrong (unless you have a physically laborious  job, of course).  Maybe you have too much stress and the stress hormones are leaking out. Maybe your diet is wrong for you. If you constantly feel dirty, maybe that’s a mind over matter issue you need to speak to a therapist about. (I’ll probably be taking your insurance soon. Everything is confidential, you know, and, quite frankly, we’ve heard it all.)  Anyway, living on a boat at sea or even at anchor will quickly recalibrate your need for everyday long showers (brought to you by the folks who manufacture and sell body products). It’s possible to be both clean and frugal with water. We know this. Fight the machine! Question authority! Be clean and tidy but not fastidious! Challenge the expectations of the Society of Beige! You’ll never go back.

Tiny downstairs bathroom. Just don’t splash around in the tiny sink and get soap all over the Italian plaster and all is well.

I roll with things a lot better than I used to (except see above re: interpersonal and work drama). This is how I survived the renovations of Edison House over the last year. Meh. All things must pass. I still get my knickers in a twist with big transitions, like moving and having a chaotic space kind of stresses me out, but overall I do much better with that than I used to pre-cruising. I’m, if not content, then certainly accepting of waiting to see what happens next rather than perseverating on controlling the future, which I have learned from hard experience is not actually a thing that is possible. Occasionally I catch myself in a rabbit den of worry and the old anxious brain starts taking over, but overall that’s way better than it used to be. I think the weather systems over the years of cruising taught me that. And all the break downs we had. The dramatic breakage of the boom. The potentially deadly backstay failure. The unfortunate hitting of the charted rock in the Sea of Cortez. Those things are lessons you will never learn in a book. I look back at those  times and feel proud of how we handled them. What’s a little hole under the boat? If we aren’t sinking, we keep going. I’m ready. Let’s go.

I could sit and watch these Terns hunting for hours. Scratch that. Cruising didn’t change that in me. It’s one of the reasons I went in the first place. It was never about the people, or the cultures. Sorry. I know it’s polite to say that I want to visit other cultures and learn new languages. And sure, those things are interesting to me. But the languages I’m really most interested in are those of the octopus, the fish, the whales and dolphins and tiny creatures. The culture I am interested in mostly is the culture of the coral reef and the reefy rocks. I’ve spent my entire adult life studying humanity.  It was, and forever will be, about the animals in these travels.

People said it couldn’t be done, adding a complete bathroom upstairs. Um. We did it.

Tiny Japanese Soaking tub. Actually a perfect size.

Cruising brings into focus that age is not just a number. It’s a real measure of how long we’ve been on the planet and the wear and tear on all our systems. Boats age. People age. Boats need to have parts maintained and replaced. So do people, apparently starting in their 60’s. When you turn 60, all systems seem to begin failing. We have been grateful for our very good medical insurance through Michael’s job with the State Patrol. We’ve used it a lot. We’re trying to get as many body parts fixed,  healed, repaired, and replaced as possible before we cut the dock lines again.

The breakdown of body parts creates a feeling of urgency about the next trip. It surely does. I remind myself that people get good healthcare (and way cheaper) most places in the world. Mexico taught us that.

People who say a person is (insert number here) years ‘young’ are going to get an eye roll from me so hard a 13 year old would go blind. When, exactly, do we start saying someone is ‘years young’ instead of ‘years old’? (Uh oh. There goes the bullshit meter!)  I’ll tell you when: it’s when we don’t want to call attention to the fact they are getting old. That’s also when mature women begin being called ‘young lady’ in grocery stores by random men. (Just stop. Don’t do it. You mean well, but you take your life in your hands. If you don’t believe women are witchy enough to curse your very soul, just call any woman over 50 ‘young lady’ and then look directly into her eyes. I’m warning you only because you are probably a nice person overall.) To be old in our country’s youth culture is a bad thing. So basically we condescend by saying so-and-so is 75 years young! When we do that, we pander to a culture that would pretend people do not get old or who would dismiss them when they do.

Bodies age and boat life will bring that into focus in ways that land life will not. There is no sense in denying it by inserting one word for another with a little wink of the eye. That kind of marketing just doesn’t work.

We cannot afford to pretend we are in our 40’s out there on the ocean. We must have systems that will accommodate our aging selves and this is entirely doable on a sailboat . We will be re-rigging the boat this season with our aging bodies firmly in mind. We may be getting older but we are  not going to be going quietly into anyone’s dark, still, night or whatever. We’re just going to need a longer winch handle. And maybe a beefier block and tackle. We’ll let you know.

Edison House, built in 1926

Seeing the Neowise comet from the middle of the Pacific on a clear night, just the two of us, is worth all the money and all the work and all the discomfort. All of it. Whales looking us in the eye as they keep pace with the boat, all of us moving north together. Also totally worth it. Being called ‘Adventure couple’ by the Chinese captain of a large ship in the middle of the sea. Worth it. The soft calling and cooing of Elephant Seals echoing off cliff faces in the dark of night. Worth it. Swimming surrounded by Mobula Rays in the Sea of Cortez, in the dusk of a long day. Totally worth it. Coming face to face with a quiet Monk Seal in crystal clear water. So very worth it. Swimming with dozens of Green Sea Turtles on Mike’s 60’s birthday in Hawaii. Totally worth it.  Having a seahorse swim into my face mask to say hello. Incredibly worth it. Even losing a backstay and ending a perfect, idyllic sail home. Worth it.  Uncomfortable , sleepless nights. Worth it. Scary water. Also worth it.  Let’s go.

The gin is long gone, the rain is coming. My friends the Terns are going home for their long sleep. We’ve got a seal in the fairway. Everything is peaceful and filled with gratitude for another day aboard the boat.

S/V Galapagos, Standing by.

 

 

 

 

Timelines: A Sacred Trine of Events

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Yesterday, Sunday, June 5, the year of our Lord 2022, we did not get a Sunday newspaper delivered. We should have known when the Lopez family failed to deliver the slim and damp, plastic-sleeved paper of little worth that we had now shifted timelines. As though our very lives hung at the end of a delivery man’s substantial wrist, carefully tossed from the open window of his dilapidated Dodge Caravan, yesterday was the day that things all started coming together. Perhaps,  had we known, we could have been more prepared. Perhaps, had we known, we would have remembered to pack our underwear.

New, bigger settee and new table. We are loving this.

At one point, maybe a couple of months into the last, hectic year, Mike had paid for a 3 month subscription to the Sunday edition of  The Olympian newspaper, our local rag.  Die hard newspaper readers of old, we had some idea that we could recapture the days of our youth when, armed with mugs of coffee, we would take Sunday as a day of rest and savor each section of the Sunday paper over breakfast. We would refold each section neatly so that each of us could have the experience of cracking the pages open; sniffing the smell of fresh newsprint as it billowed forth. For the inexperienced youth among you, this is almost as delicious a rush as ripping the plastic film off a new album. Almost.  Each week we would have a hopeful gleam in our eyes only to have the fire extinguished as we realized, once again, that we had already read all the ‘news’ the paper printed.  And the beloved comic section that we used to look forward to each week had become sad. Honestly, it was just too hard to even read them. Some of them (I’m looking at you Doonsebury) have way to many small print words and they aren’t even funny anymore. Plus they STILL publish Family Circus. I mean…come on!
Worse than that, all the adverts in the paper are for elderly people. I have to tell you, I may be getting towards ‘elderly’ but even when my joints didn’t need grease I didn’t laugh at Family Circus. Pickles… maybe. But definitely not Family Circus.
Having learned our lesson, Mike called and cancelled the subscription after it ran out. But the papers kept coming. We never got a bill but the newspapers would appear at front edge of our sidewalk every Sunday, just as though the 1980’s were still current. Mike called the office of The Olympian to be sure they had actually cancelled us and they had. Still, Family Lopez kept delivering. On occasion we’d get a hand written note (!)  about making sure that any tips went to them directly because if we added those to our bill, they’d never see a penny. That’s probably true, we thought, so we would make sure to tip in the conveniently enclosed tip envelope. We tipped consistently, but we never paid another bill. Hmmm.
Every week the paper showed up. Until yesterday. No paper was delivered yesterday.
And yesterday was the day we moved back aboard Galapagos. Coincidence? We’ll let you decide.

Things have been in quite the chaotic transition for us lately. (And looking back over the blog, can you actually say that our lives are ever calm? Maybe we’ll work on that.)  Last time I posted we were talking about our house on Edison Street and we were thick into the renovations and remodeling necessary to take a 1926 house that had been a rental for literally decades and turn it into a home, and also a different kind of rental. We love that little house and had planned to rent it furnished to travel nurses and their ilk. It was a good plan until our daughter needed a place to move in Olympia. (Olympia, WA:  land of zero availability for rental housing, and negative zero for affordable rental housing. Come to think of it, negative zero for affordable housing of ANY kind.)

 

The timing of that need had us changing our plans for the foreseeable future. It made sense for her to move into our place, leave it furnished, and make it easy on all of us. No worries about property management, no worries about tenants. Long time readers may recall when we moved out of Lucerne House in Lakewood and onto the boat. Our son and his friends took that house off our hands for that trip. Now it’s Claire’s turn. So she is moving in, and we are moving out. And while this transition will last a bit longer, yesterday was our first real day living on board. Last night we slept in our cozy bunks and this morning I remembered why we generally leave a low heat going in the aft cabin when at the dock in Washington State.

In Hawaii, I happened upon our daughter’s name spelled in lava rock. Literally huge expanses of lava, and I am walking across them, far from the road,  and then this emerges in my phone camera viewfinder. I had no words. I swear on every religious and non-religious text ever printed or thought of that I did not put those letters there and I am not making this up.

In our family we have a saying that when things begin to fall into place in that strange kind of way that the Universe has about it, we have “switched timelines”; jumped off the track we’re on and onto another track into the future.  It’s just our way of giving a nod to the mysterious way events seem to line up when the decision has been made, consciously or not, to embrace a big change. So yesterday, we did not get our paper delivered as we have done for a year now. I hope the Lopez family is OK.

Undaunted by the lack of news in our Sunday lives, we packed the car with more of our daily belongings; computers, medicines, skincare, haircare, some work clothes…just a bunch of stuff we would organize and stow aboard, and set off to the marina. Pulling a packed cart to the gate, we met Jason, our rigger, coming up the walkway.

 

‘Hey, Jason! Good to see you again! Yes, we are moving aboard today. We need to get on your schedule to get this mast pulled. What does it look like?”

 

Jason is taking reservations for August. We will get on his schedule and that’s perfect timing for us. We cannot really get to all that before August. We are firmly on the timeline now. (If you are wondering, no there will not be a cruise for us this summer and I am not one bit bitter about that. Not at all. I am not spitting in rage or having regular melt downs of despair or anything. We have some other travel plans in the works and we have a very long and detailed list of boat projects that need doing. It’s not time to have fun yet. If there is a generous God anywhere, please that she will allow us all to live healthily for a few more years so we can get the hell out of here for a bit.)

Hey, we are divers now. Here we are having fun with gentle giants in Hawaii. Incredible!

Hours of unpacking, organizing, cleaning and stowing later, we have dinner and watch some Netflix. Mike has his laptop open and is trying to fix our blog, which has been broken for months. Maybe even a year. I don’t know. I gave up hope. A couple of long time readers contacted us to find out if we were ok because we had not posted in over a year. Yikes! Yeah, we were OK. But the blog remained broken.
 We considered starting a new one. That plan felt wrong as we’ve had our blog for over ten years and there is a lot of content there. Mike had tried everything he could find to fix it and yet he could not. He’d do research, get an idea, go for it with hope and dedication, and then come away frustrated. He talked to people in India to no avail.  When Mike cannot fix something, it’s broken badly. I tried not to think about starting over.
But yesterday was the day the timeline shifted. Suddenly Mike threw his hands in the air and shouted, “TODAY IS THE DAY EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING!”. And just like that, the blog was fixed. As though he had chanted some kind of magic that unbound the spell, everything started working. (OK, fine. He found some kind of setting buried deeply under layers of other settings that had got yacked up and when he fixed that, a cascade of other fixes happened. You call it computers. I call it magic.)
He has literally been working on fixing this thing for months. It’s been in the foreground of his enormous brain. But somehow today, our first full day and night aboard, it came together and here we are again. So let the writing begin!
PS: I’m still remembering how to do photos, size them, put them in the right place, etc. These photos are terrible. (Lee, I’m doing my best here.) I’m also not happy with the formatting for this post in the preview, but, if I spend time figuring that out I’ll probably yack something up so I’m just going to push this out and be done. But We ARE BACK!
S/V Galapagos, standing by.

Everything Grows Here

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We’re growing barnacles on our hull. When we left San Carlos in December we had a brand new bottom job. Naturally we had hoped that this would see us through the year, at least. But we’re just ignorant that way; and also still accustomed to the colder waters of the Pacific Northwest, I guess. I mean, why else would we have what has turned out to be unrealistic expectations? Friends here in this anchorage with us left San Carlos with a new bottom job at about the same time as we did and they, too, have barnacle growth to attend to. Maybe that’s normal in these waters.

My hull scraping cutting board and suction cup handle. I have plans on how to make this cutting board work even better.

It’s not that there are big huge creatures attached to our precious hull, it’s that they are small and numerous and I know we cannot leave them to grow. So I find myself in my snorkel gear, earplugs firmly intact, using a flexible cutting board as a wide scraper, swimming along the side of the hull removing hard growth and attracting myriads of smaller fish who are pleased with the growing smorgasbord in the water. I was using a smaller putty knife but it doesn’t remove enough material at once. I’d be there until Christmas that way. I’m kind of ready to hire someone to do this for me, actually.

Such a clever fellow, blending in as he does. These iguanas live close to the marina and like the shrubs next to the walkway. I wish he’d let me give him a pat. He looks so nice and scaly and dry.

One of the many things about this lifestyle that has taken us a little by surprise, because we just didn’t think much about it, is how you have to constantly adjust to new environments. I don’t mean the usual ‘finding the grocery store here’, or ‘which place has the best tacos’. I mean the change in climate, water temperature, air temperature…all that stuff.

The difference between our lives here in Banderas Bay (because it feels like we live here now) and our life in the Sea of Cortez is profound. We are dealing with humidity, increasing heat, and we are enjoying the warmth of the water, which means we swim almost every day. It’s a whole different world. This, apparently, has exposed us to new and exciting organisms that, while invisible to the naked eye, find hospitable purchase to grow in our bodies. Everything seems to grow here with wild abandon.

Here are our two lessons we’ve learned the hard way so far: always clean your ears out with hydrogen peroxide after swimming, and always wear a full mask that covers your nose when swimming. In other words, keep the salt water out of your orifices. Who knew? Well, I guess we do now.

We had been here about 2 weeks when Mike began to feel ill. He actually had a fever, which is pretty rare for him. Lethargic and with a painful jaw on one side he wondered about an infected tooth, but none of his teeth hurt. I wondered about a sinus infection, based on my considerable experience with those. He felt like crap and slept a great deal.

Giving him the once over I discovered increased blood pressure for him, and an increased pulse. Hmmmm. No bueno.  I decided to take a look in his ears. In what turned out to be a prescient move, I had invested in a cheap Dr. Mom otoscope when we were back in the states. It was an impluse purchase that I felt would come in handy. I checked the ears and found, to my horror, that he had what appeared to be a bulging, red and purple weepy area on the ear canal. It was not behind the ear drum, but it was definitely not something that belonged anywhere on a human body. Something alien was in my beloved’s ear. This meant a definite trip to the doctor. Immediately.

There are two places to see a doc here. One has an office attached to the pharmacy in town. I understand the fee there is extremely reasonable (read: cheap) and you can get your prescriptions filled right there. The other is a 24 hour clinic that is more focused on the tourists in the area and is quite a bit more expensive. We went by the pharmacy doc’s place first, but he was out to lunch and Mike felt too ill to wait for him in what was turning out to be a very warm, humid day. He was fading fast. We went to the emergency clinic. Mike was seen immediately.

Lots of water here, making a good place to see this painted turtle. There were about 5 of them right there. He’s a good sized turtle.

About 100$ later the doctor had given him antibiotics and some steroid drops for his ear and told him that an organism had found its way under the skin probably due to some tiny scratch in the ear canal. It had created an ulcer. He said it happens frequently and we should wash our ears out with hydrogen peroxide on a regular basis, and especially after swimming. Huh. We aren’t in Washington State anymore, I guess. Although you could never have paid me to swim up there.

The antibiotics helped over time and I kept a close eye on that ear, checking it everyday. It took about 11 days for the thing to heal enough that it didn’t look like an open wound. We feel like we were lucky to catch this because his ear didn’t hurt and it was only because his jaw was hurting that I thought to look in the ear. The doctor made it clear that had we waited much longer, this would have been a serious infection and much more difficult to treat. Damn. Way to put the fear of the gods into us.

I don’t know what this little guy is, but he was clearly too pretty to swat and made no trouble.

So Mike is fine and back to swimming and practicing standing up on the paddle board. Thank goodness for good medical care that is affordable. In the states, we probably would have avoided going to the doctor longer due to cost. The freedom of not having to worry about the financial implications of treatment is considerable.

Soon as he was well, I got sick. What?? I feel sure that my bottom-cleaning antics are to blame because I made an unwise decision and wore swim goggles, which do not cover your nose, rather than my full face mask. Even as I was sideways against the hull with organism debris all around me, that little voice of wisdom in the back of my head was telling me this was not a great idea, that I needed to keep the salt water/debris out of my nose better than this; that keeping air pressure in my nose wasn’t cutting the mustard. I hate when that little voice is right AFTER the fact. I got a nasty sinus infection, which I fortunately had antibiotics for on board the boat. I’m better and back to swimming (WITH my face mask, thank you very much), but between Mike’s illness and mine, we’ve been kind of growing attached to La Cruz. It’s not a bad place to be stuck, but I’m wondering if we need to check our own bodies for barnacles, we’ve been here so long.

I finally found my piece of Huichol art. I’m kind of in love with it. That’s the ocean Goddess on the right side.

One of the good things about being in a place too long is you make more connections with the people who are here. And that leads to some opportunities. In our last post we talked about how we realized we were looking at inflatable dinghies with longing. (Well, it wasn’t actually the dinghy we wanted, it was the ability to move faster and with more power. Frankly if we could do that with our Pudgy we’d be happy.) But anyhow, if you are following us on Facebook you’ll already know that very shortly after that post Mike was chatting with a guy at the dinghy dock and somehow it came up that we were kind of thinking we needed to be looking at other dinghies. People always ask about our Pudgy and admire her, so these conversations about dinghies are common. This guy had a dinghy he was selling for 100$ but it was deflated on his foredeck. His woman was seriously ready for it to be gone because it was taking up space. He was feeling the pressure.

Mike took a look at it but was pretty unimpressed. It looked like it had seen way better days and as a rule, we believe you get what you pay for, although we are completely open to gifts from the Universe, as it were. While not really interested in the dinghy, Mike kind of felt for the guy and realized he was under pressure from the wife. So he offered to come the next morning during the calm water time to help the dude just get the thing off the deck, get it in the water; just cruisers helping other cruisers. That would at least move the situation along and take the sting out of his complete disinterest in moving forward with that particular dinghy.

That afternoon the guy pulled the dinghy up to our boat and said, ‘Here, give it a try. Don’t worry about paying me. Just see if you can use it.’. Well… OK. I guess that was a bit of a surprise, but why not?

A sad looking vessel, to be sure. And filthy.

It was a sad looking boat, let me tell you. Filthy, no seats; it was like my first bicycle that I pulled out of the trash at the tender age of 5. It only needed everything to be just perfect. Still, it was floating, it had a fiberglass double floor with a drain, it was hypalon (not PVC), and it was the right size. Having invested nothing, we had nothing to lose by trying it out. It was made by Avon, which has a really good reputation for lasting decades if cared for. We went down the research hole on the interwebs and determined that based on what we found, and on the feedback I had received on the Women Who Sail forum, we would see if we could save this apparently worthy dinghy. Hey, if you know S/V Rubicon, this used to be their tender long ago.

We soon found a leak on one side, so that would need fixing. We took it in to the marina and talked to Horatio, the local dinghy repair chap. He looked it over and came up with a plan to fix that leak, then we could determine if there might be more, smaller leaks that would show up after this one was fixed. He said after he fixed the leak, we should use it like that for awhile and see whether it held air and if we liked it before spending more money on restoring it further. I liked this guy. He was clearly looking out for our interests as much as his own and I felt he was honest about what he could do for us. He didn’t want to see us invest a lot of money in a dinghy that turned out to be a poor investment. If we decide to keep it, he can replace all the seams for us. It also needs a new rubrail, but we will have to get that from the states.

Checking the bottom.

So we played with it a bit and we enjoyed how big and comfortable it was. We put the Octopus engine on the thing and even though our engine is a 2.5 hp baby, it pushed that dinghy along much faster than the heavier Pudgy can go. It cut our time to get to the dock by at least a third. It’s a way wetter ride, though. Maybe with a larger engine that can get it up on a better plane, the ride would be a little drier. But inflatables have a reputation for being wet, something we had not appreciated about our Pudgy as much as we should.

Mike, testing the speed. See how his hair blows in the wind? What a feeling.

At this point we are not ready to give up the Pudgy, but we’ve got Andrew and Jill (check out their cute blog) coming to spend time on the boat in September and if we are lucky Claire and Dan may make an appearance this spring. This dinghy will be grand when they are here. That will give us enough time to use it and see if we want to invest in a larger engine with this dink, or if we need to look at other inflatables once we get to the states. Storage is the only issue, but what else is new? We think we have a plan but we haven’t tried it yet. I mean, we’re already well into the Beverly Hillbillies vibe on our cabin top, so what do we have to lose? We’ll see.

Our current look, minus the shotgun, of course.

While we had planned to spend the summer on board, once more that is not happening. We need to go to Tennessee to visit Mike’s family. And since we’ll be in the states we will go see my family as well. We plan to get our car in San Carlos, pray it still runs, and drive that to Tennessee where we will stay for a few weeks. We’ll then need to drive the car back down to the southwest and store it somewhere, probably near Tuscon I’m guessing, so we can fly home to Washington. We will leave the boat here in Banderas Bay at Paradise Village Marina. It’s a good hurricane hole.

We think we are almost ready to go exploring now but I hesitate to say that out loud. We plan to spend a few days in Paradise Village Marina before we leave as they have potable water. Have I mentioned here that a water maker is high on our list of requirements for going further with this whole cruising gig? Hey, mentioning the dinghy paid off in spades, even though that guy has never heard of this blog. I have nothing to lose by throwing it out there that we need a water maker, especially for when 4 of us are aboard. Bring it, Universe. Bring it.

S/V Galapagos, standing by on channel 22a.