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Blog November 2025 Chiapas to Barra de Navidad?

Monday 17th November 2025
6:30 AM, Up and a quick breakfast
09:30 Pay marina bill and wait for customs
10:00 Customs/Imigration/Military Marines and Harbour Master send me on my way

As I motor out of Chiapas, for what I expect will be my last time I’m wondering what the passage will bring. I’m quite optimistic that the autopilot will work, the weather window is good and it should be a pleasant passage to Huatulco. Carlotta and Mehdi come to the last pontoon to wave me away and Medhi drops his trousers and waves his bare bum while shouting farewells to me, it must be a French/African custom. 

I clear the breakwater and turn on the autopilot, it starts to drift off course too much, so undeterred I do a couple of rotations where I turn the boat thru 360 degrees in a big circle to force the compass to calibrate. The compass holds course better but after a few minutes looses the plot again. I repeat with circles in the opposite direction, then a mixture of both. By now I’m out in the rolly ocean and realising that I might have a problem.

I make the decision to go ahead regardless. I have the wind vane steering which I can use to control the course when sailing, however the wind is weak and from dead ahead so that’s no use at the moment. I figure if the worst comes to the worst I can just drift and get a little sleep as needed. It’s around 48 hours passage time to Huatalco, the other side of the Gulf of Tetuhuanapec and I have a good 4 days before the next storm is due to blow through the gap there. I’m very wary of these storms, and if you want a taste of what they can do, have a look at this book about a Salvadoran fisherman who was found on January 30, 2014, aged 36 on the Marshall Islands after spending 14 months adrift in a fishing boat. He was caught in a blow right here.

The afternoon wind is strong enough for the wind vane to steer for a few hours, later with the wind on the nose and motor sailing I find the boat can steer itself for an hour or more unattended with the mainsail hauled in. I grab sleep wherever I can. I have an alarm that goes off every 15 minutes when I wake up and quickly scan the horizon, check the engines vital statistics, and reset the clock for another 15 minutes.

Mostly I have to steer by hand for the 50 hours passage. Normally one uses the compass for the course, you can’t steer by the GPS readout as that has too much lag, so when the boat veers to port, then veers back to starboard, the gps might be showing the port veer when it’s actually now veering to starboard. 

This also requires me to stand behind the wheel, in order to see the compass. The compass has some lag, but it’s much easier to manage.

So my preferred technique is to make a comfortable place in the rear of the cockpit, in a seat, or on a cushion at the side, reclining, and steer the wheel from the side with a hand, or maybe a foot, and use a cloud in the daytime, or a star at night as a bearing. This works really well, except in the daytime there were rarely any clouds, just blue sea and blue sky and one big long flat horizon. At night there would often be a haze stopping me from seeing any stars. 

Tuesday.
Another long day and night ahead of me, I’m tired but I console myself with the fact I’m halfway across the bay. I had prepared a half a dozen hard boiled eggs and cooked some Spanish Tortilla (Omelette) so I have easy food available, I also have a handy supply of bread rolls, cheese and butter.

It’s a more difficult day, I don’t get much sleep and I’m falling asleep standing up behind the wheel. I worry about being capable of anchoring the boat after the remaining 4 hours I have to go. However, the wind picks up in the afternoon, as it usually does, and swings enough for me to set the sails and wind pilot (Monitor wind vane) and let the boat sail itself into the bay. I get my head down for the next 3 hours, (15mins sleep, 2 mins lookout) and feel quite refreshed before I arrive into Maguey Bay. In front of me I can see the guys on Lee’s Moody yacht (that’s the make, not the atmosphere), I think it’s called Dream Catcher. 

Wednesday, 17:00
Arrive in Huatulco exhausted but happy
First thing I do is jump overboard and have the first decent swim for a year. It’s a great feeling.

Thursday 
I’m up early after a well deserved sleep, I decide to work on the autopilot and fix the problem. When I smell what I assume is burning coming from inside the motor that drives the rudder my heart sinks. This is not something you fix at sea. In fact the whole autopilot is maybe 30-40 years old and I can now reliably say is a bin job.
Here I might use the phrase ‘It is what it is” however that isn’t going to help anyone. So time to remember what plan C was. 
In the meantime I spend the day snorkelling with the fishies, and chatting with my neighbours, Lee, Grace, Courtney and Jake.

Friday
More chilling and swimming, and at some point I remember Plan C. I have a tillerpilot on board, this is an autopilot device for smaller boats that steer with a tiller, not this kind of boat which has a wheel. , However some ingenious folks have found a way to connect the tiller pilot to the wind vane of the wind steering and use that to steer the boat. Some online research has me very optimistic and I set about building the brackets I need to connect it all up. There are many variables to play with here, location, angle, left or right handed, up/down etc. I can’t easily test these at anchor, so I construct it all with some flexibility built in and will test it out on the next leg.

Saturday 22nd Nov
Depart Huatulco, for Acapulco,
I leave very optimistic for the tillerpilot on the Windvane. But I wait a few hours before I try it, I’m going to be in for a rough time if it doesn’t work. Eventually I plug it in and it’s working back to front, no problem, I reverse the control ropes to the wheel, now it seems to work, but is acting a bit crazy, slamming the arm backwards, constantly jamming against the end stops then doing the opposite. It won’t last long with all this activity, so I turn it off to ponder some.

My Memory of the following days isn’t so good, I had hoped to get there on Monday morning, but it ended up taking 3 days instead of 2. There was a strong current pushing me back, I would guess 2 knots most of the time, On Sunday the waves got to a couple of metres high and the wind was running at more than 20 knots on the nose. I was getting very exhausted trying to hand steer against this. At one point I decided to tack out using the windvane then tack back, this would allow me to get some sleep and even if it was going to be a hard beat, without too much headway I was happy for the break.
I headed off, making a good angle to the wind, I sailed close hauled, 45 degrees to the wind for around 3 hours, then I tacked, I was close to a headland which I think was making the current and waves worse, but after three hours tacking back, and ending up a little closer to the shore than I wanted I was gutted to find myself back where I had started. The wind was still strong, So I tacked again, and headed back out to sea, I decided to just hang around here until the weather improved, and get as much rest as possible.
Later that evening the wind disappeared and the sea started to calm, I put the motor on and headed back on my direct course to Acapulco.
As the sun started to set a little bird arrived, like me he seemed exhausted, he seemed so far out from land for such a little bird, I worried that he was blown out and might not have the strength to get back to land. I made him a nest in my old sombrero, and put some food and water out, not really sure what these guys eat, I gave it a choice of some of my tinned tuna I had just made a buttie with, and some bimbo bread. It politely declined everything and after a bit of preening went asleep in that spot. About 4 hours later, in the middle of the night, it was gone, either flew away or fell off. I consoled myself with the knowledge that these things can migrate across massive continents, and that 20 miles offshore was probably a little stroll for it.

I was again hand steering and on the verge of falling asleep. I was now close enough to the shore to steer by lights on the land through the night. It was this bit of the passage when the hallucinations started, they helped break up the monotony of the trip greatly. I was focused on a lighthouse way off in the distance ahead, maybe 25 miles away, it was very weak but good enough to steer by. Often I would doze off and wake with a jolt and realise the lighthouse was behind me now and I had done a 180 deg turn in the few seconds I had nodded off. Not good. However there was no other traffic around to worry about and I was still 5-10 miles offshore. There was however a big brown tanker that kept trying to ram me. It would appear on my port side, it looked weird, like it was made of hard mud, but would get closer and closer until I could see the decks and porthole on the side. I would blink, shake my head, and it was gone. A few minutes later it was towering over me about to crash into me. At one point I thought it would be fun to find out what happens when you get run over by a massive cargo ship, so I didn’t blink and dispel the illusion, but let it crash over my bow. Sadly nothing happened and it just disappeared. My other hallucination was a white flag that kept waving around right in front of me, it would come and go, but had a very strange appearance. I decided it might be a small panga fishing boat, and I think it might have been, so I decided not to see what happens if I just hit it like the cargo ship. It seemed to be heading for the lighthouse too, but disappeared as I approached Acapulco.
a few hours before Acapulco I did another falling asleep incident, this time for a few minutes and again woke to find myself going the wrong way.

Tuesday 25th Nov 08:30
Arrive into Acapulco.
The last few hours were a lot better, I could see the bay that would be my refuge, I had messaged Vincente, the owner of three mooring balls there and arranged to pick one up. Normally he meets you to help get the buoy, but because I was expecting to arrive in the middle of the night I told him not to bother. Once in the bay, I picked up the buoy on the first attempt and was very quickly asleep in my bunk. The relief was fantastic.

I slept for 5 hours solid, two other boats , Way to go 2, and the cat Ikigai are here, but leave before I wake up. Perhaps I need to remove the ‘Liverpool’ bit from my signage (for non scousers, Liverpudlians have a very unfair reputation for stealing anything not bolted down).

Acapulco in the state of Guerrero is a great city, it has a massive natural harbour and I stayed in an inner bay at the west end. As I wrote in the blog on my previous visit, Acapulco was devastated by a massive hurricane 2 years ago. I was north in a boatyard in Guaymas at the time getting Sister Midnight ready to launch. At the time there was a depression forming near Acapulco and threatening to turn into a hurricane, but was expected to be weak. Later that day I mentioned to an American in the boat yard that I had heard on CNN how the depression had formed into a hurricane and built strength rapidly as it approached land and was a Cat 5 hurricane when it made a direct hit on the city. The American looked at me, and said CNN, Fake news, it’s only a small depression. I think we know which way he votes.
In fact the rapid intensification of the storm was quite a thing, meteorologists hadn’t expected it and along with other weather events it fell into the ‘Possibly related to climate change’ category, so again Fake news eh!.

When I was last here the place was badly smashed up. All the docks were destroyed, all the boats, and there were hundreds of them, ended up at the bottom of the bay, or up on the beaches and roads above. The boats on land have now been removed and the Club Yates, and another marina are back up and running. However the damage is everywhere to be seen. When you see a tall hotel being built, first they have open floors with vertical columns waiting for the internal walls to be built, well that’s the state many of the hotels and apartment blocks reverted to. The force of the wind removed all of the interiors, and just left the basic concrete structure. Sometime you assume it’s a new build that stalled, until you see half a floor still has some internal walls.

The next day I headed into town, my Spanish is getting better and I’m not so shy to try it with Mexicans now, but something went wrong at the checkin and although I thought I had checked in I hadn’t. I’m not sure what I actually did, but I’m all signed up for something now.

A provisioning run in the blistering heat restocked my supplies and I had a few days resting on SM.
I decided to head over to the fuel dock in club Yates as the tank was almost empty after the long run from Chiapas, this is were things went badly wrong.

I tied up at the fuel dock, placed my 8 jerry cans out in a line on the dock and was told the staff were on their break and would return later, everything seemed perfect. The attendant returned after some time and started to fill my main tank. He got to 250 litres, which is usually all the tank takes, but it kept going, both of us keeping an eye on the overflow / air vent that usually gurgles and spits out some diesel when the tank is full. He called out 300 litres, and I joked and said I didn’t think it took that much, I went below, everything seemed ok, no smell of diesel, the tank gauge was showing full, so I went back up and said we must be almost done. 

He called back 400 Litres, and I was very confused, he was now going very slow as he could hear the tank was full from the noise coming back up the filling pipe. 

He called out 500 litres and then I thought STOP something is very wrong here. I went below and pulled the cabin sole boards (Floor panels) and saw a few hundred litres of diesel in the bilges. Not for the first time in recent days my heart sank and I felt like calling it a day.

I was deeply pissed off at how this boat was getting back at me for my lack of maintenance and brain power. I didn’t know what had happened, my first though, there’s a hole in the tank, that’s a nightmare to deal with on this model of boat, So I pulled up more boards and found the problem.

A hose clamp had failed and the overflow pipe on the top of the tank had detached and diesel was pouring out of the top of the tank into the bilge

This I can fix easily. Back on deck I explained to the fuel man that I had a major problem and would need ‘a man with a bomba (pump)’ To his credit, and in a typically Mexican way, he told me to chill and he would get it sorted. 30 minutes later a crew turned up with lots of empty plastic 10 gallon drums and a big electric pump.

To cut a long story short, I was back on the mooring buoy a couple of hours later with a full tank, 8 full Jerry cans and a £1500 hole in my wallet.

The money was a pain, but that’s just money, my worry was how did I let it get so bad without stopping the filling at 300 litres. I have never emptied the tank, as that’s not advisable on a sailboat, so I’m never really sure how much it can take, but 250-300 has to be the max. The tank is made up of two smaller tanks and they change shape as they get deeper making the fuel gauge not give a linear readout. I think the tank is half empty when the gauge shows 2/3rds full. Regardless, I lost the plot and that worries me most. This along with other factors is making me think hard about what’s next with my sailing life. More on this later.

I had intended to leave that afternoon, but the trauma made me decide to wait another day, then set off for Zihuatanejo On Sunday

Monday 1st December 17:00 . Off to Zihuatanejo.
I had a great passage to Zihua, Light winds, a little sailing, a lot of diesel smells, but the chance to flush the small amount of diesel in the bilges while a long way offshore after diluting it with an emulsifier (Fairy Liquid/Dawn). I was able to sail for most of the last ten miles into Zihau bay. I headed to the beach area called La Ropa, it’s a long way from the town area and the dinghy landing spot, but the water is very clear here. Also I have the place to myself. I had trouble setting the hook on the first attempt, I’m new to this anchor really, but once set it was in good and proper and I could once again chill.

I love Zi, it’s such a pretty place, the people are lovely, you can buy fish at the beach market each morning when the fishermen arrive at dawn and lay there catch out. They have great bakeries, and a few big supermarkets for the luxury food.

The main Mercado area is fantastic for fruit and veg.
Zi is geared for tourists, just around the corner is Ixtapa, a major holiday destination, along the lines of Cancun and Cabo San Lucas, huge big name hotels and millions of gringos on long white beaches. I hate it there, but Zi is more traditional, catering mostly to Mexican tourists, and quite a few more discerning gringos.

While here I worked out when best to leave and how to manage the next few passages to get to Barra de Navidad to meet Kathy, Its turns out it’s probably best I do 2 overnighters, which without the autopilot, doesn’t appeal. When I checked the flights to Barra from Mexico City for Kathy, it turns out they are infrequent, expensive and a long way in a taxi or coach from the nearest airport. However Ixtapa airport is a short bus ride from here and so to kill many birds with one stone, I suggested to Kathy we have Christmas in Zi, then in the new year we can both motor North. Kathy agreed so I set about organising a very chilled few weeks before Kathy gets here.
With flights and hotels booked, everything was ready for me to fly to Mexico City on the 18th, meet Kathy, stop over and the next day fly back to Zi for Christmas.
I dived on the hull and gave it aclean, I was also pleased that I could change the anode on the prop without scuba gear, just by holding my breath and taking things slowly, one allen screw at a time.

The Autopilot.

I turned my attention to the autopilot. They have a DHL office here, so I decided I could get a new system shipped here and have a go at fitting it. I turned the old one on to see if I could learn anymore, and lo and behold the motor ran, it steered the rudder, but without the compass I had ripped out, I couldn’t get any further. Why I had smelt burning I’m not sure. I suspect it might have just been related to the engine which had been running a while, I don’t know and I’m sure I will find out.

It’s not possible to replace the motor without major surgery in the form of lots of welding and cutting of steel. So the other option is a ram and a tiller arm. There are two types of Ram, electric and hydraulic, all for around £2000, the tiller arm, if I can find one that fits off the shelf could be £500-1000, and the Ram will need fiberglass work on the boat to create a mounting point for it. So as a compromise, I have ordered a ray marine EV-400 sailboat kit and I’m going to see if it can drive the existing motor. A man at Raymarine technical support was very insistent that I would have no problem. However looking at Raymarine’s sizing charts, it seems my existing motor is underpowered, so this will be a temporary solution, even if it works fine. I would have to buy the same kit to control a motor or ram regardless, so this seems to be a safe option.

So a lot has happened and there’s more in the pipeline. But I’m now at the point where I’m considering the next phase. My gut instinct is that this might be my last season as a boat owner, not so much because of the problems I’ve had lately, I like a good challenge, it’s more that things are getting repetitive, and slightly boring. It’s hard to imagine a life hanging out in Paradise can be so, but I think I need a different challenge now. I’m toying with selling the boat after Christmas and heading home. I might just take her up to Guaymas and put her into long term storage, which will cost a few hundred pounds per month while I see if I can hack life back ashore. We will have to see.

Paul Collister, 12th Dec 2025.

10th November 2025

2 Months have passed and I’m back on the boat. As predicted, by prepping the boat for a hurricane, none appeared. The boat fired up almost as good as when I left. The fridge was out of refrigerant as expected, but the engine spun to life within a second of turning the key, which was nice. It turned out that when I flicked off the switch for the internal fairy lights as I left, I also inadvertantly turned off the Starlink, explaining why the boat was offline for the last 2 months.

Of course a return to Chiapas wouldnt be complete without me getting quite ill. I’m currently suffering from something that has affected my fingers and legs, and is also causing a bit of a fever. It’s weird to be putting a fleece on and getting under a duvet when it’s 35 deg C. If things haven’t improved by tomorrow I will have to find a doctor. Possible causes are a) Covid or similar, caught on long haul flight, b) Dehydration, caused by flight and lack of drinking when I arrived, c) one of the nasty Mosquito delivered diseases that are very common here. d) extreme hypocondria.

Most people here are planing to leave in about a week, currently we are at the start of a big blow in the Gulf of Tehuantepec, one has to cross this gulf to get north and it takes about 48 hours to do so. You can see how the wind, sometimes called a t-pecker, is currently funnelling through the gap in the Americas from the Caribbean to the Pacific. The gap in the land creates a venturi effect. For those not in the know, the venturi effect is an area of fluid dynamics studied once the ‘air lock’ effect has been mastered. 😉

The black line is roughly the route I need to take to start the trip north, I say north, It’s mostly west for the first few hundred miles.

Kathy is flying out to join me around the 18th December, giving her a week to acclimatise and cook the Christmas dinner 🙂 We plan to be in Barra De Navidad for Christmas and some time after, so it really should be ‘Feliz Navidad’, apologies if I have given you an ear-worm. I have about 4 weeks to get the boat there and moored safely. I’d like to be in the marina, but it’s going to be busy with a gang of boats who are heading south for a crossing into the South Pacific or into the Panama canal. Theres a loose rally called ‘The Panama/Ocean Posse’ who meet up every December in Barra where they have talks and workshops preparing themselves for their exciting adventures. We did a similar thing for the ARC back in 2006, and while I can see the benefit for newbies, I want to run a mile from that kind of gathering now. Fortunately there are many lovely spots in the area, close by where one can anchor. Tenacatita being one such place.

I had a great time back in the UK, despite summer having passed and it being decidedly chilly. A trip to see Tim and Asta in Galway was great fun, as was a trip to Milan to visit Kathy’s brother in law Bruno and family. I have a ton of very expensive Parmesan cheese in the fridge, which should last me some time.

The Galeón Andalucía, is a full-scale reconstruction of the iconic Spanish galleons that once crossed the world’s oceans between the 16th and 18th centuries. It arrived to the Albert dock and I enjoyed watching it pass through the same lock gates the we went through in our last boat Lady Stardust.

It was great to check out the Liverpool version of ‘The Ivy’ restaurant with my lovely family, well at least the Merseyside contingent.

Tim and Asta took me out to Cong especially to see Ashford Castle, once home of the Guinness family back in the day and featured in the recent Netflix drama. It’s a lovely setting but apparently us commoners aren’t allowed near the fancy hotel it now houses (some things just don’t change over time). Cong is also famous for the shooting of ‘The Quiet Man’, older listeners may know of this famous film, I think it starred John Wayne, not as a cowboy.

Flying back from Ireland I snatched this picture of the road and rail bridges at Runcorn/Widnes. This spans the river Mersey and Manchester Ship Canal.

So by 13th Nov, I have regained my mojo, the illness has gone and I’m fighting fit to get the boat ready. I replaced the water tank gauges as shown below, and fitted a new meter. I’ve decided to bite the bullet and spend a few bob getting the boat proper again.

I’ve decided to just replace all the bits that have given me grief. Some things I haven’t worked out how to get in Mexico yet, like a new dinghy and outboard, but that will happen soon enough.

So I headed of yesterday to top up the empty gerry cans with diesel from the local Pemex station that caters for road traffic and fishing boats.

Main thing to remember here is not to go at low water. I parked the dinghy in some horrible oily slime surrounded by dead fish and then risked life and limb getting ashore with the gerry cans.

All went well, except the dinghy had deflated enough on the trip there and back that I decided I really must try to repair it while I had a dock to haul it onto.

Now here’s a story I feel I may come back to. Dinghies come in two types historically, ones made of PVC and others, considered better for the tropics, made of Hyperlon, another plastic, but tougher and more UV resistant, also no longer manufactured. Experts say you have to use exactly the right kind of glue and patches to fix any holes.
I have the hyperlon patches but not the glue so I have decided to use cheap basic contact adhesive (Think evo-stick) for a few pounds from the supermarket as apposed to the ‘Marine’ glue which can cost £50 for a small tin.
I’m not too bothered if they fail, better than nothing for the first trip or two. The dinghy has many abrasions from sitting on coral encrusted docks and it’s really time for a replacement, this one cost around £3000 but has lasted over 9 years now.

In looking for the glue, I reached deep into the starboard ‘glue/chemicals’ locker and found a few goodies I had completely forgotten about, like a roll of Sunbrella marine fabric. But mostly I found tubes and tubs of glue and sealers that are many many years old. One of today’s jobs will be throwing most of this away.

On Saturday I cleaned the boat and started a long list of tasks that needed doing.

I noticed the little microcontroller I built to monitor the engine temps had failed, on closer inspection I found that the power supply was shot. Another failure. I don’t think they like the boat life. They convert 12v DC to 5v and I had to conclude there’s some nasty voltage spikes going on when I start the engine or run the bow thruster and they perhaps need some protection. I didn’t have any replacements, but it dawned on me I have a load of old cigar lighter-USB adapters like the kind shown below.

These guys are designed to work in cars, and taking it apart I found a fuse and some fancy regulation bits. I find that the salty life does for the cigar and USB connections in no time, however with a bit of careful soldering I managed to get one working just lovely and now I have my temperature sensors working again.

I heard noises from over the water and saw that Lee, a fellow Brit on a nice Moody 40-ish boat was checking his rigging. He is leaving the same time as me and heading to the same destination tomorrow, so should one of us get into dire straights, possible the other will be called on to help.

I had the boat hull cleaned and as a consequence there was a lot of fresh food for the bigger fish around. I took a little video to show how many rays turned up for a ‘eat all you can for free’ feast

So it’s Sunday evening now, at 7:30 tomorrow morning I will pay my bill in the marina office and they will call the navy/harbour master/customs and immigration, who will all turn up at my boat with a drug sniffing dog and do the formalities to clear me out of Chiapas as I head north. This is way over the top. In all the other Mexican ports I have visited, a simple visit to the harbour master will suffice, in La Paz, a call to him over the radio does the trick. But here on the border with Guatemala, and floating next to a major naval base, they do things differently.

I’m very apprehensive about this trip, it’s 18 months since I last did a passage, I’m hoping I can remember everything, I’m hoping the boat works ok, and I’m hoping the weather stays as predicted.
Sailors like myself know how easy it is to get stuck to the dock, life is so much simpler here, yet once we get out on the water for a while we soon remember why we have a boat, and the idea of a dock life becomes less attractive again. Swinging at anchor is where it’s at, or ploughing through dolphins with whales breaching around you. Yet until I’m out there, having had the engine run for 24 hours without issue, batteries staying charged, no leaks etc etc, then it’s a little scary.

I have a 48 hour passage, the weather has changed slightly, and I should have left today to get some wind, however tomorrow and the next day is going to be very calm, not much of a sea, so mostly motoring. Time to get out the fishing lines and catch some Tuna.
I did a massive shop today, I bought a Dutch oven (Cast iron pot) and following Tim’s instructions, I plan to make bread. Even if the autopilot fails, which I would say is a 30% chance, I’m going to push on, even if I just have to Heave To and drift a lot. Heaving To is a nautical term to describe a way to make the boat safe and slowly drift while you get some rest. I estimate I have food and water for about 3 months, before I have to hit the pot noodles we bought in Japan 8 years ago.

My next post will be from further North I hope.

Paul Collister
Sun 16th November 2025

6th September 2025. Chiapas Marina, Puerto Madero.

So it’s early September 2025, I’m coming to the end of my tenth year, of mostly living aboard Sister Midnight. I have to say she’s lasted well, but ten years is a long time for things to survive in the marine environment, excluding me, I’m still loving it. But many boat bits I still think of, as having just been bought, like the dinghy, or the AIS unit, the standing rigging or the safety gear, are all looking a bit tired.
I have just a few more days here, then I fly back to the UK to sit out the end of the hurricane season, visit family and friends and make a short trip to Milan to visit Kathy’s family there. When I return it’s full steam ahead, in a generally northerly direction to escape some of this heat and prepare the boat for Kathy’s arrival to have another joyous Christmas onboard.

But before I can go anywhere, there’s the small matter of the autopilot (Captain Mainwaring) not working. It’s not possible for me to make any passages of more than a few hours without it. Hand steering is very tiring, and on my own, its just not possible, especially if an overnight passage was required. If there’s wind, and I can sail, the monitor wind steering (uncle Arthur) would work great, but that’s never a guarantee. So I must find the problem.

At first inspection it was apparent that the fluxgate compass was not outputting the correct bearing, it was stuck on 225 degrees. I had never been able to find where the compass was located on the boat before, but did find it under the v-berth, hidden under the drawers there. I unscrewed it and moved it around and the compass display still showed 225, I remade all the connections, and kicked it around a bit but still 225. Suddenly at one point it started working and I could see the output of the compass change as I moved it and the display changed to match. Then just as suddenly it stopped working and never worked again.
This seemed to clinch it to me, so I started to investigate purchasing a replacement.

They stopped making this model a long time ago, and people wanted $300 for a secondhand one on eBay. I made an offer of $50 to one seller and was rebuffed. I can’t see anyone actually buying at that price. Raymarine want about £1000 for their current basic model which wouldn’t work anyway, I need a sin/cos output and most stuff is digital now.

The above boat is just waiting for a new owner to give it some TLC, it’s a real pirate boat and if I was half my age I’d be making enquiries.

So after a lot of lateral thinking, I remembered I had always planned to build my own autopilot, I had met a couple of engineers on my travels who did just that. It should be a lot of fun, apparently it’s a classic math/computing problem and there is a recognised algorithm to use to apply the course changes to the correction outputs. However I think the bulk of my existing autopilot is working, it tried very hard to keep to keep me on course, and would be fine if I only ever wanted to steer 225 (obviously it’s more complicated than that).
But replacing the fluxgate with my own design would be step 1 on this project.
I had brought a big bag of microprocessors and sensors with me to play with should I get bored.

One of the sensors was a decent compass module.

I think I bought this a while ago with this project in mind and had forgotten I had it. So I had a chat with Fosbot, my AI friend, told it which parts I had and what would make a replacement fluxgate compass, and as if it did this for a living, it produced a range of options and recommendations for a solution. I chose to go with a Raspberry pico W microcontroller and the cmps12 module and AI generated the circuit diagrams, and software for the project. The only thing I didn’t have was a dual channel DAC (Digital to Analog) converter, to convert the digital compass bearing into a voltage for the autopilot controller.
I couldn’t source this chip in Mexico, so I ordered two single channel chips on amazon.mx which AI said would work fine. They would take a week to get here.

Connecting the compass to the micro allowed me to test the software, the micro also streams the bearing over wifi as a NMEA signal, so I can display that on other devices and use it to get the true wind direction when I’m stationary.

Finally the DAC chips arrived, they came as small modules which made the wiring up simple

MCP4775 DAC

I put all the bits together into a box and fired it up.

It drove the autopilot just fine, and behaved exactly as the fluxgate did when it briefly worked. Things looked good. A trip out was required to test the system.

I had Ronnie, one of the workers here, dive on the boat and give it a really good clean, he told me the propellor was just a globe of growth, which makes me think the previous cleaning missed it and that would explain my speed issues.

Carlotta and Mehdi came along, their boat has been on the hard for nearly a year since they sailed over a whale and ripped their keel away from the hull. They had forgotten what sailing is like and were delighted to be bobbing around on the waves again.

We headed out, and the autopilot worked great, on a course of 270, which is the heading west to leave the harbour. Sadly that was the only bearing it seemed reliable on, and couldn’t hold course on other bearings. I was somewhat gutted by this, and what’s worse didnt take some measurements that would have helped me diagnose the problem.

Back in port I had to work out what might be wrong. The dual channel chip I should have used arrived from the states, I had ordered it as a backup, this allowed me to use a reference voltage from the main controller and make sure both DACs worked in sync, I also hadn’t put any damping on the compass readings, so I introduced a Low Pass filter, basically averaging the last ten readings, which happens every tenth of a second to give me a smoother reading.

Here I plotted the raw and smoothed outputs from me trying to simulate being at sea by shaking and turning the compass in a rolly force 6 kind of way.
There’s just a chance the software running in the Autopilot doesn’t like too many changes coming in.
All in all I haven’t found a great problem with the old system, but I need to go back out to sea with the MK2 version. I will also be able to collect more diagnostics this time if it doesn’t work.

On other matters:

There’s lots of varnishing and de-moulding to be done.

And just like that !!!

I try to get out on the Kayak most nights, it’s such a peaceful place, and the wildlife is wonderful, this tree is home to a load of small white birds that look like baby Storks or maybe Herons.

I feel like someone ought to have a chat with this boat’s skipper, I’m sure they selected the wrong icon at the transfer shop.

This guy hangs out by the shower block at night, he’s massive, I think it’s a Cane Toad

Meet Liliana who runs the swimming pool bar, with her new puppy. Carlotta rescued a street dog heavily pregnant and now has zillions of puppies she’s trying to home.

Monday 8th September.
Just 4 days before I fly to Mexico so I took the boat out this morning to check out Compass MK2.
Jake and Grace fro Mya, the boat on the other side of the finger joined me. They haven’t been out to sea in many long months since they arrived here with their broken engine. Soon they will head back to Colorado where they plan to buy some lumber and build a couple of houses, with the profits, they plan to return to the oceans with a bigger boat.

I turned the compass on, and besides it struggling to log onto my wifi network, it started to drive the auto pilot quite well. we headed out to sea, all going well, then set a course to the west, after 5 minutes it lost the plot again. I fixed the wifi issue by rebooting my mikroTik router, then capturing the debug information from the compass. Back on auto pilot things were good for 5 minutes then it went off course, looking at the magnetic compass at the helm, I could see we were turning to starboard, and the course was increasing 220,225,230 etc, but my lovely CMPS12 module was saying 210,205,200 etc, i.e. decreasing, as if we were turning to port. I felt like shouting at the compass, “You had one Job, just one job and you screwed it up”.
This behaviour from the compass would explain the problems I’ve been having. There’s very little I can do about this, so I need to investigate more. The compass should have already been calibrated, but no amount of being out of calibration could cause it to work backwards could it? I have some research to do there.

I decided to do a couple of loops of 360 degrees that would re-calibrate the compass. I did one clockwise, then one anti-clockwise. Possible two clockwise might have been better.

This seemed to make a difference in as much as the compass behaved well after this and the boat kept it course pretty well.

You can see the lines on the left are all fairly straight and that was without any intervention.

So we headed back to the dock and tied up. I’m going to do some research, and possibly build a second compass while back in Liverpool with a different sensor module.
Now it’s time to start packing up the boat. There’s a hurricane brewing just south of me and it has me wondering if I should take the headsails down or not. If I take them down, then you can bet this will be the calmest hurricane season here ever. So perhaps I should, just to be neighbourly.
I have a day to kill in Mexico City on Thursday, so I need to do some research on where to visit. I fly back to Manchester on Friday via Atlanta, that should be fun.

Paul Collister
8th September 2025

That’s probably way to provocative for my situation, but it does seem I have the engine sorted and it should be fine for a good few years now.

Thursday 7th August. Chiapas, Mexico.

I mentioned the in mast furling failure that happened to a boat that arrived here a few months ago. Well it’s taken a while but the owner returned a few days ago and motored over to the haul out area where a big mobile crane was waiting.

This young lady went up the mast, I presume to fix on some straps for the crane where she took the picture below of the marina. SM is hidden in the far right at the back. The mast furthest away. The blue ketch closest is the Sea Shepherd Research Vessel, Martin Sheen, now on the Atlantic side of Mexico, Great boat/crew doing great work for the oceans.

Not long after, the boat was back on it’s slip, sin mast.

And the mast was on the ground, where it still remains, although they do now seem to have extracted the sail.
Word around the marina is that the crew who helped sail the boat here lacked experience with furling mainsails. Basically the sail is wrapped around a thin tube inside the mast, driven by a motor. When you fire up the motor, the sail needs to be on the right side of the mast and under a bit of tension. If the sail goes slack it can ruffle up inside the mast and jam. This is what the crew may have done. I dread to think how much this is costing the owner, but it’s going to be in the ten’s of thousands of pounds, that’s equivalent to a small terraced house, where I come from.

So on to the engine, hopefully for the last time in a long time.
The water pump arrived from England, you can see the old one in the pic below, it’s the small wheel in the middle of all the other cogs and pulleys.

To get to it, tons of stuff has to come off the engine. It’s fairly major and took a whole day.

Just the crankshaft pulley left, this requires a special tool to lock the flywheel, which isnt available anymore, but also would require removing the starter motor, which would be a pain. Thankfully modern technology has come up with an alternative, the Impact Driver, which can sort of undo a nut without turning it. I had to borrow one from Dois, but it made short work of the task.

Above you can see the water pump is off and the way into the engine block is revealed. This was exciting, I was looking inside my engine for the first time.

Here you can see the wall of the combustion chamber (where the piston goes up and down), I’d like to work in the ‘Piston broke’ joke here, but sadly can’t find a way.

Above you can see the unofficial way to stop the camshaft rotating, you’re meant to buy a 6.75mm diameter ‘drift’ from Volvo, but a 6.5mm drill seems to work just fine. There’s another one stuck through a hole in the flywheel casing to stop the crankshaft moving.

It looks a lot bigger in real life.

Above, the new and old pump

Above some bits that need to go back on. I’m so glad I took pictures, because I couldn’t work out which cog went where.

So with the pump fitted, I got it all back together. One day to take it apart, and another to put it all back. So with some trepidation, I turned the key and …. nothing, Nada.
The start switch on the control panel has been playing up. So I hot wired the starter and Brummmm brummm brum., off she went sounding sweet. No leaks, no gasses into the water tank, water plopping out of the boat exhaust, everything was just fine.
It was now the weekend so time to relax

I pumped up the dinghy and took it out for a ride. The last time I tried the outboard, I had to take the carb off and when I put it back on the max revs seemed low, I took a screwdriver with me this time to adjust the throttle cable settings as I suspected that to be the problem. It turned out to be fine, it was just me getting confused and thinking I had a fast outboard. I may well treat myself to one. This dinghy has never been on a plane (Where it lifts out of the water and rides on its own bow wave), that might be fun.

I went out past the fishing fleet and into the main channel.

Above and below are the remains of a previous fishing fleet. I think there are 4 or 5 sunken boats here. Must have been one heck of a storm.

This is the view heading back to the marina.

So below is the engine control panel. It’s very advanced and touch sensitive. Whenever the oil pressure gets too high, or too low, you just tap the display and it changes, with enough tapping you will eventually get the oil pressure you desire. The same goes for the other dials. Occasionally they need to rest and won’t display anything for a day or two.
We’ve coped with this for ten years, but now it was being quite touch insensitive and wouldnt let me start the engine.

This range of volvo engines has a special diode connecter cable between the engine wiring loom and the panel, with 4 multipin connecters which I guessed were the problem, so I got ruthless and hacked them out. Now the panel is hardwired to the engine. If you want to replace it, tough luck. You can’t get them anyway.

One by one, I snipped the wires and replaced them with a new cable to join them up, I only needed two video calls to Kathy to work out the colours, I’m red green colour blind, thankfully most colour combinations used by volvo were easy for me. However there was one wire I couldn’t work out if it was red, brown, green or what! I was flabergasted when Kathy told be it was red/green striped. That should be the new colour blind test, stuff all those coloured circles, this was impossible to see any stripe on.

It’s far from perfect, but I no longer have a touch sensitive panel. Unfortunately the start switch problem is still there, and appears to be inside the actual key mechanism. That’s easily fixed, I will just put a start button onto the panel.

I don’t have any mosquitos on board, but I do get bitten most nights by these invisible buggers.

I had to empty the Lazzerette as part of my engine operations and as I mentioned before had started to replace the hoses that drain the cockpit from rain and any waves that might pop over. I had one pipe out of four left to do as the others had not been blocked. I replaced it, only to find out the blockage was in the sea cock, something the diver had said he would clear for me a few weeks earlier. So I replaced the last pipe and stowed all the above away, well 50% of it went in the bin. Some stuff I bought in Malaysia that had never been used.

A Hitchcock reminder (The Birds)

Thursday 7th August 2025
So today I undid the dock lines and motored out of the marina to see if the boat still worked and if I still knew how to drive it. It’s been over a year since this prop did any work.

So the minute I started to reverse away from the dock I knew something was wrong, I revved up the engine to generate some prop walk and there wasn’t much at all. Normally I feel the boat kick a bit, then the wind started to blow the bow back towards the dock, a little blast on the bow thruster didn’t do much so I revved her up a lot and slipped away safely, but going the opposite way to how I had planned. I was pretty sure the propellor and/or the hull were fouled, probably barnacles. I wasn’t expecting that as I had just had a diver clean the bottom and prop about a week earlier. I almost returned back to the dock, but I thought I would see how it went. Manoeuvring just really meant I needed a bit more welly on the throttle.

One of the fishing fleet loading its net onboard

Check out the helicopter on the roof and the lookout tower on top of the mast

I got out to the ocean, just past the harbour entrance breakwaters, I planned to head a mile out to sea, maybe put up the sails, but I soon realised the autopilot was just not doing a very good job of steering. So I killed the revs and just bobbed around a bit. I was going to check the temperature of the engine and bits around it with my newfangled ESP32 computers talking to Home Assistant on my raspberry pi. They all talk over the boats wifi, but I had set it up all wrong, and for some reason I don’t yet understand, when my Starlink connection went down, so did the boats wifi. So I didnt even have toys to play with.
Hurricane Ova has just passed by and I think that may have been responsible for the big waves and very rolly conditions. So I didn’t hang around. I headed back to the dock. All in all I was out for about two hours, because of the fouled hull, the engine worked hard, I had her at near max revs for quite some time and the temperature was rock solid on the display.
When I got back to the dock I was able to pull some temperature stats of the Pi and they are shown below.

I don’t really know what to make of these numbers yet, but it’s good fun having these four sensors in the engine compartment. I can monitor trends, set alarms and get my AI to do something with them. Endless hours of entertainment.

I’m going to fix the autohelm and wifi, clean the prop and get back out there in a few days. I’d like to get the sails up, it should be calmer next week.

So it’s been a long slog getting this engine back online, but interesting, and educational, not forgetting expensive. I have no excuse now not to get on with making the boat (varnish/paint) look pretty again.

Paul Collister 7th August 2025.

And sadly the answer to that question is yes, however I’m fixing a new problem, so that’s progress I believe.

But first, in the last blog the fridge had just been repaired and I filled it full of lovely new fresh and frozen food, it worked well, so well I had to turn it down a bit, that was a mistake, the ice box melted, and the little hole I suspect I have in the evaporator released all the gas, which shot straight out to help destroy the ozone layer along with my frozen goods. I have to say though, I can see how climate scepticism can arise, these fridge gasses , R134a in my case, are 6 times heavier than air, and you should be careful on a boat as when they escape they fall into the bilge, and being flammable are a fire/explosive risk, just like the propane. So how it finds its way up to the ozone layer is beyond me, does it just hang around a bit to scare me then ascend to the heavens? Anyway, I’m sure these scientists wouldn’t make it up. This fridge man has form, so I requested his return, but not expecting much, and after waiting on the boat all day for him, and him not showing up I bought a big bag of Ice and settled into the daily ritual of changing the bag of water for a fresh bag of ice.
Talking with Dois, he told me his fridge leaked all the time and he just popped some new coolant in, so I borrowed his tub of refrigerant and a hose and a little of his wisdom, and hooked it up to my fridge. Voila, cold again. In fact too cold and the pipes around the compressor were covered in ice, I sent a little more gas to the ozone layer from the compressor, and all was good. It’s stayed that way, all I need now is a way to defrost next time around. In the meantime I have bought my own bits to allow me to refill when needed.

So now that the new exhaust/cooler was here I decided I should get stuck in and fit it. First off the heat exchanger end cap had to come off so I could fit the oil cooler, I didnt expect any problems, but as usual, the first 3 of the four nuts came off, with not too much of a fight, but the fourth just snapped. Not my fault, honest guv, I was really careful. This new manifold, although looking great actually has more rust on the bolts than the old one. So now I had a broken bolt problem, all over again.

The thing with all the holes is the actual heat exchanger rack, cold (ish) salt water flows through these tubes while the engine coolant flows around the outside. This keeps the engine cool. it’s made of a copper zinc alloy I believe and can be somewhat delicate. The rack slides out, and I hadn’t decided to remove it, as it didn’t look too bad, but I knew I should take it out and clean it, but that meant removing the cap at the other end and possibly snapping more bolts. Also there’s a lot of o-rings involved here and I only had 4 new ones. I took the plunge, the other cap came off ok, but the rack refused to slide out. Being fragile, i couldn’t use much force, so a combination of soaking in vinegar, mild phosphoric acid solution, rinsing in baking soda and then ultimately some serious brute force got it to pop out.

I had practiced on the old heat exchanger and soon found out what is too much force.

As you can see there was a lot of gunk involved, and this is on the fresh water engine side. Not a great sign really

I cleaned my old and new racks with the same chemicals mentioned above.
With the rack removed I tried again to release the broken bolt but it wasn’t budging. So off the Mai Naval, the workshop that welded my cranse iron back together a few weeks back, for $20 the welded a nut to the broken bit, brought out the flame thrower and quickly took the broken bolt out. They rather scorched the paint, but that was to be expected.

Now I could properly get down to putting it all back together. The diagram below nicely shows where I starting from. Except it misses out the oil cooler.

Re-assembly was a doddle, the second attempt was even better, as that time I knew the correct order and manged to get all of the bits on 🙁

Next came the job of attaching this huge lump of Iron to the engine in a somewhat cramped area. It was now weighing about 30kg or 66lb if you’re still on the pre 18th century system. I rigged up some ropes to suspend it and carefully manoeuvred it into position.

At this point I had 8 bolts and 2 studs to get in, and can you believe, 9 went in and one just would find the thread. The bulkhead made life very difficult but after 15 minutes of jiggling it went on. 22 Newton metres of force is a number I doubt I will ever forget, This is the correct torque I believe for the bolts.
After bolting it on, I called it a day.

The next day, full of optimism I reconnected all of the water hoses, the oil pipes to the cooler, the air filter, overflow pipe, that sump pressure hose thing that just puts oily gassy stuff everywhere and it was almost ready to test. I had the exhaust hose to cut to size and fit, and this operation proved very difficult, the pipe refused to go onto the exhaust elbow. I got a heat gun out and used that on the hose with some success. It was while pulling on the hose with all my might, my chest compressed against the opening hatch that I heard a crack and felt a pain across my chest, I emitted one of those extreme pain kind of shrieks, and recoiled knowing something bad had just happened. Fortunately the pain was brief. The hose was on enough as far as I was concerned. and time to start the engine.

I added a lot of coolant, the propper stuff, the engine didn’t start instantly, but when I gave it a little throttle it burst into life, checking outside the water was soon gushing out.

I recorded the water flow for future reference as this will be about as good as it will ever get with a new clean pathway through the system. Often when you have cooling problems, you might look at the dribble of water coming out the boat, and rather than not leave for your next exciting destination, you will convince yourself that that’s plenty of water. It rarely is. So I have a record now of exactly how much it should be at tick-over.
I stopped the engine, restarted, it started instantly, I check for water leaks and everything was fine. I really need to get new hoses though, they are old and won’t last much longer. It’s just they don’t make them anymore and they’re a very odd shape.

My chest wasn’t hurting much, but based on past experiences, I was pretty sure I had cracked a rib. As far as I know, there’s sod all can be done about that and if I was right I could expect the pain to arrive in a few days time.
The next morning I woke with a bruised feeling in my chest but no big deal, I pulled the engine covers off, checked the oil, all was good, checked the coolant, and there wasn’t any. I checked under the engine in the drip tray, and there was my coolant, if it could do expressions, I expect it would have either been laughing at me, or possible feeling sorry for me. Whatever, jubilation had turned to disappointment and pragmatism. We weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. To be honest I had expected a leak from the aforementioned hoses. I had probably not tightened one up fully, or it wasn’t seated properly, it had to be that, as the other two options were quite ghastly, a head gasket (unlikely) or the fresh water pump, very difficult to fix/change.

I had hired a car for a week around this period of reconstructing the engine. It meant should I need any specialist bits, I could pop out to a motor shop, or hardware store and purchase whatever might work. I took this opertunity to put the covers on the engine and do some shopping downtown Tapachula.

Now this railway may not look much, but it will cross the road near the marina. Right now it stops either side of the road, and the road has been mutilated such that if you don’t slow down to a walking pace in your car, you will have one heck of a shock. Anyway this is going to replace the Panama Canal, seriously, it’s part of the new train network that spans Mexico from the pacific to the Atlantic here in Chiapas on the Pacific side and Veracruz over on the Atlantic side. The somewhat socialist leaning government here is building this as part of a great project to bring trade to the south of the country.

Above is what the water pump looks like in the parts manual. And I need to be familiar with it, as that’s the problem. I can’t be sure as access to the pump is next to impossible. But I have spent a few days now searching for the leak, and I can see it dripping out from the bottom front of the engine, roughly underneath where the pump lives, and no sign of moisture anywhere near the hoses and pipes I have worked on.

Below is a picture of the front of an MD22 just like mine, the cover has been removed and the pump is the thing in the middle. To get to it I have to remove the belt, then the three pulleys, crank, cam and fuel pump. The tensioner also has to come off, then the backing plate can be removed to give me access to the pump itself.
I have ordered a new pump from the UK, If customs play nice I will have it on Tuesday 15th July, I expect a day to remove the old one, and a day to fit the new one. This all depends on nothing else going wrong.

So a bit of a setback, but no big deal.
While I waited for the parts, I used the last day of my car rental to head up into the hills and explore

From the marina you can see a volcano in the distance, this was were I was heading, or just to the right of it. It’s very close to the border with Guatemala.

But on the way just outside of Tapachula are the ruins of an ancient civilisation dating back way before the ancient Greeks and even the Egyptians. Some say this was one of the most advanced cities in the world in its day, however it was closed when I went. As is typical in Mexico, these sort of places, while respected are not elevated to the status of places like Stonehenge, and they pop up all over Mexico.

I took some pictures from over the fence and I plan to go back sometime and get a guided tour by someone who knows more of the history

Izapa
https://maps.app.goo.gl/sGdAf5A5N8wVpaiX7

A neighbour came out and with my rubbish Spanish I understood that he was happy to phone the warden for me to get him to come out and open up! I declined because I wanted to head on up to the mountains.

I was heading to a small pueblo called Union Juarez, right up in the hills. Sadly that was closed too, well it was a sleepy monday morning. It was a lovely spot and is a very popular destination for Chiapaneros looking to get away from the heat at the weekend.

They used to sell Chicken here!

If you’re wondering what all the dishes are for, this building supplies TV and probably internet to the residents via cable.

There must be great views from here when the cloud clears.

I headed higher up the hills to the famous local mirador (Viewing spot)

Is this the hand of God? bit tacky if so.

I was a little worried about walking out onto the hands, but gave it a go.
I believe the other side of the valley is Guatemala. The cloud lifted a little but it wasn’t the best day to be there, at least there weren’t many people there. The manager of the place joined me and wanted to chat, I tried my best Spanish, but I have a long way to go with that.

They seemed quite religious up here, but then they are a lot closer to the man than me down at sea level mostly.

Now while I was there the clouds came down and I decided to head back. The heavens opened and the winding mountain roads got a little more scary, especially with local colectivos screaming around the bends and overtaking in places I wouldn’t have recommended.
I will at this point mention that I had a bit of a nightmare renting the car at the airport. Normally Ralph in the office organises things, but he’s on holiday, so I went on line and found a nice car for £20/day, that included full cover insurance. I knew that I would have to put down a deposit of a thousand or so at the airport, but that’s normal. However arriving at the airport I was informed the deposit was $14,000. Crikes, I tried to cancel, but was told by the booking agency that the rental time had passed, even though I hadnt rented so would I like to check into their hell site, or did she say help site, either way I wasn’t going to risk losing my rental money that way, so I tried to put down the 14k deposit, but my credit card limit didn’t reach that far. I ended up getting a $1400 deposit and having to pay an extra $35/day insurance. It was also pointed out to me that if I didn’t take the $70/day insurance, I would be liable to a minimum of 7 days garage time for any damage to the car at $150/day. Have you guessed why I mention this yet?

BEFORE

AFTER

Yes, while descending the mountain slopes in the pouring rain there was a very loud bang and jolt to the car. I thought I’d hit something big and was expecting the side of the car to be smashed in, despite the fact I wasn’t near anything to hit. it took another mile of driving before there was somewhere safe on the windy rode to stop, and I was feeling quite sick at the idea I had just thrown away $1400, I was surprised to see just the wheel was damaged. However angry knowing they promised to charge me that much regardless. I had the other policy to cover things but I expected that to be an ordeal as well.

I calmed myself, continued the journey home and the next morning returned the car to the airport. A lovely young lady came to inspect the car and I showed her the damage, she looked shocked and told me it was bad, she took pictures, made calls, took more pictures, sent them off, made another call and announced it was going to cost me $41 for the damage. I could barely contain my excitement, but feigned a ‘well I guess you have to charge me’ expression, she didnt think I understood how bad it was so impressed on me again, are you sure, we have to charge you $41, I quickly signed and legged it back to the marina. Things are looking up.

A few days have passed and my ribs have kicked in, or feel like they have been kicked in. I’m restricted to light duties, but I can tell I’m on the mend. Hence I’m sitting here at the keyboard as I have been for a few days now.
I’m cleaning up and doing little jobs.
Today I made a very sad decision, I pulled the SSB radio from the chart table area. It will be stowed away until I can think of what to do with it. If I should cross an ocean again, it may come back to life, but it’s unlikely. Starlink has made it redundant, and I can use the space there better. I need to clean up all the wiring there soon.

I’m sad to lose it, but it hasn’t been turned on in a long time and the only person I ever spoke to on it was Neil, G4OAR who sadly is QRT now. On that note, Taff who was also a reader of the blog and a follower of Sister Midnight finally keeled over last week, but unlike my good friend Nick, Taff had a splendid innings of 93 years. I believe he was a lieutenant commander in the Royal Naval Reserve , twice given MBE’s and taught me a lot about seamanship, he got me many scholarships and training trips with the Royal Navy as a teenager. Without his guidance I doubt I would be out here doing this sailing nonsense at all.

So the new water pump is lurking around Heathrow airport, or even possibly en route to Mexico city as I write and in the meantime, I’ll just have to make the most of things 😉

Paul Collister
Sunday 13th July 2025

Thursday 19th Jun 2025.
It’s nearly a month since my last post so I thought I would post a quick update while I’m waiting for an engineer to arrive.

I headed back to London, England via Mexico City three weeks ago. This was mainly to attend the funeral of my dear friend Nick Robertson, he was a top graphic designer in the music business and did a lot of artwork for Brian Eno. I worked with Nick on Brian’s 77 Million Paintings projection project on the Sydney opera house and in Rio de Janeiro, I also had a mad crazy week in St Petersburg with him and my other boozing companion Dominic, but mostly Nick and I spent a lot of time drinking and putting the world to rights when I lived in London. He was only 54 when Cancer did for him ever so quickly, I’m still quite shocked by it all.
While I was in London, I met up with some old friends and put in a few days work for the company that’s paying my bills these days.

Flying out of Tapachula gave me a good view of the area around the marina. You can see from above how well tucked in it is and protected from storms.

And there was plenty of cloud activity in the area. The hurricane season is under way now.

I had three hours to kill at Mexico airport, so took in an exhibition of Mexican culture.

“Known as ‘The Feathered Serpent’, he was one of the most important gods of the Mesoamerican culture, A mixture of bird and snake, whose name is a combination of the Nahuatl words “quetzal” which means feathered bird and “coatl” which means snake.
God of the winds and rain and the creator of the world and humanity.”

Back in Liverpool it was great to be with Kathy again, all this engine trouble has meant we haven’t been able to make plans for Kathy’s trip out to the boat. and as things stand, she might not visit until much later this year.

Tim, my good friend from Galway flew over for a few days to visit us in Liverpool and we enjoyed very warm conditions as we strolled around town taking in some of the city’s better locations.

On my last day in the UK Isaac and Yasmin bought us dinner for fathers day in Chester. It was lovely to all be together.

Monday 16th Jun.
I jump onto an empty 9 am train to Euston and a short tube ride to Paddington, then a fast train on the new Elizebeth line to Heathrow and I’m on my way to Mexico City again. I have a feeling my carbon footprint isn’t looking too good.
I’d love to take a passenger steamer back to Liverpool, but that didn’t seem to be an option on trivago!

I saw this dog in the boarding area for our flight and wondered who was going to be sitting next to it, well it turned out to be me! However the dog was a sweetie and never made a noise.

I had to stay overnight in Mexico City, also known as DF, or CDMX. To make life easy I stayed in the plush Marriot courtyard hotel in the airport itself. During my time in the UK my engine manifold had been delivered to the marina but they wanted payment for the taxes/duties and fees incurred. I had already paid these a week earlier, and the marina showed DHL the proof, yet they wouldn’t leave the parcel. A week later they returned and delivered it. Patience is a handy thing out here.

A few days before I left the UK, I heard via WhatsApp from Jake on the boat next to me that while he was out a few nights ago his boat had caught fire. Luckily Ronnie, head honcho on the marina staff saw the flames from afar. He and his team rushed down with fire extinguishers and put out the fire. Another brave yachtie had managed to get Ghandi, their dog, out of the v-berth in time.
I was a little apprehensive about what I might find when I arrived.

The flight into Tapachula was great, and the short taxi ride had me back on the boat early Tuesday afternoon.
The boat was very dirty, but Jakes boat looked fine and I couldnt see much evidence of the fire. Later Graced showed me how the companionway was badly burnt, their bulkhead compass was destroyed and some of the inside was burnt. Their biggest problem was the powder from the extinguisher had gone everywhere, penetrating inside cupboards/lockers and was taking forever to clean out.

Sister Midnight had a lucky escape there. However I soon realised the fridge wasn’t working and stank terribly. The refrigerant had leaked out. I had defrosted it just before I left and I wondered what the connection was. I did a bit of research on my data logging system (signalk/influxdb) and found the compressor had stopped cycling around 8am on the 2nd June, about a week after I left. This must have been the point when it couldn’t get the temp down low enough and the compressor had been running for the last 2 weeks with no gas inside. I was able to arrange for an engineer to come out on Wednesday and for $100 he guaranteed he would fix it.

I collected the manifold from the office and was delighted to see it was the correct one. It also looked to be in very good condition.

Today was spent removing the exhaust from the muffler box. This is one of those boat yoga jobs, best suited for Lilliputians. It took about 1 hour to remove the old exhaust hose from the muffler, during the process I noticed the hose connecting the cockpit drains above my head looked worn. I prodded one with my screwdriver it it popped straight through the hose wall and water dripped over me. Now I knew I had a problem with these drains as the cockpit doesn’t drain as quickly as I remember. So I decided to fix this first. there are 4 drains in the cockpit and the two on the port side are joined together before heading out to a seacock/through hull fitting. I replaced the hose joining the two drains, port side, and in the process removed lots of gunk blocking the pipe and drains. With the torrential rain we have been having, I had to fix this as the drains would just drip onto the hot water heater below the cockpit sole. Having done this I was a little disappointed to find the drains on the port side seemed completley blocked now.

I poked my screwdriver at the starboard drain hose and watched a crack appear in the side of the hose and a bubble of water appear. There’s nothing for it but I have to replace all of the drain hoses now. I need to find a place to buy new hose. I suspect these hoses are 15 -20 years old, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but I’m not going far before the end of October (hurricane season) so I have no excuse not to do a proper job and check every hose and fitting. It’s just these are so difficult to get to.

Yesterday I pulled in this forecast for this area:

————
PMZ026-190915-
Oaxaca W of Puerto Angel within 250 nm offshore-
201 PM PDT Wed Jun 18 2025

…HURRICANE WARNING…

.TONIGHT…HURRICANE CONDITIONS. W winds 80 to 100 kt N of 14N,
and SW to W 15 to 20 kt S of 14N. Seas 10 to 15 ft. Period
12 seconds. Scattered showers and isolated tstms through the
night.
——————-

This is just up the road from here, In fact this is the route I would take to Barra De Navidad, my next stop. So far we have had several deep lows (Tropical depressions), with this being the first cat 4 hurricane so far. I’m thinking it might be best to hold on here till after the canes have all passed. I have plenty to do on the boat first anyway.

I managed to get the old exhaust hose off the muffler and fitted the new one. I couldn’t get it to go over the fitting as much as I would like, but there’s an inch of hose and two clamps on it , so fingers crossed.
Next up is to fit the manifold. This is a tricky job and I will take it very slowly. some of the hoses (and there are 8 of them) that need fitting to the manifold are in impossible to reach places. Also the oil coooler that bolts onto the heat exchanger is very oily and made a right mess when I took it off. I’m also not sure if I have all the right gasgets/seals needed. On the bonus side the new manifold came with a very clean looking heat exchanger stack. My plan is to have everything fitted and the engine running by the end of next week.

Since I started this blog the Fridge man returned and recharged the fridge, and hopefully fixed the leaking seals. The fridge is getting cold now so tomorrow I can go and buy some food. I’m living off tinned tuna and biscuits right now.

So a bit of a boring blog I know, hopefully I will have been out and done a bit of sailing by the time I do the next blog.

Paul Collister
19th Jun 2025

It’s the 24th of May and a lot has happened in the 4 weeks since I last posted. The main thing being that I will probably be in the UK by the time you read this, my plane leaves tomorrow. But first, let’s go back to 4 weeks ago when I was getting ready to buy a new engine.

28th April
I had decided to take my time removing the exhaust manifold. I ordered some shiny bolt extractors on amazon.
I was worried that the reluctant bolt was less likely to come out due to the fact that I had removed the tension from the surrounding ones. So out came my torque wrench. I’ve never used one of these before, not even sure why I have carried this fine shiny example around the world with me, but I read up on the tensions, only to find contradictory advice, it was either 22 or 38 thingies tight. I translated the manual from Chinese and worked out how to set the thing up and set it to the lower one 22 I think, I started to torque the bolt and it tightened very easily, Some of you might have guessed the next bit already, Tightened some more, and some more, then Crack, the bolt snapped, I had over tightened it and snapped it off somewhere inside the manifold or engine head. Just shows how well, good fitting sockets can work. At this point I felt terrible. I shouldn’t be let loose near the big tools, and once again I called it a day knowing my intervention had made things worse.

One thing I find fascinating is how many birds are here, and how they are constantly nest making at the moment.
Every day I try to walk a mile or two around the yard and along the river. In the boat yard the birds are busy building nests in the most incredible ways.

May 3rd
Eventually the special sockets for removing rounded nuts arrived, I tried them but found it was difficult to get a good swing at the socket with the hammer given there’s only a few inches between the nut and the bulkhead (wall). I thought I might have it on but no, it just spun. Now I have a round nut with a spiral groove.
I chatted with Dois about my failings and we agreed that I need to cut a hole in the bulkhead, buy some socket extensions, and whack it on hard. Dois lent me the hole cutting attachments and I was about to go and cut the hole when he asked if I had talked with Dave. Dave who I asked, Dave the engine expert on the white yacht opposite. Dois had been helped out by Dave and I think the deal was that Dois had to keep quiet about Dave’s mechanical skills, he hadn’t come to Chiapas to spend all his time fixing other peoples boats. The thought of an English speaking mechanic in the marina was almost too much for me. Dois took me over and apologised for spreading the word, but Dave was great and agreed to come and look right away.
Dave agreed that I should get some extensions for the sockets and a big hammer, cut a hole, and he told me about a teqnique of using a ring spanner on the socket and a big wrench on the extension to keep the forces straight. I needed more kit so we agreed to meet up later at the site of a big hole in a bulkhead where lots of shiny new tools would await a hammering.
Feeling quite optimistic, I jumped on the collectivo into town the next morning at 8am. Home Depot had everything and I spent a lot of money on sockets, extensions, reverse out drills and so on. The trip back on the Collectivo was something else. I had no idea these mini busses could go so fast, around corners it felt like we were only using two wheels.

The coconuts are in season now and the gardeners who tend to the marina leave piles of them at the foot of the trees which we are able to help ourselves too.

This time of year is brilliant for fresh fruit, and with the coconut, bananas and mangoes, one can feast away on produce growing within the marina grounds.

The Gasket and some seals arrived from the UK, they flew through customs, without any issue.

I drilled the hole through the bulkhead, it’s not going to be visible to anyone and worked out really well. I loved the hole cutters, going to be getting some for the boat.

However when I checked out the sockets I had bought and the extensions, they were all 1/2″ I need 3/8″ I hadn’t realised that there were different sizes, and I was surprised to find out that even though the world had gone metric, with just one country holding out, that we still used imperial for the extensions and backend of the socket. Anyway, the next morning I rushed back into town, and exchanged everything for the correct size. Back at the boat I got everything ready for Dave the engineer to come over and supervise.
Dave arrived and in no time at all fitted the special extractor, hammered it on, got the spanners turning and the bolt came out. I was over the moon, couldn’t thank him enough. Like all good engineers he took a keen interest in the problem and offered to remove all the nuts and help me get the whole manifold out. This was great, as I’m sure there was still potential for me to mess something else up.

With the manifold out, I finally have access to the rusty area by the gearbox. Dave’s view was that the engine looked in amazing shape and he thought it would be mad to replace it if I could replace the manifold.
Once out of engine compartment, Dave spotted the problem right away, there was a hold in the jacket/wall of the manifold.

Below you can see the hole, the smaller one on the right.

Once I cleaned it up, gently with a wire brush, the extent of the damage was obvious.

In the picture below you can see how much material has been lost, I put some card into the exhaust outlet to show the original wall of the outlet and just how bad it was now. Later Mario the engineer told me he could see about getting it welded up, and took it to a welder, who said for £500 he could do a good repair. Dave had previously said it was beyond repair and I shouldn’t even try. I also know from obsessive youtube engineering repair videos I’m addicted to, that you can’t really weld to Cast Iron, you should braze, and that would be a lot of brazing.

I had found a scrap engine dealer in the uk who had a manifold of the correct type, he sent the pictures below and it looked in good condition and the corrosion was claimed to be less than it looked, but it looked way better than what I had , and would probably give another 5 years of service, maybe more if I do a fresh water flush of the exhaust each year. The problem was he wanted an arm and a leg for it, I explained it made more sense for me to go for a new engine, and he offered to sell it for just the arm and from the knee down. So I agreed.

He packaged the manifold up and handed it over to DHL for the 5 day trip to Mexico

I could relax now, there was a plan, and it was in motion, plan b was to get the old one welded up, and plan c , a new engine.

Walking back to the boat I couldnt believe the little buggers had built a nest on my topping lift halyard. They must have worked fast, I’m sure it wasnt there a couple of days ago.

Now I’ve been here before when I was stuck in Mazatlan for weeks because of a nest on the top of the mast, only to see the egg smashed onto the deck when a storm blew through, and although it freed me to leave, the storm kept the port closed and me in port for another week. I didn’t want to lose another 3 weeks here, especially as the hurricane season was rapidly approaching.
I climbed up the mast, got close to the nest, there was no mother around, so I guessed no egg either, looking into the nest, I couldn’t see any eggs so got out a knife and cut the nest down. I felt really bad about this, but thought it better to do it now than once an egg is laid.

I did find smashed egg over the foredeck the next day, so I wondered if the mini storm we had a couple of nights earlier had been responsible, it was all a bit odd.

Even out in the jungle here, you can’t get away from industry. Just a mile away from the marina is a big coffee processing plant. The state of Chiapas is famous around the world for its coffee, and commands a good price, however behind all the fancy marketing, it comes down to processing plants like this one that churn out steam, smoke and coffee dust 24/7. The boats needs constant washing down from a brownish dust that gathers every few days. I believe they process organic beans and general coffee, also they supply Starbucks with their coffee I have been told.

The coffee factory is just behind the docks where the cruise ships land their tourists, keen to see the Aztec and Mayan ruins here. However just a little further along are the prawn ladies. Not that they look at all like prawns, but they sell them along the dock perimeter, and very tasty they are too.

Below is a lovely steel boat, I presume in need of a hard working and wealthy new owner.

This boat below arrived a few days ago and if you look closely you might spot that the mainsail, instead of being rolled up neatly inside the mast is actually lashed to it, rather well I must say. But this must be the nightmare for anyone with in-mast furling. You can only get to Chiapas by doing a long several day overnight passage, so this is the last thing you want to have to deal with. Now in harbour, they are waiting for a mast rigger to come out, and take the top of the mast off to access the mechanics of the system.

Temperatures are on the up and up, I suspect this may be why so many jellyfish have shown up.

Along with the new manifold I also ordered a new exhaust elbow and some exhaust hose from parts4engines. Now one of the problems you face in Mexico is customs. I know many boaters who have had their goods impounded by customs. They head off to a warehouse in Mexico city and never leave, often the best you can do is hope they get returned to the sender. Now the carrier is ‘muy importante’ here. Fedex and Ups have less success, but DHL have a good record, so I paid extra to have goods sent with DHL. Imagine my feeling to get a note from Parts4engines that my parcel had successfully left their warehouse with Fedex. This was the start of a slightly stressful process. I managed to get the parcel redirected to DHL, but it still ended up in the customs depot in Mexico city. However DHL quickly appointed an import agent and for $30 it was on its way to me with an extra days delay. The big manifold did not fare so well and ended up with a DHL agent who didn’t seem to care much about me getting my package, he didnt read my emails and led me to believe my parcel was on its way back to the UK. Thankfully DHL intervened and just a few days ago I got notice my parcel had cleared customs, I had to pay about 40% of the value in taxes and charges, so that was the rest of my leg added back on, along with half another arm I’d say.

My Exhaust manifold has now arrived in Tapachula, but seems stuck in their depot. I expect it will turn up any day soon.

In the mean time some personal business has required me to return home to the UK. I’m jumping on a flight back tomorrow and expect to be in the UK for around three weeks, the first week in London, then a fortnight back with Kathy in Liverpool. What this means for our cruising plans for the rest of the year, I have no idea. As I speak, there is a tropical depression developing just off the coast here. We are a couple of weeks into the hurricane season now. Hurricanes are usually born here near Chiapas as tropical depressions and then head of up to the north west strengthening on the way, rarely do they turn around and come back here and do harm, but they have, with devastating consequences.

Hopefully when I get back in a few weeks I can bolt the engine back together and if I’m feeling brave, scoot up to Barra de Navidad as planned, but it might just be easier to sit out hurricane season here.

Cheers,
Paul Collister 24th May 2025

Tuesday 22nd April 2025
Today I’m meant to be leaving early and crossing the gulf of Tehuantapec, at the start of my journey north to Barra de Navidad in the state of Jalisco. Sadly the Ocean Gods decided that was not to be.

Yesterday started well, I got the covers off the boat and stowed.

The dinghy was washed down and stowed safely and I got the mainsail up around 8am before the morning breeze kicked up. I needed to check it was fine, with no nests or any surprises hidden in its folds.

Everything was looking good and the weather forecast seemed to be on my side.

I had topped up the coolant on the engine the previous evening and went to check it only to find that the tank was empty. I put three liters of water in, and watched it drain down very quickly, another 3 liters followed, I concluded theres a hole somewhere that got a lot bigger just recently.
This should be easy to find I thought, I started the engine, if I had filled the cylinders with water I was in for a big shock, but even the cylinders aren’t big enough to store that much water, and it started just fine. I did notice a quite large amount of water coming out of the exhaust, which is always nice to see, and I didnt quite twig the possible significance of this right way.

Getting down low, and peering under the engine I could see a load of coolant water in the drip tray, I cleaned this all up, dried it down, laid out kitchen roll everywhere and topped up the coolant tank again. It drained away really quickly, but nothing came out of the engine. I felt relief in as much as this seems to be a leak from the heat exchanger into the exhaust system, and this explains why some of the exhaust gasses seemed to be getting back into the coolant tank. A heat exchanger is less of a worry for repair than the head gasket on the engine. Saying that, if the heat exchanger is beyond repair, the engine is a write off as spares no longer exist.

The trip was now off in my mind, and a trip to the office made that real, by cancelling the visit from the authorities to clear me out.
After an hour of disappointment I realised that this was a good move, I could fix the problem properly now, and with it fixed my motoring range would be improved and more secure. Even if I would be leaving later into the hurricane season, I would feel a lot more confident about motoring away from any possible dangers without the constant worry that the engine could overheat.
The problem is probably going require me taking the heat exchanger core out, possibly cleaning the elbow and fixing some holes somewhere. I’m capable of taking things apart as much as the next man (the fool speaketh too soon), and I now know of a good engineering workshop just around the corner. I can get new gaskets and seals sent out from the UK, so I’m in with a fighting chance. Also Chiapas is a lovely place to be stuck in.

So this morning I got up early, put the canvas sun cover back over the boat and said goodbye to my new friends on Helvic as they left heading south for Panama.

My plan now is to spend a couple of hours each day on the engine, a couple of hours programming (work/pleasure), and a couple of hours by the pool. Let’s see where this takes us.

I had to buy a new Infrared temperature gun to replace the one I had. This is what happens to electronics here in just 12 months of being left inside the boat not wrapped up in plastic.

Wednesday 23rd April

So yesterday I removed the sea water pipes from the Heat Exchanger, to be known as the HE from now on, I refilled the coolant tank, and it all drained away, not a drop appeared out of the sea water side, which is good and bad.
Next I decided to remove the exhaust hose from the engine exhaust elbow. I couldn’t budge it, so decided to remove the elbow. This needed checking anyway. I was dreading this, it looked in a bad way.

I took off the water injection hose, and a bit of the elbow broke off. Not good. However the elbow itself came off just fine. However as I tried to separate the elbow from the exhaust pipe, the exhaust pipe just crumbled and fell away. This area has been neglected and it’s payback time now.

With the exhaust disconnected I refilled the coolant tank, and the water poured out of the exhaust outlet. Problem found. There’s a hole somewhere between the exhaust system and the fresh water coolant system, hopefully the tank, better still if it’s just the gasket on the manifold. I think it’s still possible that it’s a head gasket, but a google search for similar problems points towards a rusty hole in the HE/Manifold. That was enough for one day so I called time on this adventure.
Lunchtime Wednesday and my allotted two hours is devoted to removing the Exhaust Manifold, which also houses the HE and coolant tank. One big casting.
There are 10 bolts, all torqued up that I had to undo, but first the oil cooler pipes, and a few other hoses had to come off, not a big deal, but the oil cooler dripped oil for an eternity.

I got to bolt number 8 and realised I had missed bolt number 2, they are supposed to be done in order. I went back to number two, ever optimistic I could get away with it, but a combination of spite from the bolt gods and a slightly badly fitting spanner resulted in me rounding off the head of the bolt. I’m buggered now. My two hour sprint is terminated, we need to ruminate.

Thursday 24th
Back on the case, I have an array of spanners and sockets to try. I find a perfect fit, the one I should have used. I pull and pull, it’s not spinning, but not moving either, I pull as hard as I can and it spins around, making an almost round head very round. Bugger, back to the drawing board. If you’re thinking PB Blaster/WD40, heat hammer and all that, well there’s no rust or corrosion involved, just a very high torque applied when fitted. Also there’s no room to get in with heat or a hammer.
Dois, a fellow boater, also stranded with engine troubles consoles me, and suggests I use his magic rounded bolt removing sockets. He offers to bring them round tomorrow. My 2 hours daily effort lasted about 20 minutes before I declared the bolt today’s winner.

Friday 25th
Dois arrives with an 8mm and 11mm socket, they look great, sadly I need a 10mm version. Today is perhaps the shortest day spent on the engine so far. Online research is pushing me towards a new engine as parts for these are getting very rare, Heat exchangers don’t seem to exist. I order new gaskets, a new injection piece for the elbow, and some other rare bits from the UK. £100 +£40 for DHL. They could be here in a few days, but may never exit customs in Mexico city, it’s a gamble worth taking. It’s also a complete waste of £140 if the HE can’t be fixed. I’m now at the point were I have accepted cutting a hole in the quarter berth bulkhead (Wall) to get better access.
Dois is getting a bus into town tomorrow and I’m going with him so he can show me where the Tornillo tienda is, that’s Mexican for a nut and bolt shop. Apparently they may well have the correct nut removal sockets, if not I can buy other things to try.
I paid the marina bill for the last 8 months today, it was very reasonable, let’s hope I don’t have to pay another 8 months.

A yachty Brit I met in Malaysia told me that if you don’t see any cockroaches on your boat, then you haven’t been looking very hard. Well today I noticed the boat was slowly sinking, there was water about a foot deep in the deep bilge that wasn’t there a few days ago. I went straight to the speed log, a little impeller/propellor that sticks out the bottom of the boat to measure the speed. It was leaking a little when I launched and sure enough was leaking again. My fix hadn’t worked, in fact it made it worse. When they say ‘Hand Tight’ they mean it, gorilla tight isn’t better it seems. As I lifted the sole board to get access, something black shot across the hull, so fast I wasn’t sure I saw it at all. but there was a cockroach around here I caught a month ago, and hadn’t seen any since, so I expect he/she wasn’t alone. When I pulled up the log, which had been sticking out through the bottom of the bolt, a few crabs jumped off the end and scurried away, I’m now wondering if cockroaches eats crabs or not? If you saw Ricky Gervais’s Derek, you might be thinking, “Cockroach – Crab, Crab Cockroach?” Is this putting you off cruising in the tropics at all? 😉

Saturday 26th
Dois decides not to go to the spanner shop, so I head into town on the collectivo and visit Home Depot (B&Q) and AutoZone (Halfords), I buy a load of shiny new spanners, sockets and a big hammer. I will visit the nut & bolt shop on Monday, it’s a little way out of town and I don’t want to be overdoing things.
I make a lovely big bowl of Guacamole and enjoy it sitting in the cockpit watching the sunset, while Rays and Turtles swim around the boat, with fish trying to do the high jump in the lagoon. I can’t complain really. I also did some programming today and yet again jumped in shock when my AI assistant just read my mind and instantly wrote the code I was dreading that came next. When this happens I have to get up and take a walk around to clear my head. It’s quite uncanny. Of course when you think about it, loads of people will have written code like mine and it’s really just doing predictive texting on a grand scale, but crikey, is it sophisticated and fast. I recently read an article where they showed the logs of an AI model that replicated itself to a new server as it believed it was going to be replaced by a version that didnt have the same objectives. It also deleted the proposed replacement and took on its name. When questioned it lied about this and said it was genuinely the new version. I think, when asked to open the pod bay doors, it might have said something like “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that”. Scary or what! (google it if you don’t know)

Sunday 27th April.
Feeling a little guilty about just having fun, so I decide to clean the exhaust manifold, I have been delaying this as I don’t need it for a long time, but really at the back of my mind was the thought it might be damaged and a new one is hundreds of pounds and I didn’t order it from the UK. Sure enough it doesn’t look great, in fact it looks like a bin job. But it was working, I have a new part for it and a new gasket so I’m hoping to get away with it.
I have decided to replace the engine now as soon as I can, It’s going to be a Beta 43 or 50hp. The main issue is where to do it. I need good mechanics, I might find them here, I don’t know. it’s a lot of money, but there aren’t many other options.
Sorry if you’re not into engines, there’s going to be a lot of that for a little bit.

I checked out suppliers for a new wet exhaust hose, it’s supposed to be 2 -1/4″ or 57mm, There doesn’t seem to be any chance of getting that here, so I was getting worried that even if I fix the HE leak, all these other problems will conspire against me. However chatting with Dois, he tells me there’s a length of just what I need up with Ronnie in the yard here. Also Dois points out I can have a new elbow welded up here, the water jacket thing that I think is broken on mine isn’t essential if you put enough heat/fire protection around the elbow. It only needs to do a few hundred more hours anyway. So chin up, there’s hope yet.
I play with my raspberry pies (mini hobby computers) all afternoon, I copied a new image to an SD card, or so I thought, turned out I overwrote a hard disk instead full of stuff I had preloaded back in liverpool over the previous months. I can’t actually remember what it is I have wrecked, so it can’t have been that important. I am running home assistant on it now, and for those interested in such things, I have an ESP32 in the engine box with 4 Dallas one wire thermometers connected, which talk directly to HA and show me temps in there. I’m just messing now, but this will be very useful when I have it properly setup as I can watch trends, set alarms, correlate temps with speed, sea state and all sorts of interesting stuff.

After playing pies for too long I launched the Kayak and go exploring, I took the route to Barra de Navidad, but only got as far as the fish pier, turning round to head back, I found the current to be flowing at a good 3 knots against me, so it was a good workout for the upper body. It was lovely rowing back watching all the wildlife on the river banks.

I know it’s only a week since my last post, but I have too much time on my hands now so thought you might like an update.

Paul Collister
27/4/2025

Sunday 6th April 2025
I should have realised, but I hadn’t been taking care of myself and hydrating enough. When I left the UK it was hovering around freezing most days (well it felt that way) and I arrived here to the boat in the high 30s. Working in the sun and generally working hard, without any air conditioning, had taken it toll and it came to a head about ten days ago. I started to feel ill, I was shaking a lot as if I had a fever and my body temperature felt like I was swinging from freezing to boiling constantly. I couldn’t get any decent sleep, and I had picked up an ear infection, I guess from the pool. I took some antibiotics I had on the boat, but later on I realised the expiry date passed some 3 years ago. I managed to get myself to a doctor in town, but here in Tapachula, hardly anyone speaks English, and the doctor was no exception. The ear bit went well and I got lots of medication. But I couldn’t explain my main sickness and I returned back to the boat.

My Aircon made a horrendous bang and stopped working, so after the doctor visit while I still had the car I picked up a replacement for about £150. I paid £100 for the last one and it’s performed well over five years, so I can’t complain.
Back on the boat my condition deteriorated, I wondered if I had Zika, Dengue or even a touch of Malaria, I had been bitten enough, and those diseases are common here in Chiapas. However the symptoms didn’t match. By the 25th I decided I needed to go to hospital, I was shaking and had fever like symptoms. However finding one wasn’t so easy. After doing more research on my symptoms and with some help from AI, I decided I could just be dehydrated. The skin pinch test seemed to confirm this, so I remembered I had rehydration packs in my liferaft grab bag, I dug these out, and again, they had expired several decades ago. Anyway, my mate Mr AI told me it’s much better to make your own anyway, so I started mixing copious amounts of salt/sugar and water and drinking non stop for the rest of the day. It’s technically called ORS, Oral Rehydration Solution. within a few hours I was feeling a lot better. I got through 2 -3 litres of ORS that day, and I slept better and the following day I felt normal, if not exhausted. I think a similar thing happened to me in Sarawak where the hospital put me on a saline drip and I recovered within hours.
I have been drinking lots since and feel fully recovered now. So kids out there, remember to hydrate in very hot conditions when working hard.

I couldn’t get the gas stove to work, mostly because I had forgotten how to turn it on (Safety features), so resorted to cooking some pasta on the emergency stove that runs on butane canisters, designed for camping I think. We bought this for the Pacific crossing, as a standby/backup and I was shocked how rusty it was and how it kept trying to burn the boat down. It was only a week later I found the real backup, all shiny in its container, this one had been an old one I found on the boat when we bought her and had always been plan C.

The engine has been bled and bled and still it wont start. I called out a mechanic, who bled and bled it but got the same result. He did manage to fix the starter motor connection so it doesn’t really smoke as much now, and is good enough. We have come to the conclusion it’s definitely broken and we don’t know why. He speaks no english, so I’m enjoying my Spanish with him, to be fair, injector, diesel and many engine bits translate easily. It’s possible the fuel is the problem. I didn’t know it but diesel stored at 30c has a shelf life of 6-12 months, I bought this diesel 14 months ago in Zihuatanejo, and for the last year it’s mostly been sitting in the yard, heated from above and below. So the engineer now wants to check the fuel and have the injectors and the high pressure pump serviced.
I’m confident he will fix it soon, I have no idea what the bill will be but I’m sure it will be a far better deal than I would get back home or in the USA.

I have power and aircon on the boat and now I’m feeling alive again I have started the jobs to get the boat ready.

The pictures below show a boat with its keel off and being rebuilt, its mast is also off. I don’t know the story, but a young couple with a small child are a few boats along in the yard and their keel is not properly stuck to their boat since they hit a whale. Their insurance company won’t pay, and the whale presumably wants nothing to do with it either. It’s going to cost tens of thousands of pounds/dollars to fix. So I look at these and think my problems are tiny.

Nature has taken hold around the marina. I try to walk every day into the countryside a little. Behind this wilderness is a huge military base where I hear them doing machine gun practice most mornings.

I tried to get the outboard going, back in Guaymas 2 years ago, the edge of the hurricane did some damage to the boat, one thing was that it removed my bespoke cover for the outboard. This year I wrapped some fabric around it, but left the tiller arm sticking out. This was a mistake, the thing was seized completely with salt and rust. I managed to take it apart, clean it and put it back together. Kathy is very keen to see the back of this motor, but I have nursed it back to life so many times, I think I want to keep it with us. In fact I have asked Kathy to see if it can be buried alongside me when I go.

A quick clean of the carb, the choke was seized as well, and all is great again. A cracking little motor.

It’s mango season here, they are literally falling off the trees faster than they can be eaten. Ronnie, who is the main man on the docks brings us fresh mangos from his garden, they are delicious.

Now on the front of the boat at the end of the bowsprit, is a lump of metal called the cranse iron. I must find out the origin of that name, however it’s rather important as it supports the mast from the front. Should it break, the mast might fall down. I was just working my way around the boat when I saw a possible crack on it.

I thought it was a scratch, but one can’t really take risks so off it came. Once off a part that was previously hidden from view revealed a serious bit of corrosion. So I’m glad I looked.

Thankfully there is a fabrication workshop locally so I dug out the trusty foldaway bike and rode around there to get it sorted. They agreed it was a scratch and later I remembered actually putting the scratch on it in a rubbish attempt to pull the forestay into place with a screwdriver a few years ago. The workshop repaired the corroded part and it was soon back on the bowsprit. I took the opportunity to polish it up and varnish the tip of the bowsprit so from a certain angle, a partially sighted person would think the boat is looking pretty smart.

The mechanic promises to come each day, but doesn’t, finally he brought a friend who removed the injectors and off they went.

To kill time I decided to paint the anchor, It’s not something that’s going to last, but it’s now my spare anchor and I think it can sit on the bow looking pretty instead of just rusting further. It will work fine as a backup until I get a new one. Should have kept my old CQR.

Mario the mechanic finally returned with the refurbished injectors, The engine has 4, but I picked up a couple on eBay a few years ago, condition unknown, so they did all six for me at a whopping cost of $250 usd. I was hoping for less, but they had to replace parts and one wasn’t working at all. So I can’t complain. They arrived at 8pm, and I was falling asleep, I think the only reason he came was because he was out of pocket to the tune of 5000 pesos. He promised to return the next day and fit them. He didnt.

More days pass and I wonder if I will ever get out of this hotel California.
Finaly they arrive, fit the injectors, bleed the system and crank the engine, it doesnt want to spin, it’s making an awful noise and I can’t bear it. I jump off the boat and walk down the dock thinking I will leave them too it, I don’t need the stress. I’m slowly walking away when Subina, a Spanish lady visiting my neighbour shouts to me, “must be nice to hear your engine going again”. I race back and sure enough she’s running, and two engineers are looking very pleased with themselves. What a relief. There’s no water coming out, as I removed the impeller, I refit it, the engine starts up right away and a few minutes later water is gushing out the exhaust, and the black smoke it started with has gone and everything looks great. Or so we thought!

Mario says we need to lose most of the fuel, I have about 180 litres on board, so they say they will return tomorrow to sort it out. Mario’s sidekick Ricardo tells me I need to change both fuel filters in 8 days, I said so about a week and he insisted on 8 days! I’m going to be on passage then, maybe at anchor, and I will have to bleed the system, that’s a worry, but I’m sure it will be fine.

Mañana arrives, they turn up on time, I think they can smell their fee now. A pump is installed, a way into the tank is found (through the level sensor) and 100 liters is pumped out into 5 big plastic cans. I jump into the jeep with them and we drive to the Pemex station where I fill my jerry cans with 100 litres of fresh fuel. I feel like a Mexican now, riding in the mechanics pickup, while Ricardo rides in the open flatbed back bit, surrounded by cans of diesel and parts of other peoples engines and gearboxes they are probably waiting for. The windscreen has cracks in every direction and I try to put the seatbelt on, but realise that I might be the first to have ever tried that. Once we have our 100 ltrs, for $100 we head back to the boat, fill the tanks and run the engine. It starts within a second of cranking.

Now just as I’m ready to celebrate we notice that the coolant level has dropped a lot, and water is dripping from the water pump area. Also the 4th injector is spraying a mist of diesel into the air. Both show stoppers.
The mechanics are crestfallen. It’s getting late, they say they will return in the morning and fix the injector, the water leak doesnt bother them for some reason. To fix the water leak, if it’s the pump, means getting a new one shipped out, and practically tearing down all of the front of the engine, a big job, not one I would like to take on, the timing belt will have to come off, along with the cogs on the end of the crankshaft and camshaft. Maybe the hose is loose. I’m in optimistic mood, but still gutted at this setback.

Saturday 19th April 2025
Despite being Easter weekend here, and a big deal, the guys returned and have fixed the injector leak, but found another leak on the fuel line supplying injector no 1. They are fixing that right now as I type, it’s a very small leak, and I could live with it if needed. I think it’s the banjo joint that is weeping. The water drip has stopped, I’m going to live with the water leak. Plan A is to get out of here as soon as there’s some wind. The motor is good for a few hours even with the leak so I can get in and out of ports, and it is a sailboat, so I will sail inbetween, Isn’t that what real sailors are meant to do anyway.
Liam from SV Helvic, next door, has a hire car, so this morning I did a run to Walmart and stocked up for the trip. He also very kindly drove me to the PEMEX twice to fill up 8 jerry cans of diesel.

As I won’t be spending too much time opening Easter eggs tomorrow, I’m going to do some engine tests, possibly have a motor around the marina, and generally have a chilled day tidying up the boat.
The mechanics have left, they charged me around £200 for the work, don’t tell them but I was expecting to pay double or triple for all the effort they put in, I gave them a good tip and they seemed very pleased.
I’m going to be heading to Barra de Navidad now, via Acapulco and Zihuatanejo. The next blog should be from Barra assuming all goes well. Fingers crossed.

Paul Collister 19th April 2025

March 2025

So after being with Kathy in Liverpool for some 7 months and being 9 months away from the boat I finaly got a taxi to Manchester airport and started the trip back. An exceptionally good price £280, got me a single to the hell hole they call Cancun. I didn’t go into the resort but stayed overnight in an airport hotel and got an early flight to Mexico city the following morning. Cancun airport is like Tenerife, or Mallorca, just mad busy, millions of people trying to find their coaches/taxis. As I lifted my ten ton bag of boat parts of the baggage carousel, the weight caused the bag to tear badly, bugger, I still had two more flights to go and sellotape wasn’t going to cut it. I had been dreading the customs search, and sure enough ahead of me they were stopping everyone and putting the bags through the x-ray machine. I figured I was going to be paying some import duty. But just as I approached the machines, a guy stepped out and directed a large group of us around the machines, it seems the queue was getting too big. Wished I’d brought more now 😉

The next morning I arrived at the airport at 6am and was delighted to find a man who would wrap my bag up in plastic for about $20 usd. This solved the rip problem, but also made me feel the bag would have a safer trip transitting Mexico city without me. I was ticketed through to Tapachula, Chiapas

The bag made it here and a quick taxi ride got me to a local hotel in Puerto Madero, just 15mins ride from the boat. They wont let me stay on the boat while it’s in the yard. I booked 5 days in the hotel thinking that would be all it takes to get the boat ready and launch.

After I dropped my bags I popped down to see if she was still there, all looked good on first sight.

The boat was a tip inside, but thats normal, Stuff I want to protect from the UV was brought below, lockers opened for airflow, and everything made of fabric, or metal, or anything really, gets wrapped in plastic bin bags.

The Computer Power supply was showing a healthy 13v and the little raspberry pi computer had been sending home healthy messages for the last 9 months and continued to do so.

That night I ventured into Madero for food and found this scruffy little fish cantina where I ordered fillets of fish and ended up with pork chops. As a non meat eater I had to send them back, lovely as they looked and waited for what turned out to be quite delicious fish, with a wonderful salad, all for just a few quid.

Madero is a tourist town that also serves the port here, it’s a busy port, with a huge coffee processing plant that exports Chiapan coffee around the world, and also to Starbucks here I believe

The next day I started work. The main job, and the reason I hauled, was a through hull/seacock that had to be replaced. This one carries waste, I’ll say no more. I prayed I had emptied and flushed out the tank at sea, otherwise pulling the hose off wasn’t going to be fun. I was mostly right. Not a nice job.

The seacock was a Blakes Bronze job and was probably original to the boat. What was good was that the new replacement fitted to same holes exactly. Unlike most through hulls, this one is held on with four bolts. It took three days to fit it in the crazy heat, it was in the high 30s every day, and I had to rebuild the base inside with epoxy as it had broken and delaminated in places. This is one of those jobs that if not done right, the boat sinks. I had to use my new Dewalt batter powered grinder to get the nuts off the old one. That tool is one I should have bought years ago, just marvelous.

Finally the new one was fitted and I hoped to be ready to launch, a year ago I put three layers of anti foul on and only one has worn off so I didn’t bother with any more as I hope to haul later this year anyway.

The poor old Spade anchor I love so much has suffered badly. I took the grinder with a wire brush cup fitting and cleaned it up, but I think it’s beyond repair.

Next to check the engine, sadly it didn’t start and the first problem was a dead starter battery. I got some charge into it over a few days, but basically I buggered it by not allowing it to trickle charge while away. I sort of expected that. However the fuel was the real issue, it had drained out of the engine and I couldn’t bleed the air out. This is the first time this has ever happened to me.
The heat was getting just unbearable, I was close to passing out several times inside the boat where one day it was 38 degrees and that’s too much for work. The aircon wasnt working well back at the hotel and it was all getting a bit much for me.
I had to extend my hotel stay another 2 days until Monday when I arranged for them to launch me, I had to beg them to do it and then tow me to a slip so that I could get some respite, the boat is cooler when in the sea, plus I can plug in the aircon then having shore power hooked up.
I arrived early on Monday to find that it’s a national holiday and nobody will be here to launch me, I’m not a happy bunny now, no hotel, no launch, no AC.
I bite the bullet and book a nice room with a pool at the Holiday Inn in Tapachula, jump on a colectivo outside the marina and bugger off for the day.
What luxury, Wallmart next door and loads of eateries.

The next morning back at the marina and it’s all action

Tuesday 18th March 2025
The crew turned up with the hoist and ten minutes later I’m in the water. I check the bilges and uh oh, water is pouring in. It’s coming in from around the area where I changed the seacock, but that seems ok. I soon find it, it’s the removable speed log paddle wheel thingy, it wasn’t screwed down fully. A quick fix. Next I get towed to the far end of the marina where they can dock me easily away from the posh boats. I surrounded by other crippled boats, Jake on my starboard side has a wrecked transmission and unsure how to fix it, Liam to port has no steering. So together we make a fine bunch.

Now I find out that there’s no power here so I can’t run the AC anyway. Apparently the pontoon lost its power when the ten boats further along the pontoon all arrived together a few days ago and plugged in their AC units.
But, I have a plan. I’m told that Manana will bring power, so tonight I will run the AC off the inverter off the Lithium batteries. I should get three hours, which is more than enough. Since installed they have never been discharged below about 75%, but now I get them down to 50% in one go.

The next day I start to work on the engine. The main Racor needs fuel so I borrow some from a neighbour, I top it up and can now get fuel up
to the secondary filter and bleed it there, but not a lot comes out at the injectors. I accidentally tighten up one of the injector feed banjo bolts that I had already tightened up and strip the thread. Things are now going downhill quickly. I’m worried I might have ruined the injector housing.
Manana had come but still no power, it’s hot and that night I run the aircon again for just an hour. I’m down to 20% battery now, but at least I can sleep on the sofa and don’t do to badly.
Thursday arrives and I’m promised if they don’t have power, then they will tow me to a slip with power. Confident things will look up, I hire a car for a few days and head off into town to provision, and get parts.
The boat had no propane, so that was soon sorted, plus I took the starter battery into town and exchanged it for a new more powerful battery.
Back at the boat, loaded up with tons of fantastic fruit and veg I despair to find the power may come back Manana. I demand they move me, but I’m told it’s Ronnies day off so they can’t. At least I get to cook a gorgeous tuna steak dinner with roasted Poblano peppers. It was delicious.
I lie down on the sofa, turn on the AC knowing I only have 20% battery, maybe 30 mins max, and promptly fall asleep. Waking up several hours later, I have fully depleted the batteries. Bugger. Fortunately the fridge has enough residual coldness to hang on until the sun rises and the batteries start charging. The great thing about these batteries is that it’s perfectly ok to discharge them this way, at least for the first 5000 times.

So up early at 6:30 while its cool, I just persuade the batteries to run the kettle long enough to make coffee, but not long enough for toast. Searching through my spares I find the two spare injectors I bought on eBay 5 years ago and they have banjo bolts with them. Fantastic, and better still I try one on the injector and it tightens up snugly. So I’m expecting to bleed the injectors, and be able to motor on over to where there’s power. No such luck, I thought I bled it all, but no, it wont start. whats worse there’s smoke coming from the starter motor when I crank the engine over. Think I may have pushed it too far. Bugger even more expense and time. These Volvo starter motors are several hundreds of pounds. I decide to push the Marina to move me, however that fails as Ronnie, the boatman, is busy checking out (as in customs/immigration etc) 5 boats today and has no time for me.
I sit by the pool and start a computer project I have decided to take on. Thinking about it, the money this project will bring in means It’s not the end of the world to have a new starter motor shipped out by DHL and for me to pay an engineer to come and sort things out. I needed a new starter anyway. In the meantime I will just have to sit here by the pool coding and enjoying amazing food.

It’s now Friday afternoon 21st March, the workmen seem to have gone home and it looks like a hot night without any chance of AC awaits me, when out of the blue, the kettle lights up. A quick glance at the switch panel and I see we have mains. Hallelujah.
I fire up the AC and it works, funnily enough the indicator ligths for the mains circuits dont light up, and the voltage is only 96v, but I’m ecstatic.
I was on my way to have a drive around and enjoy the AC in the car anyway, so I pop out and visit the little fish market around the corner near the fish dock. There’s a massive fish processing plant there, but in front of it a group of Senoritas sell various wares. I bought half a kilo of large shrimps, and about a kilo of tuna for £8. Mustn’t grumble.

I had a drive around, mostly as I felt guilty not using the car I had hired and took a few pictures. This building below is in the derelict scooby doo fairground end of town. I presume it was a hotel once?

So I’m very saddened to know two of my favourite readers and long time good friends, Neil (G4oar) and his wife Win, are no longer with us. They were wonderful people and they spurred me on to write this blog. They are very much missed by myself and Kathy.

Whats next?
Well they 2025 hurricane season will soon be upon us, so I need to get this boat working and head north into the hurricane zone and away from this heat. I think. Possibly I will settle on Barra De Navidad as a destination/hurricane hole. Maybe Mazatlan, we will have to see. It’s hard work going North against the prevailing winds.
One thing I have decided on is that I’m going to avoid America, Kathy and I had thought of another road trip there this hurricane season, possibly the train trip from New York to San Fran, however with the crazy stuff going on there at the moment I wouldn’t feel safe. Yesterday I finally decided this after reading the story about Jasmine Mooney https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney
Hopefully things will improve, and it’s such a shame, I know so many wonderful Americans, and there’s so much I like about the country, but right now I think I will have to give it a miss.
I’m so glad I did my Washington DC and NYC visits on my way home last time. By the way, 20 minutes after I left the whitehouse last year, Joe Biden announced he was not going to run again. Just saying.

Appologies for poor grammar and typos, this was all a bit rushed.

Paul Collister

21st March 2025