Author: paulcollister

5th October 2023
Taxi to the Manchester airport, short flight to an airport in Europe (probably Amsterdam, can’t remember, they all look the same), then onto a 12 hour flight to Mexico city. Because of a last minute flight change, 6 hours of hanging around Terminal 2 at CDMX where I manage to lose my glasses. Then a short 2 1/2 hour flight to Hermosillo, an hour wait for a taxi to the coach station and then a 90 minute bus ride to Guaymas, then finally a 20 minute taxi ride to the boatyard where they are waiting for me to remove the forestay on the boat and load it into the travel lift and move me from the storage yard to the work yard.

I thought I was getting a cold the day before I left, and possibly unwisely took up an offer of a winter flu virus jab the morning I flew out, the end result of all of this was I arrived at the boat feeling pretty ill, the intense heat, high 30’s didn’t help. So as soon as the boat was chocked up I crawled into bed and slowly cooked for a few days until I had enough strength to drag the Air con unit out from under the v berth and throw it on the coachroof pushing icy air into the boat. Phew.

A few days after arriving Josh, a boat dealer and importer delivered my batteries which he had organised to be shipped from San Diego for me. This was going to be my main job inside ther boat. There are 8 LiFePo4 cells (3.5v @ 280Ah lithium Iron Phosphate) plus a spare that make up 2 banks of 4 cells, giving me a total of 12v @560Ah. Equivalent to around 800-900Ah in Lead Acid. For thse of you not literate in Ampere Hours, that’s a massive amount of power for a small sailboat, if I had space I could install a dishwasher, washing machine / dryer, Stannah stair lift etc.

The views from the boat are pretty cool, and of course the yard has dozens of really interesting sailboats around. A few deserted, but many old ones in the process of being given new life. I soon make friends with other yachties preparing their boat for the season. The heat is really too much to be working so life starts around 6:30am when it’s a little cooler. I’m having all of the old antifould removed and a new primer coat applied. It’s a bit over the top, but I want to ensure a get a good adhesion with the new paint and I get a consistent coverage over the boat. I am able to employ a local called David to do the work, however he hardly turns up and it seems he has rather overstretched himself by agreeing to take on far too much work. It seems to be very difficult to get staff here, much like many other countries post covid. Now there is a long waiting list to get paint jobs done here. So I resign myself to a long wait and decide to get on with other jobs like building the new battery banks.

Now I mentioned how I paid £750 for a new screen on my macbook when I returned home, well guess what, I may be doing the same pretty soon. I don’t want to talk about it any more or I might get upset. 🙁

So in between building batteries I have to service several of the seacocks and thru hulls, these are things that let water in and out of the boat. If they fail the boat can sink, so they all need checking over.

Sadly there had been a big storm that passed through while I was away and it had ripped one of the solar panels off its frame, the panel was intact, but gouged a little, the frame was twisted and snapped in several places. It’s hard to be sure but I think about 90% is still working ok. However I had to pop off into town looking for an aluminium tube supplier. I think most towns in the world have one, I just had to find it. I figured if I could find one in remote Borneo, Guaymas should be easy.

It took a while walking around town, but I enjoyed exploring and practising my directions in Spanish. Eventually I found a place and bought a 4 metre length which they happily cut into the desired sections I needed, short enough to fit into a taxi for a ride back

Suddenly David turns up with several assistants and in one day they strip the boat and get a coat of primer on! the next day they finish and I’m only half way through the batteries job.

So I get the batteries installed, in each box there is a 300A BMS (Battery Monitoring System), which is a computer that monitors each of the 4 cells, that’s what the thin wires are for. if any individual cell is acting odd, or under stress, the BMS shuts the whole system down. I’m hoping by having the two batteries in parallel I have some redundancy. Once again my carpentry skills were somewhat lacking and my first box had to be binned as it was 3 cm to short, don’t ask how that happened, I measured three times!

2 weeks have passed and at this point we are close to being ready to launch. However ‘there’s a problem’, Hurricane Norma is heading up the coast in our direction. It’s most unlikely that it will reach us, that’s why we’re here, but I decide to delay launch until it’s gone so I finish the jobs and schedule the launch for Tuesday 24th October 2023.

It looks like Norma will hit Cabo San Lucas at the bottom of the Baja peninsula and might track over to La Paz before dying out as it crosses over to Sinaloa. So while waiting I decide to clean the topsides. I can’t remember it actually looking this good before.

So the day before launch, the crew arrive with the travel lift and hoist me up, the blocks are moved along with the props/stands so that the covered areas can be painted.

Once in the straps the travel lift remains here overnight and tomorrow morning I will be lowered into the sea, backwards and will have to do a difficult 180 deg turn to be able to leave. The channel is very narrow.

The Hurricane passed through Cabo as predicted and hit La Paz much harder than expected. Sadly two of the marina saw big losses, Marina Cortez in particular is full of sunken boats, many others have large chunks of hull missing, I expect the damage to boats will run to the millions, but that’s very much a first world problem. I expect many Pacenos (locals) will have lost their homes in the flooding, many vendors had to close, and the town was still without electricity as I write. Part of the Malecon was ripped up, but for me the worst was losing a friend during the Hurricane.
Bob had lived on his sailboat Adios and was moored next to me for the year I was in the Marina, I got to know him well and had a lot of respect for the man. As a young man working in SF as a insurance estimator, he watched the sailboats entering and leaving the bay and decided that was the life for him, he quit his job, bought a small sailboat and sailed to Hawaii and back solo as his first offshore passage. In those days there was no GPS s he did it all by sextant. He was 90 when I last saw him and still went out kayaking most days. I was looking forward to seeing him again in a few weeks. Sadly he was found dead in his boat after the storm had passed, it is presumed he had a heart attack, his berth was close to the outside of the marina and quite exposed, although the boat was undamaged it must have been quite a wild ride for 24 hours. It’s very sad, but then I expect he would have much preferred to go quickly onboard his own boat than in a nursing home or hospital.
RIP Bob.
I’m off to bed now and will be launching at first light tomorrow. I have a space booked in a little marina just 20 minutes away in the centre of Guaymas, where I will stay for 2-3 days getting the sails on and generally preparing the boat for passage to La Paz where I will be meeting my son and his partner in a couple of weeks, then we are off to explore the Islands.

Paul Collister

12th August 2023.
I’m writing this on a Pendolino train from Liverpool to London Euston. I’m off hoping to see some Perseid meteors with my good friend Dominic and other friends I haven’t seen in a while. We will be outside of London in the Oxfordshire countryside, but right now it’s looking very cloudy.
I left the boat hauled out in Guaymas at the end of June and flew home. It’s always a bit of a worry leaving the boat alone for a few months. I think this is the longest I have been away in the seven years since I bought her. The trip up to Guaymas from Zihuatanejo was just shy of 1000 nautical miles, so a decent solo passage for me, and by the time I hauled out and secured the boat on land, both the boat and myself were quite tired.
I have detailed the trip in a bit more detail below.

24th May 2023, Arrive in Mazatlan
The passage to the old harbour at Mazatlan was good, and this time I felt confident enough with my Spanish to call the port traffic control station on the VHF radio. They usually talk in Spanish and are very busy with the tourist boats that constantly ply their way from the harbour to the nearby islands. No response, disappointing, but at least I refreshed my Spanish.
This harbour is great, I planned to do some shopping for boat bits I will need for the relaunch which are best purchased in the big city, however I managed to strain some back muscles and was basically crippled for a week. I couldn’t get ashore and just moving around the boat was difficult, so I just rested for a few days.
Eventually I ventured ashore, I was still in a lot of pain, but was hoping some exercise might free things up, which it sort of did, along with a lot of soreness.
I found a few great chandleries not far from the harbour, and a plumbers merchant where I could buy 25 metres of clear plastic hose to redo the fresh water lines. I also picked up the correct shackles for the Spade anchor. I restocked at the supermarkets and bought a stack of smoked tuna from the main market known as ‘Pino Suarez’. As good as La Boqueria on the Ramblas in Barcelona, but half the price, and fewer tourists like me.

I found that everyone was selling ciruela, it must be the season, but I didn’t know what a ciruela was, so avoided them, however a local had made me try one in La Cruz and they tasted great. I now realise they are very similar to plums, something I had never been fond of, although like many of my childhood food hates, I may never have tried one, but rejected it as a child because of its colour. Anyway they tasted great and I bought loads here in Mazatlan from street stalls.

Leaving the old port of Mazatlan I saw several of the tour boats that were constantly moving in and out of the harbour, actually taking their guests around the big rock islands that are scattered throughout the main Mazatlan bay.

6th June
I move the boat to the El Cid marina for a few days for some fuel and to get the hull scraped. A local diver and his father come out in a panga to the marina and cleaned the prop and the hull. The boat really needed it.
El Cid has the harbour entrance that made me swear and Kathy get frightened for her life the last time we visited. The entrance is very shallow and has sunken lumps of sharp concrete that will pierce the hull should the waves push you off the exact centre. Big party catamarans coming out can make navigation a challenge. I was careful not to try it at low water again. This time the tide was high, but there was also a fair amount of current flowing. I approached the entrance with trepidation, here big rollers travelling across the Pacific build up into waves that could ruin your day, however it didn’t look too bad. As I approached the entrance a huge wave arrived out of nowhere and would have been a problem if that had caught me. I backed off and started counting the seconds between the waves so I could time the entrance. I thought I was ready when a voice came over the radio ‘Sailboat at the entrance, come in now, it’s safe’. I assumed this was one of the staff of the El Cid resort, who has a good view from the breakwater. So I throttled up and managed to get into the channel and over the shallow bar just before a big wave broke. Feeling like an accomplished hardened sailor I then motored to the fuel dock where I made a complete arse of myself by trying to go alongside the fuel dock with 3 knots of current pushing me off. A fellow sailor came to my rescue and on my second approach to an adjacent dock, I managed to tie up. From the fuel dock to my berth I managed to screw up again and completely got the turn into the slip wrong and had to reverse out and do a 180 degree turn, head out the marina and return for attempt two, which was textbook and gave me a little bit of cred when I explained to the onlookers what freak tides we were having 😉
I have refuelled here several times before, but I was assured the hotel/resort was great, and it was not expensive. They have a stack of pools and eateries so I decided to chill for a few days at the pool while I prepared for the last part of the season’s sailing.

Walking along the Malecon, I came across this group of Banda musicians messing around after a day’s work on the beach, they played some great music, and I felt privileged to hear them. No one I have played the music to agrees with me, but I still think it was great.

8th June. Leave to El Cid marina for Topolobampo
I had planned to stop at Altata on the way north, but the high swell that was building put me off, so off to Topolobampo with two nights at sea before I would arrive. There were a few big fishing boats on the way, but nothing very eventful.

11th June Arrive at Isla Maria Sand Dunes
To get to Topolobampo you have to follow a channel that extends out into the Sea of Cortez for several miles. It’s very shallow either side of the channel and for large parts of the route you can see and hear thousands of birds on the sandbanks. I usually travel just outside of the buoys that mark the channel, as I don’t want to have to deal with the harbour master who controls the channel. Once I pass the first headland that juts out from port, I turn, right next to the sunken shrimper and two miles to the north I anchor in 10ft of clear beautiful water. I catch up on my sleep here before heading into the Marina right in town.
There, like everywhere else, things are quiet, with a definite out of season feel. I provision for the next leg and enjoy a fish meal on the Malecon.
One of the reasons for coming here was to refuel, however I have managed to sail so much that I don’t really need any, and after a couple of days I leave for the last leg north to Guaymas

I visited the museum at Topolobampo as it was open. Their main exhibit is this biplane, along with many photos from when the plane was operational.
I think the plane is famous for the ‘Battle of Topolobampo’ which was the first naval-air skirmish in history.

14th June Dept for Guaymas.
I leave the marina and again return to the sandbanks to anchor overnight. This allows me an easy and early start from the anchorage.

The wind blows perfectly and I make a great passage to Guaymas. I had expected to arrive late, probably in the dark and had decided to anchor out at one of the many bays a few miles from the town. However, as I approached I realised I could make it into the town with plenty of daylight left, so I phoned the Marina manager and checked if they had a berth, which they did, so I motored straight down and into the slip. Job Done.

16th June Marina Fonatur
This Marina is downtown and walking distance from the shops. It’s also directly across the bay (10 minutes cruising) from the shipyard I am hauling out in. In a few days I will cross over to Gabriels boatyard and motor into their travel lift slings and that will be that for this season. But first I must get all the sails off the mast and furling systems. Everything needs to be prepared for the possibility of a hurricane. The hurricane season has started and at this point there are many views on what will happen. It’s a El Niño year (The Boy) and this causes a vast belt of hot water and air to spread across from the Panama area extending far out into the Pacific. Often this heating will cause hurricanes to form easily, however this year, for reasons not fully understood, the water north of the Baja and off the Californian coast is much colder than normal. I think this causes a lot of wind shear, and wind shear kills hurricanes. So far the hurricanes haven’t been up to much, mostly heading west off towards Hawaii, however August/September is the time to really worry.
This boatyard doesn’t have to worry about the sea, but it does suffer from flooding and I believe a recent hurricane caused so much water to flow through the boatyard that several boats were toppled.

20th June Haul Out at Gabriel’s boatyard
Crossing the bay to the haul out was fun. I didn’t have the location of the travel lift, but I did know I had to approach it at right angles to the shore, and line it up straight from some distance out. Much of the bay is only a few feet deep and a narrow channel allows access to the lift. I had some tracks left on Navionics from other boaters, which proved useful. Once I was close, I couldn’t see the travel lift, and my expected destination looked like a deserted bit of coastline. However with the binoculars I saw a couple of Mexican marina staff standing at the end of the dock waving at me. A few minutes later I was tied up organising the slings for the lift.
I had been warned that the lift was quite small and that I would need to remove the forestay to fit in the slings. This is a pain, but I have done this before, however here they wanted the next sail stay, the inner forestay (Staysail) removed. I haven’t had this off for seven years and I knew it would be a struggle with the corroded screws. Anyway I eventually got it free and we were in the slings and chortelling along to our new home in the storage yard. Here you cannot stay onboard overnight so when it is time to return and launch the boat, I will be moved to a ‘working yard’ where I can clean/paint etc.
I spent the rest of the day packing and putting the boat to bed, and the following day I grabbed a taxi to the bus station and took a bus to Hermosillo, the nearest airport I can fly to Mexico City from.

I wonder why I left that fender out? will it still be there in October?

As you can see from the picture above it was getting really hot. In the boatyard away from the water it was very hot, this year hotter than normal and the yard workers were complaining. Fortunately I had plenty of water bottles on board and handed them out to the workers who really seemed to appreciate them.

I had hoped to spend a few nights on the boat putting it to bed for the next 3-4 months, however with the heat and the management keen for me not to stay on the boat, I quickly closed her up and grabbed a taxi into town to the coach station to get my bus to Hermosillo.

21st June. Bus to Hermosillo.
I think there’s an airport at Guaymas, but it doesn’t seem to have any airlines operating there, so I had to take a coach to Hermosillo, quite a large town a couple of hours to the north.

I had two days to kill in Hermosillo so I took in some of the highlights.
This imposing building below is basically the town hall, and has amazing murals inside, as do most town halls

23rd June 2023:
Time to head home, I left the hotel around 7am and had a crazy taxi driver take me to the airport. He was cursing at screaming at every other motorist, but amused me no end with his taxi driver talk, aimed against the Mexican government, the council, the police etc. A bit like an angry London cabbie on speed.
I flew home via Mexico City, Paris Charles De Gaulle then Manchester. All went very well, flying AeroMexico right up till Paris.

26th June
Great to see Kathy again, who was waiting for me at the Lime St train station. The next day was not so great as I head down to the Apple Store and pay £750 to an Apple genius to get the cracked screen on my MacBook Pro replaced. Genius is the right word I suppose, getting people to pay that much for a $75 part is genius.

29th June
One important task on this trip home is to head to the USA embassy in London and get new visas for us both. We need these to enter the USA with the boat.

While in London we visited friends and also saw Isaac’s (my son) workplace. He works for a very hi tech company with offices in the centre of Soho. They have so many goodies for their staff we were quite amazed. Things like a bar, games room, pool tables, cinema and all the food and drink you can consume.

5th July
Visa applications were processed and soon we were back in Liverpool. I took advantage of the various tests that our health service provide for free, Aorta, bloods etc. Seems I might live a little longer.

12th August.
Our visa arrives which is great. Soon I’m back off to london to hook up with lots of friends and family I haven’t seen in ages.

Back in Liverpool I settle down to various chores that have been waiting. I have some programming to do, and I start ordering lots of bits for the boat I plan to fit when I return.

August 2023:
Just six weeks until I return to the boat now. There’s going to be a lot to do on my return. My son and partner will be visiting for a few weeks, then in December Kathy will join me and we will sail down to the Barra area for Christmas. Later in the year I’m hoping to host more friends and meet up with old sailing buddies before next Spring when I think we will be sailing back north. Nothing is finalised yet, but instead of heading into the South Pacific, we may be heading back to Canada and onto Alaska.

Paul Collister

Tuesday 23rd May
I’m finally back in the Sea of Cortez, or at least at the entrance, anchored here in Mazatlan old harbour.

It’s a few weeks now since we finished our trip south ending in Zihuatanejo, before I left I took in a local festival of young people performing traditional song and dance.

I also lugged a starter battery across town to make sure I would have a way to start the engine should I need to after the sun went down and my batteries were depleted.

It was around this time that I dropped my MacBook (Laptop) in the cockpit. Not a big drop, maybe a foot onto the wooden deck. and not in a violent way either, and it seemed to survive, however a few days later when I turned it on the display was black. No visible sign of any damage at all to suspect I had cracked the display. However as the days passed a bigger and growing crack appeared. Fortunately I have an external screen I can use, and after many hours of trying to enable it blindly, I got there. This was the first of several gutting and expensive failures. It seems this is going to set me back £600-800 to repair, more than most laptops cost. My iPhone is also playing up, it’s an iPhone8 and getting on, normally my phones are on the seabed by this point, so I could think of that as a positive. Much as I love Apple products, the expense will be the ruin of me.

Off to Barra Navidad.

Here in the protected lagoon I can finally relax and get some boat jobs done, there’s a small leak from the saltwater foot pump at the galley, taking it apart reveals a broken rubber diaphragm. I have an old one I can use to fix it, but I don’t know how to reassemble it, the big spring must be clamped down somehow, and I give up.

An attempt to use the monitor windvane on the way here caused the chain to come off, this actually broke on the N pacific crossing and has been operating under paperclip power ever since, I have a spare chain, but not the will power to dismantle the whole thing and fit it. I will wait until the boat is on land where I can pick up the bits I will drop in the process.

There’s some nice walks around Barra de Navidad and I followed the beach to the busier and very pleasant seaside town of Melaque, this poor puffer fish should have known better than to mess with the big waves crashing on the beach here.

So after a very chilled week in Barra doing some research on how to fix the boats ailments I proceeded onto La Cruz, to take a place in the Marina for 2 weeks. This will be the first time the boat has been tied up to the shore for over 4 months, and my aim was to give the boat a big clean with fresh water.
I arrived just as a festival was starting, fireworks every night and lots of activity in the town.
It was also great as I met up with Clay & Brenda on the yacht Sanssouci, We first met them around San Francisco in 2019 and travelled together down the coast and around to La Paz on our trip here. They were on their way to the South Pacific and when covid hit, they instead headed back to Canada, quite an eventful bash back, involving rescuing a family in a mayday situation. They had waited until this last year to try again, and they were here in La Cruz awaiting their Visas for French Polynesia having sailed down from BC Canada for a second time. Sadly due to boat issues and the late arrival of their visas, they decided to give it a miss again, the weather forecasts aren’t great now, and they are now in Ensenada heading back to Canada. I hope they get to do the passage one day. I enjoyed a couple of lovely vegan meals on their luxurious big Beneteau.

The fish market in La Cruz is quite a site, it’s always busy with a wide variety of fish on sale.

One of my objectives since arriving in La Paz has been to buy one of the buckets that most Mexican men seem to carry around. I finally found one, it was not easy and I began to wonder if I was not allowed one, being a foreigner. Now. I could soak my lines that had become salt encrusted, and even do some clothes washing when on passage.

One of the things you can’t do when at anchor, is anchor work. With the new windlas the chain has been jumping out of the gypsy (See pic below), I noticed it was also very twisted in the locker and wondered if that might be the cause, of course I knew it was going to be the gypsy, but grasping at straws I laid the chain out on the dock, removed all the twists and took the time to clean it and replace the markers. The chain is 60m long and the first 30m , the part most used, has lost its galvanised coating and is starting to rust, the other half not so bad at all, so on somebody else’s suggestion, I reversed the chain so the rusty bit is in the locker and the galvanised end is now on the anchor. I’m thinking now the rusty bit will rust faster and it’s only when the wind picks up and I need to put out more chain will I remember that the rusted away chain is supposed to save me from the rocks. Watch this space.
Anyway the whole exercise ruined several t-shirts, a bit of the dock, some skin on my hands, and made no difference to the chain jumping out of the windlass. An email to the firm that I bought the windlass from 5 years ago, confirmed I had bought an ISO standard 10mm Gypsy, and I measured my chain and discovered I had a DIN standard chain, this is the problem, checking with Lofrans, a new Gypsy will set me back nearly £300, not cheap this boat fixing lark. Fortunately I found one on eBay for £70 which is now waiting for me in Liverpool.

While cleaning the boat and polishing the steel, I found that two of the lower shrouds, these are the steel wires that hold the mast up, had cracks in them. They are meant to be good for at least ten years according to most boat insurers, and these are about six. No problem, just a few thousand pounds more and I can get new ones shipped over. There are cheaper options I can explore.

Punta Mita
Finally it’s time to start heading north in earnest, I have stocked up on food, fuel, had the hull cleaned again and I plan to sail to Mazatlan in one overnight passage. I leave the marina for Punta Mita, a little bay within Banderas bay which makes a good overnight stop before popping out into the ocean propper.

At Punta Mita I drop the anchor. My beloved Spade Anchor, The anchor pictured below, that is one of the most expensive, but also most effective having a unique lead filled tip.

I feel it bounce along a rocky bottom and not find any sand, it’s mostly sand here so I pull up the anchor thinking I will motor a few boat lengths away from the shore and try again, except up comes the chain, no anchor to be seen anywhere. This is a new experience for me, and I’m about to go into shock when I think, quick, slam a GPS waypoint into the chartplotter, if nothing else, this will be a reminder of where it all went wrong. The wind is gently pushing me out to sea so I sit on the bow platform and try to think this through. No amount of thinking makes the anchor re-appear so I look at the spare CQR anchor sitting next to the empty home of the spade and think, well it’s showtime CQR, I have never used this anchor before, and it can’t be deployed from the port side of the boat where it lives due to problems to do with chain, the gypsy and the fact it’s mostly on a rope rode. So I move the sad lonely (ex spade) chain around to the CQR and shackle it on. 15 minutes later I drop it to the seabed, where it quickly sets. We had a CQR on the Greek boat we used to share with our Irish friends Tim and Paul, and in all the years I used it, I don’t think it ever set once, it was just 35lb of iron lying on its side on the seabed, so I’m mightily relieved to have it set so well. I jump over the side with my snorkel on to find visibility to be about 1 metre and the anchor is 7 metres down.

I’m able to examine my GPS track using the GPX files created by the navionics chart plotter and work out the exact point where I dropped the anchor and where I pulled up the chain, and the boat traveled a curved path between these two points which were about 40m apart. Of course the GPS can be +- 10m, but is usually more like 2-3m on the open sea.

You can also tell the speed of the boat increased at a certain point which could be a clue.
I dinghied out to the spot later and put some buoys down at the area I needed to search and tried my hand at freediving down, but as I can’t free dive, this didn’t go well. I spotted some tour guides preparing boats for the guests of the luxury hotel I was anchored off and dinghied over to them to see if they knew of any local divers. It was with a little trepidation, as cruisers often go on about being chased away by hotel staff, and not welcome anchoring close to the resorts in case we spoil the view for their guests, or something. Anyway, these guides couldn’t have been more helpful, two of them jumped into my dinghy with snorkels and started diving in the area. I asked what I should pay them, and they wanted no money, just to help me find the anchor. They couldn’t see either and said they would try again tomorrow. I waited overnight but the next day the water was no clearer so I set about researching where to buy a new anchor. I put a post on a facebook group for local sailors and a man in La Cruz offered me a very good deal on an anchor he didn’t need anymore. Marty on the power boat next to me suggested I ask a proper diver to come and scour the seabed, and that he had seen pangas with compressors in the local fishermen’s port, a small port surrounded by a large breakwater that housed about 40 pangas and was a mile away, so the next day I dinghied down there and asked around. One man understanding my situation immediately grabbed a snorkel and said let’s go, again he wanted no money, just to help. I explained I wanted a scuba diver and so we walked over to a guy who was up for it, once he finished his Huevos Rancheros breakfast. The three of them then followed me back to the scene of the crime and they spent an hour searching but again the visibility was too poor. They thought in a few days things would be better and I should call back and seek them out then.

Disappointed, I decided to go back to La Cruz and pickup the anchor on offer, stay the night there, restock on fresh food and return, hopefully to clearer water.

I bought the 44lb Bruce with chain and 200ft of heavy rope from fellow cruiser Brian for about £100, these are fine anchors, not an easy fit for my bowsprit, but manageable. This was a great deal, and I figured that should I get the Spade back, I would have no trouble selling this setup.
The next morning I headed back, there was a strong wind blowing from Punta Mita to La Cruz, so rather than battle and waste fuel, I sailed out into the bay away from Mita then tacked back, It was great fun with the rail almost in the water, and making 8 knots, I had too much sail up really, but it wasn’t for long, as I’m hanging on to a very bouncy boat, a call comes in from Martin, the Mexican tour guide who found me the scuba diver to say they had been back to the site and had recovered the Anchor. Just F’ing Amazing, I hadn’t left the marker buoys, so they had taken transits from the first dive a few days ago and remembered where I said I thought it was. I was so pleased. I dropped anchor outside the panga port and dinghied in. I got the anchor, pushed lots of $500 peso notes into their palms and headed back anchor in the dinghy. By now the swell had built up and big waves were breaking across the harbour entrance, there was no way I could get through there without the boat being flipped over. I would have to get my timing just right to get out between the big waves. I tied everything down in the dinghy, I didn’t want the anchor falling out again! When there seemed to be a gap/lull I went for it, wishing the motor would just go faster, I could see the approaching swell building, but I only had to travel maybe 80 ft to be past the worst of it and then I was out and safe. All went well

So below is a picture of a new shackle, this is what the shackle looked like that joined the anchor to the chain.

This is what my shackle looked like when the diver found it!

You can see the corrosion is extensive, but mostly it is internal. I saw no problems the week earlier when I undid it and refastened it to the other end of the chain. I expect I didn’t inspect it very well, that’s a lesson learnt.
Also one should not use stainless steel shackles for this job. The spade has a galvanised shackle on it now.

On the corrosion front, when servicing the head pump out system, I noticed corrosion on the nuts that hold the seacock together. These are old cone type seacocks, and the two nuts that hold the top plate on had corroded and there was nothing stopping the cone popping out and causing the boat to fill up and sink. Not good!
I tapped the seacock to test my point and to my horror the cone not only popped out, it shot out, hit a bulkhead, bounced and disappeared into the bilge. Leaving me with a fire hydrant type situation pouring water into the boat.
Now each seacock has a big wooden bung attached to it just for this circumstance, so I grabbed the bung and rammed it into the whole, but somehow the water continued to pour in, I think the bung maybe oval in shape. I was able to reach down and find the bronze cone, shove it in, and tie it down while I worked on a proper repair.

So finally with my anchor back on board, I headed off to Mazatlan. I wanted to use the Spade when I arrived so killed the motor when I was en route and the sea was calm and transferred the CQR onto the deck and replaced it with the spade. This took some careful planning as there was no way to get the anchor back from here if I dropped it in over 100m of ocean.

I dropped anchor in the old harbour and the spade set instantly. A big sigh of relief. I will stay here for a week or so.

PS This has been doing the rounds on Mexican Social Media, it’s the American Maths team finally celebrating beating the Chinese in the world maths contest after 30 years. (I don’t know if it’s true at all, but it made me chuckle)

Paul Collister

24h May 2023

It’s nearly 2 weeks now since Kathy boarded her flight at the small airport of Ixtapa. I’m about to start my leisurely trek north to Guaymas, back into the Sea of Cortez. I plan to haul out in a yard known as ‘Gabriels’ as it is he who runs it. I understand it’s basically a fenced of bit of desert where the boat will be propped up for the 3 months during which the hurricanes may or may not whiz by. Another section of the desert is separated for those who want to work and live on their boats, I will have mine moved to the work area in October when I return and get the hull antifouled. This will be the first time I have left Sister Midnight alone on the hard and I will have to remind myself about what’s involved. Guaymas is in the Sonoran desert and will be very hot and dry, but with it being hurricane season, it could also face some serious downpours. 

Before Kathy left we took a trip over to the resort at Ixtapa to see the Crocodile sanctuary, boy they are big crocs, and they are so still most of the time, scary. There were also lots of Iguanas and impressive white vulture type birds, I’m not very good at species of anything.

After seeing the crocs we had a drink on the beach then got the bus back to Zihuatanejo.

One morning as I was re-anchoring I was forced to reconsider where to drop the hook, which was swinging over the bow ready to go due to a mussel diver suddenly surfacing in front of me, we waved at each other, to make it clear we were both aware of the danger, when I noticed the Hallberg Rassy yacht below sailing towards us as it was leaving the anchorage. I thought this wasn’t the best time or place to be showing off your anchoring skills whilst under sail, and I worried that he might not have seen us or worse, the diver, as he was tearing along and heading straight for us. I waved and gestured at the diver, and I think he saw and changed course away from the diver and more towards me, I thought best get out of here quickly so I motored away from everything quickly. I went round the block as the HR raced past, the diver was further away now and I re-anchored safely. The HR Skipper dropped by later in his dinghy to apologise and explain he has engine problems and had to use his sail to get out. Seemed like a nice bloke.

Later that day Kathy and I enjoyed a last meal at a wonderful restaurant on the northern hillside overlooking the bay, they did a lovely vegan dish for Kathy and a fine fish steak for me.

So in the 2 weeks since Kathy left, quite a lot has happened. 

Mon 3rd April: Kathy flies home
The main event, after getting the bags ashore in the dinghy was the first taxi wanting 350 pesos to take us to the airport, I offered 200 for a laugh, he countered with 300, I said it was two much and he laughed and walked off, the next taxi in the rank had already agreed 250 with me the day before so in his cab we jumped and sped off. 

The fare back is more like 800 pesos as they have a monopoly over who can collect at the airport, so after Kathy went through security, I walked to the road at the edge of the airport and flagged down the next taxi leaving the airport, who was happy to take me back to Zihuatanejo for just 200 peso (£8) rather than have an empty cab.  My friend Arturo says the English are the meanest when it comes to money, don’t know what he means 😉

Back in town I started provisioning for a couple of months back at sea. Mostly dry goods and cleaning stuff.

I decide I may as well clean the port water tank now Kathy has gone, getting to it is quite a chore, but in the end it works out well. I do need to source new gaskets.

Having cleaned the tank, I contact Ismail the local fix it up man, who brings me a load of water, plus I use him to get 140 ltrs of fuel and a bottle of propane refilled. This works out to be quite expensive, but it saves me a lot of hassle.

Now we start with the first of the expensive jobs
I spot a crack in the rigging, I inspect the rest of the rigging and find a crack in another shroud, both lowers, and both unlikely to bring the mast down should they fail, but bad enough to require me to change them ASAP, I also need to go aloft and check the other end of the shrouds, also the fittings inside the two headsail furler drums aren’t easy to access but must be checked. I can replace the two faulty shrouds for a few hundred pounds, but in reality, the whole rig should be replaced, last time, just 6 years ago, this cost me around £6000, so not cheap.

Thursday 6th: I try to clear out
I headed ashore to clear out with the Port Captain, but hadn’t banked on them taking the whole week off due to Easter.  Instead I did more provisioning and had another chilled day.

Monday 10th
One of the problems with Zihuatanejo is sewage, for a while I thought I had a problem with our holding tanks, as I would wake up in the middle of the night to a strong smell of sewage, however it turns out to be the town discharging into the bay. We were anchored very close to the Town Pier, a mistake I think. Perversely I think the excess of organic matter causes there to be a lot of life in the water, and a lot of growth. So I was having to haul the anchor chain every few days and give it a scrub down. Every few days we would motor out of the bay into the big ocean to dump our holding tanks, and on the last trip I had noticed we were struggling to make 4 knots, at quite high revs, it seems the hull is very badly fouled, too much in fact for me to be able to travel north, unless I could arrange in transit refuelling, like the fighter jets do. So I arranged to have a local couple come out and clean the hull, I had to collect them from a dock I hadn’t been to before, and realised as I approached in the dinghy, that it must be very close to the said sewage outlet. Yuk, anyway we all dinghied back to the boat where they spent 90 minutes scraping and scrubbing. They did a great job, but they, and the dinghy, ended up covered in what I at first thought was grit, but in fact turned out to be very small critters all wriggling around. 

After dropping them back at the dock, I cleaned up and went back to the capitanias office and managed to clear out. I find them to be very helpful and efficient, unlike several gringos who seemed to resent the whole business of clearing in and out. If they find it hard here, I hope they don’t ever sail to SE Asia. The problem for one of the sailors was that this office requires you to bring copies of your documents as unlike other offices they say they can’t copy them. One particular gringo angrily pointed out the copier in the corner of the office and was insinuating they have this rule just to make things hard for us poor sailors. I don’t know why, but I expect they have their reasons, and Sailors should always have copies anyway, it’s not a big deal.

From the captains office I walked out of town a little, in what turned out to be around 35 deg C blistering sunshine to buy some oil. I have to do an oil change real soon. With the oil I headed back to Soriano, a Hyper supermarket and filled a trolley with liquid refreshments, and fresh goodies, bread cakes etc. A taxi back to the dinghy and then back to the boat and away to the far side of the bay to the La Ropa beach so I could swim and check out the cleaning job.

Las Ropas means ‘the clothes’ and the beach got it names after a Chinese ship was wrecked here and its cargo of clothes wash washed ashore in 1910. Presumably it was known as ‘la noname beach’ before then. As I hauled the anchor up I was hosing down and scrubbing the chain with the deck wash hose when it suddenly stopped working. A check at the pump showed that there was a blockage at the water intake side, related to the recent cleaning I presumed, so I got a bucket of sea water and slowly continued the job.

Tuesday 11th
The engine refuses to start, nothing when I flick the switch, I rummage around with the wiring harness, just in case there’s a bad connection, but nothing, I pull the engine box off and flick the hot start solenoid override switch, only to hear a whimpering noise from the starter, looking at the batteries, they’re showing a very low voltage and I twig the batteries are flat. 

I have been waiting for this day for a while now, the batteries were bought as a temporary measure in Japan, almost exactly 5 years ago, to replace the previous batteries that had lasted 5 years. However we have taken to discharging these more since I plumbed in the 3kw Inverter and we started making toast with the electric toaster most mornings. The addition of Starlink and the watching of BBC until late at night hasn’t helped. So I wait for the sun to charge them up then around 10AM I have enough charge to start the engine, that will then put a lot of charge into the batteries, except it doesn’t. On closer inspection I see the alternator isn’t doing any charging. I’m not big on coincidences, and two engine electrical faults both happening at the same time means they must be related. I measure the feed voltage to the alternator and it’s zero, so that’s easy when I wiggled the wiring harness behind the engine control panel, I must have disabled this wire somehow, except I didn’t. Very odd. It’s getting hot and I want to get going, the engines running so I think I will fix it later, but realise without the engine giving me lots of amps, the batteries are still quite low and using them on the anchor windlass in their poorly state will be a bad move. So like hot starting the starter, I hot start the alternator by connectingg a little 12v bulb I have on a pair of wire tails between the + and the 61 terminal, the alternator fires up and I have an extra 35 amps flowing into the battery. Things are good to go, but I’m getting that horrible feeling that big things are breaking faster than I’m fixing them.

I head over to Isla Grande (Ixtapa) which is only 8 miles or so away, I can’t wait to be in lovely clear water so I can do some swimming, it’s been getting hotter and hotter every day. Once there I set about fixing the deck wash, it turns out a shrimp has decided to climb into the recently cleaned thru hull fitting and was sucked into the system. I have to take a few pipes and fitting off to find the little bugger, he’s turned to rubber now and doesn’t look much like  a shrimp anymore. I decide as I have it all in bits I will clean the grocko  filter on that system as it’s bound to be clogged, the lid won’t come off, after an hour of battle, and a bit of lost skin, I win, only to find the filter 95% ok. Cleaned up and reinstalled, I get back to hosing down the bow area.

Wednesday 12th, I need to fix this charging problem, and set about checking all the connections on the panel, I decide to replace a few older connections and replace the buzzer with a better one I have had on board for a few years waiting its turn. Everything is looking smart there, and it’s feeding the voltage down to the alternator just fine. However it’s not arriving there. The cable goes to a junction box at the back of the engine, and from there to the front where the alternator lives. To get to the back I have to do a lot of cupboard emptying and dismantling, when I reach the box I’m thinking it’s a pain to dismantle it, it all looks solid, lets just check the alternator connections again. I follow the wire from the 61+ terminal on the alternator and it weaves its way up to my starter motor override switch. And there it terminates in another switch, installed by the previous owner in order to disable the alternator, and some idiot has knocked it to the off position by accident. A measured amount of cursing at full volume ensues, the switch is flicked, the engine starts, the charging charges, and another byproduct of this is that the taco (Rev counter, not the edible type) starts working again. Will I miss these four wasted hours of my life I wonder.

Looking at the engine in all its glory, with the covers off I think it makes sense to do the oil change now. So out with all the bits and off we go. Now I wonder if anyones knows if Einstein had anything to say on the matter of Oil changes, It seems to me that gravity works differently during an oil change, Oil never flows down onto the rag under the source, but always just misses it, as if it bends towards the thing you really don’t want to get oil on. Then you have the weak force, the strong force, and the get oil over Pauls shoulders and forehead force. All unstoppable.

Thursday 13th, Wake up on the sofa last night at midnight having fallen asleep watching a YouTube boat building video. I see the battery voltage is down to 11.5 Volts. Very bad. I also had problems earlier with not being able to charge the Mac using the 12v-240v 300W inverter. So I empty the Quarter berth and dismantle the bed to access the battery bank. There are 4 house batteries in parallel, giving me about 400AH and a separate 100AH battery, from the same batch for the engine starter. I normally have them all in parallel giving me one 500AH house bank which I use to start the engine. I have gone back to splitting them up so that I can flatten the house bank, but rely on having a separate engine battery to start the engine in an emergency.
Going through each battery, I find one of the house batteries is in very poor shape, falls to 10V with a small 5A load, and the starter battery isn’t much better. I disconnect the weak house battery, and set the switch to keep the house and engine batteries separate. Tomorrow I will see what happens with the batteries. No internet at night now.

Having put everything away, in a much neater manner I book flights home, confirm my haul out date with the yard in Guaymas and jump into the Kayak. I land on some rocks in some swell, I wonder about the wisdom of this, but I’m rewarded by snorkelling with some amazing fish, sea snakes, rays and I find the biggest bestest shell ever, looks brand new and has a slimy thing living inside. I want to take it home, but I leave it there as it would be mean on the resident.

I have scribbled down a rough itinerary for my trip north, I will leave this Sunday 16th or the day after, depending on how this norther, further north plays out.

Paul Collister 14th April 2023

March 2023
A bit of background on my sailing trip around the world. The relevance will become clear soon enough.
If you are wondering what made me hit the oceans and leave a comfy life ashore, I have a philosophy that if you head one way when everyone else is going the other, you will end up in interesting places not often visited. In reality you often end up in dead ends, however I combine this with seemingly random reasons to visit places, and it has proved to be very pleasing.
My initial thoughts to sail around the world started as a kid when I heard about people called ‘Master Mariners’ and others who were known as ‘Yacht Masters’. I didn’t think I would ever get to university, but these titles seemed something to aspire to. I got my Yacht Master certificates a long time ago, Master Mariner is not something I’m interested in anymore and likely way beyond my skills . But my interest in circumnavigating the globe initially came from two sources, the famous ‘Sunday Times Golden Globe Race‘ race and Joshua Slocums trip in ‘Spray’.
Now for the almost random part, My uncle moved his family to ‘Malaya’, back when it was occupied by the British, and I was a kid. I was always intrigued if that country was as exotic as he described, so when Sister Midnight appeared for sale there, it seemed like a good enough reason to jump on a plane and visit. Next a book about ‘The Inside Passage’ in British Columbia was enough to inspire me to cross the North Pacific to sail around Vancouver Island. Finally a film I saw around the same time gave me a reason to head to Mexico, in particular the beach where the two main stars meet at the end, in Zihuatanejo. Despite the fact it wasn’t filmed here, and was fictional anyway, didn’t put me off as choosing it for a destination. I’m so glad we came here on such a flimsy whim, I really think this is turning out to be one of my favorite cruising destinations.

In case you didn’t see the film, it’s the Shawshank Redemption.

7th Feb – La Cruz / Banderas Bay/Bucerias/Puerto Vallarta

Arriving into Banderas bay we made straight for the first tenable anchorage at Punta De Mita, just at the top NW part of the bay. Here we could rest before heading to the main cruisers hangout at La Cruz. From the somewhat remote anchorages we had been in before, we now had access to several huge hypermarkets like La Comer, Soriano, Walmart etc. An inexpensive one hour bus ride would take us into the big city of Puerto Vallarta with more big box stores. We did think we would get a spot in the Marina in La Cruz, one of the few marinas in the area, however it looked a bit rough, wasn’t cheap and in reality offered little versus being at anchor. It was also full up with cruisers, many, like the 70 boats at anchor, were waiting for a weather window to sail off to the the South Pacific. This is one of the main departure points for boats arriving from the north, or heading up from the Atlantic, via the Panama canal.

There’s a very active sailboat community here and the small town of La Cruz de Huanacaxtle was buzzing with activity. We made the most of the stores for provisioning, and enjoyed the vast Sunday ‘Farmers Market’ where Kathy took advantage of the many Vegan stalls.

18th Feb – Ipala
We spent about 10 days in La Cruz and really enjoyed it. To continue south, one has to get around Cabo Corrientes, this is a cape, or point of land sticking out into the Pacific that sort of separates the waters to the south from the Sea of Cortez to the north. This protrusion into the sea has been known to cause dangerous seas to build up in this area, opposing currents and weather systems can create dangerous conditions for small boats and it has to be taken seriously when planning your passage. However at this time of year, in relatively calm conditions, and combined with the fact that we tend to go 2 or more miles offshore I didn’t expect, or in fact encounter any problems. I did hear from another sailboat having a very difficult time going north around the cape the next day, which surprised me. Sister Midnight is quite a heavy old boat and we are quite used to a bit of a rough sea. Once around the cape, we pulled into a small indent in the coast at Ipala to break the journey up so as not to need to do an overnighter.

20th Feb – Chamela
An early start for the 10 hour passage to Chamela, Another lovely beach with palapa restaurants. We managed to find a few basic shops to get some bread and fruit & veg here. The town is called Punta Perula.

23rd Feb – Tenacatita
Tenacatita provided a lovely break, first we stopped near the entrance at the western end of the bay before moving to the very popular anchorage just behind an outcrop that provides some protection from the Pacific swell.

You can make out the route/track we took through the mangrove river that actually joins the two anchorages. We took the dinghy down this 5 mile round trip and it was quite stunning scenery, with baby crocs basking on tree trunks at the water’s edge and lots of birdsong all around. All was great until on the way back when a caterpillar dropped from above onto my shirt, let’s say this is not something that pleases Kathy and we had to get out of the mangroves ASAP.

26th Feb – Barra de Navidad – Lagoon
The next leg was less than 20 miles to the lagoon at Barra de Navidad.

A luxury resort/marina was built and can be seen in the pictures below. As often happens, resorts and marinas don’t mix. Different skill sets?. This marina was rather run down and couldn’t really decide if they liked cruisers or not. I remember in Malaysia, huge new waterfront property developments would often be advertised with a small marina attached, artists impressions, of beautiful people with new luxury yachts adorning the docks, the reality usually was that the entrance and slips silted up in record time, and the docks fell into disrepair and were removed by the next typhoon.

It’s hard to imagine but Barra was once, hundreds of years ago, a very busy Spanish navy port. The expedition to colonise the Philippines was launched from here, although we saw no mention of it when we were in the Philippines 😉

The lagoon is a very safe place and the entrance in is very shallow and very narrow. Also there is only a smallish area within the lagoon deep enough to anchor, it can handle a good few boats but one has to be careful to avoid the shallows as the boat below found out.

Barra is such a delightful town, very laid back, mostly based around tourism, and full of American and Canadian visitors and residents. Not many Brits.
There is a famous, at least in the cruising community, French baker, who loads up his panga with fresh croissants, baguettes, pain au chocolat etc and tours the lagoon visiting boats with his wares. He can be hailed on VHF ch22 and special orders placed.
For a small fee you are supposed to be able to leave your dinghy in the Marina and take advantage of the luxury resort facilities, I had promised Kathy a proper massage at the resort as part of her Christmas present, but on touring the place it seemed a bit sterile and soulless, so instead we went to a lady in town, who spoke no English but seemed to know her stuff and Kathy had a good experience I believe.
Another advantage of the lagoon is that there is a 24/7 water taxi service, £1 each way from the anchorage to the town. Very nice.

Another interesting aspect here is that three canals were channeled into the town and very pleasing homes built to look over them.

We could have stayed longer in Barra but after a few days we pushed on south towards Zihuatanejo.

9th March – Manzanillo (Carrizal, Santiago & Hadas)

There are three possible stops on the northern part of this large bay. The south east is home to a large commercial port and Navy base and although you can anchor there, it is more exposed to winter wind and swell.
We went straight to the first anchorage at Carrizal, a deep protected cove, which turned out to be a bit dull. The next day we went to Hadas, which has an odd Marina, again it’s part of a very impressive resort and the owners don’t seem to like boaters. There are no finger slips, where you tie up alongside, instead you med-moor, which entails dropping an anchor and reversing to the dock. I’m very comfortable with this from my time sailing in Greece, however it’s a hopeless solution for a boat like ours with a pointy bit at both ends, on Lady Stardust, we could jump off the bow platform onto the dock, not on SM, you would break a leg, the stern has so much crap on it, that’s not an option either. The solution would be to use the dinghy to get the few feet to the dock. Again we decided to stay at anchor and dinghy in, they don’t seem to like that either and charge $USD 14 for the privilege of tying up your dinghy, not bad if the resort pools and facilities were included, but they’re not. No matter, the resort looked lovely and we enjoyed some great food there, it was also a good place to walk to the local supermarkets and later we got a taxi to Manzanillo for a day out.
For a few days we moved to anchor off the beach at Santiago, just a few miles to the west. A huge expanse of perfect beach lined with restaurants.

When it came time to leave, we scooted over to the city and followed the southern coast out, this meant getting quite close to the docks, however this ship left the dock and made a beeline for us, I assumed he was heading the same way as us, yet he changed course to overtake us on our port side, instead of continuing his previous course to our starboard side, then just as soon as he cleared us, with no more than 100 ft between us, he turned back to starboard and crossed our bow. I have no idea why he did this, I’m going to assume he wants to brag to his fellow master mariners that he sailed past Sister Midnight, maybe he was bored, or maybe he just wanted to freak me out. It was safe at all times, but I can’t say I was relaxed about it.

16th Mar – Cabeza Negra (black head)
It’s 180 odd miles to Zihuat from Manzanillo and very few places to shelter, so rather than do it over two nights we decided to do a day trip to Cabeza negra, which can offer some respite from the swell, then an overnighter to Isla Ixtapa, then a last hop into Zihuat.

17/18th Mar – Isla Ixtapa
Now Ixtapa is interesting to me. Most people will have heard of Cancun, it’s a big resort in the Gulf of Mexico (Caribbean side) and was built as a major tourist project by the Mexican government starting in 1970. I had to change flights there once on my way home from Cuba, I hated the place. Well Ixtapa is the equivalent, but built on the Pacific side, a small unknown stretch of coast with a sleepy fishing village of Zihuatanejo, which was transformed into mile after mile of high rise hotels and apartments. Isla Ixtapa is an island, a 5 minute water taxi ride from the resorts and exists solely to provide holiday makers with an island beach/lunch experience. amazingly it’s actually ok.
Now back in 2000 I had to visit Mexico city representing the technical side of our business as part of a UK Government trade mission. I loved Mexico City and decided to extend my stay by a week and have a holiday. Locals advised me to get a cheap hotel in Ixtapa, at this point I had never seen the Pacific Ocean so I flew here and booked into a hotel for a very lazy week. Now I was going to sail past the hotel having arrived here by crossing the North Pacific and being in the same spot (give or take a mile) that I had visited 23 years ago via the North Atlantic. Not sure why, but I liked that. If I was a weirdo, I’d be thinking Ley Lines, and cosmic orders, thankfully I’m not.

We anchored here for a few days to get over the overnight passage. Dinner ashore one afternoon was very pleasant. My Spanish skills have reached the point now where I can order food and drink like a local, however they assume I can understand them like a local, so the conversation usually goes downhill very quickly. This was one of those moments, when I think they wanted to say, “Just talk in gringo language like everyone else here, it will be easier all round”

20th Mar – Zihuatanejo
We made the short 2 hour trip to Zihuatanejo passing the Marina at Ixtapa. The plan had been to go there for the week before Kathy flew home, easy to get ashore, facilities etc, but by now we had become so used to living at anchor we decided to see what Zi was like and skip the Marina. Also the Marina has gone downhill I hear, and the entrance is badly silted and need good timing with tides and surf to get in safely.
Zi has turned out to be a fantastic place, the bay is sheltered, an easy dinghy landing on the beach, with help from the locals. The town has a very safe laid back feel, but also very lively around the markets and high streets, lots of music and bars, a great food court that reminds us of SE Asia. We can walk to the big Soriano hypestore which even has Vegan food for Kathy, we found a great Vegan restaurant and also an Indian place too.
One problem we had was that we ran low on water, we last filled up in La Cruz and when I ran the tap, a very brown water came out. I later twigged that the tank level was low, but we had also just been bouncing around a lot in the sea and the sediment in the tank had been mixed up. Time to clean the tanks, not an easy task. There are three inspection hatches on the starboard tank each one big enough to get in and clean but the angles are difficult. Anyway once the boat had been still for a while we used the remaining water in the starboard tanks for washing and the like and then I ripped off the hatches and got to work. It wasn’t great inside, some yucky sludge along with the rust, but it cleaned up well. I had 20ltrs on deck from La Paz I keep for emergencies I could give the tanks a bit of a flush with, then we ordered 10 garrafones (20 ltr bottles) from a passing Panga and we were back in business, I will do the other tank when I reach a Marina.

It’s now just a week before Kathy flies home, then I have to get the boat to a safe place, I could sail north to Guaymas or San Carlos, many do that, but it’s a long way. Mazatlan might be better. I’m leaving the boat all alone for 3 months, encompassing the worst of the hurricane season, so I need to find a safe place, if such a thing exists in a direct cat 5 hit.
I will do one more post I think before I return with my final plans.

Paul Collister
27th March 2023

(Pronounced: Zee-what-ah-nay-oh)

Wed 22nd March 2023
We are now in Zihuatanejo and will remain here until Kathy flies back to the UK in 2 weeks and I will move the boat to somewhere safe where I can haul it out before I return to the UK for the hurricane season.

I will expand on the trip below, but basically we have traveled through various levels of paradise, ending up at anchor in Zihuat which is definitely in the running for one of my favorite towns ever. As we left the very dry desert vistas of the Baja and traveled south, the land got greener and greener, with that comes more humidity, and also more bitey things. Along the way the waters filled up with more and more interesting creatures, now we have to watch out for Crocodiles in the water and it is not recommended to dive on your hull in the Ixtapa marina because of these guys. While it is in the mid 20’s (77 f) in La Paz now, we are often in the high 30’s (100 f) here.

The boat has performed really well, but it wants some attention. The last time we were in a marina or tied to a dock was a few months ago and the topsides could do with a good washdown. An oil change is due, and the hull needs some antifoul. We are low on fresh water. These warm waters cause the hull to foul very quickly, i.e., in a few days a clean hull will be covered in a light growth, after a week it’s really bad. I have been paying local divers to clean the boat at various stops along the way, but the antifoul is now missing in a few areas.

Starlink.
This is our first voyage with Starlink for our internet access and I had decided to only connect it for an hour at most each day to get the weather and check emails. It’s quite heavy on the batteries. Guess what, we need bigger batteries. We have spent many an evening now watching the BBC, comedy and documentaries. we use it on passage, when the sun is shining or the engine is running and read tweets instead of looking out for fishing nets or whales. I hate the often used phrase ‘game changer’ but it really is for long distance cruising. I no longer need to worry after a few days out of cell phone range if the weather is turning bad, I can contact people ahead, marinas etc from remote anchorages, and I easily provide some customer support for my old work while in very remote areas. I had a great 30 minute video chat with a friend back in Liverpool on Skype when making 6 knots in rolly seas a few dozen miles offshore. Nice one Elon, you’re great with cars and rockets, why not just stick with them eh?

The trip south
I have left it a bit late to document our trip, we did hope to make it to Acapulco, but decided to take in as many places as we could heading south, and even being lazy about it, it still seems like a roller coaster of a trip. We had lots of amazing experiences along the way, but I will just mention a few with pictures below.

6th Jan – Los Mochis
From Topolobampo we took the local mini bus service to Los Mochis and met up with Arturo who lives there. A clown joined us for a few stops and visited everyone on board looking for a financial contribution to his somewhat complicated personal & social condition. While passing the hat around he was jabbering on in some crazy deranged squeaky clowns voice. Given that just yesterday cartel gunman had been controlling these roads and stopping vehicles, he wasn’t the most calming of entertainers, especially if you’re like Kathy who has seen far too many scary clown thrillers.

Los Mochis is a big city, and we wandered around the main park before our bus was ready to leave and take us to El Fuerte.

El Fuerte
Arturo joined us on the next bus route to El fuerte, where he spends a lot of time with his girlfriend and her family. We found out later that one of the Cartel members also shared the journey with us. He kind of stood out, but everyone ignored him.

We stayed in a posh hotel, very old and grand, but not at all expensive. El Fuerte is a small town out in the country on the banks of the river Fuerte (Strong river). It has thrived on the lush agriculture and mining in the area. we are close to the copper canyon railway here.

Arturo took us to a local refuge for animals where we enjoyed feeding them. Unfortunately Kathy ignored Arturo’s very strong warning about ‘deeting up’ (The application of insect repellent containing DEET) and she really suffered for that.

This hotel claims to be the birthplace of El Zorro, and each night he does a performance in the restaurant, fortunately we were able to be in and out before he had cloaked up.

After a couple of days we headed back to Las Mochis, took advantage of the Walmart there, then took the next boat back to the boat, bought a dozen Garrafones (20ltr bottles) of water and headed back out to sea.

16th Jan – Altata
We had a great sail south from Topolobampo to Altata, in a previous post I describe how I did this journey on my own and couldn’t find the entrance to the lagoon at Altata, huge breaking surf seemed to cover every possible way in. Since then a few people have told me it’s really easy so armed with more confidence, we had another go. This time it worked out well, however when the channel seems very narrow and it’s dropping from 20 meters deep to 4 meters in just a few boat lengths, it can get quite scary. I saw two fishing boat that looked like they were heading in so I decided to follow them, bad move. They were going to fish off the side of a big bank. A quick course correction and we made it back into the chanel and into the lagoon.

The most striking thing for me was seeing the fishing boats in the bay/lagoon. They fly a sail, a bit like a spinnaker from a rig that has a mast and two poles one extending out over the stern and the other over the bow, making the three corners for attaching the sail. it then fills and just skims the surface of the water. I think their net is dragged over the other side of the boat and they slowly drift the length of the lagoon, several miles at a fairly slow pace. I expect this is a very traditional setup, however I don’t suppose in the old days when they reached the end of the lagoon they would fire up their 250hp outboard motor and scoot back to the start upwind. Still the 40-60 boats make quite an amazing spectacle.

20th Jan – Mazatlan (Old port)
We stayed a few nights in Altata before heading off to Mazatlan. This would be another overnighter and Kathy and I prepared for our 4 hour on / off watch system. Unfortunately we had to motor at the start and as soon as we cleared the sand banks a dense fog descended on us, with very poor visibility and a night passage to handle, we fired up the Radar, praying it would work, it hasn’t been used for years. It did work, but I needed to get Kathy up to speed on how to use it. Along with the AIS we hoped to be ok. It was in the middle of the night when a target I had been tracking seemed to be deliberately aiming for us. These waters are full of very large (200ft ish) Shrimp and Tuna boats, some of them have helicopter pads on them for quick crew changes. Fishermen can be quite worrying with their seemingly random courses, I often wonder if boredom causes them to come and look at the little sailboat from England sending out its AIS beacon. This one was starting to freak me a bit, I turned off the autohelm so I could steer and take avoiding action if it got any closer. The radar had it as being under 0.1 mile from us, I could hear its engine, but no visible contact as the fog was very dense now. The next thing it appears out of the fog, I could see the crew on the deck, lit by the huge working lights that created big globes of light in the fog. I had been sounding a fog horn, but I doubt they would hear that with all their engine noise. They changed course quickly and I presumed they hadn’t expected me to be there. I checked my AIS setup and realised we were not transmitting our signal, just receiving theirs. This is a power saving option I sometimes turn on. Oops. Being a plastic boat, we don’t always make a great radar target so it’s possible they didn’t know we were there.
Come the morning the wind picked up, the fog lifted and the autopilot failed. Fortunately we could put the sails up, the wind steering went on and we happily sailed all the way to Mazatlan. We spotted several whales on this passage.

We anchored in the old port, we are reluctant to use the marinas in the northern part of town, especially as we hit bottom trying to get in last time and I thought we might lose the boat after the surf lifted us up and slammed us back down on the sea bed. The old harbour is also easy to walk downtown from and we had a few chores to do. On our first provisioning trip we found ourselves in the middle of what looked like a carnival parade, but we learnt later it was the parade to chose the Carnival Queen.

So I had to fix the autopilot, there was no way we would get to Acapulco hand steering. I had a plan B, using a tiller pilot, but that was complicated, however I should try to fix that up anyway. My guess was that the remote rudder indicator was not working, it looked ok and we usually get a ERROR 67, which means the remote sensor isn’t working, this has been an issue since we bought the boat and the error never stopped it working. So out came the sensor, it was a sealed unit but on measuring the resistance I guessed the unit was faulty, I pulled the wires apart and they broke apart in the process making me expect that was the problem.

I was only left with about 1 cm of wire sticking out of the unit after I had stripped back the faulty connections, so had to be very careful attaching new wires, I managed it and added a splint to the connections to hopefully give it some ongoing support. It all went back together and we upped anchor and did a waltz around the anchorage, testing it. Thankfully it worked. Also since then we haven’t seen the ERROR 67, which had been popping up every hour or two for the last 8 years now. I presume this connection was always flakey. Looking at the tracks on the chartplotter makes me think the course is even straighter than ever, but that’s probably just wishful thinking.

We got some laundry done, stocked up on food from the mega superstores and the Mercado Municipal, Mazatlan has the best smoked tuna I have ever tasted, and we headed back out to sea and south towards La Cruz.

30th Jan – Isla Isabela
It was an overnighter to Isla Isabela. This island is very special, it has a huge colony of Blue footed boobies, frigate birds and no end of Iguanas. It’s a national park and also has nowhere to anchor easily. The small partially protected bay is mostly rock and many people have had to leave their anchor there as it gets caught under the rocks. This is one of my worst nightmares, we have a very expensive anchor, it’s brilliant, and I don’t want to lose it. Fortunately I had been given the GPS coordinates for a small patch of sand amongst the rocks, it wasn’t much bigger than the size of the boat so we crept in with Kathy and I hanging over the side staring into the water to see if we could find it. We couldn’t, so I launched the dinghy with my snorkel mask and a length of rope and a small buoy. I took my dumbell as an anchor. (It needed using). I put the mask on and hung over the side of the dinghy scooting around until I found the patch. I tied the rope to the dumbell and the buoy to the other end and threw it over, this was in about 30 ft of water. I headed back to Captain Kathy who was motoring around the small bay waiting and we headed back to my mark and dropped the anchor. Next I snorkeled over to the anchor to see it had in fact set in the sand, but right next to a big rock that was also there. Not great, but I hoped the anchor would not drag under the rock, it was fairly calm weather so ‘fingers crossed’.

1st Feb – San Blas
Many people had said to avoid San Blas as it has a bad reputation for noseeums (invisible mossies) that leave bad bites, however it sounded interesting so we headed there and up the river to anchor. It had a pleasant town square and a very laid back feel to it. We had hoped to maybe get a place in the state run marina, but as is often the case, due to very low fees, it was full.

We stayed one night then pushed onto to Mantanchen bay.

2nd Feb – Matanchen Bay
Matanchen Bay was getting a lot of flack on the radio nets and on Facebook for dinghy thefts, I’m always surprised by this, having sailed for 8 years from SE Asia to Mexico, we have never had anything stolen, we always take precautions, and would never tempt fate by leaving a expensive outboard dangling of the back of a dinghy in the night in a poor area, in fact we always lift the dinghy out of the water. Also these dinghies are often found on the beach downwind of the boat, with their engine missing. The bay made a pleasant stop, but the next morning we pushed on to the resort bay of Chacala

4th Feb – Chacala

We spent a couple of very pleasant days here, the fact that one of the beach restaurants did decent vegan options for Kathy helped. A lot of RV’ers seemed to like the camps here.

Our next stop would be Banderas bay, the bay of flags! Here is one of the biggest and popular marinas on the mainland coast, it’s also the place where many boaters gather before heading off to the South Pacific. We arrived at the peak of this, and there were many boats there preparing for their first serious offshore journey. More on this and our trip to Zihuatanejo in my next post, this one is getting too long.

Paul Collister
Thursday 23rd March 2023

12th Jan 2023.
The lighted boat parade was shifted until after I collected Kathy from Mexico airport, so I decked the boat out in cheap xmas tree lights and made plans to take it out with Kathy and join the parade, however bad weather arrived in the form of strong northerly winds, and the parade was cancelled by the Capitania de Puerto.

So on the 11th December I flew to the capital Mexico City and met Kathy at the airport. Just before Kathy landed I got a txt msg from American Airlines saying they were “sorry that Kathy’s bag had missed the flight. It would be sent on on a subsequent flight”. She had changed flights at Atlanta, and even though there were no significant delays, her bag had not cleared customs in time and had been sent on to Mexico, but via Detroit. We couldn’t wait as we had a flight back to La Paz to get, so after many hours of failing to breach their customer service firewall, “Press one if you are happy, press any other number to return to this menu”, we got the bag forwarded to La Paz and collected it a few days later.

Kathy soon settled in and we were off on our supermarket tour to collect the various ingredients to make the Christmas meal(s).

We spent Christmas on board SM and had a great time, very relaxing, Kathy prepared a fine meal and pudding. I worked off a few calories by taking the Kayak out for a ride.

I got my dates mixed up and we were meant to leave for the islands and spend New Years Eve at anchor, however we left a day late and instead saw the new year in, in the marina. So on the first day of 2023 we sailed out of La Paz (Literally) and went to spend a night at anchor in Caleta Partida, 20 NM north of La Paz. We had great winds and flat calm seas. We sailed almost from the marina exit to the spot we dropped anchor.

I was very pleased to be back on the water properly, Carlos the diver had just cleaned the hull and we sped along. I really have noticed how a clean hull is essential to getting the top speeds. I also caught a dorado on the way, which was nice.

The following morning was fun as the windlass failed after 5 seconds of effort. The windlass has a sealed gearbox, full of oil. The motor is bolted to the aluminium case and has to be removed to gain access to the gearbox and the solenoid. Just a few months after we bought the boat in Malaysia, the solenoid failed. In trying to replace it I found the corrosion between the steel and aluminium was advanced and the cast case had a crack, which meant the unit was doomed to fail soon. So 6 years ago I had a replacement windlass shipped out to Malaysia from the UK. It cost me £900 then, the cost today is around £1600. Of course the shift in the cosmic balance caused by this act, meant the failure of the old windlass would now be delayed by six years.
For now I hauled the anchor up by hand and we made the overnight passage across the Sea of Cortez to the ferry port of Topolobampo on the mainland.

We sailed out of our anchorage and continued to sail, past the huge Sea Lion colony at Isla Islotes and through the night arriving inside the protected waters of Topolobampo early the next morning. We anchored 4 miles away from the port in a beautiful quiet spot and relaxed before heading into the Marina the next day.
I took the old windlass apart in case it might have a simple fix, but as the cover came off the motor a cup’s worth of lube poured out from the motor. I think the gearbox seal might have failed. I could be wrong but I don’t think motors are generally flooded with oil.
So I swapped the windlass out for the new one. I was able to drill some holes in the base plate that allowed me to fit the new one in just the right spot. Very lucky really to get it to line up with the bow roller and the chain hawse so well. I did get through an awful lot of drill bits making just three holes in a 4mm SS plate.

A tip for anyone else new to this sort of thing, either wear footwear all the time, or be very careful to clean up all the steel swarf from the drilling. I was removing shards of steel from my bare feet for a few days after the job ended. Hosing the deck down didn’t remove them!

Another job I had to do was replace the 110v shore power plug on my cable. This is a sure way to start a fire. The existing plug was rated correctly, but for some reason these often overheat and this sets off a chain reaction of making the connection worse, which causes more heating.

From the anchorage I hauled up the anchor with the new winch, which seemed to work ok.

We motored into the Marina and were warmly welcomed in by Nelson and his staff. Unfortunately there was trouble waiting for us. If you know anything about Mexican drug cartels you will have heard of El Chapo, A man in the same league as Pablo Escobar. Well Señor Chapo (Guzman) is in jail in the States, and the morning we arrived the security forces had arrested his son Ovidio, because of this all hell had broken out in Culiacan, the capital of this state we were in, and also in the town of Los Mochis, where Arturo lives and where we were hoping to visit. There had been street battles and the cartel had taken control of the highways and airspace around these towns. Roads and airports were shut. A passenger jet had been fired on, no cars, trains or ferries were moving, people had been told to stay indoors, all businesses had closed, and we were advised to stay on our boat until things calmed down. It didn’t worry me too much as a similar thing had happened three years ago, and once the police had realised they were outnumbered, they had simply handed the prisoner back to the cartel, in order to avoid any more trouble. This time, the prisoner was whisked away to Mexico City and may even be extradited to the USA at some point.
By the end of the day, the street battles between the cartel and the military had ended, between 30 and 100 people may have been killed, and the suburb in Culiacan where he was arrested remains sealed off by the security forces.
The following morning I took Kathy for a coffee in town and we did a bit of shopping, everything seemed normal.

The next day Arturo joined us and we had a lovely lunch in a hilltop restaurant overlooking the bay here.

So Arturo returned to Los Mochis, he had left us with interesting information about the troubles.
We had planned to go into the mountains on what is known as the ‘Copper Canyon Route’ on the famous ‘El Chepe train’ but it was very expensive and presented us with a few problems around our timetable. So instead we opted to get on the local bus service and head into the heart of El Chapo land. changing buses in Los Mochis where a lot of the fighting had been. We were heading for ‘El Fuerte’ a very pretty town some way inland, and we would stay in a historic hotel built in the 19th Century as a huge family home. This trip would prove very interesting. A real insight into the darker side of things here. More in the next blog post.
As I write this, everything is calm but that may well not last. We leave here tomorrow and head south towards Mazatlan, several vehicles were set on fire there, but generally it’s going to be a safe destination, and I have no concerns about our safety. More on Ovidio here

Paul Collister

Sat 29th October.
Just finished the main part of moving the computer system I work on in Latvia, to the cloud. It’s mostly been fun and very interesting. Decided to print everything off and stow the printer ready for my departure. However the macbook can’t see the wifi network of the printer, nor can the phone. Possibly the printer is at fault, but I suspect it’s down to Apple and the ventura upgrade I did on the mac and the IOS update I did on the phone, I bet apple have decided not to support old printers that don’t 100% implement the wifi standard the way they like, my printer could be a security threat after all and steal all my money, print off a few plane tickets and jet off with a handsome flatbed scanner down the road to somewhere nice. I’m furious, partly because I threw away all the old printer leads that had the big square USB V0.01, I’m so angry with Apple I may sell my shares in the business, that will get their attention once they realise I’m serious!. (P.S. in restrospect, selling my shares would have been a very smart move at that point [sad face] )

Monday 31st, Halloween I understand.
Just noticed a line in the Starlink dish warranty “.. not covered for damage due to: Lightning, electrical surges,fires, floods, hail, windstorms, earthquakes, meteors, solar storms, dinosaurs or other forces of nature”, I’m feeling comfortable on the dinosaur front. Now I don’t want you thinking I’m the kind of guy who routinely reads product warranties, it’s just I’m looking for evidence for a fictional row I’m having with a guy on facebook about using Starlink on boats. Thinking about it, that’s probably worse.
Just finishing stripping, sanding and applying two coats of varnish to the starboard rub rail. I was fascinated by the Greek myth of Sisyphus and his rocks after hearing a version on Radio 4 as a teenager.
Last night Peter and Marcia, who had the baba 30 along the pontoon from me, and now have a lovely tatoosh boat, invited me over for dinner. We celebrated the victory of Lula, I must say it was great seeing Marcia so pleased, she is from Rio, but lives in Chile with Peter now, He is from New Jersey. We discussed dialects and and how Spanish varies so much across latin America, and I made them laugh with some coarse scouse impressions like ‘yeritederlah‘ as a expression of concern for one’s welfare in true scouse (“Are you alright there lad”).

Skip ahead to the 7th December.

I took the boat out to the Islands to get a bit of snorkeling in before the sea cooled too much, it’s down to 24 degrees now, which is a bit on the cold side.
I stayed in Caleta Partida in between Isla Espiritu and Isla Partida. I was there for nearly a week, the starlink dish worked very well, and I had a relaxing time, kaying most days and doing a bit of snorkeling and I also cleaned the boat hull and prop. I decided to leave my boat scraper there for next time, it’s sitting nicely 5 metres down and is marked on the gps for my next visit.
At one point I dived into the water and found myself about 2 metres above a huge turtle that was slowly swimming away from me, quite a sight.

A strong northerly was forecast which would mean the port would be closed for several days so I headed back. I arrived in La Paz around the same time as the early Baja HaHa folks.

The Baja HaHa is a boat rally that travels from San Diego in California down to Cabo San Lucas at the bottom of the Baja Peninsula. There’s usually a few hundred boats, mostly sailboats, mostly Americans, that get together to travel as a pack, stopping off along the way twice for big organised parties. When they arrive at Cabo San Lucas, many of them travel on to La Paz and then explore the Sea of Cortez, others continue onto the mainland and explore there and many of them will continue into the south Pacific in the spring as the start of a much bigger ocean crossing. The rally didn’t run for the two years of covid so I expect the numbers where quite large this year. I can’t criticise people for wanting to travel as a big group, safety in numbers, comradeship etc, we did a similar thing on the ARC rally in 2006, but I couldn’t hack it now. Too many excited people all talking at once, and statistically, at least a third of them will probably be trumpers.

Back in my berth in La Paz, the marina is now full, thanks to the southern migration from the states, lots of excited people and the morning net is full of newbies asking where they can buy propane, who sells engine parts etc. The anchorage is quite busy too, but it could still take another 50 boats if needed.

November brought the annual day of the dead festival, again this was the first time the city had staged an event since covid started so I was very pleased to be able to attend the national theatre grounds to see some very strong visuals.

Paul Collister.

I have been back around 4 weeks now the first week was great, the rest not so good.

I had just got settled in and headed to the market early on Saturday to get some fresh food, the trip back from the market takes me down a steep hill towards the beach, I normally go quite slowly down these hills, scared the bike might run away with me, however this particular morning I was feeling very positive about everything, and decided I must fight my fear of falling off the bike and try to set a new record, if not for speed, at least for scaring myself. So instead of pressing gently on the brake as the bike speeded up,I peddled faster. All was going great, and would have been fine if it wasn’t for that pesky hole in the road, caused by all the recent flood water ripping up the tarmac. Having little bike wheels doesn’t help either. Anway, the bike stopped dead, I didn’t. Fortunately I was able to break my fall with my face. I smashed some teeth up, my glasses shattered and embedded themselves in the flesh around my eye and as I skidded along the tarmac, my skin sacrificed itself in order to provide some breaking friction. There was a lot of blood involved, I think my chances of pulling that morning were seriously reducing.
Lots of people rushed to help, and once I stood up I realised it was going to be ok, no broken bones, but a day later the ribs started to make their position on that matter known. Fortunately this all happened outside a dentists, as one of their staff was leaving. He obviously had medical training and persuaded me to go to his surgery so I could clean up and try to stop the bleeding. There they looked at my wounds and it just happened that a surgeon was in the building and he explained I needed stitches and he could do them right then if I wished. He removed my sunglasses from under the skin and put a dozen stitches around my eye and a few in my lip. Further inspection showed a few teeth to be smashed. They then bandaged me up and told me to come back in a week and they would remove the stitches and advise on the teeth. They wouldn’t take any money for the help they gave me, which was just amazing really.
So two weeks after the crash, I’m pretty much recovered, ribs still hurt a little and the dental work starts tomorrow. Once the teeth are fixed up, I’m sailing out of here to get some snorkeling in.
Kathy will be heading out to join me mid December, which will be great. Then we will leave La Paz and explore new places.

So now I’m back doing boat jobs and programming. I replaced the 12v Cigar lighter system in the cockpit with more sturdy connectors, I think they are called SAE and seem more robust and should be good for a few amps.

Next I replaced the cigar lighter plugs on the Searchlight and the Foghorn I made in Malaysia. Now I knew there was a problem with the foghorn, besides the power connecter, something to do with the push button you press to make it work. So I put the thing down and plugged it in. Boy is it loud. I almost fell overboard with the blast. Then I remembered, the problem was the push switch I bought, was a push to break, not to make, so you had to press the button to stop it. Having woken up all of La Paz, I replaced the button and it works great, as did the searchlight.

People are busy fitting Starlink systems to their boats here. If you don’t know, Starlink is an Internet Provider from Elon Musk which uses the 3000 satellites he has in low earth orbit, which increase by 50-100 most weeks as his spaceX company launches them. On your boat you have a small dish and can get 100mbs download or better. And it works as your sailing along. At the moment the satellite you connect to has to have sight of a land station for the downlink, which limits you to a few tens of miles from the coast when going offshore, but that will change soon. At the moment all of the sea of Cortez and the whole of the coast of North America (Not sure about up north around Alaska)is covered.
This really is a game changer in so many ways. The ranks of the Digital Nomads are swelling, property in remote areas, and sailboats in remote spots are being taken over by yuppies who prefer that life to crazy rents in LA or Silicon Valley. For us sailors, we now have Netflix anywhere we drop hook, or even on passage, that doesn’t interest me. What I love is being able to get good weather forecasts easily. Working at anchor has lots of advantages, but then again, I’m trying to avoid work. Downloading the parts diagram for the gearbox when broken down in the middle of nowhere could be helpful. Kathy will love the connectivity with family & friends.
So I did some research into how these Starlink dishes work, which took me into the workings of phased antenna arrays. Now I was really impressed, such clever technology that a flat printed circuit board can be made to act like a highly focused beam, and track a satellite moving really quickly while at the same time compensating for the boats motion!, this is done without the dish moving and happens in milliseconds. I just had to have one.

I ordered it and it was here about 4 days later. I bought the RV version, which basically means I’m licensed to roam with it, and I can pause the monthly $65 contract when I don’t want to use it. The dish was about $400. Bye Bye Iridium.
It was up and running in minutes, and I made a video call to Kathy and it was perfect quality, no noticeable lag or jitter.
So now I can anchor in remote spots and not worry when all the other boats up anchor and leave that they know something about the weather that I don’t.
I also need to have good contact with the rest of the world so I can keep up with who my prime minister is on any given day.

I took the boat out the other morning just so I could reverse back into my berth. That went very well, mostly thanks to the bow thruster. Carlos had recently scrubbed the boat and the props so that helped.

There has been a lot of live music in town these last few weeks.

So not a lot else to report on, the boats in good shape, The dinghy repairs might not be holding up and need some attention. Now I have the boat reversed in I can varnish the starboard side. I checked the gearbox oil in the outboard again and I think my repairs are good and that machine might last a bit longer.
I’d really like to go for an electric one as a replacement, I’m hoping to get a watermaker sorted soon, lots of new lithium batteries in the next year, and an electric hob and I can then get rid of the butane and petrol onboard, making us quite self sufficient, if only I could catch fish and bake bread!

Paul Collister

24th October 2022

A month ago I left the boat and headed back to the UK. I try to get back during August/September to visit friends and family, it’s also very hot on the boat.

The trip home was easy and despite the UK being beset with public sector strikes, the trains were running fine on that day and I was soon back in Liverpool reunited with Kathy. As I left a hurricane had started to make its presence known and was on course for the Baja Peninsula, early tracks had it just missing the boat, but it was a worry, eventually it passed La Paz without causing too much damage, just a lot of flooding.

The flight back to the UK, via Amsterdam passed over Galway and Liverpool, but sadly didn’t want to stop at either, wouldn’t it be cool if they had bell pushes like the busses!

Liverpool was busy as usual, plenty of tourists and nice late summer weather, I managed to leave just before it turned to Autumn (Winter to most civilised people).

After a week in Liverpool I popped over to Galway for a few days with Tim & Asta before they headed off for a long sailing break in our old cruising grounds in the Ionian. It was great catching up and enjoying the great cooking and fresh bread always on offer at Tim & Asta’s home on the waterfront

Flying back from Galway to Liverpool one gets to see the scale of the offshore wind farms, below is just one of many in the Irish sea. I’m a big fan, I know plenty aren’t but given the current alternatives, i.e. mass extinction, then I’m cool with it.

I toyed with the idea of buying a bigger apartment in Liverpool while I was there and looked at several possibilities, mostly in the new build/off plan area, so I could rent it out until I finish this bout of cruising, but I didn’t see anywhere that really excites me, also, I was aware that the UK was heading for big economic troubles, and I wondered if there might soon be a property crash, which looking at the current forecasts seems distinctly possible.

Another job I had to tick off was changing my registered doctor, I joined a practice in the University area of Liverpool and below you can see the entrance. This is in the cluster of victorian buildings that house the Liverpool school of Tropical Medicine and has played a big part in finding treatments for diseases like Ebola/Aids/Covid19 etc. I’m looking forward to seeing inside the builing as compensation for my next illnes!

Another thing that happens in September is that Kathy, my daughter Yasmin, my best friend from school days, Dave and myself, all have birthdays. So Yasmin generously hosted us in her house and Isaac (my son) drove up from london so we could all celebrate another year passing.

So no sooner had I arrived, and I was on a plane flying back into La Paz.

I took the shot below of a local fisherman after he returned to the dock a few boats along from me, he passed me on the way out and the pelican was sitting on the transom all the time and he was feeding it any fish bits he didn’t want. It seemed like the bird was his pet and seemed quite happy to go along for the ride. I didn’t see many scenes like this in Liverpool 😉

I have been on the boat for 3 days now, everything was perfect when I returned, the boat has had a good wash from the hurricane and everything was still working.

I set out this morning to kayak over to the Magote and explore a little mangrove creek. The entrance is silted up so you need a high tide to get in and there was a big tide this morning so off I went at 8:30 before it got too hot. It was an easy paddle and I had a swim before returning. While paddling around I had a video chat with Kathy who told me there had been heavy rain in Lpool and it was quite cold, I must say I felt a little bad about that, but it didn’t last. I’m hoping Kathy will be flying out to the boat soon, I’m not sure she would like the heat as it is right now.

Arturo has left La Paz, he has moved to live with his new girlfriend over on the mainland, I’m hoping to visit him later in the year as he is only twenty miles inland from a port I can sail to. So I have lost my translator and dining companion, consequently I’m stepping up my Spanish learning.

Apologies to all my friends I had planned to visit but didn’t make it. Can I blame an old lady for messing up some of my plans, probably not, hopefully I will get to see everyone when I get back next year.

I’m planning to spend a week or two doing some programming work and a few small boat jobs before heading back out to anchor in the islands, I’m keen to do some swimming / snorkeling with the fishes before the water cools down too much. It’s around 30c right now, but will be dropping quickly, and in a few months a wetsuit might be required. When Kathy arrives we may well head over to the mainland and then travel south, possibly as far as Acapulco.

Paul Collister