Author: paulcollister

Tuesday 1st December

Rabbits
Up early, at least earlier than the bloody painters who haven’t finished the hull yet and we launch in a few hours. The plan is to lift the boat high in the slings so they can get under the keel, clean it properly then paint it. Eventually a whole gang arrive and start the work. The travel lift is busy preparing for a sailboat called Aventura which is being hauled out at ten. Everything goes to plan and we are launched just after 12. The whole thing is an ordeal for Kathy as she has a tooth hanging out which is giving her a lot of pain. As soon as we arrive back in La Paz it’s off to the dentist for her, or maybe some string tied to the door handle if things get too bad beforehand. 

Once launched we reverse into the fuel dock, and I’m very pleased to see the Bow Thruster works very well, the LED dims a little, so I’m wondering if it used to, or there might still be a problem. I will do some more tests at a later date. 
The boat is flying along with the new paint and shiny prop. We were doing 6.5 knots with a moderate amount of power, 2000RPM, so it’s much better. I’m very happy to be afloat again, and we have tidied everything up and are enjoying having running water again.We fuel up, get water, wash the boat down quickly and head out to sea.
It’s a bit bouncy out there, but I have spotted a small cove, called honeymoon cove, just 40 minutes from the marina, on Danzante Island. One review says “it can be a bit tight getting in,  but that’s appropriate for a honeymoon”. As it turns out, we are the only ones there. Our first attempt at dropping the anchor finds a stony/rocky bottom and it won’t grip. So we re-anchor in a different spot and the same problem. I let the boat drift back away from the shore, letting out more chain hoping at some point we will find sand, and in the end we dig in, but not very well. Then the boat turns and backs up to the beach, I’m not 100% happy with the situation, but as the wind is expected to drop a lot and there are no waves at all here I think we will survive. All the same I set a tight anchor alarm on the iPhone. 

Wednesday 2nd
One other boat joined the cove and anchored in a narrow section between two cliff faces. An older double ender boat like ours, but full of youthful exuberance. Loud Abba/rap for a while, then a lot of shouting at the cliffs, I’m not sure if they had ever heard an echo before, but we all have now.
We moved around a lot as the sun set, the wind swinging in every direction, eventually we ended up very close to the beach with the tide dropping, at one point we only had half a metre of water under the stern. With the very rocky bottom it was quite a worry. However the tide was soon rising and the wind pushed us a little further away, so I slept reasonably well, checking the depth and location every few hours.

Come dawn, the mountains were lit up spectacularly, and the waters were splashing like crazy with all the sea life. We left around 8am to make the most of the morning calm and headed north into the predicted strong winds for the deserted salt ponds town of Salinas. The boat performed really well, into a headwind of 15 knots and oncoming waves, we easily pushed along at over 6 knots without pushing the engine hard at all. We anchored in 4 metres of water off the beach, the anchor dug in first time and dug in deep, we gave it maximum revs in reverse and she didn’t budge. This means I get to sleep long and deep tonight. Later we went ashore to tour the ghost town and gather some salt from the old abandoned ponds. Kathy was quite amazed by it all. We joked about making Christmas cards with the scenery, it just looks like frozen lakes covered in snow.

Thursday 3rd
The wind built through the night, but I got a great sleep nonetheless, during the day the wind climbed to 25 knots but because we were anchored in a bay facing north, the waves were quite low, the boat seesawed around a fair bit and we stayed indoors doing odd jobs. I did some programming, without the internet you realise just how good books were, I mean programming books, I wanted to check the name of the tick box you see on web forms, I wanted to know the name of the element/attribute that is set when the tick appears, I guessed at Value, Selected, state, tick, etc etc, without the internet or books I was stuck, I ended up searching through some javascript code from a saved website and found it was called checked!  Kathy cleaned out all the cupboards in the galley and washed them with a mixture of water & Borax, hopefully this will strike a blow at the cockroaches that visit us each evening to see what dinner leftovers there might be. I lifted the stove out of its bay so we could clean around there and I checked the gas hose that supplies it, I couldn’t believe that it had been chafing on the steel plated bulkhead and had a groove in the sheath. I made a temporary repair and have made this the number one repair job to do when we get back to La Paz. I had meant to replace the pipe in Canada or the USA but couldn’t find anyone who could supply the pipe with fittings. I think this might be easy here.
I was up several times in the night, the wind was wild but eventually calmed a bit by morning.

Friday 4th
Up early to see if the weather has calmed enough to leave. We had seen 35 knots of wind yesterday, but we were now around 20, and although it looked and sounded bad out there, I felt it would be no problem, especially as we were heading downwind. The Raspberry PI computer had been logging the wind all night and a quick import to excel showed the wind was definitely on a downhill trajectory.

Kathy was keen to press on, so we took off, the first problem being the anchor chain was stretched taut by the force of the wind on the boat, so Kathy had to abandon her prone position in the V berth flaking chain, to drive the boat forward to where I was pointing from the bow. Every ten metres that came in had me running down to the anchor locker to knock the chain pyramid over. If I didn’t do this, the bigger pyramid would fall over on itself and trap the chain, making it impossible to anchor later on. As soon as the anchor broke free, the boat swung around in the wind and was away. I had the Genoa up and the engine off in minutes and we took off on one of the best sails I have had in a long time. It was a broad reach with waves and some surf pushing us along generally around 7 knots, at one point the GPS recorded 10 knots. We seemed to have the sea to ourselves and with bright blue skies, I lay back in the cockpit and let the autohelm do the work.

6 hours later the wind had dropped a lot, and I let out the last third of the sail as we glided into Agua Verde bay. Soon the hook was down in 9m of clear water and we broke out the drinks to celebrate a fast passage. 

Saturday 5th
We decided to enjoy having a lie in, then a lazy day in Agua Verde. After a leisurely breakfast we checked out the surf on the beach and decided it was a bit much for Kathy in the dinghy so we opted to go ashore in the protected little cove we were anchored in and take the dirt track to the village. It’s only about a mile, but up and down winding mountain trails. I’m glad we did, the trail took us inland behind a big hill overlooking the bay and we discovered amazing views both of the bay from high above and also of the mountains and plains inland.
At the village we stocked up on Bimbo bread and 5 hours of internet vouchers. Back at the boat we caught up with the news, downloaded the latest weather forecasts and generally continued to be lazy. 

Sunday,
I’m up at 7 and looking at the weather it seems like a good time to get off, I think Kathy might have preferred a lie in and a lazy breakfast, as we often do on Sundays, but today we have strong Northerlies forecast followed by several calm days and I figure we can do 50 miles to Evaristo in 8 hours in we average more than 6 knots, which should be doable in the predicted wind of 15-25 knots. So on with the kettle, and I start stowing while Kathy is still fast asleep. 
By half seven we are motoring out of the tranquil bay at Agua Verde into big seas and strong winds, The waves are high and for the first hour, on the side of the boat, making it rather Rolly. I quickly have the Genoa headsail up and the motor off. As we turn away from the wind and start our 7 hour downhill run we are hitting speeds of 9 knots as we rush off the big waves hitting us from behind. An hour later the wind shifts so that it is right behind us, I’m glad I didn’t put up the mainsail, we have enough sq ft up there and the main would just be more work. However the big waves has us corkscrewing a lot and the sail collapses frequently, then fills with a loud crack. It’s an old sail and I’m not looking forward to it ripping so I shove the engine on, furl the sail and get the spinnaker pole out. Soon we are flying along again and the Genoa stays filled for the next 7 hours. It’s brilliant sailing, I sit on the foredeck, as that’s the only place getting any sun. One of the problems of sailing south like this is that the sun is dead ahead and hidden by the sail, the solar panels aren’t happy at all.

After a few hours I check that all the lines are good, not chafing, the rig is under a lot of force, big waves lift all 19 tons of us up and throw us down, while the wind exerts a massive force on the Genoa sheets, which are very taut. I notice that somehow I have got the uphaul for the spinnaker pole wrapped around the radar unit on the mast, I’m amazed it hasn’t ripped it off yet. It’s also going through a shroud it shouldn’t, what a mess, I slacken it off and let the sail control how far down it can go, in the end it works out fine. Kathy sits in the cockpit for the last hour of the journey and is shocked when the spinnaker winch starts screaming as it spins quickly, I jump over and grab the fishing reel, I use the winch to tell me when the line is running out. It’s a big one, and after a bit of a struggle I get it on board, it’s a 4kg Dorado. Enough for 5 big meals. It’s the largest fish I have ever caught and I feel quite bad about killing it.  As I expect today is the last sailing day of the year, so will this be my last catch of the year.

We turn into San Evaristo around 2:30 pm, and I try to furl the Genoa, but unfortunately it’s blowing too strong and the sail furls too tightly and I can’t get it all furled. I need a better way to get this big sail in when it’s blowing hard. We drop anchor in a very protected cove on the north side of the bay and Kathy pours a drink, I have a beer before getting down to some serious filleting.

Monday
We leave Everisto and head for Isla Partida, but on the way we take a small detour to check out the Sea Lions at Isla Islota, a couple of big rocks north of Partida. They don’t disappoint, there’s plenty of them, making lots of noise, and quite a smell. Later we anchor in a lovely cove at Ensenada El Cardonal, there’s only one other sailboat there and we have a peaceful night, the wind now having dropped right down.

Tuesday
Leaving Partida, we glide down past Esperitu Santo, the wind picks up a little and I unfurl the Genoa again, The sails fills nicely and we are off at 3.5 knots in a very flat sea, we sail all the way to the anchorage at La Paz, negotiating the channel around the end of the sandbank that extends almost all the way to the oil terminal. We drop the hook just outside Marina De La Paz and I phone up and I’m lucky enough to get a berth in there from tomorrow.

Wednesday
A 5 minute motor into Marina La Paz and within a few hours the boat is hosed down, plugged in, hooked up to the internet and lots of $$$ handed over to the marina. We are back to being a static caravan for the next few months. I’m quite motivated to do lots of work on the boat, and also do some interesting Software dev.
We are here now until we work out what’s going on with the Vaccine, Brexit and other stuff. Kathy plans to fly home in Feb, I may join her, but only if I’m free to travel and visit family and friends, also we don’t know if we will be allowed to travel via European airports yet. It was announced today that Brits may only be allowed into other European countries for special reasons, because as a ‘third country’ with a High covid Level, we may be banned. Also we may be required to have vaccinations before we can board flights, and we may not be able to get them here before Feb. So many variables, we will have to wait and see.

Paul Collister.

Tuesday 24th November 2020
Our first day on the hard, and this is a very hard concrete yard we are in, and it’s not as bad as I was expecting. There’s not a lot going on here other than two men who are sanding the old antifoul off the hull in preparation for 2 coats of new interspeed 640 hard antifouling. I spent the day cleaning the prop, fitting a new anode to it and repairing the autopilot which failed just after we left Agua Verde. Once again the key that holds one of the cogs to the drive shaft fell out. Unlike the last time, I couldn’t find the key. I took this as an opportunity to give that area of the boat, behind the rudder shaft a good cleaning, with the hopeful bonus of finding the key. Thinking about it, I should have found it, and I’m wondering if the key might have slipped back into the motor housing. I ended up having to make a new key, and realising I don’t carry any material I could cut, 5mm by 5mm square, I chose a 10mm stainless steel screw and set about filing it down. It took a little while, but fit perfectly in the end. I made a dimple in it for the set screw that hadn’t done its job before and all was well, except I couldn’t test it as a lad was busy below sanding the rudder. I checked it before bed and it seems to be working fine. Later I heard Gerry and Chris, the two boats we met in Agua Verde calling for help with their lines as they approached the marina. I wandered down to the pontoon to help. A useful tip I picked up on my travels around is to have some ropes and fenders ready for when you dock, also it’s best to try to be parallel (ish) to the dock when approaching, it’s much harder when you are 90 deg to it 😉 . It was good to see them safely tied up. Later Kathy and I enjoyed a meal at the smart restaurant upstairs, Kathy was delighted to see a decent vegan menu on offer.
By the end of the day, 1/4 of the hull had been sanded, and several very small blisters had been decapitated. Back in Penang, Malaysia, nearly 5 years ago, there were several hundred blisters, many the size of saucers, the hull treatment seems to have worked well.

Costs:
As I was looking at the quotes for the haul out and paint job, which aren’t small, I thought I might pen a few notes on the cost of cruising for us. This seems to be a popular thing on other blogs, so without too much detail:

Monthly costs in the dock: £600 (Typical in the sea of cortez for a 45ft slip)
(Includes electricity, water, facilities, etc, just add food & drink)

Haulout & relaunch cost: £370
Labour to sand and paint hull, (2 guys 5 days ish) £1200
Paint: 3 gallons (11.5 litres) £600
Total haulout & paint job (£2170)

So I would do the haulout every two years normally, this time it’s over three since I painted. So that averages about £1000/year. And £600/month for the slip seems a lot, but because we are at sea/anchor a lot, it probably averages down to £500/month over a year. My costs of running the apartment back on Merseyside wasn’t that much less, when I consider Service charges (£120), Electric/Gas(£100), Council Tax (£110). Food and drink is cheaper here, I sold my home in West Kirby last year, so fortunately I don’t have those bills anymore. So all in all it’s not costing us much to be spending our time hanging out in exotic, tropical paradises as you might think.
Of course there are big ticket items that come up every now and then like new sails every 5-10 years (£5000), new standing rigging (Wires to hold up the mast) every 10 years, (£4000), failing electronics, probably a few hundred pounds every year. At some point I will need a new engine, that could be anywhere between £5000 and £15,000 depending on who does the work.
The other big cost we have is flying home from far flung places.

Wednesday.
The sanding continues, fortunately it’s not too loud inside the boat, but later a second guy joins and it’s getting a bit noisy. I book a hire car in the marina office so we can spend tomorrow being tourists, and get Kathy to a big supermarket before her shopping withdrawal symptoms kick in. I rub down the propellor, it has no grease in it at all, which is fair enough I suppose. I last serviced it in Sointula nearly two years ago. I spend the day doing some programming for work, it goes remarkably well, and I produce a flash user interface, well flash by my usual standards of 80×24 character, 128 levels of grey! Aren’t plugins great.
The sanding is taking forever.

Thursday
After a half hour of waiting for the car I go to the office to find out the lady there forgot to book it for me. Oh well, Manaña.
The sanding is continuing, It looks like they will complete today. They are doing a great job, but it’s going to be 6 man days work, I’m sure in Kudat, Malaysia it took one guy three days. I decide to have a serious go at bow thruster anodes, the props are badly fouled on the inside and impossible to clean without removal. I have tried several times to take the anodes off on past haulouts, but the bolt that holds them in place wont budge. The zinc has corroded around it, plus I think the wrong loctite may have been used on them, until I remove the anodes, I can’t get to the holding nut. Generally the anodes have not changed much in the 5 years they have been on, which in itself is an issue. I have a problem as all my 5mm allen keys needed for these bolts are missing, I think they broke on various jobs, I have one that I have filed down to be a 4.5mm ish key for some odd job in the past. I give up with the one key I find as it just isn’t budging and the key is two long to put across the prop. The shopping list for tomorrow grows. I also need to try and find anodes for the stern of the boat.

Friday.
Hurrah the rental car arrives at 9AM and we load up and head into town, I stop at an auto-service parts place and pick up an expensive allen key set, that comes with a snazzy ratchet wrench for about £15. The same or similar tool was available in Mr Tool, in Malaysia for no more than £5. Anything that is imported here, even value Chinese goods is pricey. I wonder if this is how the UK will be next year, A GoPro for £300 will cost £400 due to taxes & shipping fees. Next off to the Chandlers, where they have no suitable zinc anodes, I also can’t find any drill bits that I could use to fashion a block of zinc I have into the part I need for the stern.

I show Kathy around town, This is my third trip here and I’m almost a local. The wind blows very strong, but we find a lovely spot for lunch in the town square. I will let Kathy write about that, so far she has fared well for Vegan meals, largely thanks to the ingredients in Guacamole being quite veggie.

Off to the supermarkets (note the plural) and I am pleased to be able to stock up on cases of soda and cerveza sin alcohol. Kathy even finds some vegan products in the Ley Supermercado. From the town, we head up into the mountains to visit the mission at San Javier. This is a very old mission, in a valley right up high in the mountains, 30 km from Loreto and very remote. It shows what faith those missionaries must have had, it takes us an hour in a car on a tarmacked road to get there, goodness knows how long it must have taken back in the 17th Century with dirt tracks and donkeys. Kathy is surprised to see this little oasis of a village appear out of the mountains with the mission at the end. It is quite a lovely spot. I’m sure Kathy will elaborate.

Back at the boat I can see they have finished the sanding, but no painting has started yet.

Saturday
Painting begins, but not before I crawl under the boat and get my head under the keel, I can see there’s a large chunk of it missing. I’m guessing it’s from when we hit the mis-chartered rock in Canada, looking at it in detail, I’m thinking the hull material in the area looks messy, I’m wondering if in the past it has been patched up badly. I organise for it to be filled, glassed over and finished with epoxy resin.

Also the strip of damage near the rudder is filled ready for fairing.

I watch a YouTube video from Sidepower, the people who made my bow thruster, about removing the anodes then the prop, but the anode bit seems to have been edited out. It’s not a lot of use, a guy has a bow thruster on the table and he holds the propellor on one side as he undoes the nut on the other. I scroll down to the comments where some guy has written “Thanks for that, but unfortunately I have a boat wrapped around the bow thruster, so your technique doesn’t work.”. Thankfully the reply suggests showing a block of wood through the prop to hold it in place, something I had thought of doing but was worried it would damage the prop. As it turns out this works fine, and the allen keys I bought allows me to remove the anodes, and then the props.
Funnily enough, when I dig out the new anodes from my expensive/tiny boat bits locker, I find two 5mm allen keys in there, I obviously thought at some point in the past, this would be a good place to keep them. Forgetting that I always forget such great ideas. I clean and paint the props and will refit them tomorrow.

Next I try to drill holes in a large zinc block I have that could replace the wasted zinc on the stern. I always thought you had to drill slowly with metals for best effect, it seems with Zinc it’s better to go like a madman with the fastest drill you can, ignore the smoke and glowing drill bit, just go for it. I am making a big hole with lots of smaller holes, and the only way I can justify the result is that you have to dive under the boat to be able to see what a terrible mess I’ve made of it. In fact I may wait until just before launch to fit it so the boatyard staff don’t laugh at me. As the sun sets we head up to the restaurant here and have a lovely dinner.

Sunday
The boatyard is quiet today, so I clean the prop and then fill it with marine grease.

I finish off hacking a hole in the zinc anode for the stern and fit it. It’s a terrible bodge, but it will work. I expect as the zinc wears away, the nut will come loose and it will vibrate itself to bits. My plan is to replace it and the other one on the port side with the correct anodes when I get back to La Paz, they may be in stock there, if not I can order them. Hopefully I can dive and replace them myself with my new scuba skills. Tomorrow was meant to be launch day, but I think it will need to go back to Tuesday, also we have quite strong northerly winds at the moment, so my plan to go north won’t work right now.
I did a little more checking on the boat weight today, as the ton/tonnes thing always confuses me. The boat weighed 17.5 metric tons in the travel lift slings.
That’s the same as 38,581 lb. Looking in the sales brochure for the boat, the weight (displacement) is stated as 29,000 lb, making us 10,000 lb overweight.

Or 30% overweight. That seems a lot, the problem is that manufacturers always want to play down the weight for sales reasons, lighter boats go faster. So they often leave off things like anchors & chain, fuel and water, cookers, batteries, even the mast sometimes, anything that might be optional. Even so, I think we might be a touch too heavy. Kathy suggested we could lose some books, but I expect she means my books 😉

Monday
The boat bottom has been painted with two coats in most places, there’s more to do, but the final bits will be done in the morning when the boat is in the slings.

The rudder bit has been repaired, it’s not perfect, and the bash to the keel looks fine now, and at least it is solid and no water could work its way into the ballast.

The bow thruster props cleaned up well, I have painted them with the antifoul used on the hull, I’m not sure how well it will work, it was a bit thick going on, but I expect it will soon ablate off.

Tomorrow we launch, into the tail end of a strong northerly, typically we are heading north, against the wind which I expect will be gone by the time we turn for the south. We will explore the islands around Loreto. I’m looking forward to having a faster boat again. The bow thruster let us down on the way into the travel lift, I noticed the control panel LEDs went dim when it was engaged, this might have been because of the growth on the props, but I suspect it is more likely going to be an electrical problem. This could be one of two obvious things, a bad connection, which would be great as that’s an easy fix, but more likely, the batteries can’t supply the many hundreds of amps needed to turn the prop. Tomorrow if the prob is still there I will be running around the boat with my multimeter while Kathy energises the thruster!

Paul Collister.

Saturday 14th October 2020.
We leave La Paz around 11am, firstly we made a run to Chedraui to get some fresh bread, fruit & veg. Being there early ensured our admission with scores of other geriatrics. I’ve heard of Covid safe places, but this felt more like Covid assured.
The timing of our departure seemed good, the weather was acceptable, even if it meant a fair bit of motoring to get north in the prevailing winds. But not just the weather was right; we had returned to La Paz to hopefully see the demise of Orange Head, but as a bonus we got the announcement of a vaccine and the demise of Dominic Cummings. So all in all, things are looking up.
While we were in La Paz we enjoyed a few meals out, and did a bit of shopping, but mostly I was programming and Kathy reading. I still have a lot of work to do and I’m hoping to get a fair bit finished on this passage.
We met up with a lovely German couple, not from Germany, but from America where they have lived for many years. They have circumnavigated the globe once already and are on their second trip. We had a laugh about out respective father/motherlands, they wondered how their country could allow right wing groups to flourish, given their history, and I postulated my theory that the UK is suffering ‘empire demise’ syndrome and that Brexit might ultimately be good for us. That was a fun conversation!

Kathy might write about how to recover from losing your bike keys at the supermarket. While in La Paz the local government shutdown the Malecón in the evenings, Covid is on the up again, as it seems to be in many places. At least we are away from it for a few weeks now. The La Paz carnival has been cancelled along with the Christmas market. 

We motored up to the small uninhabited island of Partida, just above Isla Esperitu Santo. Anchoring was easy, it’s a safe place to stop for the night with lovely beaches, but we will leave early for Isla San Francisco. We have an appointment with the travel lift to haul the boat out a week on Monday, and I would rather spend time up near Agua Verde and beyond than down here.
I caught a massive fish on the way up, so far the cedar plug I bought, has been out twice, and each time brought me a lovely catch. I rather badly filleted this guy and ended up with 1.5kg of dinners. The cove here has quite a few big motor launches and massive Catamarans, some enjoying their loud party music. 

Sunday.
We leave at 9am for the three hour trip to Isla San Francisco. But as soon as we leave the sheltered bay it becomes obvious the waves from the North are quite big and instead of making 5-6 knots, we are soon down to 2-3 as we start pounding into the sea ahead and 20 knots of wind (apparent) on the bow. For half an hour I consider turning around and finding another cove on Partida for the day, but optimism, false as it turns out, makes me decide to push on anyway, by the time the waves are 15ft high and the bowsprit is hitting the sea on a regular basis, we have gone too far to make turning back worth it. So we push on. We hadn’t prepared for such a rollercoaster ride, the first this boat has seen in a year or more and we had become complacent. I had closed the main hatches but hadn’t screwed them down tightly, consequently the bed got soaked when the foredeck was covered by one wave. A little later the Aircon unit that had been sitting on the sofa with the new printer on top took flight. It landed on the cabin sole, I haven’t really inspected the damage yet, but I fear the teak & holly may have a few more marks on it. If the printer still works I will be very pleased, especially as my visa runs out this week and I plan to print out the new application when we get to Loreto. We are the only vessel heading north and after nearly 6 hours of bashing into the sea we turn into the protected cove of Isla San Francisco.

Previously I had worried that with the boat sitting idle for many months in the heat with a half empty tank of fuel that the dreaded diesel algae might have flourished, and that on the next rough passage it would stir from the depths of the tank and kill the engine, I’m confident now that’s not going to be a problem. In fact hats off to the engine, it’s doing a great job, but I must get it serviced soon, I think the cam belt is well past its set by date.
There’s quite a few luxury motor yachts and high end charter cats here. A jet ski is whizzing around and several marques are setup on the beach. We don’t mind, my main task now is to make the poached eggs for our breakfast, that we had delayed upon leaving with the idea of having it for Brunch, or Lunch if we were delayed. It turns out to be a lovely early dinner.
Tomorrow we will spend an extra day here, I have to climb the mast as there’s some white thing flying around at the top, as if a plastic bag has wrapped itself around the windex (Wind direction pointer thing). 

Monday
We walk over to the other side of the island and pass some salt pans on the way.The salt has a pink colour Kathy tells me, something like the expensive stuff you might see in Waitrose. I’m tempted to fill a bag with it, could easily pick up a few hundred pounds (£) worth of salt for free!
Later I snorkel around the boat, as usual the fish put on a spectacular show for me, there are several shoals of different species swimming around me. 

Most of the motor boats have left and there’s around ten sailboats here, three of us are Bob Perry designs. I climb the mast and find the white thing up there is the white insulation tape that was covering the unused Raymarine socket , I rip it off, check the other fittings and take a few pics.

Next a kayak over to another baba looking boat, it turns out to be a Union 36, the hull is very similar to a baba, and probably came from the same mould. We chat and I get some news from him as he left wifi land a little later than us. He tells me Oregon and California have gone into lockdown, he explains that it’s down to lefties and he worries about his home state of Oregon and how now they have legalised hallucinogenic mushrooms, it will all go to pot, actually that’s already legal there 😉 He quotes how Amsterdam has been ruined by prostitution and pot!

Tuesday
We have a pleasant overnight stay, a few more boats arrive but it’s mostly sailing yachts like ourselves and there’s little noise other than a generator running on a big beneteau., We depart early, around 7:30 AM, Kathy is able to flake the anchor chain into place without really leaving her v-berth slumber. She joins me on deck half an hour into the passage with a remark about how nice the mornings are and we must get up earlier more often!. We are on the way to El Gato, a lovely spot, but rather exposed to swell from the north. I tried twice to stop there with Arturo, but both times it was too rocky. I decided to leave early as if we can’t stop there, after this 6 hour passage, we will still have enough light to push onto Agua Verde which offers slightly better cover for a northerly swell. Also the winds tend to be less in the morning, and travelling up the strait between the Peninsula and the Isla Jose generally means going into a headwind and oncoming waves.

Halfway up the strait I remember there’s an island on the chart and our path takes us directly through it, It wasnt there back in January, but seemed to appear, at least on the chart during the summer. Yet I couldnt see it as Arturo and I steered around it. This time I decided to sail directly through the island, It looked so green on the chart I imagined it must be full of slippy grass that the keel would ride on, as you can see from the chart below we skidded right over the island and back into the sea on the north side, the depth sounder never dropped below 80m.

We have a very relaxing trip and at one point get the sails up and enjoy an hour on a close reach, later we motor sail the remainder of the way.

Arriving at El Gato we find a yacht and a motor boat, The yacht is called ‘True Love’ and has a younger couple on board (Finger down throat time), how do they call into the coastguard with that name, imagine, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, it’s True Love here! Or what about if true love hits a rock?
We chat with them as they dinghy back from the beach where the motor boat has his dinghy a little way up on the sand. The tide went out, and it’s too heavy for two men to drag back to the water. It has a 35hp outboard and is about 12ft long with a sit down steering console. I silently congratulate myself on having gone for the lightest dinghy and outboard possible. We may go slower, but even Kathy could drag the boat and motor off the beach if needed.
Kathy is enthralled by the rock formations here and she will no doubt post some of the pictures. There’s not a lot at El Gato other than pink rocks that look alien.

Wednesday
A lazy start to the day, we depart for Agua Verde around 11:30 and arrive 3 hours later. We pass between a big rock/small Island off the coast. They were once joined and in fact still are below the surface, the pilots all agree it’s very dangerous to go through the gap, yet modern charts and google images show there to be no obstructions.

All the same I follow a carefully plotted line between the two. Agua Verde is empty of boats and very calm. We walk around the village and Kathy is amazed at the variety of wildlife and animals, goats, chickens, dogs, vultures, horses, all roaming free. We buy some internet tickets, 1 hour for £1, I assume it’s a satellite based system and later I reconfigure our boats wifi extender (Bullet M) to pick up the weak signal from the tienda and after a lot of head scratching, I turn the router into a bridge and the extender into a router with a dhcp server and we are all devices go. Sadly I waste our first hour of internet just trying to get it to work. We then feast on BBC/twitter/Facebook until our 2 hours are up. Kathy learns of ups and downs back home, but all is ok, I learn that not a lot has changed at the white house, but I’m very worried about the last minute rush to sell off drilling rights in the Arctic. I can’t get the lowdown on machinations at number 10, I expect I will have to wait for the memoirs to come out. It seems Brexit is turning into a complete shambles where a deal may be done, but it looks like a deal that nobody will want. So all in all, no change there. 

Thursday – Sunday
Still alone in the bay, Very calm and peaceful here. The village is very sleepy, some lads are crabbing on the rocks across from us. 

Kathy and I spend these 4 days dinghying around the little coves in the bay. Kathy dons her snorkel mask and gingerly gets back into a little underwater exploring. It’s difficult, she’s not a fan of salt water, or of a lot of things that are in it, like sea snakes and urchins, but she does really well and by Saturday we are able to make a long excursion around some headlands a long way from the beach. It’s such a lovely spot here.

We are joined by Chris and Gerry on two sailboats that we saw earlier in Isla San Francisco. Gerry sends over a plate of fish and taco ingredients for me, to make up for the fact he has to run his generator for an hour each night and morning, fortunately it’s quite quiet and worth it for the fish, which I think he recently caught and breaded, I would rather think that than imagine they have been in his fridge since Costco in Los Cabos. The Suzuki outboard is playing up again, but I think I’m on top of it, I think it’s as simple as the carb filling up with water, if I take the carb apart, swear at it , and then reassemble, it works great, so all I’m really doing is cleaning the water/fuel out. It started playing up just after I emptied the dregs of the fuel can into it. Sadly the drain at the bottom of the carb has broken, also when I reassembled it, I must have damaged the makeshift washer as it leaks fuel from the carb now. I count this as a success all in all.

Monday 23rd November.
We leave at 07:45 for the 22 mile trip to Puerto Escondido. Here we haul out. It’s a lovely passage and when we arrive, half an hour early, we try to get fuel, but the man on the dock who raced past us to get there first takes forever, and half an hour later the travel hoist has lowered its slings into the water and is calling us over. I give up on the fuel and slowly head for the lift, unfortunately as we approach they tell me I have to reverse into the slings. There’s a 10 knot crosswind pushing the bow down to port as I reverse, After many attempts I’m getting closer, but the lift sits above a very sharp and rough concrete set of piers, and once the stern is in, if the bow blows around, I’m going to be paying in teak and gelcoat. Fortunately a passing dinghy offers to help and I get him to push my bow back as I reverse, this works right up until the stern is in-between the piers, but then he is gone, I can’t see him, but the bow is swinging toward the concrete and I’m about to rush out again, which may not even be possible, when suddenly he is back on the job and the boat is lined up perfectly. Phew!
For the first time in 4 years, and 4 travel hoists, I find myself in one with a working weight sensor. I had always assumed our boat weighed 18 Metric Tons, but found out today the back end of the boat weighed 10 Tons and the front 7 in the slings, and we are light on 1/2 ton of fuel and water right now, so I’m very happy with that.Of course I would like the same boat in a ten ton version, for speed, but then I might not win so many battles with the rocks that jump in front of me. The hull looks ok, a small chunk is missing near the rudder, but only gelcoat, about 30 cm by 3 cm. I blame that on Canada, we probably hit a tree at some point, a USA tree would be too scared of litigation, and they don’t really do trees in Mexico.
Tomorrow at 8am a man will start sanding the surface down, I need to see how deep the barnacles have left their mark. I also have a very small number of blisters, maybe 5 mm across and just slightly raised, I’m not losing sleep over them. The starboard big anode had gone completely, the prop anode is about as far gone as you would like, but the port anode is still doing great service. I haven’t changed the hull anodes ever, so that’s good. The Max prop has no grease in it as usual, I will repack it, I’m not sure when the grease leaves, if it’s slowly over several months, or the first day I run up the prop?

We are here for a week, hopefully that’s long enough to get everything done. We shall hire a car and do a bit of sightseeing. 

Paul Collister

Saturday 14th November:
We have had a good rest in La Paz, but I have been working my socks off writing software for my UK customer. This was meant to be a small project I could mostly do on passage, but once I started, and looked at the data I had to work with, big problems emerged and I have been stuck in La Paz with its good internet connections trying to resolve this. I have done enough and now we can leave, the weather is good and I have a spot booked in Puerto Escondido to haul out in 9 days time, so it won’t be too leisurely a trip there.

I’m glad we popped back to watch the election, what with that, the vaccine and the departure of the eye test idiot, things are looking up.

So a breif blog to say we will be out of touch for a week or so.

Wednesday 28th October 2020.

The storm is peaking, although it’s not really a storm, 25 knot gusts in the bay and the harbour master has closed the port to everyone wanting to leave. You may still arrive in an emergency.

The marina office calls the harbour master for me and gets us permission to move out to the anchorage less than a mile from the marina as long as ‘we take all the necessary precautions’ whatever they might be.  First we must do a few jobs

In the morning Carlos the diver and his cousin arrive, scrape down the bottom and we are all good below, clean prop and bow thruster is a must when leaving the slip in strong winds. Arturo calls around and helps me take the canopy down. We have been very lucky with the weather as we will not roast with the aircon and canopy missing, the days are noticeably cooler, and with this wind it’s actually very pleasant.

We leave the dock without any drama, We have to turn the bow into the wind to leave which is always difficult, I get as much speed as I can going astern, as the bow is swinging the right way under the shadow of the big boat next to us, we get quite close to the boat on the opposite pontoon but hard to port and full ahead and we are on our way. Sadly we reach our destination in about 5 minutes, the anchor digs in first time and we sit about 1/4 mile off the Malecón which we have just heard is closing tomorrow, except for joggers in the morning, as too many people have been promenading without masks and not keeping the 1.5 metres apart.
This morning on the Ch22 VHF net, after the Malecón announcement was made, the village idiot, who occasionally pops up with his latest covid conspiracy theory announced that we would all be saved if we just take Vitamin D3 supplements. I think that this proves a worrying fact that if you keep shouting random nonsense, you might actually stumble on a truth. I had heard theories about this before, and although there is no firm evidence, there’s a growing body of research in this area that is interesting. I think we do well for Vitamin D by being on the boat, fair skinned, and mad as the proverbial Englishman in the midday sun. I do hope we learn of stack of useful stuff from this pandemic.
Kathy is reminded how nice it can be at anchor as we bob around in the diminishing swell as the storm drops away.

Thursday

No great rush to get the day started, we are only going as far as Esperito Santo, we don’t have a destination yet as I’m not sure how windy or how much swell there will be in the islands.

We motor up with a fast ebb tide to the most famous beach around here, Balandra. It has one of those mushroom stones, that appears on every postcard. We make over 7 knots with the ebb and the newly cleaned hull. Balandra, although very pretty, has too much swell to consider staying, so instead we take a few pics and push on to Esperituo Santo. We meander between the coves on the Island and my first and favourite choice of Canelero bay is full of luxury  motor yachts and plush Catamarans. I then decide to go to Ensenada Partida, right at the top of Santo, before Isla Partida, It’s very safe and calm there, and if we spend a night or two there, then we can work our way back down the island visiting the other coves and hopefully next Monday find ourselves in a much calmer Bandelra Bay before heading into La Paz to restock and watch the election.
Ensenada Partida has two big sports fishing boats here, but besides them we have it to ourselves, we have a great dinghy ride over to where a colony of Pelicans live and drift around watching them dive bomb. The fish have a worrisome life here, I caught one on the way into the bay, just as Kathy brought us head to wind so I could drop the main, the line went screaming out and I was sure something big was on the end. It turned out to be a tasty Skipjack Tuna I had for dinner later. 
By the time we had dinner, we had been joined by 8 other holiday boats, Cats and big motor yachts. Good old Mexican Banda music filled the air from all sides, mixed in with laughter, hysterical shrieking, jets skis and lots of shouting. A new joy entertained us in the form of a loud buzzing sound above, a drone no less, how nice! We retreated below and got on with our 2010 version of Scrabble which doesn’t need the internet.

Friday
We had to row back from the pelicanos last night as after four vigorous pulls on the outboard engine starter cord, it refused to start and the fourth pull would be the last as the rope snapped off. It was getting too dark to fix. I redid the cord this morning and it’s working fine again. A must for our trips ashore here. I was disappointed as four years ago in Langkawi I bought 100 metres of starter cord in Kua, I wanted some general purpose rope for tying things. This rope is thin and very strong and designed for the job, sadly it has no UV protection so wasn’t that good for outdoor use, I looked but I couldn’t find any. I think I have used 100 meters on tying up odd bits and bobs around the boat over the years.
After breakfast we dinghied ashore, the water shoals very slowly here, so it was very shallow for about 100 meters from the shore when we left, the tide was going to drop even more so we anchored the dinghy in knee deep water some way from the shore and waded the rest of the way. When we returned the dinghy was aground and we had to drag it for a few minutes into deeper water.
Later in the evening the bay filled with big lagoon charter cats, Many big charter cats are made by lagoon, I don’t like them, they’re like floating bungalows with lots of uPVC double glazing and patio doors. Saying that, they are very spacious and comfortable, but I’m of the school that it’s not meant to be that comfortable.

Saturday
We retrace our steps back two coves south to Ensenada Candeleros, my favourite spot on Isla Esperitu Santo. I have been here with Tim & Asta, Jim and Arturo, And now with Kathy. I’m pretty much on first name terms with the goats here now and could certainly get a job as a tour guide. I had been expecting the place to be full of boats, but we arrived at 11 AM when most are transiting to their lunch locations, and I was pleased to find we could get close in as there was really only one big cat in the bay. I anchored off the north wall, 100 metres away from some nasty looking rocks. My plan is to be far enough away to be safe, but close enough that no one would risk anchoring between us and the cliffs.
Just in case anyone thinks this lazy idyllic life we have to endure doesn’t have its problems, then think on.  We have a family of little creatures who have decided to come sailing with us, They look like small roaches, or maybe large Beetles, they move quickly and last night as we lay on the sofa watching ‘The Social Dilema’ they took to scurrying around us. They had confined themselves to the breadboard area up until now, but this was an expedition too far for my liking. This morning Kathy and I removed all the cushions from the cabin, then all the locker cover and doors and proceeded to treat all the surfaces with a mixture of boric acid and sugar, Inaccessible areas received a spraying from a product called ‘Poder Mortal’ Which I’m thinking won’t be to popular with the little creatures. The boric acid is a sneaky chemical, once ingested, by them eating the sugar, or just getting it on the skin, a slow death starts, they return to the nest and die, where upon the other roaches will consume their dead brethren and die themselves from the poison. This does rather test my Buddhist  leanings.
After lunch we head ashore, there’s quite a few tourist boats that have arrived and some have set up small marquees to dine under on the beach. We walk up to the old well and take some pictures of the bay. It’s extremely picturesque and most pleasant here. Later I swim around the rocky islands and see lots of tropical fish.
As the sun sets the feeding frenzy starts, Pelicans dive bombing all around and crazy activity in the water around the boat as big fish attack the tiniest of fish, which you can just see in the video below.

Sunday

We spend a second night at Ensenada Candelero and have a lazy Sunday morning. I start work on some website and backend code for my customer back in the UK, I have agreed to about two weeks work to be started asap. Fortunately I can do most of the work without an internet connection. I like working offline, it makes me focus on the task at hand better, however it does make you realise how dependent you are on on-tap knowledge. I often google stuff I know, but can’t remember. I have a good offline source of coding manuals which can be useful, but mostly I’m just regurgitating code I have used before, web interfaces, database routines etc.

At 2pm Kathy suggests a walk up the valley pass, it’s not too hot so we give it a try, we end up in a dead end canyon, and decide it is quite hot after all and head back. I snorkel around the big island and see many fish, but nothing like as many as when Arturo was here and the island was closed. Still not evidence to be conclusive, we saw one goat today, but when the island was closed we saw many. A large motor yacht arrived at lunchtime and up on the fly deck, there was a DJ with a desk and big PA speakers blasting out music to the four guests on board, the whole bay was subjected to this horrendous onslaught. Several boats close by upped anchor and left. By the time we returned from our island hike they had left, thank goodness.

I also made good progress on the boats systems, I have the PI reading in data from the GPS dongle, it will also provide an accurate clock for the PI, something the designers left off. I have it reliably recording the Wind data after a reboot now as well. I think I’m going to go for MySQL Replication to move the data from the boats system to this Blog site. I do need an internet connection to get this working. 

Monday
We leave Candelero to head back for a WiFi or 4g signal, we arrive back in Balandra Bay a very popular tourist beach, claimed to be one of the most beautiful spots in Mexico, it is nice, and the swell, although a little annoying should reduce through the night as the northerlies are long gone now. As the sun is getting ready to set, we dinghy ashore and I run up the white sand dunes in my bare feet wondering what Kathy is shrieking about below, I soon find out as I stand on several of those little cactus thorns that are everywhere. Now I’m up for a bit of shrieking. We wander along the beach and out to the mushroom rock as the last tourists are leaving. but just before we can get our photos lined up a new tourist boat arrive and dumps a load of passengers into the water to get their obligatory pic with the rock.

I hope I don’t get into trouble for saying this, but I’m rather dissapointed with the Mushroom. I do think the stone masons have done a great job of restoring it with rebar and concrete after it was recently toppled by tourists, but Kathy has much better pictures of massive potential mushrooms just around the corner.

Tuesday
We leave Balandra Bay around 9am to make the hour long journey back into La Paz bay, where we drop the hook and prepare to go ashore and get some fresh bits and bobs. We wonder if we need to buy pretzels in order to watch the election coverage later. Things don’t quite go to plan. The authorities are stepping up their enforcement of the covid rules here, and because people have been ignoring the masks and distancing the Malecon is closed in the afternoon/evenings now. I suspect the supermarket may enforce the ‘only one person from a family‘ rule and not let us both enter. So Kathy goes ahead into Chedraui while I cunningly cycle around the far end of the car park. Once kathy is safely in the store I approach only to be told that geriatrics can’t enter in the afternoon. Foiled! On top of that I have the money, the shopping bags and one of the shopping lists. Kathy is waiting inside for me to join her and I can’t contact her as she didn’t bring her phone. It all works out in the end, but Chedraui are now blacklisted by Kathy and Soriano is our new Supermarket of choice, where I’m allowed in an hour later. I’m just grateful that I didn’t get in and Kathy was refused on age, I would have been to scared to come out I think.

We are two hours behind USA EST (East coast time) and so the Florida results start coming in as we are settling down for sunset and dinner around 5pm. It doesn’t take long before we both realise that no one is going to be talking ‘Landslide’ in this election. I stay up until 4am watching the numbers come in and the tweets go out. Poor Poland 😉
Thoughts of sailing off into the blue on Wednesday or even Thursday with a result confirmed are dashed. However it’s so pleasant out here at anchor, and we both have a lot of things to do that require the Internet that we may well stay here until the weekend, when hopefully a preliminary result will be clear.

I really wanted to be in Mexico for the Day of The Dead festivities but they were cancelled this year. I first became interested after visiting an exhibition back in the 90s, I think, at the British Museum. Looks like it will have to be 2021.

Paul Collister.

We haven’t done a lot this week, but things are noticeably changing here. The temperature has been steadily dropping, days are now in the lower 30s as opposed to the higher 30s, nightimes are much cooler and we don’t need the aircon running to be able to sleep now. Also we are just getting our first northerly blow of the season. From hereon in we can expect increasingly strong blows coming down from the north. This means I have experienced the whole cycle of Northerlies, Southerlies and Westerlies plus my first, albeit benign, hurricane season.

We leave here in two days time, so today and tomorrow is all about stocking up on supplies, downloading books and videos we want to watch later as we will have no signal wifi or Cell Phone for a few weeks once we leave La Paz. On Wednesday we take down the covers, stow the aircon, haul the dinghy onto the foredeck, top up the freshwater and head out. We plan to head back in a week solely for the purpose of listening/watching the US election results. Because we are heading back out into the sea again for two – three weeks after this we could easily wait until we reach Loreto to hear the result, but we are quite invested in it now. Being in the Americas we have been in the right time zone to be able to watch the presidential debates live. I think I was with Kathy on board in Thailand 4 years ago when Trump got in. Previously my good friend Tim was sailing with me when the Brexit result came in, I forecast both results would go the other way. Third time lucky eh?

We are glad Kathy got out of the UK when she did, Liverpool is know under strict lockdown (Tier 3) and the rest of the country is facing increasing restrictions. Parts of Mexico are seeing increases in the virus, but our area, BCS, seems to be doing ok right now.

I’m pleased with my migration over to Amazon for this blog site. Now I have full control over the server (Virtual) that is hosting things, I can try to write some interesting code. I plan to add a live data feed from the boat to this server, this means that you should be able to see our location, speed, course, water depth, wind speed and direction and other stuff, in realtime on the blog. I’m working through a design for it now, but I’m thinking of storing all the information in a database on the boats PI computer (MariaDB) and syncing it with the same database on this server. That way I can sync the databases when I get a signal. If I can get both my brain cells to work together on this I may be able to recreate past journeys by re-running the database from a previous date/time.

I’m also thinking of buying myself a telescope for Christmas, I had dismissed this as a mad idea for a boat, but my last trip out to the islands was wonderful for stargazing, the binoculars revealed so much, so I’m thinking I could set up camp in the beach at night in these remote places and see what I can see. I last had a telescope when I was about six, my uncle dropped it on the stone floor of our kitchen, smashing the lens inside. He sneaked off without taking any responsibility and that was my last telescope. I may have picked up a couple of weeks coding work so that would allow me to treat myself. I haven’t looked, but I gather there’s a lot of options out there, I understand you can get computer controlled tracking mounts and all sorts of extras. Research is needed.

Paul Collister

La Paz, BCS, Mexico

It’s been another quiet week. Life continues slowly here, yet the days fly past. Kathy made Vegan tacos in the week, based on some rather dull shredded soy. This gave me the chance to try one of the sauce trays I had seen in the supermarkets. It seems, and I could be making a fool of myself here, that you tip the contents into a blender and a few minutes later you have a fresh sauce. I think if you want to punish yourself you can use a mortar and pestle. The pack costs about 60p and made the tacos taste great. I removed half the chilies first. We also had a guacamole sauce which was lovely. Shame they have to use plastic packaging.

Salsa Rojo

On Friday we went for a meal at Estrella Mar on the waterfront close to the marina. They made a vegan pizza especially for Kathy and I had an assortment of fish beautifully steamed with rice.

Anyway that’s about as much food talk as I want to have for about for a year.

For fun I have migrated this Sister Midnight blog over to the Amazon Web Service AWS. I’m not sure how well it’s known, but Amazon are huge in the computer cloud business. They power many of the big web sites, streaming services and a stack of Internet stuff like eMail, eCommerce, Bitcoin, I could go on..
It was mostly fun, but it took many days to get the email notifications to work as Amazon are crazy to make sure Spam and fraud can’t originate from their systems. I’m all for it, but I had to jump through a load of hoops and be evaluated by a human! The previous email system suffered from being blocked by different ISPs from time to time, but hopefully these emails should be trusted and less likely to be dumped or shoved into the junk box.
Im hoping also to be able to stream videos faster, I have attached a HD video at the bottom as a test.

Paul Collister.

Not a lot happened, shopping, a trip to the Mogote and dinner in Bandido’s restaurant where Kathy was promised a Veggie burger, she was offered mushrooms with it, which she opted for; just as well as the burger turned out to be some mushrooms in a bap. Presumably their idea of a veggie burger is a meat burger with the burger removed!

Still it’s a lovely place to visit, I doubt we will return.

We did a bit of cycling this week and went out of town to the box stores to see if Kathy could get anything vegan there. I checked out the printers in Walmart, my current printer has run out of ink and the cost of the new cartridges is the the same as buying an identical (but with wifi) printer which includes cartridges. Just crazy. This will be one of the first things I change should I ever be voted world king.
We noticed very familiar labels on several products, like the pesto sauce and realised it was the same as Asda in the UK, who of course are owned by walmart, or where until recently.

The temperatures dropped a little today, mostly due to the cloud cover, but the sea also seems a little cooler so perhaps we might be near the end of the heat. I’m worried it might be too cold soon 🙁

Paul Collister

Monday 28th September.
We have a walk along the Malecon.

Tuesday: Nothing.
Wednesday: Bike to shop and beach.
Thursday: much like Tuesday except I make a joke based on the ‘Things, that in 2019, you would never have thought you might say in 2020’.
“Two bubbles walk into a pub and scan themselves in”

Friday:
Covid freedom day, It’s been 14 days since Kathy left Liverpool, and we have decided today that we are probably safe enough to go out for a meal. The temperature readings and oxygen levels are good, although it would appear the finger on my right hand might have Covid, often reading just 85%, the left hand is fine though, usually getting 98/99%.
We go to the Vegan taco restaurant and Kathy enjoys her first ‘meal out’ here since January.

Saturday:
Finally we get to the farmers market just off the Malecon, I feel for the stall holders there, there’s next to no customers. Then again, a lot of them sell artisan stuff, so they could well still be living off the profit on an artisan spud they sold in January. I’m mainly there for the Vegan Pesto, Arturo is coming over on Sunday to meet Kathy and we plan to do Pasta & Pesto for him with some of the real Parmesan cheese kathy brought back from Milan (Thanks again Bobbie), however she said she wouldn’t have any pesto until Tuesday.
Later in the day we cycle to Chedraui Palacio, a bigger version of the local Chedraui Abasolo. At least they have Cilantro, which seems to be in short supply here. It’s a lovely bike ride, especially on the way home as the sun sets and a cool breeze accompanies us on the 15 minute downhill cycle back to the boat.

I have setup a server in the Amazon cloud (AWS LightSail), and I’m spending a bit of time playing with this, it’s good fun, well mostly, and a side effect is that I can connect to the BBC iPlayer and we can watch our favorite programs now. I’m amazed how cheap this is, I wanted to do this a while back, but it was going to cost me around $50 / month, now it’s only $3.50/month with discounts and a free month. If this works out I’m going to move all my websites and this blog over to Amazon.

I have been struggling with the loud bangs/cracks I have been hearing in the boat since I arrived in the marina a while back. My first thought was that the mooring lines were two tight and creaking on the hawse, Something that happens when the lines are very tight, but this wasn’t the case. Sometimes the bangs are quite loud and I had wondered if debris was floating under the boat and bashing into it. Then I noticed after a few weeks that it seemed to be loudest around sunrise and sunset. I worried that the boat was expanding and contracting with the crazy heat and that perhaps parts of the hull expanded faster than other parts and that caused the cracking sounds. I was worrying that it might be damaging the boat, and today I could hear constant cracking and banging around the head area. Normally when I run outside I can’t see anything in the water and the lines are slack, but today underneath the head area I saw a large group of big fish taking turns to attack the hull, and as they did I could hear the cracking sound. I’m still not sure if it’s their teeth hitting the hull, or the crack of the barnacles being ripped off, but at least that mystery is finally solved.
The antifoul I have on, which is a Jotun Seaforce from Malaysia does not seem to be holding up anymore. I have provisionally booked a haul out for the middle of November in Puerto Escondido and will have some of the locally proven paint applied.

Sunday:
Arturo calls over in the afternoon and we take a trip to the Mogote for a swim, Later we have dinner on the boat and Kathy gets to know Arturo better.

Hopefully now we are out of our quarantine period we can do some more interesting things around town.

Paul Collister.

Monday , shop for bread and drinks
Tuesday, walk on malecon
Wednesday, walk to baseball court, run out of propane on tank 1 , buy bread
Thursday, walk through town.
Friday, day off.

Saturday
Kathy asks for help on her laptop as she has started to compose her blog. She is running windows 8 on a Sony Vaio. This is hell. It’s been a long time since I had to deal with a Microsoft product, but within minutes I’m shouting at the screen because of its insane idea of how humans should work. I can honestly say that coming from an Apple perspective, this system is nuts. After trying to save her word file, its reporting errors, an investigation reveals it’s file formats that are not compatible, does Kathy fully understand this? All of the recent docs have been deleted, so why show them as available files? We have to reboot to get the wifi connection back, quite what the link between file saving and WiFi is I wonder. The circle spins, it says connecting, then the circle and text disappear. Does this mean we are connected? there’s no obvious way to tell, I hover over the icon and it gives me the option to connect, I click, it says you can’t connect, ‘would I like to run the troubleshooter’, No Thanks. Just pausing with my finger over the mousepad makes unrelated windows and new screens pop up with no obvious way to get rid of them. I close Word and can’t find anyway to restart it, I could go crazy if I had to use this for long. Now I’m thinking of the protests in Trafalgar square yesterday, they had placards blaming Bill Gates for the virus, and claiming he got the idea from a computer virus. I’m thinking bigger, I’m thinking the reason that the USA and the UK have their knickers in such a monumental twist is down to Bill Gates and Windows 8. If I went on twitter now I might well lash out at someone, it’s only because I’m back on my Macbook Air that I can calm down again. Rant over.

It’s a very hot day today, I have moved everything off the pushpit, mostly MOB (Man OverBoard) kit into the shade as it must be suffering from the UV.
We have been onboard now for 8 days since Kathy set foot into Manchester airport and the potentially dangerous covid world of international air travel. We have been self isolating on board, with me making the odd quick trip to the supermarket and a couple of walks in the evening all masked up and avoiding others. We plan to wait until 14 days have passed then we will head out and have a nice meal in one of the many restaurants now open.
I managed to find a use for my Pesos that were locked up in the online shopping site ‘Mercado Online’, I bought some H&S kit.

It seems like the timing has worked out well as Liverpool is heading into serious lockdown along with the rest of the UK, with Brexit looming I’m quite happy to be watching how it pans out from a good distance.

Sunday 27th.
Another super hot day so we pop out to the Magote for a swim. It’s busy there and a local family are racing up and down the coast towing kids on some kind of board, I would say water skis, but I suspect they went out of fashion many years ago, along with my big floating windsurfer board.

Paul Collister.