Author: paulcollister

Monday 22nd June.

A very jolly chappie on the morning net points out that we have two potential hurricanes forming roughly 1000 miles SW of the Baja Peninsula, but it’s a lovely sunny day so let’s not worry about them! In fact they are not much of a threat. I use this site at the US National Hurricane Centre for my initial data.
I spend the morning writing up the documentation for the work I did yesterday and then installing and testing it. That takes me right up to my Spanish lesson, which goes well until the end when I pronounce a sentence in a half hearted way, and for some reason, Arturo bursts out laughing, he can’t contain himself, I ask him to explain what I said wrong, as I don’t want this kind of thing happening down the Mercado, but each time he starts to explain, he starts the uncontrollable laughter again. This goes on for far too long, eventually I gather I mispronounced Ba and Ja, with a Ha sound, but I sounded like a grumpy old Mexican. Apparently it’s the funniest thing he has heard in a long time. Oh well.
Perhaps I’m a bit grumpy because we had just spent 15 minutes practicing my pronunciation of the phrase ‘Por Qué and ‘Porque’. The stress, and emphasis seems to be very important as the words can mean a lot more than ‘why and because’. Something I am leaning is that syllables must be pronounced completely flat. no sing song, but stress on the correct syllable is critical. Also I have to do the actions now, to emphasise I mean ‘For God’s sake Why’ I have to be waving my arms in the air shouting ‘Por Qué’

Lesson over and I jump into the dinghy to get away from the heat, and head over to the Magote. This strip of land has many mangroves and inlets along the shoreline, I headed SW and found an interesting inlet/creek. Now as it seems Santa is still having trouble delivering my DJI Mavic Pro Drone, I have had to make do with some google and bing images to show you the aerial view. I have also tried to do a zoom in as the drone descends from the stratosphere with the help of some circles and lines.

Before I enter the mangroves I notice a fire has started in the distance, I think this is probably the La Paz refuse centre, it seems to catch fire a lot.

The entrance to the mangroves is hidden until you are almost on it, the water shallows to just a foot or so and I have to lift the motor up and row towards the entrance. There’s a build up of sand, or a bar as it’s sometimes called, at the entrance, but I can get around the side of it where there is a channel that drops to 1 metre deep once inside the creek.

Inside I can see the bottom well, as in most places there’s only a foot or two of crystal clear water. The small fish are darting around at what seems like a fast pace, but every now and then, a large fish zooms through like an underwater missile, if you blink you miss it, and the little fish, somehow seem to scuttle away even faster.

There’s another half metre of tide to rise yet, but all across the sandy river bed I can see indentations which I work out are foot prints, and I expect someone has been walking through casting their nets here.

I get out my little paddle and work my way deep into the inner reaches of the mangroves, through gaps the dinghy can just fit. Then I find myself in a place with lots of little buzzing flying stinging creatures so I make a quicker retreat.

Once I’m back in the bay I chuck my little anchor over the side and enjoy a very refreshing swim.

I notice the fire is now creating a lot more smoke and the change in wind direction at a certain altitude is quite visible.

Tuesday:
Lots of Spanish practice today, but to break the lesson up I head off to the ferreteria for a spot of exercise and to buy some very fine wet & dry sandpaper with a grit rating of 2500, I didn’t even know it came that fine.

Before I went into the ferreteria I realised my bike lock was missing from my basket, I suspect it fell out on the way here, so after my shopping, I head back retracing my route. I recall hitting a hole in the road down a side street that quite shook the bike. I need to find that road. Retracing my steps is a little fraught, as I travelled down two main roads that are one-way, but it makes for more fun. Eventually I find the hole, but there’s no sign of the lock. Now I start to think what might have happened? I have it in my mind, that due to the poverty here, and the fact I’m a little bit out of the centre, that perhaps somebody has picked it up knowing it might have some value. Of course without the key, which is in my pocket, it has little value. So I slowly cycle around the block and sure enough I spot a bedraggled chappie standing on the corner staring at the lock in his hands. I’m now focussed on the fact he has locked it closed. I’m trying to quickly work out the implications of this. He found the lock open. but without a key. At this point the lock is almost useless, it has one last thing it can do, and that is to change to the locked state. Once locked, without the key, it’s all over. What he has done gained him nothing, yet removed his only option. I figure I have the advantage on him now, so I approach and explain that I had lost that lock and would like it back, I reach into my pocket and produce 10 peso, which is about 40p or 50c, I offer it to him, and he says it’s not enough, I look him in the eyes, and he knows his bargaining position is quite weak, especially as I have two new ones on the boat and I don’t even like this fluorescent green lock. He hands over the lock and seems happy. I spend the rest of the journey home wondering if my logic was right for the lock, until I reach the Oxxo store by the marina and indulge myself with a Magnum Double Chocolate.

At some point in the past somebody, probably me, has used an aggressive scourer on the stainless steel sink in the toilet, it’s letting the new shiny tap down and has been bothering me.
I set about sanding the steel down and get quite a decent shine to it, not quite mirror finish, but by starting with 1000 grit then 2500 I manage to get the gouges out.

I need some polishing compound now. I had all of this at home in England, but threw it when I sold the house. Later the urge to do the same polish on the galley sink overcomes me and I spend half an hour on one sink with great results. Of course now I have to do the other sink, and get the polishing compound and buff it up to a mirror finish. This is the problem with having too much time and nowhere to go!
I think I have cracked the future tense in Spanish today ‘voy a’ etc. Arturo seems to have stopped laughing now, which helps! I tried to ask if the adjective always changes gender to follow the noun, and he didn’t understand my question, so I tried to use my new word caluroso, for hot (as in the weather) and wanted to know if it would become calurosa if the hot thing was feminine, so I tried to say would it be ‘calurosa chica’ as I couldn’t think of another feminine noun that might be hot. Rather than answer that question, Arturo gave me a stack of phrases to use instead to mean ‘hot babe’ including chica sabrosa meaning tasty babe, none of which I need, but sabrosa is a good word for restaurants, es muy sabrosa.

Wednesday:
Today the supermarket has reinstated the tea mountain. It’s called Jamaica, I think we know it as hibiscus tea. I stuffed a few years supply into a bag with the plan to brew it up when I get back to the boat, in fact I will in reality take it on a tour of a few continents before tipping it overboard. If you know what I’m meant to do with it, do leave a comment. I have been drinking it cold in taco bars and it’s very nice, at least I think that’s what it was.

Hurricane threats are on the up, with 5 possible events showing up, but they are all unlikely to be a problem.

I decide I ought to check if the engine still works, just in case I should ever venture out of here again.

Firstly I do the normal checks and see the oil is a bit low. I thought I had topped it up, and looking under the engine I see there is oil in the drip pan.

So I dig out the nappies. If I was rich and stupid, I would use marine oil absorption pads, but I find Kiddies Atifugas work just as well. The biggest problem is getting them past the checkout girl without her wondering if I might have kidnapped a baby or something. I accept I look a bit too old to have a baby. I wonder how Mick Jagger coped.

I check the engine is in neutral, only to find the gear stick, lever won’t budge. A little bit of firm wiggling and it moves but with a very rough grating manner, I can hear things rubbing/catching in the binacle, so I assume it’s no big deal. I will need to investigate, but for now I can change from ahead to astern.
I turn the key, normally the engine would start within a second, but not today, it takes a couple of attempts letting the starter run for about 5 seconds. Then it starts just fine. I think the fuel must have drained back into the tank as it sat here for the last couple of months. I put it into reverse and the gearbox doesn’t engage, which is a worry, but after some stronger wiggling with the lever, it engages. I’m thinking something is not quite right in the binacle where the lever joins the teleflex cable.
Next I try ahead and astern again, and all is fine. I turn the bow thruster on, but the light on the control stays firmly off. Not good, I suspect a bad connection.
I had every intention of spending Thursday taking it easy and getting really stuck into the Spanish, however I can see myself having to take the binacle apart and also sort out the wiring for the bow thruster. With all this boat stress I think you will understand how I could lose 6 of the last 9 games of Scrabble with Kathy.

Thursday:
Please don’t tell me I’m the only one, who at the grand age of 61 to has just twigged that “The word alphabet is a compound of first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.” I just found this out when I learnt Spanish for alphabet is Alfabeto.
If you own a Baba or similar boat with a knock off Edson binnacle, you may be interested in the rest of today’s activities, however should you be a more normal person, you might as well skip to Friday.

Once I could look inside, the problem was apparent. The securing nut for the bolt that keeps the big cog on the spindle sticks out and was catching the small nut on the morse/telefex cable

I need to reposition the cable so that this can’t happen, It’s not going to be a problem in reality as once the forward gear is selected, the lever falls back a little and the nuts don’t touch. To do this I need Kathy waggling the lever while I climb to the back of the engine to adjust the transmission end. Something that is a lot of hassle. As a temporary fix, I file the bolt and nut down to present less of a target for the cable.

While I have the binnacle in bits I slap a coat of varnish on the compass base, and get rid of a varnish run that had been bugging me for over a year.

I find where the cables to the bow thruster are joined and wrapped up in tape, expecting some moisture might have got in, but before I start ripping them apart, I consult the manual to find out which wire has the power so I can test that first. Well I’m sure you have heard of the ‘turn it off then back on’ as a way to fix things, looking at the manual, I realised all I had to do was turn it on. Feeling like an idiot, I turn on the big circuit breaker, and all is working fine. I never normally turn this breaker off as there’s no need really, unlike the big breaker for the anchor windlass, that could easily be activated by stepping on the foot switched on the bow.
So all is working again.

Saturday:
Spanish homework, then a trip to a Mexican bookshop to buy a book I can practice reading from. I’m going back with Arturo in a week or two, as he can help me get one that doesn’t have long words, but for now, I pick up an attractive book on the history of the peoples of the Baja Peninsula, going back to before the Spanish missions. The bookshop is supposed to be one of the best in town, but has a feel of a Malaysian shop. There’s no love for the books here, all very practical shelving in rows more like a discount supermarket. I think I have been spoiled by the British and American bookshops which are closer to a Diagon Alley (Harry Potter) vibe.

A check of the hurricanes shows the earlier threats have gone, but there’s a new one called Boris, but as you might expect it’s all wind and won’t last long, it has caused quite a depression though. I’m more worried about the next two as they will start with the letters D & C, which is a lot scarier than Boris 😉 (UK Specific joke)

Sunday:
A very dull day, stinking hot and I don’t do much other than work out how the man with my padlock could have used it. I had been pondering the value of a lock that you don’t have a key for, and eventually it dawned on me that this is how you are reading this blog. It’s called Asymmetric encryption, or Public/Private keys. Basically he could have put my lock on ebay/amazon for Kathy to buy, she could have used it to lock a parcel she sent to me which only I could unlock!
I bet he’s kicking himself now.

Paul Collister.

Monday 15th June 2020

Up early and a bit more coding while it’s cool. Come 3pm and Arturo hasn’t appeared on line, so after a little wait, I pile into the dinghy, and head off to the beach. It’s another stinking hot day and it’s just great to do some swimming in the cooler water.

La Paz has opened up a lot today, I haven’t been into town to see, but the main Malecon (boardwalk/promenade) which runs for several miles along the waterfront is still closed to pedestrians, but vehicles can use it now, and they certainly are. From the far side of the bay, on the Magote beach I can hear the continuous rumble of traffic trundling along. A passenger jet flies overhead having just taken off from the airport and I realise that this is the start of the end of the peace. A lot of people are very excited that they can go out shopping now, or hang out in coffee shops, but not me. I don’t suppose there will ever be such a lull in life again, at least not in my life time. I hope I made the most of it.

I let the wind and the current push me back towards the marina, by the time I get there I could do with another swim to cool down. I think I might do this more often. Today felt like a Sunday, and I toy with the idea of making it a Sunday, thereby working on an 8 day week. I would need a name for the extra day, maybe Exday would work, I would put it between Friday and Saturday. I’m not sure, but I think after 7 weeks, I would be back in step with the rest of the world, and could hop back onto the 7 day week again. I should have started this plan a month ago while everybody treated every day the same. Another thought is to delete wednesday, for a 6 day week, 7 week trial.

Back at the boat and Arturo calls to apologise, but he got a job in a restaurant, in a dodgy part of town and he couldn’t leave when he was expecting to so we reschedule the lesson for the evening.
The lesson goes ahead with Arturo teaching me from an empty restaurant on the waterfront. It seems the dodgy part of town is just a block down from where I am. I think it’s just a little isolated on the beach at night with everything shutdown. Arturo is only doing the work as the owner also runs a diving tourist operation he is hoping to work for.

Tuesday:
Sitting down in the cockpit for breakfast and I kick the cafetiere over, covering all my lovely new teak in Mexico’s finest brew. If it’s not one thing ….
My noisy neighbours left a few days ago, and it looks like Paul and Jana on the big motor launch next to me are getting ready to depart soon.
I call Kathy and she laughs when I tell her about Arturo and last nights lesson; Arturo had taught me some good phrases, like ‘en serio’ I’m serious, or are you serious. I asked him if I could have used it when the security guy said I was too old to enter the supermarket. Arturo was surprised, but not enough, in my book, he laughed and said I should use that phrase next time. However instead of saying ‘hey paul, you don’t look that old’, he actually offered to do my shopping for me if I got stuck, which was even worse. Sure Arturo, thanks and see if you can pick up a zimmer frame for me while you’re at it! I did wonder if it was Karma, and when I was offered free entry to the museum as a senior a few months ago I should have refused. What’s the saying, live by the free bus pass, die by the …
Later my neighbours call by and invite me to dinner tomorrow. I’m rather unsure due to Covid, they aren’t taking it too seriously, but I don’t know how to say no. It might be a British thing, but we hate to be rude, so I will just have to catch the virus and die, rather than upset them.

Wednesday:
It’s so hot today, but before it reaches its peak, I cycle down the recently opened Malecon to Marina Palmera.

There’s a guy there who has been running a diving school from his yacht, Covid has put an end to that and he’s selling up and heading back to Canada. He had a load of diving and other gear going at very good prices, but I’m a bit late finding out. In the end I buy a used BCD (diving inflatable jacket thing) and a very nice mask and snorkel, all for $60. I also get some good tips on the best places in La Paz for diving equipment and service. Cycling back I stop of at a ferreteria and pick up a small tarp to cover a gap between the big tarp and the little one on the bow, this will keep the sun out of the cabin in the afternoon. Unfortunately Sister Midnight is starting to resemble a refugee camp from the dock.
In the evening I head over to my neighbours for dinner, an experience I will never forget. Starting with my hosts boast of running with the bulls in Pamploma as a young man, to ending with their joint vow not to travel to Florida as there are two many democrats there. I learnt so much about the true origins of Covid, why it had been invented and who it was designed to take out, along with much new information on how to kill it should it ever reappear. I left enlightened and with a much better understanding of the US presidents popularity.

Thursday:
I take the dinghy over to the Magote beach today. It’s been a really hot week, mostly around 37 deg C during the day and sometimes as low as 25 in the night. It’s so nice to have a swim and I try out the new snorkel mask I bought yesterday, only it’s just sand with the odd shell below me. To think the whale sharks are just around the corner, but I’m not allowed to visit them without a guide.
On the way back I snap a couple of pictures of a big mega yacht that seems to live at the end of the marina,

I think it’s a bit ugly, but I now know it’s one of several yachts owned by Carlos Slim, who used to regularly swap places with Bill Gates for the title of Richest Person in the World.

Back on Sister Midnight I received a visit from my new American friends I dined with last night, they had brought some fruit and veg over that they were chucking before they leave for the US. We chatted for a bit and I was asked what I thought about Trump, I explained it was difficult for me as a Brit to criticise another world leader these days, in fact any misplaced feeling of superiority I might have once felt traveling the world has definitely gone now, which is a good thing anyway. I pointed out we have a well educated idiot running the UK, and I thought they had an ignorant idiot running their country. She sighed but reminded me, that despite all of that, he was a financial genius, and America was going to need that after the virus. She pointed out how the economy had been massively on the up since he came into office, I pointed out it was already on the up before he came into office, but apparently that wasn’t significant. The man’s still a genius.

Friday:
So in for a virion, in for a pound (of SARS-CoV-2 that is) I arrange to meet Arturo and do some shopping downtown at the public market. he has had me rehearsing my lines for shopping, and striking up conversations with people. On our walk to the mercado, I learn a lot of names for street furniture and pavements steps, railings etc. by the time we reach the market I have forgotten them, and with all the confusion in my head I have even forgotten how to say “hello, can I have a kilo of carrots please” not that I ever wanted to buy any carrots. So we sit down outside the market at the bus stop amongst the local people and Arturo whips out his travelling whiteboard and marcadora (marker), and boradora (eraser) and we set about going over all the words I have just learnt and immediately forgotten. I know we will be there until I learn them so I make an almighty effort. Of course the old man sitting over from us is very interested in us and my broken Spanish and Arturo says we must bring him into the conversation, which is a bit scary. So Arturo explains he is my teacher and can he help. the old man is delighted and exclaims in fast La Paz style, he is happy to help foreigners as we are all the same under the eyes of the lord. An interesting start I think. Arturo pushes me hard, “Greet him Paul, Quickly” So I’m in with the old “Hola, Buenas Dias, Como estás”, it’s going well. He replies with some foreign language, probably spanish, who knows. Arturo intervenes and we find out the man has a brother in America, I tell him I am English and I live in a boat in marina La Paz. My boat is very beautiful and I have a house in Liverpool. That’s it for me, out of stock phrases, but Arturo is pushing, say more paul tell him more about yourself, I’m struggling, so. I go with the “Tengo sesenta uno años” I’m sixty one, he replies “I’m 84”, which I’m pleased I understand. But not so pleased when I realise I’m in a bus stop talking to an old man going “I’m 61 you know”, and he’s going “I’m 84 you know”. Kathy and I have agreed that it’s over when we start telling people are age like that!
We move on into the market and I have to buy the vegetables and fish, that goes well, I tell the green grocer “I’m 61 you know” and Arturo starts laughing. That’s it. I can do the age thing, no need for that anymore.
I manage to ask the fishmonger where he gets his tuna from and is it frozen, which it is, and buy 1/4 kg for a very reasonable price.
We head back to the boat and Arturo cooks up a shrimp bouillabaisse type soup.

This takes some time so we practice Spanish which is great. Sometimes I speak French to Arturo which is fun because he doesn’t realise we switched languages right away. I only know a few french phrases, but I can slip in the odd ‘Mais Oui’ instead of ‘si’ and it takes a little while before he twigs. Later he tells me his portuguese is quite good and he learnt it by playing with Brazilians in online World of Warcraft type games.

Once cooked we move into the cockpit for a late lunch. It’s very tasty.

As it’s now about 4pm and very hot I suggest to Arturo we take the dinghy over to the beach for a swim, he’s keen, he hasn’t been to a beach since the start of lockdown in March. We have tried to social distance all day, but I expect if either of us had the virus we both have it now. but we have been in the sunshine and as my new American friends told me, that will kill it! (need an emoticon for a bewildered shaking head at this juncture).
We have a refreshing swim, and on our return we checkout a sunken yacht that has half the hull visible above the waterline. It has had every deck fitting unbolted and a hole cut around the depth transducer. Nothing was wasted, other than a ton of fiberglass that nobody seems to want.
We finish the day at a burrito bar where Arturo has made friends with the owner. As I’m not eating meat these days, my maestro has me go over all the possible fillings with the owner that I could have, in spanish of course, we settle on Champiñons, cebolla, Avocet y salsa. Very tasty.

Saturday:
Yesterday I managed to fix a software bug in my solar data collection system, or so I thought, today it appeared I had actually just added another bug. The changes I made to the software were trivial, and I was sure they would work fine, it’s not easy to test on a live system, and building a test system takes ages, so I winged it, consequently today I sent a few hours fixing my bug and doing proper testing. It didn’t help that one of our data providers choose today to have a fault on their system and they were sending me bad data.
My Americans friends from next door left for America on Thursday and returned on Friday night, I saw them this morning and found out their car had broken down in the desert and they had to limp back to La Paz at 20mph. They are hoping to try again on Tuesday. The Americans on the boat that recently arrived opposite me seem to have declared the Covid incident over, and are having parties in the cockpit, everyone invited, leave your mask at home. Sadly I can’t make it, I have some drying paint that needs my attention.
On my trip to Chedraui I notice work is now progressing on the new building site on the waterfront. The building at the back that I posted a while back, was I thought an abandoned apartment block, but in fact it is a derelict hotel, the Hotel Grand Baja. I found some information on the web..

“1976 seemed to be dominated by the completion of what most considered the pinnacle of the tourism complex in La Paz, the Hotel Presidente Gran Baja California Sur.
The eleven story, five-star resort hotel was the tallest building in the state, and boasted tennis courts, a pool, bars, restaurants, a nightclub, two floors of suites at the top of the hotel, and a total of 250 rooms for guests, who could also make use of the beach on the Bay of La Paz, and the pier, for mooring yachts.
Twenty years later, the Gran Baja would be an abandoned shell, blighted by vandalism and a monument to the failings and near demise of the La Paz complex“

There was talk from the state governor of pushing to get it re-opened, but I can’t see how that will work, especially now. It may not be the last hotel to end up as a derelict eyesore along the coast of BCS. To be fair this is the biggest building in La Paz, and is a bit unusual, but get down to Los Cabos, and there are scores of building like this.

Sunday:
A lazy day again. It’s just too hot to get much anything done. Last night I brought the bike down to the boat and gave it a service while it was cooler, it had been making embarrassing noises when I applied the brakes. It needs new pads. Today I take it back to the bike racks in the marina car park.
I promise if that’s all I can find to write about going forward, I will stop the blog and spare you the tedium of reading it.
I finally managed to code up the web pages I said I would do a week or two back, now I have to update the documentation and do some more testing before I release it, but I will be glad when that’s out and I can get back to being lazy again.

Covid rates have doubled here these last few days, still lowish numbers, but more places are opening and there were queues for some of the beaches this week. Also the UK should be seeing the start of a significant increase around now, but that hasn’t materialised. I suspect in the UK the numbers aren’t accurate, the government are under pressure to get the country open again, and the scientists have all been silenced so we will have to wait and see. Kathy and I review our plans constantly as to when she should come out here or when I should go back there, but right now I think I may take the boat north in July/August and fly home in September for a few weeks, feed the cat and pick up my mail.

Paul Collister.

Monday 8th June 2020
Off to Chedraui, the supermarket for some fresh bread and beer, pleased to see a good stock of my favorite Heineken there, but totally shocked to see that someone has taken 3 bottles out of the six pack.

This beggars belief, not only are those 3 bottles now stranded at some checkout till, but the remaining three bottles are also stuffed. I can only imagine the idiot who did this hasn’t been reading my blog lately. Some people are so irresponsible. And in these times of crisis. I only hope the staff manage to reunite them.

On a much more serious note I heard today that Patrick Childress has just passed away. I mentioned a ‘go fund me’ account for his treatment on our boats facebook page. This was very upsetting. I had been following his progress across the Indian ocean and along the coast of Eastern and Southern Africa with great interest. We will be following his route ourselves in the next few years, we have a lot in common with him and his wife Rebecca. We have similar boats, and try to live a simple life, and enjoy pottering along the seas enjoying as much of the local surroundings and people as we can. Patrick became ill with Covid-19 and although he was clear of the virus, and his lungs seemed to have almost fully recovered and was almost off the ventilator, the rest of his body suffered massively and despite good care in a South African hospital, he didn’t make it.
If Patrick, who seemed very healthy, fit and active can succumb to this virus, then so can anyone else in this marina, and may well do so if they don’t start taking things a bit more seriously.

Tuesday:
Guess what, it’s varnish time again. Seems like only a few weeks back I was slapping the varnish down, and that’s probably because it was only a few weeks back. I’m a bit dissapointed at how quickly the finish has dulled since I put the last coat on. I’m going to finish off this tin of Epifanes high gloss varnish and then start experimenting with some other longer lasting finishes. The rub rails have lost most of their varnish so they will be a good place to experiment on. Before it gets too hot I rub down all of the bowsprit / Platform and cap rails but by the time that’s done the temperature is in the 30s so way to hot for varnish. I plan to be up at first light on Wednesday to slap the varnish on.
Later my Spanish lesson is fun, but I can’t remember half of the previous days work, I think I probably learn 1 or 2 nouns or verbs each day. At this rate I should be able to put a sentance together in time for my 80th birthday.
The radio bursts to life in the morning with an enquiry to find the owner of a 30ft sailboat that has left its mooring and is now aground on the Magote shore. No one replies.

Ok, I need some help with a couple of simple questions here related to my recent plumbing activities:

Can you please answer the two polls below

[poll id=”3″]

And, secondly…

[poll id=”4″]

Wednesday:
Up early to varnish, it goes on easily and quickly just as the sun is rising, No dew which is great. By 9am it’s all done and I make some breakfast. Later a trip to Chedraui and then Spanish practice for the rest of the day.

Thursday:
Coding and documentation for the solar sites system. I spend most of the day on this, mostly sorting out notes and scraps of documentation which are all over the show. It’s a bit better organised, but I’m probably only 10% of the way in. I don’t get paid for the documentation bit. In the afternoon I write some PHP code, test it and deploy it to the live servers in Latvia, I do get paid for that, almost enough to buy a tin of epifanes varnish here 🙂 Tomorrow I have to design and code up in raw html/php a new user interface for part of the system. That’s a days wages so, several tins of varnish.

Arturo has me doing silly pronunciation exercises today, the result seems very subtle to me, but he thinks I’m sounding more Mexican each day!

Sometimes he says, ‘Quick run outside , find a local and repeat what you just said, they will be so confused as you will sound like a local but look like a gringo’. I think he is a good motivator, perhaps not 100% honest.

Perhaps the local birds are mistaking the baba for an aviary, this afternoon I had a hummingbird hanging out in the cockpit. The chaffinch, as Neil has helpfully identified for me, now pops into the main cabin most days to checkout the crumb situation. There’s a little video below

Friday:
A long bike ride, some groceries, Spanish lessons and bed. It was so hot today, it’s been 30-35 deg C all day and all night, that I wasnt up for anything very energetic.

Saturday:
For the last few days my wifi and cellular data connections have been playing up. It got me wondering what the dock ethernet was like, there’s an RJ45 Ethernet socket on the dock for each boat, next to the power hookup. You have to buy a cable from the chandlers with a proper Marine Connecter on it to be able to use this and I baulked at the price of $40. So instead I have been paying $50 a month for a data plan, which required me to buy a motorola phone to hack so I could get the hotspot to work. Not very clever logic.
So today I bought the cable, plugged in and found I was getting incredible speeds, broadband levels as good as I ever got back home. I’m very happy with that. I’m hoping to get my Pi computer visible on the internet soon so I can monitor the boat from afar. I’m now watching Mexican TV soap operas online to help with my learning, you kind of know the plot, you just need to know a few phrases, like ‘how did he find out’, ‘if I ever get my hands on him’, ‘your going down for this’, ‘he doesnt deserve you’, etc etc.
Once this was all up and running I jumped on my bike and cycled off to Ley Supermarket, I locked my bike to the railings and headed on in for some vegan burgers, being the only place I know that sells them. As you enter the supermarket, you have to wait while a member of staff squirts some antibacterial gel into your palm before you enter, sometimes they even take your temperature. Today the young lady looked kindly at me but didn’t offer the gel, she put her hand up to say I couldn’t enter then waved a security guard over. He asked if I was English, and could I speak Spanish in Spanish, which is something I can understand and reply with ‘poco’ , with a little bit of sincerity. he then pointed to a sign in Spanish that said ‘Seniors are only allowed in before 10AM’, this is a restriction they have implemented to restrict contact between Vulnerable people and the rest of us, or as I must now say, between us vulnerable pensioners and those young uns!
I was a little taken aback, especially as I had just cycled 5km, mostly uphill and didn’t think I looked that old. The humour of it won over and I laughed as I climbed on my bike and cycled off, except I forgot I had chained it to a rail and promptly fell of the bike. Perhaps they know more than me. Nurse Nurse.

The Present Subjunctive –
It is vital for the data to be precise
In the Present Subjunctive form
It is vital that the data be precise

If the above means something to you, I’m impressed, you probably understand the past subjunctive form as well and the problems of using was instead of were.
My problem is that some of the translations I do from the internet news posts in Spanish use the past subjunctive and present subjunctive forms and I have no idea what they are talking about. I didn’t do very well at English at school, woodwork and physics were my favorite, followed by maths. I still struggle with terms like adjective, personal pronouns, adverbs etc, I’m ok with nouns and verbs.
I think I’m going to have to skip this bit. In all I’m very pleased with my progress, I’m finding I can read over 50% of most things I see when out and about, some of the tweets I get are in Spanish and I’m enjoying working them out. It’s fascinating how the Mexicans can’t hear differences in pronunciation that I think are massive, like when I say the sound ‘ll’ it starts with a ya sound , as in Yazmin, Mexicans say it with more of a Ja sound as in Jasmin, I can say either and they don’t seem to hear any difference, same with Ba and Va, they only say Ba for both, if I say either they hear Ba . Most odd. Yet if I don’t get the rr in Carro right, it sounds like Caro, one is car and they other ‘expensive’ so an expensive car is ‘un caro carro’ .

Sunday:
I sit on the other side of the cockpit for my breakfast today, and my lady chaffinch arrives and seems put out because I’m sitting where she normally finds some breadcrumbs, in fact she flies around me a few times then proceeds to head straight inside to the cooker then breadboard. She’s getting a bit too familiar for my liking. I’m not very pleased with her anyway as I look around the cockpit and see little presents of bird shit she has left everywhere for me. I finish my toast, get the hose pipe and brush out and give the cockpit a good washdown. While I’m doing this I decide to try some of the magic pink cleaner that works so well on the stainless. It performs really well and the grey teak looks like new.

This gets me thinking that I could fix up the caulking that’s a bit rough, glue down the few planks that are lifting, give it a light sand and it will look fantastic. It’s quite worn, but in reality, it’s still thicker than you find on many new modern production boats. I did plan to have it all replaced when I get back to Thailand, but who knows when that will be.
So in a way, I’m grateful to my little fluffy friend for sending me down this path.

Next I pop off to the supermarket for bread and pick up some lovely fresh fish on the way back from my favorite fisherman just around the corner from me.

The rest of the day is spent coding, mostly making web pages, I hate it, HTML and CSS are two ‘languages’ that are all over the show. I started this solar monitoring web site nearly ten years ago, and it shows, I can’t make user interfaces to save my life, and add in my colour blindness and general bad graphical design taste and you end up with some very ugly screens. On the other hand, if you are a fan of 80’s computers, you will feel right at home.

I finish the day with a huge fish dinner in the cockpit while mosquitos devour my legs.

The latest Coronavirus news is that a lot of places start to open up tomorrow, beaches and national parks open, but with restricted numbers, restaurants with limited capacity etc.
Kathy’s flight back here was cancelled, that was meant to happen in about 4 weeks time, now we have to wait and see. There’s no point in rebooking yet, as flights advertised for July/August still risk being cancelled. Tempting as it is to think everything is getting better, I think in 2-3 weeks time we will have a much clearer idea of the impact of the lifting of restrictions. Until then, I will just have to grin and bear it in the constant sunshine out here. Please stay safe out there, as far as I’m aware the virus hasn’t heard of any changes and plans to carry on as before.

Paul Collister.

Monday 1st June 2020
Things are meant to start opening up a bit today, but nothing seems to be happening. I go for a cycle to another supermarket a good way on the eastern side of town just for the exercise, but in there I notice a man stacking a fridge with beer, behind the beer I see some alcohol free cans, which are quite nice. I ask him if I can get some and he says “no way José”, pointing a his watch. It takes a minute, then I remember alcohol sales are not allowed after 6 pm. I’m quick with my , “Pero es sin alcohol” and he relents, I’m right in there with “Quatro por favor”, and he passes 4 cans to me, I look at my watch and wonder if I should run to the checkout in case they hit me with the ‘after 6 pm rule‘ instead I go for the “perdon, quatro mas, por favor” and now I have 8 cans, I feel like I’ve just robbed a bank and got away with it, or as they might say in the future, done a Cummings! (Sorry if your not from the British Isles, but Cummings is our much hated leader, apparently, as we are only just realising).
Back on the boat I watch a video about La Paz put out by the President of the hoteliers assoc here. He mentions how La Paz has one of the top 50 beaches in the world, and the best beach in Mexico, and is moving up the most desirable destination list. They hope to have 5 new hotels completed in the coming few years but want to maintain the local feel to the place. Good luck with that mate. It would be a shame if this place ends up like Cabo San Lucas, La Paz is quite Mexican, in a Baja way, but Los Cabos, which includes both holiday destinations of Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo are just full on Vegas style gringo resorts. Great for a two week piss up, but not for me.

Tuesday:
Water appears on the floor of the head, I have seen this for a few days now, at first I thought it was a splash from the shower, the next day when it reappeared I went for a splash from the sink as the culprit, as I hadn’t used the shower, today I had to accept there was a leak somewhere, probably from the sink, and that I was going to have to get on my back on the floor and crane my neck, contort my body and search for the source. Sure enough the tap was leaking.

I will check tomorrow, but I seem to have stopped it leaking by re-attaching the water hose to the copper tube that goes into the tap, however the tap is badly corroded underneath. As you can see the whole fitting is not looking it’s best, and certainly not doing justice to the marble sink top. Quite why somebody thought marble was ok for a worktop is beyond me, is the boat not heavy enough! I’m going to take this opportunity to buy a new mixer tap and replumb below. If I can’t get a suitable tap, then I might look at servicing this tap, it may be possible to get it rechromed here cheaper than buying a new one.
Later I have my Spanish lesson then pop back to Chedrui supermarket to scoop up the remaining Alcohol free beer. I read today that many of the breweries have reopened across Mexico, so I’m hopefull supplies will resume soon.
We had a little excitement tonight when a boater and his male companion where run out of town, or forced to leave the anchorage. Apparently they were naturists but were performing what some consider unatural, or at least, not for public consumption, acts on the foredeck of their boat anchored just off the entrance to the marina. I heard the boat owner is a convicted sex offender and is wanted in the state of California. Later I heard they had returned to the anchorage a little further away from us, and that the cruisers here were organising to get them arrested tomorrow! The most worrying thing to me is that he is alleged to have his 80+ year mother on board who has dementia and, allegedly, can sometimes be heard screaming for help. I would like to say, never a dull moment here, but in fact it has actually been quite dull since January.

Wednesday:
The morning radio net has an anouncement under the Emergency Help category, which is reserved for people in desperate need usually, about the flashers. They are anchored outside Marina Cortez and the plan is to get the police to move them on today.
I decide I’m going to tackle the head tap today and head of to the plumbers early in search of a tap, I find one in the second plumbers I visit that is similar to the existing one and costs about $45 or £40. It’s chrome plated and will probably only last 5 years or so, but at that price I’m happy. I also pick up the cable I wanted so I’m now able to start the Cockpit LED lighting project soon.
Of course nothing is simple, once I have pulled out the old hoses, one of them won’t be long enough to reach the new tap, it could do with changing anyway, but chasing it through the bilge I discover a load of corrosion, it never seems to stop. I have to get a grinder on the job to remove the old hose clamps they are in such a bad way. After a few hours of workout contortions the job is done. I’m very pleased. Next I’m going to varnish some of the cabinetry and get the whole room looking smart.

On the way back from the hardware store I pop into the supermarket for some fresh bread and can’t believe my eyes when I see the fridge full of cans of Hieneken Zero beer, my favorite. There’s also real beer, the drought is over. Suddenly I get a whiff of the virus pandemic being over, and life being back to normal. It’s a lovely feeling but the reality soon returns at the checkout with the 2 metre distancing and everyone in face masks in the long queues. However I do understand now how an easing of restrictions can lead to people getting carried away with their new freedoms. I’m not going to stockpile the beer, there might be others who like it, but next week I will get a few cans in as I expect the lockdown to return big time soon. Mexico is heading downhill fast.

Thursday:
I put a few more hours into my Spanish this morning in the hope I will perform better in my lesson. Yesterday, my teacher Arturo, insisted on putting all of the women in his household, and there seemed to be quite a few, on the video call with me and getting them to start a conversation. I was quite flummoxed, they were kind, but I think they were keen to get back to peeling spuds or doing the dishes, rather than try to understand my rubbish Spanish.
As it turned out we spent a lot of the lesson trying to find the english way to address teenagers, There is a word in spanish for it, Joven, but I could only come up with scouse terms like La, or ‘alright there lad’, ‘Excuse me young man’ isn’t a phrase I would normally use. I love the vagaries of language that reveal cultural differences. I was reprimanded by responding to a ‘how are you’ from one of the ladies yesterday, with a ‘Good thanks, and you?’ where I used the informal ‘you’, tu instead of usted. I think I blew my chances there!

So after my lesson I jumped on the bike and cycled around town to all the electronic shops I had identified on google. One was shut until September, the other just shut, a third didnt exist, the building that looked so promising on streetview wasnt even there, so I gave up and headed back. On the way I found a new hardware store and picked up some plastic cable trunking I plan to use to mount the LED strip lighting I’m making for the cockpit.
Back at the boat, I make my usual Guacamole, read and watched the sunset, then set about cutting up plastic and gluing LED lights together.

Friday:
Before it gets too hot I head off to find the Electronic components shop on the outskirts of town. It’s a good long cycle ride, around 12km in all, but interesting.

I don’t know if I’m cycling into a rough area or an upmarket area. I had recently read about a serious stabbing in a car park outside an Oxxo store (7-eleven) out that way, when a down and out had been refused money he had been asking a stranger for. I never worry too much about these things, you could find the same problems within a few miles of where I lived back on Merseyside, I think most big cities are the same. Nonetheless I keep a keen eye on my surroundings.

I find the shop and it has a great selection of bits and bobs I could use. Next I pop over the road to a huge Soriano supermarket in a big edge of town mall/estate. This is better than the one I visited last week as small businesses, taco stalls, bars and shops have grown up around the estate and have allowed it to blend into the area better. from there I drive down a road called Calle Puebla which is ever so pretty and runs for a few miles, lots of individual houses with lovely gardens, and very friendly people who wave and say hola as I cycle past. I could happily live in this street.
Further on and I’m back on familiar turf, near the marina and I spot a gecko on the cycle path.

I fit the LED strips under the solar panels and crudely wire them up to the cigar lighter socket in the cockpit.
Later my Spanish lesson leaves me strugling with very subtle , at least to me, pronunciations. My optimisitic self has always assumed people would work out what I meant if I just got close to the right sounds, but that’s definatley not the case. Arturo wants me to be fluent at counting to 100 by monday, I try and he tells me I have a lot to learn. In particular I’m struggling with Six, or Seis, pronounced Says, or is it Saiz, or maybe Sayis it’s probably none of those. Pondering on this I try to imagine if you can slightly change the pronunciation of six in English and still be understood. I then realise that a slight change to the sentence “I want to buy six dolls for a kids party” might get you arrested if your not very careful with the pronunciation. Tricky stuff this language thing.

Saturday:
Most mornings as I sit in the cockpit having my toast and coffee I’m joined by a little bird that flits around me, sometimes it scares the living daylights out of me by appearing right in front of my face and hovering there for a few seconds before settling on the deck next to me. It seems the cockpit crumbs aren’t good enough for it now, and the cheeky bugger is heading down into the boat most days and checking out the bread board and cooker. I don’t mind too much, it seems to know its way out ok.

After breakfast I pop to the shops for some fresh bread then I launch the dinghy. It needs an outing and I want to ensure the motor is still working ok, at least that’s going to be my defense should the authorities come for me. I’m hoping they won’t spot my swimming trunks, sun tan and beach ball 😉
So I row out of the marina then slowly motor over to the far side of the bay to the stretch of land called El Magote, and beach the dinghy.

It’s lovely walking along the shore in the water, On the way back to the marina I stop in the middle of the bay over the big sandbank that splits the bay into two channels, it’s only about 1.5 metres deep, I sling the little grapnal anchor over the side and then jump in and have a wonderful swim. It’s so refreshing and cooling I may do this every other day now.

Back at the marina I haul out the dinghy and give it a good wash, it’s not looking bad given that it’s 4 years old now. I think the covers on the sponsons have helped a lot.

Later I see a pelican has joined the fisherman in their joint quest for dinner. As the fisherman guts his catch the Pelican practically eats from his hand. While he is fishing the Pelican sits there motionless. Quite a sight.

Sunday:
A very lazy morning, then in the afternoon I run some cable for the new LED strip lights and fit a switch into the cockpit locker. I have the option of 2 or 4 strips illuminated. I’m very pleased. It works well, the LEDs are a bit too blue, but it’s only a temporary solution until I can find something more homely. I don’t know if the LEDs will survive more than a couple of seasons, I’m expecting to lose the whole shooting match of canopy/solar panels and wind gen should a hurricane come this way anyway.

This week my computers/phone were reminding me to get my flight from London Heathrow back to the boat. I should have been arriving back here a few days ago getting the boat ready for Kathy ,whose flight is due in mid July.
Kathy’s flight hasn’t been cancelled yet, it was booked a long time ago, maybe even last year, way before Covid hit the headlines, so we don’t know if it is going to be cancelled closer to the event. I expect the airlines don’t cancel until the last minute, that way they hang onto your funds, and maybe they are also being optimistic. As it stands Kathy plans to fly if the flight is still on, if it’s cancelled then we will look at all our options. It’s quite a fast moving situation, with the North West of England now with an ‘R’ value of around 1.0 and climbing, the government may bring back full lockdown to Merseyside, in which Kathy will be better off out here, however she would have to transit via Madrid, which shouldn’t be to risky, but then she arrives in Mexico City with no guarantee of an onward flight to La Paz. Regional flights get cancelled hours before take off if they don’t have enough passengers. Hotels are shut and Mexico city is a real hotbed of virus infections now and the hospitals are in a dire state. So getting stuck in the city for a few days isn’t attractive, and should Kathy pickup the virus and needs a hospital the local hospitals in La Paz are getting quite busy now. On the other hand, many are predicting the second wave in the UK has already started and could be quite a big problem there.
I have a new neighbour here in the marina, they arrived in their big catamaran on Friday, they must be based here as there has been a steady stream of visitors to them, nobody is wearing a face mask. I’m going to tell them I might have the virus so to keep a distance, should they speak to me. I think it’s true, any of us could have the virus! 😉

Cuarenta y uno, Cuarenta y dos …..

Paul Collister.

Sunday 24th May 2020:
I woke up feeling quite ill, I had a bad nights sleep and now I had a serious headache. I climbed into the cockpit for some fresh air and had my morning banana and toast & coffee, I could tell I wasnt right, so I ran through my checklist of Covid symptoms: Coughing, no, just the runny nose as usual. Taste & Smell, well that banana didn’t really taste at all, and the coffee was just like hot water. So Covid Rovers 1, Hypochondriac Athletic 0. However many people will confirm my coffee doesn’t taste that good. Breathing, well pretty rubbish really, quite laboured, Covid Rovers 2, Hypochondriac Athletic 0. Better take some readings.
Temperature now 38.5 degrees, in the fever range, pulse 150, double my normal rate, blood pressure through the roof. Looks like Covid is just getting penalty shots now. My breathing is getting harder so I head below and lie down for a bit. While I’m lying down I check out the emergency covid phone number for La Paz and have it handy. After an hour I check my temperature again, it continues to rise nearly reaching 40 deg C, I reach that blissful point where the hallucinations start. So I’m now convinced the Covid has an Anfield style lead over the hypochondriacs, so I put in call in to Dr Reddin in Ireland. He’s not overly concerned and manages to reassure me. I’m lying face down, that really does make the breathing easier.
I pop online to the Mexican Covid reporting site to see how that works just in case things get worse. I fill in the questionnaire, question number 2 being, “How will you pay for any care, insurance details etc”, I can see why the reported number of cases here might be a bit lower than expected. Anyway, they give the team a big boast and tell me to go away and stop being a big girls blouse. Suddenly the team are revived, Covid Rovers 2, Hypochondriac Athletic 2.
You don’t want to know the details of the next few hours, but I lose a lot of weight quickly. Then I sleep for the rest of the day. When I wake, my temperature is down, and my blood pressure is dropping slightly. I can also breathe a lot better. I go back to bed and doze for the rest of the day until nightime when I sleep well.

Monday:
I spend the morning being very lazy, my temperature is normal again, as is my blood pressure and pulse. I’m thinking I either had food poisoning or a touch of some bug. I’ve had nothing to eat since Saturday and I don’t have anything in, so in the afternoon I pop along to the supermarket to get some bread. Passing along the aisles I spot my old friend the Cervaza cero, this poor bottle has been hidden somewhere, and is now up for grabs. I pop him in my trolley if only to give him a little trip to the till and back. I’m not optimistic.

The beer bottle almost makes it, until the Mexican checkout lady wishes it ‘good luck’ in English and it replies with a ‘thank you’ (if you don’t get that reference, you need to watch this ). Back to the camp for this guy!

I’m exhausted cycling back to the boat, but can’t help noticing lots of taco stalls open, and kids playing in the park. I wonder if the cummings effect is reaching this far.
Later I login with Arturo for my Spanish lesson, but struggle to follow much.

Tuesday:
Still feeling rubbish, but eating again now.

Wednesday:
It’s really hot now, so I throw another canopy over the bow. I think it helps a little. Sod all else happens today

Thursday & Friday are mostly lost, except I have to attend a conference call with some systems guys in Belgium, it’s the end of the day on a Friday for them, and I expect they have beer, chips and mayonnaise calling their name, but it’s 7am for me, and I have to look like a smart computer engineer representing a multinational organisation, worse they want the meeting on ‘Skype for Business’ which I cant get working. As it turns out I’m more together than them, the meeting goes well, they get all the action points, and I get to make breakfast. Later I do some reading and studying of openPlotter, a system I’m looking at implementing on the new boat computer. I think I may have a solution to my intermittent autopilot problem by getting the PI to drive the tillerpilot connected to the monitor windvane.

Saturday arrives and I realise I’m just not getting enough exercise, I’m putting on weight, and given that I’m not eating much, that can only mean I’m not using any calories up. So I decide to head off to the out of town shopping estate, or big box stores, as the Americans call them. I plan to buy cable and connectors from Home Depot (B&Q) and rig up some propper LED lighting in the cockpit. It dawned on me that the PI computer can do PWM lighting control over the LEDs to give me a mood effect, perhaps some AI can predict my mood, but I think I’m getting ahead of myself, first let’s get the wire.

I fail to get the wire, and the connecters, it’s not that they didn’t have some wire, more I hated the whole thing of being in this cavernous store, that could have been anywhere on the planet, and you wouldn’t know based on the store itself. I decided there must be plenty of small ferreterias in town, family businesses that I would rather give my money too.
My trip to the store hadn’t been a good experience. I chose this destination partly as it’s a long cycle away (18km round trip) and the exercise would be good, plus if I was stopped, I had a good excuse for being there, food shopping is allowed and many gringos go to the big box stores for their supplies.

In our travels from Malaysia to here we have seen many modern shopping developments, in many countries but they all generally come down to two types: The Mall, and, The Out of Town Big Box Estate.
The picture below was taken on route, I expect this is what the countryside here would have looked like in every direction for the last tens of thousands of years, certainly back to when humans first arrived here. In fact It would have looked like this up until a few years ago.

First the road is built, nothing against roads, and the major highways in Baja California have allowed the area to thrive where it was once, only a few decades ago, quite isolated. Many of the resorts down here were very exclusive as the only way to access them back in the 50s and 60s and earlier was by private plane, some of the resorts still have their airstrips that were used by partying celebrities popping down from Holywood for a secluded break.

But these sections of the road are unloved, nobody wants to live next to the box stores, and at some point the box stores estates will look old and faded and a new estate will pop up on the land next to them. So acres of scorched fields sit awaiting that time. I expect the locations are chosen based on the cheapest land available outside of the city.

Acres of car parks surround these buildings and look quite odd when the customers aren’t allowed in. Most of this estate isn’t open as it’s deemed non essential, 10 pin bowling, designer shops, cinemas etc.

If the covid disaster lasts for another year, I expect much of this estate may not reopen. In town, many small businesses will struggle and may fold, but the buildings have performed under many guises before and will find a new life. the city should still be attractive but these estates might slip easily into a dystopian world, it’s hard to love this much poured concrete.

I expect land must have been cheap, and some developer imagined being on the doorstep of Walmart and Home Depot would be a selling point, as a housing development has sprung up over the highway, nestled in the scrub.

This doesn’t feel like progress to me.

Sunday:
I decide to capitalise on my new exercise urge and head off on the bike again. This time in the opposite direction of the ‘out of town box stores’ instead into the heart of La Paz. It’s Sunday, the churches are closed and I expect it to be quiet, however off the main malecon, the streets are busy, quite a lot on stores are open and I notice people queuing at the barbers. I need a haircut, but I’m not ready to get in line for one just yet.
The flowering plants are lovely, I think a lot of it is called Bougainvillia, and the cacti are looking great with the palm trees. I have put some of the pictures of the streets around downtown below.

Back at the marina I snap this guy who seems to have made this spot his home. I would call it a heron, but I’m not sure.

Paul Collister.

Sunday 17th May
Today we hear the lockdown in La Paz has been extended from the 1st June for an unspecified period. This is due to the rate of infections in Mexico not having peaked yet, although it’s still pretty low here in La Paz. The hurricane season has officially started here as well (15th May) so I could be blown away at any moment, although historically not a lot happens until the middle/end of the summer.
I decide to head of to Ley, a giant Mexican hypermarket, in fact the largest Mexican chain of supermarkets in North West Mexico. I hadn’t been here before, but found it much busier than the supermarkets closer to the Marina. It’s a little bit further out of town, so good exercise.

There wasn’t much difference in the goods on offer, but I did manage to buy some Mexican made vegan chorizo and hamburgers which actually tasted quite good.

Back on the boat the last of the cushions was fitted, and I retired for the day not wanting to over exert myself.

Monday:
I wake to several emails asking why the systems I built to monitor wind and solar installations are failing. A quick check reveals the server has run out of disk space, this is an oversight on my part and a warning system needs to be put in place. I spend an hour deleting log files and archiving off old data. I now have 30% free space, but will need to work on this to ensure the problem doesn’t repeat in a few years time. The system, which is mission critical(ish) only has 50GB Storage. This might have seemed ok at the time it was built, but I now have memory sticks with more capacity.
It’s too hot to be outdoors, so I set to work on decoding the data from my ancient ST50 Speed and Depth instruments. They talk a secretive language to each other over a single wire network. I have no idea about the electrical or data protocol, but decide to put a scope on the wire and see if I can work something out. I don’t have a scope so set about using the sound card on my laptop to act like one, only trouble is the macbook air doesn’t have an audio in jack, so I move onto using a USB audio stick to capture the signal. I don’t know if this will work but it should be fun.
The previous night I had sent an email off to a guy who makes a hardware device that converts this SeaTalk 1 protocol to the more open standard of NMEA, asking for any tips, and just as I’m rummaging around for hardware bits to start my project he sends me an email with stacks of data on the electrical signals and the data content. Just amazing, I realise I can interface the SeaTalk to my raspberry pi with just two resistors and a FTDI USB serial adapter, which I have. They only cost peanuts to buy. A few hours later and I’m pulling in the depth readings and the Speed over water. Tantalisingly I’m getting data packets showing the water temperature, but it’s always 0xFF which makes me think it’s not reading it. Brits of my generation and older often have a fascination with water temperature, as we spent all of our childhood holidays at beaches were the temperature is generally in the hypothermia generating range. Water temperatures above 20 deg C tend to over excite us.

Now I can log location and depth as I travel around and use this information to generate my own chart data, It’s like having my own black box data to analyse, next time I go aground!
Arturo, my new Mexican friend I met at the airport some months back phoned and we agreed that I will pay him to teach me Spanish via Skype for an hour each day, starting on Tuesday.

Tuesday:
I had a disturbing dream last night based on a report I had read about Prime Minister Johnson just before I retired to my bedchamber.
He was at a meeting when a quite complex process was being laid out and he said, “crikey, that’s a lot of work, and quite complicated, who’s responsible for seeing that through then?, he said looking around his ministers”. Ministers looked around awkwardly in silence until a civil servant spoke up and said, “Well Prime Minister, I think it’s you”.
Then the Prime Minister was on the TV reading from a todo list, and he was saying how much he had to do, he reached an item, ‘Pay Europe several Billion pounds as promised’, which he read out and said, “Crikey, I forgot about that one, bugger”.
I will leave you to work out which one was real and which one was my dream/nightmare.

Come the afternoon I hooked up for a video call with Arturo for the first of my daily 1 hour Spanish lessons. I was rather apprehensive about how this would go, Arturo isn’t a teacher, but has recently qualified with a degree in language studies and speaks good English and French, so he knows a lot about language structure. He is also a very enthusiastic clever guy. I needn’t had worried, it was a great lesson and we firmed up my understanding of conjugating AR verbs, which was nice. Later I firmed up his bank balance a little, which was under strain as there is no work in town for him at the moment. So a win win situation.

Wednesday:
I took off on my cycle this morning to find a Ferrateria (Hardware store) to buy some lamp oil for an old battered lamp I had found in the locker in the shower. It was rather rusty, but should clean up. In the UK these lamps are expensive, if you can find them, but I remembered they were only a few Euros in Nidri, Greece the last time I was there. I found a store that had the oil and it had shiny new lamps for just £4, so I bought one and threw the old one away.

I like to read in the cockpit as the sun sets, but the cockpit has no lighting since I replaced the spray dodger/canopy and I thought this lamp would be nice. However as it turns out, the flame burns very low. I don’t know why this would be, other than the fuel isn’t up to par. Most strange, it looks great though.

I’m going to have to wire up some LED lighting for the cockpit.

I cycle around a bit as it’s such a nice day and I need some exercise. The blossom is lovely right now.

After a delicious fish & salad dinner I set about writing software to process the new readings coming in from the instruments I now have connected to the ship’s computer. It’s really only the depth readings I’m interested in. I had thrown together a little bit of Python code to read in the data and display it in a raw format, but Python isn’t a language I’m fluent in, so I started again in C, this is my bread and butter language. However, reading from devices like USB sticks on Linux isn’t something I do often and had to read up on that. Eventually just after midnight, I managed to get the packets in and decoded ready to store in a database. This will be more fun, I’m expecting Facebook and Cambridge analytica will be banging on my door soon wanting the data, I’m sure they have algorithms ready to turn tide height, speed over ground and wind speed in La Paz, into a ‘prime selling opportunity’ for somebody.

Thursday:
Up early, feeling groggy, and off to Chedraui for some fresh bread. The weather is lovely now, cool nights, and 31 deg C most of the day with a gentle sea breeze.
Another great Spanish lesson where I learn how to use the verb Poder (really useful for “I can not understand you”, “can you speak in english please” etc).
People arrive late in the day and move onto the boat next to me, it’s a fast sailboat, Jeanneau 49 DS I think, fin keel, and they have come to return it to California. They plan to leave on Saturday.
I make Guacamole and sit in the cockpit coding my new Tide height system. By 23:00 I have it working and running on the PI Computer as a task logging the tide depth every minute to the database. In a few days time I will have enough data to compare with the official tide predictions for the area. I bet like me, you can’t wait to see how that turns out 😉 .

Friday:
I wake up at 01:00 after having fallen asleep watching some boat porn, I’m not sure what it was, but I think it may have been ‘Salt & Tar’ stepping their new mast. Anyway YouTube has rolled on to a BBC programme about Sailing in the Sixties, and I would usually switch off and drag myself to bed, but instead I wake myself up and watch an hour of people building kit dinghies like ‘The ‘Mirror’. A lot of dinghies were sponsored by newspapers back then, I actually raced a ‘TV Times Dinghy’ in Portsmouth as a kid. It was cut out of a big block of polystyrene, I’m lucky to tell the tale, it started disintegrating half way through the race, these boats would dissolve in most chemicals, and portsmouth harbour was full of oil slicks back then. Later in the show they move onto Chichester and then Knox Johnson with their ‘around the world voyages’ There’s a lot about Donald Crowhurst, which is a very sad tale, if you don’t know it I suggest you check him out. Sadly there’s little mention of Mottisier, a Frenchman who really stole the show as he was really the first man to sail solo non stop around the world, he would have got the prize but couldn’t be bothered to sail to England to collect it, instead he carried on and did another half a world eventually chilling out in somewhere nice like Tahiti. It seems to me the French have always had the edge over the British in sailing matters, but I wouldn’t expect the BBC to highlight that (Obviously I’m excluding Nelson).
Enjoying breakfast in the cockpit I noticed there are a lot of small birds around right now.

Next door the crew are busy provisioning for their trip and getting all the boats systems ready. I quite envy them, they should have a lovely sail/motor up to the USA.
I pop to Office-Depot for some stationary and take a detour on the way back for extra exercise. I had often spotted a big hotel/apartment block that I assumed was under construction, or maybe shuttered now for the virus but managed to get a bit closer today and was disappointed to see it’s in a bad way.

Back at the Marina, I unpack, taking time to wash down all the goods with soapy/bleachy water before they go into 3 day quarantine in the Quarter Berth.
Then my Spanish lesson, I’m just about hanging in there, but I think if I left it a few weeks I would forget everything.

Saturday:
So before I head to bed I get the last of the database entries for the tide height as logged under the boat here in the marina. I now have 24 hours of tidal data from 00:00 on Friday Morning to 23:59 Friday Evening.
I have plotted it below. I have had to remove a few samples which were out by more than 50%, not sure what is going wrong there as I average out 60 samples taken 1 per second for an average reading every minute. You can see the results below.

Then I overlaid the forecasted tide from my tidal prediction software app. This uses a formula which is based on the effect of the orbiting bodies out there, mostly the moon, and some local parameters. As far as I’m aware it’s not table driven. The overlay is in white. I was very impressed at the match.

‘Exit Strategy made their exit this morning. I now have a lot of space to starboard.

Off to the laundry to do the washing, it can’t be put off much longer, and we’re coming up to the monthly change of t-shirt anyway.
I know it’s important to be working on a vaccine right now, but does that mean work on the ‘Automatic Tissues in pocket detecting Washing machine’ is going to be delayed!
I spend the afternoon mostly glued to the twitter screen and the BBC news as it looks like the leader of the British government, Dominic Cummings, may be about to lose his job, It’s possible his part time assistant, Mr Johnson, may be in trouble then. Exciting days.
Watching the sunset from the cockpit, I notice my new neighbours pointing at the water, closer inspection reveals a small fin moving quickly along the surface. A few minutes later there’s quite a commotion in the water, somebody is trying to eat somebody else. All goes quiet for a bit, then starts up again 5 minutes later, this goes on for an hour. I never get to see any fish, just frenzied activity just below the surface.

Paul Collister

Sunday 10th May 2020:
The days total achievements amounted to fitting a few mosquito screens around the boat and shouting at twitter posts. However I was pondering my existence on a boat during lockdown while doing the dishes, so I might as well bore you with my meanderings now as a way to fill some space.
I had just watched a video blog (Vlog) from “SV follow the boat” about how well cruisers are already prepared for this type of pandemic life, in as much as we generally have several weeks of food and supplies on board, we are by the very nature of sailing self sufficient and while running the tap to rinse the dishes, always a luxury, I was further reminded of a piece Vanessa and Robert wrote about their trip around Vancouver Island, partly with us last year, and how living aboard made them really appreciate how few material things you need in life. So I thought I might write a little about how our fresh water works on the boat.
Of all the things needed for survival, water is right up there, you can go a long time without food, but without water you’re doomed quite quickly. We have a 10 litre bottle of water under the sink we keep for emergencies, but rely on our two steel water tanks to supply all our needs, drinking/cooking/washing. Each tank holds about 200 litres (50 gallons), to put that in perspective, an average bath uses about 120 litres, so we carry enough for just over 3 baths, and if we had room I would definitely fit a bath. It’s not a massive amount of water. When we left Japan for Canada, it took us 5 weeks, but we provisioned for 7-8 weeks worst case, we had a water maker, but didn’t want to be dependant on that, because as it has just shown us, it can fail at any point and isnt easy to repair, especially out at sea. So we would have to exist on 400 litres over 8 weeks , or 7 litres a day (just under 2 gallons). We actually made landfall in Canada after 5 weeks with one tank empty and the other quite full, so that worked out well. But to achieve this you do have to train yourself not to do certain things. Leaving a tap running is a big no no. Filling the sink with water is also out. And showers are rationed and short.
The galley has three taps (Faucets should you be tuning in from America), the main hot/cold mixer tap supplied from a pressure activated pump, just like you have at home. This is often turned off on passage as it is very wasteful.

The other two pumps are activated by pedals you pump with your feet below the sink. One provides cold water from the tank, the other sea water from outside. Most of the dishwashing is done with the sea water, then a quick rinse of the dishes with the fresh pump, I try to get the water to cascade over many dishes at once, rather than treating each dish to its own rinse. I love the foot pumps as you can dispense tiny amounts of water, if I just want to dampen a cloth I can get a teaspoon sized amount out easy, with the main pressure pump it’s much harder to control.
Here in the marina we have hot water, we normally get hot water at sea when the engine has been running for half an hour or so, the engine’s radiator water (Heat exchanger to be nautical) is used to heat up fresh water, but being connected to shore power in the marina, there’s an electric heater that kicks in. So I had a full sink of hot water to soak the dishes in. This is a rare treat for me, and I felt a little guilty about it, even though I’m in a marina with water literally on tap. I still rinse with the sea water, as it has become habit now.

Monday:
Not much better than Sunday, lots of polishing around the boat and a trip to the Immigration office to be told I had missed my middle name off one of the application forms and I would have to go back online, start a new application and return in a day or two. I picked up some fresh bread, avocados and coriander on the way back. I think I have too many avocados now.

Tuesday:
Today I got stuck into polishing the woodwork in the cabin. I bought some spray polish, it’s called Pledge in the UK, it’s like instant gloss for those of us too lazy to do it the old fashioned way. It worked great, but I did wonder how much harm the chemicals involved might be doing to my lungs.
Mike from SV Elsie Jones came over for help with his electronics. He sat in the cockpit, 2 metres away (ish) and we chatted through face masks about boaty things. He’s quite ancient and had some good yarns to tell. He’s from Manchester originally, the boat is named after his mother who is welsh, but he lives in Thailand and bought the boat here in La Paz and planned to sail there. Those plans are scuppered for this year so he booked a flight home, La-Paz to Mexico City to Dallas to Japan to Thailand, quite expensive, then found out he’s not allowed to transit at Dallas. I doubt he will get a refund. I advised him to find out why he can’t transit, I’m sure he should be allowed, he’s travelling on his Irish passport, his Irish links are quite tenuous, and he wondered if that was why. You can’t transit through the states now if you are coming from the UK, Ireland or a schengen country.

Wednesday:
I decide to get up at 06:30, after a very restless night. For some reason around 02:00 I woke with my heat rash stinging, I thought I would try to learn my pronoun rules with the verb Ser and Estar. Once you have this cracked, a lot of Spanish gets easier. Things like: “Yo soy, tú eres, él es, elle es”, for “I am , you are (informal), he/she is”, and all the plurals, they are , yous are etc. I fell asleep reciting these and of course went straight into a nightmare that lasted until 6:30 of me not being able to get them right. Prior to that I was working for both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in some hellish office were everyone seemed to be mad. I expect their offices probably are quite mad.
So as the sun rose, and the kettle boiled I unpacked the printer from its several layers of plastic bin bags to see if it would print off just one last Visa application before it died, one with my middle name this time. All went well and I headed off to the immigration office after a very pleasant breakfast of coffee, toast and Danish pastry in the cockpit.
Passing the Arjona chandlery on the way, I popped in to see if the fuel switch for my outboard engine had arrived from Mexico City, looking at the invoice it was 8 weeks ago when I ordered it. They had promised to phone/email me when it came in but never had. They seemed very pleased to hand it over to me when I arrived, and I’m looking forward to fitting that shortly. The old one leaked sometimes and filled the cockpit with the smell of petrol.
I arrived at immigration, puffed out and very sweaty, it seems to be getting hotter earlier every day, I know that’s how the earth’s orbit works, but it seems that 9:30am is the new 12:00 now. Must be a virus thing. I tried hard to get my forehead temperature down by waving my head in the breeze, waving my sombrero around my head and taking deep slow breaths. The reason being they take your temperature before you can enter the immigration office and on Monday I was borderline, I tried to explain that I’m an old man who has just spent the last 20 minutes cycling up a hill in the heat, but it didn’t matter, they let me in anyway and seemed happy to see me, a quick check of my new documents and I was told everything was fine and my visa would be ready before 1 pm. I also didn’t need to pay for it, thereby saving me a trip to the bank.
I was surprised how well things were going, and I did wonder if it was because of my trousers! I had read the night before on facebook how someone else got great service in that office the day before, and they pointed out they had dressed up quite formal for their visit. I always dressed up in SE Asia, as immigration / Customs and Quarantine people consider themselves to be very important people and to go in in shorts and t-shirt is a sign of disrespect, but in Mexico everybody seems to wear scruffy jeans, even when in the immigration office. Anyway, I was in long trousers, button up shirt, and I even combed my hair, despite it not being the weekend. Who knows? I popped back at 12:30 and my visa was ready and they were all smiley faces, even getting me to jump the queue, much to the surprise of the Canadians who were only on their 4th visit. I chatted with them, they were on a boat out in the anchorage, I told them I was on Sister Midnight, they replied, “oh we heard you on the net, and we saw you in Cabo, You’re the guy who lost his passport aren’t you”. Fame at last 🙁

Back on the boat and Carlos the diver had been and left after fixing up the gouges in the coachroof that the dinghy had made. They are coming back tomorrow to sand/polish and match up the colour. I’m not expecting it to be perfect, but it will be a lot better than it is now and one day I will get someone to do the whole of the boat from bow to stern so it looks like new.
Next up I dragged two of the sofa cushions out onto the dock and with some of the soap given to us as a gift in Osaka, I started scrubbing them. I have a supply of fresh water and endless sunshine to dry them, so I thought I should give it a go. I have no idea when Kathy and I will be able to agree on new fabric for the cushions, so if I can just get them looking a bit better it’s got to be worth a try. anyway I’m running out of things to polish.

Thursday:
Woke up with a headache, it must be hell for hypochondriacs these days. I decide to ponder my fate in bed for a while and decide it’s reading too much twitter that is probably giving me a headache. I get up, do a bit more cleaning. Carlos returns and admits he can’t match the colour of the gelcoat and has brought reinforcements, a gentleman whose name I miss, but he has a tub of what looks like orange paint with him, and he sets to work. I stay below as I make it a habit never to watch skilled craftsmen doing an important job, I feel the extra pressure can only make things worse.
Later that night just after the sun sets I watch the International Space Station make an almost overhead pass.

Friday:
Shopping day today, I have noticed that either I’m getting weaker or the bike needs oiling. I decide I will go to the supermarket every other day now that I’m in the marina, and that I will cycle beyond the police checkpoint and back to get some extra exercise.
I can imagine some people might get freaked out by the checkpoints, Police, Army and Navy guys hang around stopping every car, each of them holding on to their AK47 automatic weapons. It doesn’t bother me, perhaps because when in Afghanistan, it would often seem like I was the only one without a machine gun or mortar launcher hanging off my waist. I wave and they always wave back. I smile at them, and hope they smile back, but with everyone wearing a mask, it’s hard to tell. I miss the smiles you normally get from everyone as you cycle around here.

I spot what may possibly be the last bottle of alcohol free Heineken in La Paz. It’s sitting on the floor with the other misfits, like the bad boys sent to detention or the group W bench. This bottle left its five friends in the 6 pack carton at some point and has joined the other oddballs on the floor out of the way. Twice I have taken it to the checkout, both times to be told it can’t be sold as there is no entry in the tills lookup table to give it a price. It’s future is uncertain. I will visit it on subsequent trips to see how it fares.
Later, encouraged by the cushions I have washed so far I work on some more before retiring to the cockpit for Guacamole as the sun sets and I spot another pass of the International Space Station. I track it on my phone and it starts to disappear just after it passes over Houston.

Saturday:
I do another shop, I have decided to start building up a decent stock of supplies should I have to make a long offshore passage. I may go north in the sea of Cortez to avoid the hurricanes in a few weeks time, but I also am working on a Plan B should that not be possible. My plan is to head out to Hawaii and reprovision there before heading north to Canada or even Alaska depending on where the Pacific High is. this will give me a few months at sea and more time to work on my fishing skills, starting with Tuna down here and ending up with Salmon towards the end of the trip.

The sea/organic life in the marina is quite something here, the water must be very nutrient rich, the shrimp noise from under the boat is really loud, and as you can see above, plant life is quick to grow on anything not moving fast here.

I stow away some more pot noodles, salt, flour, instant yeast and tinned goods, and wash the remaining cushions. There’s one stubborn one not dry yet, but I’m amazed at how well they cleaned up, amazed and embarrassed that I took so long to sort this out.

Paul Collister

Sunday 3rd May 2020
Another pretty lazy day, It took a while to get the blog up and editing the underwater video footage was a pain, I deleted the best footage by mistake. I have heard that some of the popular sailing video bloggers make a fortune, all I can assume is that they’re a lot better at video editing than me. Still they must spend a lot of time doing the drone footage, finding the right music, and just simple stuff like setting up cameras, time lapse filming, charging devices etc. Then after the editing, there’s the uploading to youtube, dealing with all the subscribers, patreon etc. How do they find time to sail, or in my case polish the stainless steel and varnish the brightwork. Well hats off to them, but it’s not for me. You will just have to put up with old fashioned blogs with the odd bit of rubbish video.
I hear that the server I host this blog on struggles to feed video without a lot of buffering, I can believe that, I think I share one server with about 20 other users. We all have virtual servers, on one physical computer, and often the servers are hacked and used to send out stacks of junk mail. When this happens all of us on that server experience problems with our emails getting rejected by various networks with spam blocking filters.
I replaced the video of the overgrown hull which I was hosting on the server with a youtube embedded version. This seems faster, but I was bombarded with copyright infringement notices for the Jaws imitation music. YouTube said I didn’t need to do anything, but I should choose from two options, delete the music, or replace it. I was reminded of the good old early computer days, when your floppy disk was broken, and you tried to save a file you got the options of Abort/Retry/Ignore. As I remember they all did nothing other than make your disk drive grunt for a few seconds, then the message was redisplayed.
I found a way out of the dilemma and the video seems to play better now, perhaps it will be taken down, I don’t know. I did choose that music version because it was from a copyright free site. Oh well, I’m not going to waste time worrying when there’s still dull stainless steel shouting out my name.

Monday.
In to town early, shopping, and back on the boat by 11AM. I did plan to go to Immigration, but decided to leave it until Wednesday. I’m going to move into the Marina on Tuesday, Water supplies are low, the hull needs cleaning, and if I need to make multiple trips to immigration it will be easier. I’m not sure how long I will be there, the marina does seem to be a lot quieter now, so my virus fears aren’t so bad. I will miss the dolphins, the sunsets, and the cooling winds I have at anchor. But I will have electricity, hot water, all the toast I can toast, and I can give the boat a good wash down and get some of the salt off.
The plan had been to do some work today programming, but it turned out that I need to wait for some specs to come through, so instead I continued to polish the stainless, today I did half of the cockpit area, It’s starting to look great. I cleaned and polished the sheet winches, something I have never done before.

They came up looking stunning. I was really shocked, they shine so bright, it’s like being on somebody else’s boat, the kind of boat that is properly maintained, like an expensive boat that might race at Cowes or something, certainly not the type of boat I might own. I can imagine this boat might actually look smart one day. I’m definitely going to get the fiberglass gelcoat spruced up at some point and I will buy a proper low speed buffing/polishing tool soon.
Just as the sun was setting, a dolphin, or a gang of them, and I think gang is the correct collective noun in this case, leapt out of the water, quite close to me, really quite high, completely out of the water by a good foot or two, before landing on the surface with a big splat, not a graceful dive, but I presume a splat designed to create a shock wave to kill the fish there. And not just one show of acrobatics, but this happened 5 times in rapid succession, which is about how many dolphins were there, so perhaps they all had a go, or one was very hyper. Then there was a bit of a frenzy with tails sticking out everywhere. For reference five leaps & dives takes exactly the same time as it takes to grab an iPhone, put in the passcode, select the camera icon, point and just miss all the action!
While messing around on the youtube platform I noticed that a video I posted many years ago (2006) has now had over one million views, now I know a million isn’t what it used to be, but I’m quite chuffed to have reached a milestone of a million, a million anythings would have impressed me. Before I get carried away, I think the video is just proof that it’s all about the marketing. It’s called ‘Waves in the Atlantic’, a name I chose because when I used to take my kids to the Rhyl Sun Centre swimming pool complex in North wales, every hour or so, the PA would announce, “Waves in the main pool” and the wave machine would start up as scores of kids and parents would head to the pool to be thrown around (so basically a private joke only I would get). Anyway, it seems a lot of people google “Waves in the Atlantic” and I think I might have had one of the first videos with that title, I’m presuming that as people clicked on it, the number of views went up. I doubt they watched it as it’s quite boring, and not the cruise ship rolling horror story they were expecting, but as the clicks went up, so did the ranking in the search results, and like magic, 1 million people have clicked on it, well subtract my 50 or so clicks.
I still like it because it’s one of the few times I felt I captured the rolly experience of a big ocean. It’s here if you want to check it out.

Tuesday:
Up early, headache, sneezing, a bit dizzy, will I last the day? I expect so. I get started on preparations to bring the boat into the marina. It’s a little tricky as the engine hasn’t run for a few weeks and the anchor and chain has been getting quite groggy for a while. The growth on the chain looks bad. First I do the engine checks, the oil is a little low, but that’s ok, the water coolant is also a little low, but that’s easy to top up. She starts first time, which is normal, especially in these high temperatures. I was rather worried that the thru hull for the engine water intake, that’s the hole in the bottom of the boat that water is sucked through to cool the engine, may be blocked with all the weed on the boat, but it’s fine. I take the covers off the engine and shine a torch around to make sure there are no oil/fuel or water leaks. All is good, but there’s far too many toast and breadcrumbs on the top of the engine for my liking. I don’t know who’s putting them there, but it has to stop.

I plan to head into the marina at 14:00 around slack water, we are near spring tides now and the currents can run fast. My problem is the bow thruster is fouled up, the prop is very barnacled and the hull is well rough. So I won’t have as much maneuverability as I would like, so avoiding the fast tides seems smart to me. Having got the boat ready, removed the anchor snubber and put out some fenders and lines and I’m ready, but 2 hours early. So time to finish off the stainless polishing in the cockpit. with 30 minutes to go I put away my polishing kit, the cockpit looks nice now, start the engine and prepare to weigh anchor (22kg last time I looked 🙂 ). The first job is to remove the growth on the chain, it’s pretty bad and I don’t want all of that going into the chain locker and stinking the place out. I’m assuming there are already a few dead crabs in there from when I last hauled the thing up. I get a wire brush and as the chain comes up, foot by foot I scrape the sea life off the chain, and hose it down. The problem is after two foot the hose stops pumping water.

Back down to the cabin, up with the floorboards and lets have a look. It seems the sea water isn’t getting to the pump. I check the filters, expecting them to be blocked but they’re not. Now I’m thinking Apollo 13 again, I reroute the supply of water so instead of coming from outside I’m using fresh water from the remaining tank. this better work, otherwise we will run out of precious water before we reach the docking stage. It doesn’t work, I tried to call Houston, but there was no reply, I expect their working away on the replica of Sister Midnight they must have, trying to come up with a fix. Time is running out, the tide will turn soon and I will miss the re-entry window to the marina and have to spend another night out here.
I have a plan, if I can route the water from the Lunar module, sorry, I mean the water maker thru hull to the deck wash pump, then it might just work. Unfortunately, the water maker thru hull is 1″ and I need to connect it to a 1/2″ pump fitting and I only have 3/4″ hose.
Still nothing back from ground control, so I lash together various fittings until I have a rudimentary system.

It seems to work, but I’m quite expecting the pipe fitting to blow off under pressure soon. Carbon monoxide levels start to drop 😉
Back on deck and the tide is about to turn. I haul up the chain, two foot at a time, then scrub and hose it before letting it down into the locker. It takes a few minutes to do every two foot, and I’m trying not to work out how many feet are in 40 metres, which is how much chain is out. Every 10 metres I have to rush down below, crawl across the bed and flake the chain in the locker. I didn’t think this bit out very well, as I’m covered in seaweed/sea-life from the scrubbing and deck-wash hose, plus I didn’t close the window above the bed, so I think I may need to change the bedding soon.
Thankfully after 15 metres, the chain seems to be clear of weed, not sure why, perhaps this mostly lies in the sand and the scraping action isn’t great for little creatures to make their home.
The anchor pops up and looks disgusting, but we are clear and drifting with the wind now. the tide has almost stopped, so into gear, slow ahead and off to the marina, a good 5 minute journey.

I rev up the engine and the whole boat shudders, the engine groans, so I back it off a bit. I’m assuming the badly fouled prop (playing at the Dublin Castle) is the cause, props need to be carefully balanced, just like car wheels, and this is very unbalanced. I tried the bow thruster to see if I could shake some growth off it, and to see if it had any effect, however it just beeped at me as if two say ‘you having a larf’.
I find my berth, the marina have two guys waiting for me, I’m turning to starboard for a port tie, there’s a boat to starboard of my berth and I think it’s going well, I’m going quite fast as I’m not sure how well the turning will work when the dockhand starts frantically gesturing for me to turn more to starboard, not sure why, but I do, and almost hit the yacht to starboard. I think he was wrong, I turn back to port, pull in and a quick full astern stops me and kicks the stern in nicely. The same dockhand tied my bow line to the mid pontoon cleat then tried to get my yankee sheets off as a bow line. Perhaps he’s new here.

I jumped ashore, thanked them, adjusted the lines and relaxed. Great to be in safely. Then I realised I had gone back in time to a pre virus era, I had no mask on, was standing right next to the dockhands, passing them ropes. No hand sanitizer in sight. I’m almost certainly going to be on a respirator by the time you read this.
It’s been a good few weeks since I was in a dock, so lots of boat washing to do, I launched the dinghy to get the deck clear, it was covered in seaweed. I spent an hour giving the boat a good clean, connected the shore power and sat down for a well deserved Cerveza Sin Alcohol.
No sunsets or dolphins, but I enjoyed my dinner in the cockpit until I noticed a couple arrive on a dinghy and tie up opposite me, they joined another couple on the pontoon opposite and proceeded to spend the night being jolly. I was going to pop over and say hello, ask how often they met up, and was the shrieky women, with the ear piercing shrillish laughter, that travels for miles in every direction there most nights? As I may be leaving sooner than expected, but I didn’t. All of the shops have run out of beer, perhaps that might put a stop to it, or maybe they have stockpiles, or worse, several bottles of gin. I think I have earplugs on board somewhere.

Wednesday:
More headaches, I’m definitely on my way out. then again it might just be related to my infected tooth. That pain is firmly in the root now, and my tooth itself is fighting fit. I’m woken by a cracking sound from the hull, as if something is breaking. I jump out of bed, run on deck but can’t see anything. Back below and it repeats. I spent the whole day repeating this dance to no avail. My latest theory is that there’s crap in the water bashing the hull as it drifts past. I was going into Immigration today as my visa runs out, however I realised it runs out today and I’m not sure if that’s in the morning or at midnight, and they won’t renew it until it runs out, so instead I decide to wait until Mañana. The printer wont print my documents anyway, out of ink.
I spend a bit of time doing documentation for the software I’m about to write for some swiss solar power sites, then decide to check out the part numbers for the new toilet parts. Quite a dilemma really, the repair kit, which is mostly rubber seals/gaskets and rubber joker valves is $100, the whole pump assembly including all those valves is $130, and a whole new toilet is $200. I decide to dismantle it again, It was working great after I last fixed it just a few days ago, I’m assuming I did something wrong when I put it all back together. It’s stopped pumping water from outside for the flush. At least I’m working on the sea water side of things. There’s a blockage somewhere, I spend an hour chasing through hoses until eventually I find the problem, it’s a little fish, the size of a goldfish, he’s perfectly squeezed into a valve in the top of the toilet pump, but his tail is snagged on the outside so he won’t flush out.

I felt for the poor guy, it must have been an awful death as I pumped away trying to get water through. I expect it’s like the opposite of waterboarding for a fish, having air poured over your head. I wonder what secrets he gave up!

Thursday:
Visa day, Up early and off to the immigration office, I just managed to print out the forms I needed and a begging letter requesting humanitarian help, before the printer ran out of ink. I bought the printer in Malaysia a few years ago so it’s done amazingly well to last this long on the original cartridges.
Of course the Immigration office had a problem, “computer says no”, and I have to go back on Monday. It’s a good cycle to the office, but good exercise, and I can certainly tell I’m not so fit compared with a few weeks back. It’s also not great cycling with a face mask on in this heat, on the plus side, I’m swallowing a lot less flies.
I did some shopping on the way back and tried several stores for an inkjet cartridge, but it seems they only stock them for printers that are sold here. Disappointing to say the least. Throwing away ink jet printers is one of my pet hates. I picked up a kilo of fish from my friendly fisherman on the beach, he remembered me and was very smiley and cheery. I usually tip him for the fish, 10%, or 30p, not a lot really but he seemed to appreciate it. It must be difficult for the locals right now, the streets were very quiet, but I sensed a few more places open than usual. I think Mexico is hoping to reach its peak of new cases in the next week and then they may relax restrictions.
For the afternoons chores, I pulled out all of the anchor chain and rope rode and laid it out on the dock. It needed a fresh water wash and scrub. In bed last night the smell of fish from the chain locker was overwhelming. I took the opportunity to hose down the inside of the locker. I’m also going to reverse the rope rode while I have it out, there’s been a bit of hockling (untwisting/knotting of the rope) near the chain.

Friday:
A lazy start to the day, I’m suffering from heat rash which is waking me up on a regular basis through the night. I tried to get some lotions I use back home, but they have never heard of them here. Simple stuff like Calamine Lotion. Lots of Farmacias, but they all sell the same limited range. I will keep on looking.
Before the diver arrives I clean the chain, and the chain locker. I manage to get a new splice in the rope and discard about 30ft that is looking a bit flakey. That’s enough rope to make a lot of baggywrinkles.

Later in the morning Carlos the diver arrives , He is soon below with his cousin or uncle I think, they scrape for a good hour and do a wonderful job. They clear a lot of blocked thru hulls so I hope the deck wash will work now. They also help me put the chain back into the locker.

Carlos compliments me on the boat, asking if it’s a Hans Christian, which I’m quite happy to be confused with, The Hans Christian is a very pretty and solid boat, and possibly owes a lot to the same designer, Bob Perry, as Sister Midnight. I’m sometimes compared to a Tayana 37, which is a little bit of a snub. Boat owners can be quite snobby 😉 Anyway, Carlos points out the he and his uncle can do any boat job but specialise in painting and fiberglass repairs. I ask for a quote to fix up some missing chunks of coachroof that the dinghy gouged out on the passage over from Japan. I almost fall over when, after a bit of deliberation between themselves, they come up with a price of $50! I think I have already spent that much on gelcoat repair kits before deciding I could never get the colours to match. They start on Tuesday!
Carlos helps me stow the chain back in the locker before he leaves and I head below to see if the deck wash works now.
I redo all of the piping so the deck wash pump is fed from the correct sea cock/thru hull. It still doesn’t work, so I start pulling pipes off to poke a wire thru the fittings/hoses to find the blockage

Pulling this very sturdy looking hose, that has been on the boat since I bought her causes it to snap, without a lot of effort. Once again, I’m reminded this boat only stays afloat based on the laws of probability. Not because of my good preventative measures. Eventually I find the blockage, another poor fish tried to swim through the 3/4″ to 1/2″ reducer and never made it. His body swelled up and blocked the fitting. Yuk.
The deck wash is now working and the dead watermaker has a reliable source of sea water again, should it ever come back to life.
On the plus side, I have realised I’m in the right place to renew all the pipes and fitting in the bilge, there are great plumbing suppliers here and chandelries for the oddball stuff. It should be better than ever soon.

Saturday:
The heat rash is really annoying now, I head off to search for Lanolina Anhidra, but to no avail. I find some other emollients I’m hoping will work.
It’s been very hot in the marina so I decide to cover boat, this cover hasn’t been out of the locker since we were in Langkawi, Malaysia. I can barely remember how it goes on, but it does a great job of cooling the main cabin.
Hopefully I can work in there during the day now.

Paul Collister.

Sunday 26th April 2020:
It’s getting hard to justify being a lazy slob on Sundays now, when I’m doing very little on all of the other days, but today was a very lazy day. Yesterday I had a great long chat with my son Isaac on his 24th birthday. And today I had another lovely long chat with my daughter Yasmin.
I did a lot of reading up on viruses and realised they are bloody complicated things and that the scientists are a long way still from understanding this new Coronavirus. Here in La Paz, the lockdown seems to be working, I heard from a local that the hospital has next to no Covid patients, and that the deaths in town were really low, much lower than normal as car accidents make up a lot of the deaths here, and not many people are out, especially at night as there is a curfew after 10pm for all travel except emergencies. Like most places there hasn’t been much testing going on so it’s hard to know how many people have had it, but as everyone seems to be observing the strict lockdown, it may well be down to a handful of cases now. Of course once they start lifting restrictions here it could / probably will all kick off again. We shall see.
In about 2 weeks time, some airlines are planning to double the number of flights in and out of Mexico.
I used skype to call British Airways in the USA about my cancelled flight, I asked for a refund and within two minutes it was processed, the next day the money was in my account, hats off to BA, so glad I booked direct and missed out on the £5 saving via expedia.
So today I had my usual hour trying to learn a few more Spanish words. I watched a lot of dolphins frolicking around the boat, checked the hammock was still working ok, and had a great time watching boaters getting into trouble with the authorities. Recreational boating is not allowed right now, so going out for a day trip fishing has been banned, yet for some reason about a dozen sports fishing boats headed out this morning, full of Mexican families looking to have a fun day out in the bay fishing and picnicking. I sort of felt for them as they headed back, screaming past Sister Midnight riding high on their bow wave doing about 25 knots when they spotted the police boat and its support Jetski. The happy laughing folks on the speedboats suddenly stopped laughing as they killed the throttle, fell off the plane and then tried to sneak behind our yachts and make their way over to the far side of the bay where they were hoping to sneak in around the back of the authorities. It didn’t work as the JetSki roared over to intercept them, they had to wait until the big motor launch came along side and spent some time investigating them before they were released. This went on for a couple of hours and I saw about 8 boats stopped and interrogated. I have no idea what their punishment was but if you break the curfew it’s a few hundred dollars fine, so this could be similar.

Not long after the sun set and I decided to make another effort to find the north star Polaris. I did try when Jim was out here as the stars were so bright further up in the Sea of Cortez away from the city’s lights. but now I had the laptop and a wealth of online resources. I soon found Ursa Major and followed the two stars at the end down until I found the north star, I checked with the boats compass and it was close enough, I doubt if I could do more than hit a continent if I had to steer using that as my only guide. Those norsemen did pretty well to find there way around with that and a rusty nail hanging from a bit of string.

Monday:
It’s getting hot here now, so I went for swim around the boat at slack water (No current to take me away), the growth on the hull was bad. I swam around and wondered if the boat would be able to get back to the marina with such bad growth. In theory with my new diving certificate/knowledge, I could dive myself and clean things up, but for $40 I will get a local guy to do it soon.

The video above shows the extent of the growth. The prop and bow thruster were much worse, but I powered up the engine and gave them a spin, that removed a lot of the growth. As you can see at the end, it scrapes off quite easily, but it will take a while.

I spent the rest of the day in the hammock reading about Baja California South and hearing all about how they shot the Titanic movie here and how many famous stars from Hollywood would pop down here to party. The area was very popular in the period when gambling was banned in the USA and before it was banned here. Kathy and I visited a cultural centre in Ensenada which used to be a famous casino built by Jack Dempsey, a famous boxer?, possibly funded by AL Capone and frequented by many hollywood stars of the day.

Tuesday:
It’s going to be very hot all week, 37 in cabin today, hotter outside. I headed off to to supermarket early to avoid cycling back in the heat, but sadly by the time I reached the boat on my return the chocolate I bought was liquid and sloshing around inside the wrappers. Interestingly, the hershey’s bars tasted better after a second setting!
I called in to see Mike on SV Elsie Jones on my dinghy ride back to the boat, he’s an interesting guy from Manchester UK, but has been living in Thailand. Like many people he’s stuck here unable to continue onto his South Pacific voyage and now has to worry about where to put his boat for the hurricane season.
I did more swimming, reading and watching the dolphins who now visit every day.

Talking of hurricanes the season has started early, some people are predicting a quiet season this year, I’m not sure why as NOAA are predicting a few more hurricanes than the average, as the oceans are hotter than normal, and warm water is the main ingredient for a successful hurricane. NOAA issued a notice about the possible early formation of a tropical storm that looked rather close for my liking. This caused me to start my hurricane planning a few weeks earlier than I had planned. A bit of research showed me how devastating recent hurricanes have been in the area. My research is ongoing, but I may decide to head north soon, depending on covid. This particular disturbance fizzled out quite quickly.

Wednesday:
Chucked out a few emails to see what was needed from me for some possible programming projects.
Later for dinner I had pasta, now I usually cook my pasta in sea water, but this time when I filled the pan with water there was quite a few bits in the water, I usually ignore these, very small, probably a bit of yesterday’s dinner I missed in the wash? however these dark specs were darting around the pan, closer inspection revealed that they were very very small fish. I was a bit shocked so dumped it and used fresh water. Later I wondered what was wrong with me, I almost had big fish for dinner, so my logic was completely irrational, just like I would love to be able to eat barbequed crickets in a nice Thai sauce as we saw in Phuket, but really struggle with the whole idea.

Thursday:
Got some replies re work, so started to get myself back in the zone. However the holding tank was smelly so made concentrating difficult. I ended up spending the day fixing the toilet/holding tank and cleaning the bilge. Not a lot of fun, but needed to be done. All is good now, however I need to replace a few parts on the head, including a very expensive Y valve.

Friday:
Getting into the work thing now, but not really enjoying it. I can tell how much I’m into the work by how many other jobs I find that are essential to be done asap. For example, while searching through emails to find a work related thread, I noticed just how dull the table in the cabin had become. Work would have to stop while I gave this a polish, of course this only led to other essential cleaning jobs. In fact by the end of the day, the cabin was looking great, but I hadn’t got a lot of work done.

Saturday:
Guilt at the lack of work had me starting early before it got too hot.
I decided to reorganise my work, over the years I had often reorganised things to make it easier, I usually forget what I have done and start all over again. Today will probably be no different. My plan is to go over all the work I did on these projects, refresh the documents and move them and all the code to GitHub, a safe place where I can keep one master copy of everything I do up in the cloud. I’m quietly confident this will work, that is until next year when I forget that’s what I did, and go looking for the code elsewhere and end up in a mess again.

Most evenings at sunset I sit in the cockpit and munch on either homemade guacamole & tostadas, or some fruit. This week has been a disaster, I forgot to buy avocados early on, then the ones I bought mid week refused to ripen, despite the heat. Don’t worry (as if you would), I’m on top of it know, in fact, I may have 6 overripe avocados to get through in two days!

Yesterday on the morning radio net one of the local gringos came on to let us all know the coronavirus thing was a complete hoax (he had the official figures no less!) and we had all been part of the biggest con job ever. Nobody replied to him and the net controller politely moved onto the next subject of ‘Local Assistance’ for anyone wanting to find out where to buy stuff or get services etc.
Quite incredible.

Paul Collister.

I have given this page the title above, not to be a smartass or make a political statement, it’s just I want to make sure I’m reminded of this great wisdom that was recently imparted to me when I look back over the blog in years to come and we are back to more normal times.
Everything is just lovely here, out in the bay it’s very relaxing, quite calm and quiet. The anchor is firmly in place, and I’m popping ashore every 4 days to restock on bread, fruit & veg, and Cerveza Sin Alcohol.

Saturday: Out with the hammock. The temperatures have been steadily rising here, today we are hitting 35 Degrees Celsius. It’s expected to be getting up to the 40s next week.

Sunday: Saturday was exhausting, what with putting the hammock up, adjusting it, and chasing the pillow that blew out and went overboard So I decided to take Sunday off and just relax.
One thing that can be a worry out here is a phenomena they call ‘The La PAz Waltz’, this describes the crazy motion of the boats as they swing around at anchor. The reason it’s weird here is that in the bay we have two main channels separated by a shallow sandbank that runs down the centre, just a few feet below the surface. The bay is quite large, but has a narrow entrance at the end of the bank and consequently the tides can run quite fast, several knots most days.
As I mentioned before the current was enough to cause the boat a few hundred feet in front of me to pull their anchor out and he drifted down and almost hit us. So it’s always a worry that the anchor might come out and then I might drift onto the sandbank, into another boat, or get swept out of the bay with the current. There are several ways to deal with this. Firstly I have a chart plotter showing my position running 24/7 I can look at at any point to see where I am, I drop loads of markers down whenever I think I am at the extreme range of the chain in any new direction.

I have an anchor alarm App on my iPhone that makes a loud horrible klaxon sound when I drift too far from where I’m meant to be. This is a horrible way to be woken up at 3AM I can assure you, especially if it’s just because the iPhone couldn’t get a good GPS fix for a few minutes.
Finally I have the transits I take from the deck. For those who don’t know, transits are imaginary lines I make up between this boat and other objects, usually that don’t move on the shore. I did have a radio mast that lined up perfectly with a yachts mast when the tide was flowing into the bay. However that yacht left. Lining up masts of boats is problematic as unless they swing around the same as me, and none of them do here, then the transit is only good for one state of tide with the wind in a certain direction.
I do have one transit I love here, I have a picture below, when the tide is flooding strong, if I look between the masts of the ketch to port of me, it frames the two masts of the schooner behind it, and behind the schooner, bang in the middle is a third boats mast. It’s very reassuring when these all line up, as they have been doing for the last two weeks, as it means my anchor is well and truly set fast in the mud.

Monday: Off shopping to Chedraui, the big hypermarket where I’m shocked at the checkout to only be allowed to buy 2 cans of beer. It’s not even real beer. I could have bought two cartons of 12 cans each, but I only wanted 6 cans. It seems you can only have two, two cans, two cartons, possibly two 40ft containers of beer, but only two. I don’t really understand this, but I expect it’s bad software in the till that won’t let you have anymore than two items marked as alcoholic. I always hated it at the self service checkout when I had to get approval for my non alcoholic beer, and in America where often you just can’t put cerveza cero through an automated checkout. Come on ’till vendors’, get your act together.
As an aside, one of my first paid programming jobs in the early 80s was writing software for the tills in Austin Reed, on Regent St, London. I wrote a networking protocol that allowed the tills to communicate with an MP/M server and download PLUs and upload transactions. I had to connect all of the tills together and a grand total of the days sales appeared on a big monitor in the boardroom. I was astounded when the grumpy old directors were complaining that they took until 1pm to get their first million pounds of the day into the tills!

Tuesday: I decided with all of this sunshine, I should be making water with the surplus power from the solar panels, The batteries are fully charged by mid morning. The machine hadn’t been run in many months, possibly a year and when I fired it up it wasnt pumping sea water through the system.

Upon further investigation it seemed that there was a problem with the high pressure pump. I pondered on stripping it all down and investigating, but decided instead to make some Guacamole and have a gentle time for the rest of the day and to convert some left over nylon rope into baggywrinkles.

Wednesday: Mike on Ikigai had anchored next to me in the bay, he needed to get some minor repairs done on his engine and we had a great chat, mostly about how crazy many of the yachties were here ignoring the social distancing. I stayed onboard and Mike was in his dinghy while we chatted. I lent mike my outboard to save him rowing ashore.
Time to rebuild the watermaker. The pump came out easy enough and it appeared to be seized, but may have just been very stiff.

One of the bolts snapped off during the process, crevice corrosion again, probably caused by sea water leaking into the pump casing. Fortunatley I had the exact spare on board, which made me think the previous owner was expecting this? I was able to get the piston out and clean everything up and re-assemble the pump. What’s that phrase people often say to me, ‘Don’t give up your day job Paul’. The pump leaked badly and also didn’t pump, making me think the real problem might be in the motor that drives it. It could also be the membrane is so blocked that no amount of pressure will get water through it, but I doubt it.

The watermaker is over 20 years old and so probably due for replacement. I always wanted to build my own using off the shelf components, membranes can be bought easily around the world for under $100, but this unit has special proprietary ones, that will cost $800 to replace, last time I looked.
This is on the back burner now. I’m not going anywhere so no big deal.

Friday: another shopping trip, I bought a six pack of Cerveza Sin Alcohol this time, and that went through no problem. On the way back to Sister Midnight I stopped by to say hi to Mike on Ikigai, and drop off 20 ltrs of water he had asked me to get for him. He’s heading off to the north shortly, hoping to do some charitable work helping the locals who are in remote areas and might be struggling. Mike gave me a very fancy bluetooth speaker, RRP $$$, it had died on him, so I was hoping it might be a simple fix.

Now here’s a note of caution, not all teardowns on youtube are good. This one gets 90% of the way and realises he is doing it all wrong. I got 90% of the way and found out that he was right! bugger, still I managed to get this seemingly one mould piece of kit into lots of bits. I was hoping for a fuse, or a flat battery or something obvious, but Nada, so facing the second defeat of the week it is boxed up and waiting some inspiration before I take it apart again.
I retreated to the Hammock for the rest of the day and watched turtles and dolphins swim by while I read about the Myths and Legends of Baja California.

Thursday: Spending so much time sitting in the cockpit looking out I realised I had a lot of stuff on the back of the boat that didn’t need staring at, all the life saving kit like the Danbuoy, the horseshoe etc aren’t much use when solo and at anchor, so I moved them to the quarter berth where they will be spared the UV degradation. I also set about rewiring and tidying up the multitude of wires that run up to the solar panel and antenna on the rear arch. It’s looking quite sparse out there now and is begging to be polished. I also brought in the self steering rudder as the Marina will want to charge me for the extra foot it takes up sticking out the back of the boat when I finally move in there.

I recently saw Jamie on his ‘Follow the Boat’ vlog making a mat out of rope, this is a bit like baggywrinkles, in the sense of ‘what to do on a boat when you are bored’ I’m never bored, but always planned to do this on a long passage one day to while away the hours on watch. I have done a 5 week passage and never once felt the urge to make baggywrinkles or a doormat, but somehow this piece of rope was screaming out to be made into a rug.

So I decided to get into this slowly and I have started with a small Celtic Knot. I might move onto the harder stuff later, but it’s kind of fun.

On the way back from the shopping trip I took a detour around the anchorage and was taken by how pretty this Canadian ketch was looking.

If you can’t read the next section in a Philip Marlow/Private eye voice, then just skip it, otherwise it’s too silly.

“It had been a while and i was about to run out of the hard stuff, Jimmy the Shark had hinted at a place a few blocks away, that for the right price might sort me out. I made my way over, and was let through the door by a wary old man. There was a grill between us, but he knew why I was there, 140 peso he said, as he slid a bottle of the stuff my way. 70% pure he said, I suspected it had been cut with some cactus juice, maybe aloe vera, but it looked the part. I handed over the money and made a quick exit before anyone took an interest.”

So back to Saturday, and work, and I mean real work. I have been wondering about making some money for a while now, and today I sent out a few emails about projects that I have been asked to get involved in to do with the solar power monitoring systems I built a while back. I’m not sure what my customer is doing now as a result of the virus, but I love the way their solar panels and the wind turbines have just carried on feeding power into the grid and raising invoices without a second thought to Covid-19. Wish I had some systems like that.

Paul Collister.