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.