Wednesday 2nd June 2021.
I’m getting ready to leave tomorrow, I will need fuel and some food, so I decide to check out the big municipal market before I leave. I’m on deck about to retrieve the bike when my neighbour points out that I have a visitor on the top of my mast. Looking up I can see a nest has appeared. The area that’s available up there is only the size of a beer mat, yet it looks like a ‘Mourning Dove’ has moved in. Apparently they can build a nest in a day if needed, typically 1-2 days.
I’m no expert on these things, but I may be soon.
I climb the mast to investigate and as I approach I can see the mother bird right in front of me, she stares for a few seconds then flies off, revealing a big egg she was sitting on. I take a picture and retreat. Not before I ponder slinging the egg over into the sea and brushing the nest away. I decide there’s no need to make a rash decision just yet, I will go to the market and ponder.
The market is great, one of the best I have seen in Mexico so far. In my mind, I’m optimistically wondering if the chick might hatch while I’m out shopping, and be ready to fly away in a couple of days, I have no idea on these matters. However, I’m struggling to justify killing the baby dove and distressing the mother just so I can meet an arbitrary deadline of being in La Paz by Monday. I can actually wait here for a couple of weeks, it’s slightly cheaper, but I won’t get to spend as much time with my new friends in La Paz as I had hoped.
One neighbour, and a couple of online friends have suggested I be brutal and explain to the mother she needs to start again in another place. A worry is that I could be stuck here for weeks, and then if a hurricane appears I may not be able to make the crossing in time to prepare the boat for my flight home. All to save a chick, that has a low chance of survival here anyway.
As I ponder this, I become acutely aware that I’m wandering through the poultry section of the market and there are hundreds of birds in various stages of dismemberment hanging and stacked all around me. There’s probably worse than Pollo here if I looked deeper. I don’t eat chicken or any meat anymore, so I didn’t feel an immediate guilt or duplicity about this, but I have eaten more than enough in the past. It seems we have a problem killing little pretty fluffy vulnerable things, best let them grow up and get tasty first.
From the market I visit the art gallery which is now open, they only have a small exhibition on but it’s amusing and reminds me of the work an artist friend does in London.
The other museums seem to be closed so I cycle down to the industrial dock area, I’m curious to see where the ferry to Stone Island is. This is supposed to be a great place to visit, miles of lovely beaches, but I’m confused because none of the islands here have any real big beaches. It turns out that it’s not an island at all, just a bit of coast that’s difficult to get to. I feel very cheated and want to complain to some kind of standards body. Surely the definition of an island should be easy to enforce.
I find the ferry terminal, but now feel that I would rather cycle the 25 miles or so needed to get to the beach rather than take a fraudulent ten minute island boat ride.
Friday 4th June.
The mother is still sitting on her egg(s), I’m a little wiser having met people who have had the same issue, two sailors have advised being brutal, another explained how he decided to wait and enjoyed watching the babies hatch in a nest inside his mainsail cover, then fly away. I’m with him on this one but worried his chicks took 2 weeks to learn to fly, I expect mine will be advanced learners. I also heard there’s more than a 50% chance a predator will attack the nest, survival rate is low for chicks, hence the mother’s nest 5-6 times a year I’m told. Somehow the idea of a pelican, or frigate solving my problem doesn’t seem so bad. Nature’s way?
For now I have put out a call to refrigeration engineers to come and fix the fridge, that’s going to take a few days, should they turn up, and I may have to wait for parts, then we can reassess the situation. I’m not sure if these birds are migratory, but if so, most countries have strict rules about approaching / disturbing their nest, in the USA and possible Canada, I think you can be imprisoned for interfering, I have read of people having to leave their boats and move ashore. Fridge man just called to say he will arrive on Monday and can work on my fridge, so that’s good.
A local diver has just finished cleaning the bottom of the boat, he spent an hour underwater, he tells me the antifoul is very good, just a few small barnacles at the stern and that my anodes are all good. All this for $40.
There are a few boats here, that the owners have left for the hurricane season and gone home. I wonder how bad it would be to relocate a nest to their boats? 😉
So I have a free weekend now, I have no work, not many boat jobs, and miles and miles of fantastic beaches and eateries, I guess I will just have to find a way to cope.
The weekend.
Later on Friday I noticed a lot of emails arriving, after an hour I had over 5000 messages from Microsoft (MSN) telling me I was spamming them. I shut my mail server down and started to investigate.
It turns out my server (I rent from Amazon) has been hacked. The email server I configured is secure, I put a lot of effort into that, but I can see ways to improve now. The problem comes from WordPress, at some point I had used a plugin (some fancy code that gives your site bells and whistles) that had installed malicious software onto my server, allowing baddies to upload more evil code at a later date. I actually host about 10 websites on my server, mostly old or test sites I play with. One of them, a wordpress site I used to have at bluehost was the source of the infection, in fact it was almost certainly infected there, possibly by another user on the shared server. The file dates point to this. So it was only the websites on the server that were vulnerable, however the wordpress sites, in fact probably all the sites have the ability to send emails, and that was the hackers intention it would seem, so last week around half a million Wells Fargo Phishing emails left my server for the users of MSN. Microsoft blocked my IP fairly quickly and sent me complaint emails for each one they received. I also had about 25,000 emails, backed up in queues waiting to be delivered.
I spent most of the weekend trying to figure all of this out, and I hope my site is secure again, but the nature of the hack makes it hard to be certain, without re-installing wordpress on all my sites (3 in total). We shall monitor it closely. I also will be throttling my email server so it can’t send more than 1 email a minute or so, once I work out the syntax. One of the side effects of this is that my emails might not get through to people, or end up in junk folders until I re-establish my servers credentials with the spam agencies.
I managed to fit a trip to the beach to cool both days though, so not all work.
And a visit to the supermarket.
Monday and I have a cold fridge again, Raffa, the local fix everything engineer refilled the gas for £50, but tells me the unit is 11 years old and needs to be replaced. The connections are leaking oil and the evaporator is rusting. I might get a few more months before it needs to be refilled. This could be expensive. But for now I have cold Cerveza sin Alcohol.
Paul Collister