Rain

Yesterday afternoon in La Paz, it rained. A lot. I was outside grilling shrimp as it got darker and darker. Then it started raining, just a little at first, but in about three minutes it was pouring. Art came out and held an umbrella over my head while the shrimp finished cooking, and then we fled inside. Judging by our impromptu rain gauge (a pyrex pan left beside the barbeque), we got more than 2" in about 45 minutes.

The house we are house-sitting for the summer isn't normally waterfront property, but yesterday afternoon, it was riverfront. These views are from our second floor balcony looking out at what is normally the street:

If you look at the cement wall in the center of the picture, you can get an idea of how brief and intense this storm was - the wall didn't even get entirely wet:

New Toy

While I was back in the US recently, I bought a lensbaby kit. I have some experience using a view camera, where you can alter the angle between the film and the lens (among other things), and thought it might be fun to be able to do something similar with my SLR. It is:




I'm going to need a lot more practice with it, but I'm looking forward to using it in Mazatlán this winter.

Parts

I was sewing a screen for the companionway this morning, having finally gotten frustrated enough with the mosquito net we'd been using to keep the cats inside (which has an annoying habit of falling on your head while you're pushing it out of the way to go in or out) to do something about replacing it, when the presser foot on my sewing machine slewed off to the side. The thumb screw that holds it to the presser mechanism was stripped. Unfortunately, that's one of the few parts for the machine that I don't have a spare for. Crap. I was really on a roll with the companionway screen, too.

Off to Ace hardware I went. Juan, their resident expert in threaded things, had about 20 parts that were almost right, but nothing that would actually work. One thing about La Paz that can make it hard to find your way around, is that only maybe 20% of the intersections are signed with street names. Of these, 10% are turned the wrong way. So you find your way around counting blocks from where you are. Well, I do, anyway. Thus, I always carry a map. Juan drew an x on the map directing me to Taller de Maquinas de Coser, three blocks over and four blocks down from the hardware store. He also wrote the name of the place down on a scrap of paper, so that I'd know it when I saw it.

Juan's map and keywords were good - I found a sign on the courtyard wall of a house just about where he said it would be with "Maquinas de Coser" on it. In I went. It was a little upholstery shop in the courtyard of a house. After I was able to explain what I was looking for, the guy who was working there said "uno momento" and disappeared into the house. About five minutes later, he came out, very apologetic that it wasn't slotted like my original part. It was, although sans slot, otherwise exactly the thing I needed. I thanked him profusely and asked how much. 10 pesos. Amazing.

It worked, and our screen is almost done. Now I know where to go for sewing machine parts. I am very glad this afternoon for two things: that we have a car and that we took the time to learn a decent amount of Spanish. Without the car, this would have taken at least three times as long, and cost at least 10 times as much as my 10 peso part. Not to mention hot - the sewing machine broke around noon, so I was doing this at the hottest part of the day. Without the Spanish, barely past basic though mine is, it would have been flat impossible. That's been well worth the work and classes we've put into it.

Isla San Francisco

With Art back in town and a favorable weather forecast, we decided to take off for a short cruise on June 2nd. Our friend Crit came along on her boat, too. This was great, both for the company and because we shared meals pretty much every night, which meant only half the cooking and cleanup for each boat as we otherwise would have had.

Our first stop was Caleta Partida. We've been in this anchorage quite a few times, and it remains one of our favorites. The water, though, was still too cold for comfortable swimming - I need to be really, really hot before I'll voluntarily jump into 24c (75f) water. It was hot, but it wasn't that hot. Still, there was plenty to do - we spent some time enjoying our new outboard motor and tooling around the anchorage. That was a great way to create some breeze in the middle of the day, when there was none otherwise, but we both got a wee bit baked from the sun and the fact that we stupidly forgot to bring any water with us.

After two days in Partida, we headed up to Isla San Francisco. Isla San Francisco is a drowned, extinct volcano. The anchorage is in the crater. It has beautiful white sand beaches. It is so very much the perfect Sea of Cortez anchorage that it is the cover of the main cruising guide for this part of the world. It is, in short, gorgeous. I'll shut up now and post some pictures. These next five were taken by Art, as I cleverly managed to break a toe our second afternoon at the island - no hiking for me.


Arione at anchor with the Sierra Gigante mountains behind:










Looking across at the Sierra Gigante, early in the morning:



Crit's boat, JASDIP*, at anchor at Isla San Francisco:




*JASDIP = Just Another $#!^^y Day in Paradise

Driving down Baja

Art took four days getting down Baja - if we'd both been on the trip, we could have done longer days, but by yourself, it's harder, so four days broke it into manageable chunks. Day one was from El Cajon to El Rosario. He had a car full of stuff - boat parts for friends and things that we either can't find here or that are much more expensive than in the US. I've brought this sort of stuff back by plane before, and have never been charged any duty - I just hand the customs guys a copy of our import permit for the boat and that's that. Unfortunately the customs guys at Tecate had either never seen one of these permits (seems unlikely) or didn't want to deal with it. Either that or the guys at both the Cabo and La Paz airports are doing it wrong, because they charged Art duty on every last thing he had in the car. Not a huge amount of money, but it had to be paid in cash, which he didn't have, so finding an ATM and settling up took a while - good thing he'd planned on short days.

El Rosario was a stop that a lot of people had recommended. Boy were those recommendations spot on. The Baja Cactus hotel had beautiful rooms for just a little more than $30 (US).

Baja Cactus:


From El Rosario, it was on to Guererro Negro, then up and over the mountains to the Loreto on the Sea of Cortez side of Baja.

This was the view from Art's room in Loreto. He arrived in La Paz early the following afternoon.

It was a long drive, but now we have a car. Totally worth it (easy for me to say as I wasn't the one doing the driving).

Dockwise

The Saturday before Art took off for San Francisco, we helped our neighbors on Lily, a Beneteau 48, load their boat onto Dockwise. Dockwise is a service that ships boats all over the world on semi submersible vessels. It's like a cross between a ship and a dry dock. They pull into a port (in our case, Pinchilinque) and fill their ballast tanks so that their deck is low enough for the deepest draft boat they plan to load.

The dockwise ship arrived in La Paz with several boats already aboard from previous stops:



Lily went in to port of the boat that is the furthest right in this photo:



The boats all drive on, their crews leave, welders construct stands under the boats, and they pump the water out, raise the boat to its normal waterline and take off. It's pretty cool, and in our neighbors' case, saved them a minimum of a couple of months of upwind sailing to get back to the Pacific Northwest. This way they get to spend the summer up there, rather than getting there. They'll unload in Nanaimo.

This boat loaded behind us:


It was a really interesting way to spend the morning. They took us all off the boat via a launch to Costa Baja, and we caught a cab from there back to our marina.

Done!

The decks are done. We went back in the water on Saturday, May 7th. Took the boat back to Marina Palmira and started the drudgery of moving out of the rental and getting the boat put back together. We got out of the rental by the 12th, but the putting back together process is still underway to some extent - not only had just about every single thing aboard been moved to the middle of the boat so that the guys could access the underside of the decks, but all the stuff that had migrated over to the casita had to be reabsorbed. I'd say we're at about 90% at this point.

We've decided to stay in La Paz for the summer - the more we talked to people about Mazatlan, the hotter and steamier it sounded. We'll go to the mainland after hurricane season. Art's going to fly up to San Francisco and retrieve our car this weekend - Marina Palmira is definitely nicer than Marina de La Paz, but it's a way out of town, so the car, while not absolutely necessary, will be very nice to have. Hopefully, when Art gets back, we'll have a chance to get up into the islands before the really hot weather gets here. Redoing the decks sort of ate our cruising season this year, but the project was well worth it.

Decks:






We are extremely happy with how they came out.

Decks, Cont'd

The decks are coming along.



They're only able to glue down two planks at a time on each side, so it's rather slow going, but they're looking really nice, don't you think?

Once everything gets glued down, the job should speed up again - caulk, sand and reinstall fittings (we're hoping to do that last one in the water, rather than on the hard - cooler, and no ladders involved, which would mean I could help).

Meanwhile, I'm in LA for the week, taking care of some states based business, including our taxes. Leave it to me to manage to schedule a trip north during a cold snap - it's supposed to be in the 40's tonight. Brrrr. I have definitely become acclimatized to Mexico.

Off with the old

We're about two and a half weeks into the project, and the old teak is all off the deck. It was quite an involved process. Art's been helping with the work, both to see how it's done and to keep the cost down. He's also been taking some pictures. Apologies in advance for the scarcity (and size) of said pictures - when we're on an internet connection where we're not paying by the mb, I'll post more.

First, all the hardware had to come off. There is a lot of stuff on the deck of a Mason 44. Chainplate covers, stanchions, deck fills, hose bibs, blocks, track, etc. All this is through bolted, so the first step was to empty out the lockers and take down all of the headliners under the deck down below. Then everything has to be removed, numbered, bagged and stored. The result is a boat that looks like this:



While that was happening, Reggie and his helper were going over the deck, removing the thousands of screws that attached it to the fiberglass substrate. Some people don't remove the screws, but instead just cut them off. This is a bad idea - it leaves thousands of tiny holes in your deck, and, if you're doing paint or fiberglass rather than teak, the screws can print through the new surface over time. We've seen boats where this has happened, and it's not pretty. Some people will just pry the screws up when they remove the teak. Also a bad idea - you can actually delaminate the upper layer of fiberglass decking from the balsa core, and that's a very expensive and difficult thing to fix.

Then the teak has to be pulled chipped chiseled off the deck. Masons are very well built boats. Correspondingly, even after 22 years, the teak was extremely firmly attached to the deck. Art said the average size of the pieces they were able to remove was ~2" long. It was pretty tough going. Eventually, they got all of the teak up, and were left with a bare fiberglass deck with bits of mastic adhering to it. That all had to be scraped/ground off. Messy.



Interestingly, we did not have fiberglass non skid under the teak. I'd heard that a lot of these boats did, as the non skid pattern was in the molds used to build the boat. On our boat, Ta Shing apparently ground it down before installing the teak. That's probably part of why the teak was so well stuck.

Once they got all of the mastic scraped/ground off of the fiberglass, it was time for one last grinding to smooth everything down, and they were ready to lay the new teak.

Oh, but what's that? This isn't teak caulk! It's teak cleaner. Crap! The distributor sent the wrong stuff down from San Diego. Luckily, Reggie was able to sell the cleaner to a marine business here in town, and the distributor got the (we hope) correct stuff on a truck that should get here tomorrow or Friday. So, for now, they're just dry fitting the planks. Once we have actual caulk, they'll move on to the next step, which is gluing them down. Stay tuned!

To the Yard

There are two types of boaters, it's sometimes said: those who have run aground and those who will run aground. Monday, we became the former.

Our trip to the yard where we'll have Arione's teak decks replaced started off fine. We got off to a fairly early start from the little casita we're renting, get down to the boat, schlep the laundry and a last few things for the house up to the rental car, top off the water tanks and untie. There's no marked channel from Marina de La Paz south to the Singlar yard, but we have, we think, a pretty good handle on the route we need to take. The tide's going out, though, so we need to be careful. At first, everything's fine – 12, 15, 17 feet showing on the depth sounder, amazingly, actually matching what we're seeing on the chart. Then, things start getting skinny. We showing 8 feet, then 6, then 5 then... uh, oh. We're in the mud. Art backs off and tries another direction. Crap. In the mud again. The bottom's soft, so there's not a lot of worry about breaking the boat, but this is waaay too skinny for our tastes. We try yet another direction, and with a sickening sort of slurping feeling, we're hard aground. On a dropping tide. This is not good. If we have to wait to float off, we're going to be here until late afternoon, and still we'll have no idea what direction to go. We try gunning the engine in reverse. Nope. Heeling the boat over with the boom. Nope. Putting up the jib and seeing if the wind might take us off. Not a chance.

We call Reggie, who's doing the work on the decks. He says he'll try and get someone from the yard to come out and help, but they don't get in until 9:00, so it would likely be 10:00, with even less water, by the time they get to us. We hail the marina. At first, they say they can't get to us until 10:00 either, but Art points out the situation with the tide, and they say they'll get someone right out. A few minutes later, two pangas with guys in blue marina uniforms are headed our way. We get lines attached, and they start pulling. And pulling. And pulling. The boat heels over and I hear things crashing off the counters below, so I run down and put stuff away before it breaks. I am, at this point, starting to get a little freaked out. As Art pointed out, this wasn't exactly helping, but that's just where my brain seems to want to go. I have visions of us stuck here for days, waiting for the tides to come up. But what if this was a really high tide? What were the tides doing over the last few days? How could I not have checked. Hell, what were we even thinking, setting off into an uncharted bay on a falling tide. We are, clearly, idiots. Also, we have no idea what this is going to cost. What if it winds up being a salvage job? (a salvage job is a very expensive, complicated maritime law thing related to whether or not the boat's actually in danger.) Do these guys even know where the deep water is? My brain is doing me no favors here, going off on the worst possible tangents. After about 40 minutes, the pangas get us free. Those three guys just refused to give up (which is what I told the office at the marina when I stopped in today to leave a tip for them). We are both incredibly relieved.

We call Reggie again, and tell him we'll mill around in the marked channel until he can get a boat out to guide us in. He does one better than that, and gets a boat and an extra guy who has been in and out of Singlar a whole bunch of times on his own boat, which draws even more than we do. This guy comes aboard and sends us way up to the top of the bay to cross over to the channel which runs pretty much nowhere near where we thought it was along the Mogote (peninsula on the west side of Bahia de La Paz). It takes a long time, as we're sort of feeling our way along, dead slow, but we do eventually get to the head of the dredged, marked channel into Singlar. In addition to being incredibly reassuring, our helper (Bob? Bill? Why am I so bad at names?) Rob is good company. He left for San Diego later that afternoon, but we know which boat is his and are so buying him a drink (or several) when he gets back.

Of course, by the time we get to Singlar, the water is too low for them to get us out – the slings on the lift can't be lowered enough to get them under Arione. Reggie runs me back to Marina de La Paz so that I can take our rental car back to avoid being charged for an extra day. I get us checked out of the marina. Oh, and the towing bill? Just over $100 U.S. What a relief.

Decks

Arione is not a new boat. She's well past old enough to vote and could get a drink if she had the ability to order one. She has teak decks. Teak decks that were, regrettably, but standard for the time she was built, fastened with approximately five million screws through the balsa cored fiberglass nonskid decks that were molded into the boat for people who didn't want teak. Of whom there were very few, judging from the messages I've read on the Mason mailing list over the past 10 years. Most people with these boats have either dealt with their decks or are wondering how they will deal with them. We've known since we bought her that at some point, the decks were going to be an issue.

We figured at some point we'd have to replace the teak decks with painted nonskid. Which would have been functional, but a little sad. This is a boat that wants pretty decks, and paint is not particularly pretty. What we didn't know was that we were going to be in La Paz, where there is a guy who specializes in redoing teak decks. He took us around and showed us a lot of his work on other boats. It's beautiful. Bonus - he glues the teak down. There will be screws and bungs in the edge pieces, but that is something like 95% fewer screws into the deck than we have now.

Replacing a teak deck is never going to be a bargain proposition, but he's doing it for us at a price we can afford. Art's going to help with the labor, and I'll inventory the hardware as it comes off, so that reduces the labor a bit. Through a local mailing list, we've found a short term rental that's not too dear.

The work starts Monday. We'll rent a car this weekend and move all of the stuff that needs to be off the boat into the rental. I'm psyched.

Carnaval!

Carnaval in La Paz runs through tonight. It started last Thursday. The Maleçon is pretty much shut down, and lined on both sides with booths selling food, beer, drinks, souvenirs and games.

For some reason, I really get a bang out of the balloon vendors. They look like they're carrying an impossible amount of stuff until you remember that what they're carrying is mostly, well, air. Still, I'm guessing that many mylar balloons has got to be pretty heavy.

Balloon Sellers

Most of the games involve shooting things or fishing them out of a pool of water.

There are also lots and lots of rides.

Things get going around 4:00 in the afternoon and get more and more raucous with music and dancing until the whole thing shuts down sometime well after 3:00. This has made getting any sleep an interesting proposition, as our marina is right downtown and it's been too hot to close the hatches at night. However, since someone either re-aimed or muted the freak show loudspeaker that was blasting "La niña más pequeña del mundo!" over and over at approximately 20,000 db on Thursday and Friday nights, it's not too bad.

(I have no idea why Mary Poppins is on this sign.
I'm also pretty sure "la niña mas pequeña" is
bigger than that. By quite a bit.)

The last three nights of Carnaval, there are parades. We went to the first one, on Sunday and watched from the street. That was fun, but the crowd was so dense it took us about an hour and a half to walk the mile back to our marina. And, in this mass of people all pressed together and moving different directions, we kept seeing women with strollers, usually trying to get from one side of the street to the other. It was wild. And I was a little afraid for the kids.

We went to last night's parade as well, but this time we had seats on the balcony at a restaurant above the action. Much better view, less claustrophobia, food and fun people. Much better. Unfortunately, set back a bit from the street, so it was hard to throw eggs at the parade. Not actual eggs - in La Paz (and who knows, perhaps in other parts of Mexico as well) they sell hollowed out eggs filled with confetti to throw.

Eggs

It's very festive. For some reason, the crowd was quite a bit thinner last night, so the walk home wasn't bad at all.

Some floats:




I believe these three ladies were the queen of Carnaval and her court:







There was a kids court as well:





Because where there are pelicans, there is guano, I like the realism on this one:



We were at the tail end of the parade route, so many of the participants, including, I suspect, this guy who got off of one of the floats and came up to see us in the restaurant, were pretty well lubed.

Caleta Partida

Art's son Todd is down visiting this week, so we wanted to take him out to the islands. We went to Caleta Partida, which we're been past a couple of times, but never visited. Nice spot. The coromuels cooperated (by not piping up) and we had two very pleasant nights there. Unfortunately, it's been uncharacteristically cloudy (it even rained a little yesterday afternoon and this morning), but it was warm, and the afternoons brightened up fairly reliably.



Before we left La Paz, we bought an outboard for our dinghy. We'd been trying to be purists and get by with just rowing our (hard) dinghy. That works fine when it's calm, but with any sort of wind or chop, it takes a really long time to get anywhere. We found a 2.5 HP Mercury at a shop here. Outboards are about twice as expensive here as they are in the states, but short of driving up there and bringing it back (hard to do, even if we had a car, which we don't) there's not really any good way to bring one down. So we paid up, and now have the world's tiniest four stroke outboard sitting on our stern rail. It works great, especially with the dinghy dogs on the Trinka. We aren't going to set any speed records, but it beats the heck out of rowing everywhere.

Todd and I each went for a paddle in the kayak - Caleta Partida has a passage at the back of it that leads between Isla Espiritu Santu and Isla Partida - it's too shallow except at high water to even get the dinghy through, but since the kayak draws about four inches, you can get pretty far back in it. We played around with the outboard on the dinghy (under the pretense of breaking it in), and did a lot of reading and lounging around. After the past two weeks, it was just what I needed.


They're not kidding when they talk about gin clear water. It felt like I was paddling around in a very large puddle of Bombay Sapphire. Except that wouldn't have smelled very good:

We have an inflatable kayak (the double/single one all the way at the bottom) with a frame and a backbone. It is one of my very favorite toys.


Sunrise in Caleta Partida:




On the way back to La Paz, we were boarded by the Mexican Navy. At least we think they were the Navy - they never actually identified themselves, but the uniforms and automatic weapons were sort of a dead giveaway. At first, we thought they were trying to sell us pictures of our boat (our Spanish, while a lot better, is still bad), as two of the guys had digital cameras and were snapping away like mad, but when we tried to tell them we already had a lot of pictures of our boat, it quickly became clear that that wasn't what they were interested in. They asked us all about our safety equipment, checked our paperwork (thankfully not dinging us for not having updated our crew list with Todd's name, which I think is technically required, but seemed like an awful lot of work for a three day trip), and then had Art complete some sort of customer satisfaction survey. He answered "¡muy bien!" to everything - with a guy holding an AK-47 about 5 feet away, really, what else was he going to check?

We're back in La Paz at Marina Palmira for a few more days. Next week, we'll move to Marina de La Paz, which finally has space for us. That's much more convenient to downtown, restaurants, etc. Marina Palmira is nice, but it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere, and you have to take a taxi or the three times a day shuttle to get anywhere. The bus, at 8 pesos, is much less expensive than a taxi, and more fun, too.

Todd goes home tomorrow. It was kind of a bummer that the weather was so cloudy and cool for the week of his visit - it was in the 70's and sunny all week in Menlo Park where he lives, but it sure was great to have him here.