La Paz, BCS, Mexico
We have been very busy for the last two weeks.
Packages started to arrive and we had to scramble to deal with it all. The first to arrive was my new Kindle, which was the easiest to deal with - interesting to note that when Amazon says you will get your Kindle on a certain date, you get it on that date! It took only three days from order till delivery.
The big packages arrived on schedule as well, although it did take a bit longer (much bigger boxes that we did not feel like shelling out the big bucks to get here any faster).
The largest of these boxes of course, was the new dinghy. Here you can see me happily unwrapping my gift. Only two weeks later, we got around to putting some air into it. The dinghy looks good and works as advertised, but as usual our trusty Mercury outboard was not so cooperative. After sitting in the hot sun for 4 months, what fuel was left in it seems to have turned to some kind of glue and the fuel filter actually broke in half. After searching the town of La Paz from one end to the other, I did find a suitable replacement filter (only about 10 times the size of the old one) and after completely disassembling and reassembling the motor, it is purring like a kitten again. In our one little test out in the wind and rough waters just outside the marina, the dinghy appears to be much faster and more stable than the old one. There is just one test left - to see if it will actually fit on deck.
A large amount of the time I spent over the last few days has been with installing our new chartplotter and radar radome. After numerous conversations with people at West Marine and Raymarine, assuring me that the new unit would fit exactly in the space of the old one, it turns out that the hole had to be just a bit wider. My Dremel tool took care of this problem and I soon had it looking good. Exchanging the old and new radomes was not technically challenging, but did require extracting the old cable and running the new one through all the various twists and turns that get it from the back of the boat to, well, near the back of the boat. The 10 meter cable was just exactly the right length, but it did require moving everything out of the cockpit locker (lazarette) and me squirming into the bowels of the boat again to get it fed through.
The wiring was basically the same as for the old chartplotter and it all basically worked first time, although I have been battling with some intermittent signals on our NMEA interface between the Nexus instruments and the new C95 chartplotter - I think I have that working OK now. Note: For all the upgrades done, it really does not look much different than it did before (If you could see the back of that radome, you would see the word "Digital" written on it - the only evidence that anything has changed.
We worked on lots of other little projects as well.
I installed a new starter battery. This time I went with a maintenance free AGM type battery, mostly because it is installed in a box that has little or no ventilation and I don't want a build up of gasses in there. Because our main house battery bank is made up of regular lead-acid, non-maintenance-free batteries, I have installed a new Balmar Digital Duo charger to allow different charging programs for the two banks. I already had a similar arrangement for our windless battery, so now we have dueling Duo chargers - pretty cool huh?
We have mounted most of the equipment in the cockpit area and now have the bimini up - we now have some shade in the cockpit again.
Oh yah, the last of the sails is now up - not a difficult job once you figure out which way is up. The foresail, with its newly installed matching beige Sunbrella UV strip, is now functional. As you can see from the pictures below, the boat is looking ready to go to sea at a moment's notice.
We hoisted the main sail a couple of days ago so that I could string the reefing lines. All went smoothly until, as we were lowing the sail, the wind piped up and made a shambles of our nice neat flaking job of stowing the sail. I don't know how the weather gods always know just when to attack. In spite of that setback, the sail is down and stowed, the reef lines are in place and we are ready to go.
With a lot of the work done now, we have started making trips to the local grocery stores to get some provisions. For much of the last week, we had run out of food and were forced to eat out a lot (a real hardship, I know). It did not help that Susanne found some bugs in some of our older food stocks and had to throw most everything away - she has been busy cleaning out the pantry and deciding what she wants to re-stock.
Since we usually go to the stores early in the morning (we prefer to do the long walks before the heat of the day), the aisles are not nearly so busy and the produce has not been picked over quite so much. The parking lots look pretty deserted at that time of day.
As for the weather, it just keeps getting better. Now that the hurricane season is officially over, the daily temperatures have been steadily falling. The highs are mostly around 30 and it cools off very nicely at night. This is probably the best time of year to be here. Regardless, looking at the weather reports from back in Edmonton, we are very happy to be here right now.
As for our plans, the only thing really holding us here in La Paz is the Magnun charger/inverter that we ordered some 3 weeks ago. It has still not arrived and I have to keep extending our stay with the marina office - they have been extremely helpful and have told us we are OK in our current slip until the end of November if we need it - hopefully it will not come to that, although living in the marina is very addictive. It seems the longer we are here, the harder it is to leave.
{GMST}24|9.3066|N|110|19.6068|W|La Paz, BCS, Mexico|La Paz, BCS, Mexico{GEND}
After a good night's sleep at Playa La Bonanza, we were ready for our crossing of the Sea of Cortez. The anchorage overnight was perfectly calm and we awoke to a beautiful sunrise on the long, deserted beach. We left at around 8:30AM, bound for Mazatlan.
As we approached the breakwater entrance to Estero Sabalo, at 8:45AM, the wind died and we had completely slack tide conditions, as predicted.
We made a non-dramatic docking at Marina Mazatlan where we are currently moored on dock 3 - nice and quiet but a long way from the washrooms. Our first order of business was to find breakfast, then take a long nap.
