Zihuatanejo

Zihuatanejo, Mexico

If ever there was a place designed to make you forget your troubles, it is Zihuatanejo.

It is a beautiful anchorage, a safe place to land and leave your dinghy and there are an endless number of restaurants and bars serving cold drinks and incredible Mexican food.  It is not hard to understand how some cruisers spend weeks or even months here.  The weather is still warm during the day, but it is a lot cooler at night than where we have been lately - lovely for sleeping on the boat.

My first task was to find a way to get our mainsail functional again - I didn’t want to continue up this coast without it, if it was at all possible.  I was able to get the sail track off the mast and rolled up as best I could. It became very evident where the problem lies. The entire track has become brittle and it takes very little effort to break chunks out of it, which is exactly what the sail slides did.  Interesting enough, the catamaran anchored next to us, who we first met back in Chiapas, have the same Tides Marine system and they had exactly the same failure, four days out of Panama on their way to the South Pacific - they turned around and aborted the passage.  We feel lucky to have had the problem so close to a safe harbour.

Fortunately for us, the original sail track on the mast takes the same shape and size of sail slides as the Tides Marine track.  With the track removed, and a jury-rigged track stop (made from a piece cut off of the Tides Marine track), we were able to untangle the mainsail and get all but the bottom two slides into the mast track.  This should make the sail usable, although limited to a double or triple reef - this is OK since we rarely sail with more than a double reefed mainsail anyway.

At this point in time, we are pretty well a fully functional sailboat again, ready for the next challenge.  In preparation for an imminent departure, we had 60 gallons of diesel and 50 gallons of water delivered to the boat yesterday. Now we are once again just waiting for an ideal weather window.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, we will do a bit of provisioning, with a possible departure on Wednesday.

{GMST}17|38.128|N|101|33.28|W|Zihuatanejo, Mexico|Zihuatanejo, Mexico{GEND}