SV Sine Timore: Don’t Panic

Marina Riviera Nayarit, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Nayarit, Mexico

Last Thursday, April 5th, in the middle of a period of never-ending north winds, a perfect weather window opened up for a passage around Cabo Corrientes (Cape Current). This was too good to pass up, so we paid our marina bill and got an early start on a perfect calm morning. We were feeling pretty confident and organized this time, looking forward to a fast, uneventful passage to Bandaras Bay.

For some reason, for the first time in 8 years spent on this boat, I did not check to see if the raw water intake valve was open and, once the engine was going, I did not look to see if there was water coming out of the exhaust. The day before we left, I had turned the valve off so I could clean out the raw water filter and forgot to reopen it. The results were predictable.

As we were slowly motoring through the narrow entrance channel, I realized the exhaust didn’t sound right and quickly confirmed that there was no water flowing. I shut the engine off and hurriedly opened the valve, then restarted the engine - but it was too late! Still no water flowing!

Before the engine had a chance to overheat, I turned around in the channel and headed for shallow water - I didn’t want to block traffic by anchoring in the deep channel. The boat came to a gentle stop, aground on a shallow sand bar. While Susanne put an anchor out (just in case) and kept an eye on the boat, I pulled the impeller out of the red-hot raw water pump and put in a new one - a bit of a struggle with screws that did not want to come out. Fortunately, this seemed to solve the problem and we had water flowing through our cooling system again, and as the engine had just barely gotten up to its normal running temperature when we caught the problem, no real harm was done.

We spent another 15 minutes or so getting the boat off the sandbar, using the engine to drive it off whenever a helpful wake from a passing panga got the boat rocking a bit. From start to finish, we did not lose much more than a half-hour on our departure time. Thank goodness we have a full-keeled boat and can get away with stunts like this.

The actual passage was as advertised. We had a light southerly breeze for most of the way - never enough to sail with. During the night, the winds died completely and conveniently stayed away as we rounded the cape in the early morning. By 10:30 AM we were safely tied to a dock at Marina Riviera Nayarit. We had a surprising following current for most of the way, resulting in a fast (for us) passage, 140 miles in about 24 hours, using low RPMs on the engine. A nice change from some of our struggles on passages last month.

Note: In spite of the light to non-existent winds, the seas were somewhat lumpy with some odd short-period waves that had my crew sick for a lot of the passage. Still, for rounding Cabo Corrientes, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Now that we are in Bandaras Bay, a busy cruising destination, we are hoping to get a few issues taken care of. Of course, we had to wait until after the weekend to get started.

Our foresail is now at PV Sailing, a sail-loft that will re-stitch the halyard connection at the head of the sail, and anything else that looks like a potential problem. Our ailing Raymarine radome is at a local dealer where they will see if they can fix it - I am not too confident that they are going to be successful as they did not sound very positive. Raymarine’s normal solution for every problem is to send the equipment to their repair facilities in the USA - not very convenient! We will see...

Meanwhile it is back to life in paradise once again. And for us, it really is. Compared to Central America where we have spent so much time lately, it is much cooler here. During the day it is still warm, close to 30 degrees. At night though, it cools off to 17 to 19 degrees, making it perfect for sleeping on an un-air conditioned boat.