Countdown on hold

Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico

The usual delays.

While the weather here has been getting warmer, reminding us that it is probably time to be moving on, the prevailing winds are still from the northwest - the direction into which we will be heading.  Local knowledge says that if we wait a while, they will shift favorably in the near future.  Just the excuse we need to stay put a while longer.

The main reason we are still hanging around however, is that Sue has still got a nasty cough and we are reluctant to take off on a 2 or 3 day passage unless we are both feeling our best.  And there is actually no rush - the deadline (hurricane season) for getting into the northern part of the Sea of Cortez is mid-August.  So, for now, we are finding a few more boat projects to do and generally just taking it easy.  With the mid-day temperatures getting up into the low 30s, it is pretty hard not to take it easy.

One project that we had put off till now is re-marking the anchor chain.  For the edification of the non-boaters our there, we like to mark our chain so we can easily tell how much we are letting out when we are anchoring.  Some people use little tell-tale flags and such, but we like to use paint - just seems to hold up longer going through the windlass.  Still, the paint does not last forever, so occasionally we have to refresh the marks.  With this in mind, we hauled out about 300 feet of chain onto the dock and did our artistic best (we put a mark every 25 feet using a system that makes sense to us, even though it probably doesn't make sense to anyone else).  This should hold us for a couple of years.

Before putting the chain back in the locker, I took the opportunity to borrow a grinder (complete with its helpful owner - thanks Mike) to remove a few rusty links from the end of the chain.  This, combined with the new "anchor swivel" that we replaced in San Diego, make for a nice clean, non-rusty connection for our primary CQR anchor.

One other simple chore I tackled was cleaning out the raw-water strainer (a crude filter for the cooling water for the engine heat exchanger).  For a rough idea of how bad the growth is in these semi-topical waters, look at the before and after pictures.  That accumulation of crap was  from just one passage from Cabo San Lucas to Mazatlan.

Our plans?  If the conditions are just right, we could be out of here as early as next week. No promises though!

{GMST}23|16.25|N|106|27.2833|W|Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico|Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico{GEND}