In Pursuit of Reflection By MichaelLA PAZ, MEXICO

Me, standing on an 8-inch block of wood to
reach the boot stripe I'm painting.

Standing ashore and looking back at her, I’m always pleased to note that Del Viento is a fine looking boat. But approaching her in a dinghy over the past couple years, the nearer we got, the rougher she looked. It became increasingly clear that she sorely lacked cosmetic attention.

 

Her hull and topsides were rough and chalk-like. Everything soaked into her porous surfaces and left a stain. Her 36-year-old gelcoat looked like 36-year-old gelcoat. The turquoise ornament and boot stripes were worn, chipped, and faded. Our pending haul-out represented an opportunity to remedy this.

Back in my 20s, when I lived aboard the first Del Viento, my liveaboard neighbors took sandpaper to the hull of their Passport 47. It was the first time I’d heard about very fine grit sandpaper and wet sanding. I was shocked to see this method bring a high shine to Mimosa’s gelcoat.

So twenty years later, I bought a lot of sandpaper, sheets and sheets of the 400-, 600-, and 1500-grit stuff suitable for wet sanding. For days in the Guaymas boat yard I stood on scaffolding and ran my 1/3-sheet electric sander over the hull with water everywhere (don’t do this at home, I nearly destroyed the cheap corded sander, went through nearly half-a-can of WD-40 to keep it going). White gelcoat residue ran down my arms and covered my hat. In the 110-degree heat, it felt good.

Slowly, a smooth, shiny finish emerged. At this point I taped and painted the ornament stripe and boot stripe a dark, dark blue. Then I used my buffer to first apply a liquid polish and finally a paste wax. It took more than a week of work and my arms were ready to fall off, but the results are astounding. Del Viento could almost slip undetected into a gaggle of new boats at the Annapolis Sailboat Show--sort of. I've yet to do the same to the gelcoat surfaces of our cabin top.

Next up is the story about the final major yard project. This one didn’t take the most time, but it was the most curious of the projects by far…

--MR

 

Caught in the moment--Frances reacts to something she ate
at a Guaymas taco stand.

Eleanor and Sophia (of Dawn Treader) and Frances at a fancy beachside
restaurant in San Carlos where we celebrated Carla's (Dawn Treader)
birthday.

This picture sort of captures the shine of the polished gelcoat.
In fact, this picture captures everything, taken the
evening before we launched.

 

The girls feeding rice to pigeons in the pretty Guaymas plaza.
Windy insists it's an urban myth that you shouldn't feed
birds rice lest their little stomachs explode. If so, shame about all the
weddings where the end of the rice tradition resulted instead
in the manufacture and disposal of millions of little bubble-
blowing bottles. Think twice before you start an urban myth.

 

Tranny Time By MichaelCALETA LOBOS, MEXICO



Tranny out. The job was surprisingly simple,
just bolts around the bell housing. The
challenge was separating the coupling.

I sometimes vacuum my engine room. Sounds odd, I know, but the 25-year-old Yanmar and her surroundings aren’t made up of broad, smooth areas to wipe down; the surfaces are intricate and difficult to reach. So after gradual wearing of the belt has left a coat of rubber dust everywhere, I pull out our (excellent) 120V vacuum cleaner. They say it’s good for the engine to keep it clean.

I share this anecdote to say that I know this space. Anything new stands out.

“Look at this,” I said to Windy, “I think we have a problem.”

It was faint, but a fine pink mist had discolored the clean, white oil absorbing mats I keep under the engine and transmission. The pink mist had made a radial spray pattern, one line of pink just below where the shaft exits the transmission.

“That’s transmission fluid. I think it’s coming from the seal and spinning off the shaft when we’re under power.”

I opened our manual to see the seal in the breakdown diagram and then small-framed Windy contorted herself and used a headlamp and a mirror to explore underneath the transmission to find more evidence to support the bad seal theory.

Transmission re-installed. A big side benefit
of this job was being able to clean and
paint this half of the engine room.

I flipped the pads over and watched a new spray pattern form after about ten hours of engine run time. I checked the fluid and added two ounces.

“Good timing for this to happen, since we’re hauling out in Guaymas this week.” Windy said.

I emailed the Mexican boat yard for their mailing address and permission to receive a package. Then I emailed a Yanmar parts supplier in San Diego to have a new seal shipped down.

“You should replace the nut too.”

“How much are those?”

“Forty-five dollars.”

A week after we hauled, the parts arrived. I disconnected the transmission, realized there was no way I would be able to change out the seal with the transmission in the boat, and removed the transmission. Once out, I realized there was no way I would be able to remove the nut that attached the coupling to the back.

Then Omar appeared, a local mechanic who dropped by to coordinate the removal of the engine from our neighbor’s boat. Omar clearly knew our transmission and said he could remove and replace the nut and both seals in his shop and bring it back Monday morning. Sold.

Omar brought it back as promised and I went to work reinstalling the transmission and coupling inside a boat sitting on the hot earth. It was over 100 degrees inside.

So that’s it for the mast and transmission work. In the next post, I’ll write about the biggest job of all, the one that consumed almost half our time in the yard…

--MR

Frances with one of the sheep at the far end of the yard.

Father's Day in the yard. I woke to receive the larger
citrus squeezer I'd coveted, wrapped by the girls
to make it impossible to guess what was inside.

Eleanor and Bean with one of the friendly yard security guards.
As we go to press, his name is on the tip of all our tongues...

 

Frances and Eleanor out to lunch downtown with Windy.
They are no doubt keeping out of my way for 26 days
while I transform Del Viento to the extent possible.

The Stick Job By MichaelGUAYMAS, MEXICO

Here the crane has me in a bosun's
chair; I'm attaching a loop of
webbing just beneath the spreaders.

It was a problem. It was a problem that drove Windy to a place beyond extreme agitation, but still this side of madness. It bothered me too, but I was resigned to living with the problem simply because the remedy seemed so daunting. Then Windy took a turn decidedly towards madness: “It’s either we fix this or we sell the boat.”

Our mast is over 60 feet long. It’s hollow and made of aluminum. In the summer of 2012, we installed a new anchor light and a wind instrument transducer at the top of the mast and a new radome about halfway up the mast. When we installed these devices, we dropped cables down the inside of the mast and out the bottom. Since that time, every slight pitch and roll of our boat has caused yards and yards of loose cables to swing, hitting the inside walls of the mast. In the cabin down below, this produced a cacophony that I imagine is like being trapped in the bell tower of Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral at noon.

The obvious fix for this problem is to remove the mast from the boat. But that is a big deal, and certainly seems like an extreme measure simply to silence a few clanging wires. I Googled nine ways to Sunday for a way to fix this acoustic nightmare without removing our mast. Windy and I spent way too many hours manipulating improvised tools through small holes in the mast, trying to catch and secure the troublesome wires.

It’s either we fix this or sell the boat.

As we planned to haul Del Viento sometime this summer, we included in that plan a decision to pull the mast, somehow secure the wires, and re-step the spar.

So the first thing you should know is that I’ve never pulled the mast on a boat before. I came into this project knowing little except the obvious: I would have to detach the following things.

• the boom and vang from the mast
• all standing rigging from the deck
• all the aforementioned wiring from someplace inside the boat

Beyond that, I trusted that the yard would take care of the rest.

“I want to pull the mast,” I said in Spanish to the yard manager, “maybe tomorrow?”

“Si, I’ll contact the company we work with and let you know what time the crane will be here.”

“Great, thanks!”

The next day, a couple hours later than scheduled, the crane arrived. I greeted the operator and asked whether he’d done this before.

“Oh yeah, lots of times—all these boats,” he said waving his arm across the sea of boats sitting with ours in the sun-scorched yard. I enthusiastically told him I was relieved to hear this, as I’d never done this before. Then he hemmed and hawed (in Spanish) and told me I’d first have to remove the radar. We both looked up the mast.

“No way Jose!” (I didn’t really say that, but I did ask him why, protesting mildly because the few Youtube videos I’d watched the night before didn’t show anyone removing their radar so they could run a sling up the mast.)

Remember Project Bean? Well, it's ongoing.
Here Frances carries him through the streets
of Guaymas in a backpack. This is very near
where Windy found him.

From his explanation (in Spanish), I understood that he planned to wrap his short loop around our mast, attach it to his hook, and pull, letting it slide upward until it caught beneath the tangs where my lower shrouds attached. I’d learned from Youtube and Google that this was not the way to go about this. I’d learned that pulling from these tangs or even from the spreader bases was a recipe for damage. I’d learned that a good way to pull a big mast like ours was to loop beneath the spreader bases, but to attach separate lines to this loop and run them down to the halyard winches, transferring the weight of the mast to the winches, but retaining a control point up high, above the center of gravity.

I realized I was now in charge of this operation. I explained to the crane operator and the assembled yard crew exactly how I wanted to do this. Everyone agreed.

Then the crane operator offered that he wasn’t sure he could lift the base of the mast above the lifelines. The arm of the crane was now extended to just about a foot above the spreaders.

“How much higher can you go?”

“This is it.”

It turned out the crane operator who’d assured me of his experience had no idea our mast was keel stepped and was amazed at the notion. Laughing and shaking his head, he drove off. The company he worked for had a larger crane, but it was broken. He thought it would be fixed within two weeks.

“There is another company,” the yard manager assured me, “I’ll call them.”

It was clear when the next crane arrived that this is what we needed from the start. It was clear when I talked to the driver that I was still going to have to manage this effort. I again explained what I wanted to do. I asked him to haul me up in my bosun’s chair, explaining that I’d secure the loop beneath the spreaders exactly as I wanted them, but leave it hanging in a way that it would be easy to grab later with the hook.

So that’s what I did. I positioned the loop and dropped two attached lines to the deck. Once he lowered me, I detached my chair, he hooked the loop above, and I tensioned the lines on the halyard winches. Then the crane pulled and our mast lifted without complaint, the top of it soon reaching more than eight stories up. We guided it down to the old tires, crates, and chairs I’d scrounged and assembled on the ground alongside our boat.

Just like that we turned Del Viento into a powerboat…a disabled powerboat, more on that in the next post.

--MR



This is the anchorage in front of the Guaymas Fonatur marina,
across the bay from where we hauled.



The morning of the haulout, awaiting the lift.

Frances watching Del Viento rise.

And this is why I married her. Here Windy sits in the
blazing heat, biting ants everywhere, peering into
the mast for 45 minutes to untangle wires.
This is the middle of the operation in which we
eventually, successfully, pulled 12 swim noodles
up the length of the mast with the offending
wires inside them. I never want to have to do this again.



This is our mast step. After I cleaned the step up, I cut a
hole in this thin, tough, plastic placemat and laid it down.
Along with the Lanocot I generously applied to the base
of the mast, this should reduce the corrosion caused by
the aluminum/stainless steel interface.

Our People By MichaelGUAYMAS, MEXICO

Ethan showing Windy what's what.
(courtesy Nancy Jones, Eyoni)

Del Viento is sitting high and dry and defenseless (against adverse weather) in a Sonoran desert boatyard. But more on that in a later post. I want to write today the story of our getting here, the story of our people.

We first met Ethan, Nancy, and their daughter Zada two years ago in La Paz. Afterward they sailed south on Eyoni to discover Panama while we headed north on Del Viento to discover Alaska. Now here we all were again, in this same city, the kids and parents picking up where we left off, but with a history. It was all good, except for what wasn’t.

The Eyoni crew were now at the disquieting intersection between their 6-year cruising past and a future that will look very different. While their return to stateside life is a fate we all share, for various reasons—and a personal reminder that we cannot forever delay our own return to the workaday world—it seems sort of unjust in Eyoni’s case. I’ve never met—nor even read about—a family that derives more joy from this floating vagabond existence.

Eleanor atop a Baja navigation light tower.

When we left La Paz the first week of May, we left Eyoni behind. But the night before we raised anchor, over shots from Ethan’s tequila flask, Nancy said they may be right behind us, heading north for a short last hurrah in the Sea they’ve come to love. So we went slowly, just in case.

During our seven-day rendezvous, we saw more, explored more, and did more with the Eyonians than we would have done in a month on our own. (We admit to letting days pass at beautiful anchorages where we hang out aboard just doing our thing.) Ethan and Nancy are keen observers and despite having spent seasons past in the Sea, they explore with a contagious sense of wonder, zeal, and appreciation that left us following in their footsteps, eager to have our eyes opened.

Ethan shaping a found bone into a
needed marlinspike.

In a single day, we anchored in three different places, miles to sail between each of them. In that same day, we walked a beach as far as we could see, Nancy and Ethan helping us to identify the bones, shells, and tracks we encountered along the way. We climbed navigational lights, built a fire to roast marshmallows, and dinghied deep into mangroves for a picnic. We saw centuries-old hand tools hidden in plain sight among middens and we swam to the sandy bottom twenty feet below our boat to see the distinct shotgun-muzzle sign of buried clams. By the time we arrived at our evening anchorage at San Evaristo, Nancy had taught each of the three girls to braid their own Challah loaf for dinner.

Eyoni is north now, way north, but out of the Sea, on the outside of the Baja, and not far from the U.S. border. I doubt assimilating back into U.S. life will be a painless affair, but I wish them the best. There are all kinds of families in this world, but only a tiny percentage of those who have the means and are otherwise able to be out here—living this unique, floating way—choose to do so. So the families we meet on this proverbial mountaintop, the ones who made the same set of choices we did, who face the same challenges, who yearn for and appreciate many of the same things, and who are as unabashedly pleased with their path after six years as we are after three years…well, those are our people.

Fair winds ashore Eyoni family. We’re spending the rest of the year in your beloved Sea and will refer often to the notes and superlatives that Ethan scribbled throughout our cruising guide.

--MR

 

Eleanor, Nancy, Windy, Zada, and Frances walking the salt flats.

Eyoni at anchor, Isla San Francisco.

The two crews. It's clear Nancy and Eleanor are the posers.

Ethan and Nancy waving from Eyoni.

Frances and Zada herding fiddler crabs.

Hiking down the road to the salt flats behind San Evaristo.

Frances greeting mama burro.

.

Two mothers and their daughters enjoying a Mothers' Day walk.

Who brings marshmallows and fire starting stuff with them
on a hot Baja hike? I think you know.
(courtesy Nancy Jones, Eyoni)

Me launching off a cliff.
(courtesy Nancy Jones, Eyoni)

Frances and Zada waiting outside a San Evaristo tienda.
(courtesy Nancy Jones, Eyoni)

  

Eyoni motoring into the sunset.