Aries 32 - Thistledown
it looks like it's time to leave san diego. obi (jonah), tillikum, and matt all left last saturday. Hopefully I can catch up with them somewhere. there isn't really anyone left here that I know, although I've been hanging out with some friends of nicole's that live here. They helped me run a bunch of errands like going groccery shopping and picking up my new sail, and took me to home depot to pick up some wood. I took them sailing today, as I tested out my new oars (more on that later).
I think I might spend two days (stopping in some islands) on my way to ensenada... or I might just go off shore and head far down the coast. I don't really know what I'm doing but I'm pretty sure tomorrow morning will be time to leave. I'll look at some charts before I go to sleep I suppose.
I kind of slacked off here schedule wise. Once I got south of point conception I figured I had nothing to worry about for a long time... but it's been a long time and weather constraints are coming up again. hurricane season in mexico is summer, so I want to be well away from the mexican coast by late spring. obi said he plans to leave mexico (for the marqueses) on march first, so if I follow his schedule I'm looking at spending less than a month sailing the whole coast of mexico, not leaving much time for studying spanish, exploring, or working on the boat. I have spent time traveling mexico before though.. and maybe the galapagos will be cooler anyways if I get there.
I just picked up an asymetrical spinnaker, for light air sailing. I'm pretty excited about it, since we spent so much time slowly drifting down the coast with hardly any wind. They say these things will move a boat faster than wind speed in just a few knots of wind. I also bought a hand held electric wind meter, so I can know just how hard it is *actually* blowing when the weather gets nasty. If I find out that nasty weather is 20 knots of wind I might be worried about what happens when it's blowing 40.. but if I find out that the nasty weather is actually already 40 knots, I'm going to be much less concerned about storms. I don't think I'm currently a very good judge of wind speed.
I've given up on fixing my transmission, and didn't bother having an outboard bracket made. I have forward. I've actually commited to my engine far enough to finally buy spare zincs and impellers. I did some more research and I think my transmission is the same one on the MD21A, so if I can find an old one of those on some repowering boat, maybe that will be a source for a new gearbox, or at least a reverse clutch cone. (aparently the machine shop couldn't make me a new reverse clutch cone because of some coating). I got an estimate last friday (getting sick of dealing with the engine) for a whle new engine and with installation it would have been 14k. I spent some time last week staring at my engine just trying to like it. If I start to like my engine maybe it will be easier to deal with. My dingy is anoying, and in some ways un-practical, but I do like my dingy, and I think that helps.
I made 15' oars out of douglas fir hand-rails from home depot with 1x6's bolted to the ends. I tested out the oars today and they pushed me out of the slip I'm in far enough to raise sails, although they flex a little too much being so long, and tying them to my winches with constrictor knots didn't make the best oarlocks. They were also sort of awkward to untie when I needed to sheet in the jib sheets. I'm going to need to get oarlocks fabricated if I'm going to keep rowing. I also tied rolling hitches so they wouldn't slip out, but these became anoying when I needed to pull the oars in to dodge piers or whatever. I need some kind of bulge on the oar itself that will prevent it from slipping. Just moving my boat a couple of hundred feet (all up wind) was quite a workout, and if someone else hadn't been steering I'm not sure how well I would have done.
I got a good deal on a life raft from a guy who bought one for a trip to mexico in september, but had some health problems and never made the trip. between that and my EPIRB I should be pretty safe. I put together a ditch bag too.. with some water, my fishing gear, my epirb, the extra GPS, an MRE that Steve left on my santana 22 a long time ago, etc.
I made poly carbonate storm shutters for my large galley windows, since I think the existing windows are glass. This should protect the boat if a breaking wave crashes against them. I bought a set of dewalt cordless power tools, including a grinder, drill, and jig saw, that all run on the same battery packs. This should make working on the boat easier, since now I won't have to worry about my inverter throwing the circuit breaker over and over again. I used them to make the storm shutters, to make a new dinette table, and used the grinder when replacing the outlet thru-hull for my bilge pumps. I recently added a manual bilge pump that needed a bigger outlet.
I was going to make washboards (drop in boards) for my companionway to replace te swinging doors, but I was going to buy the wood at a carpentry shop, and I hadn't bought the tools yet, and I didn't want to borrow a crappy jig saw and do a poor job, so I was going to have the carpenter there do it. He cost $70 per hour! but it was only one hour of work so I didn't mind paying him to do it right. I was going to lamanate, varnish, etc myself, and I gave him a template for how to cut them out. All he had to do was cut two copies of a template out of a half sheet of plywood. I kept calling him back asking him if he'd done it, and for two weeks he said "a couple more days." At one point he said "jeeze, I haven't even started it yet," which kind of pissed me off, because it seems that if he had started, it it would have been done. It's not exactly a long process that's started on one day and finished on some other day. Now it's too late, because I don't have the time to laminate them, so I gave up. Maybe I'll just buy a half sheet of ply in mexico and do it myself now that I have the tools.
I lost my ATM card yesterday. This was pretty stupid. Now I'm dealing in cash, and I'm going to have to have my parents forward my new one to me in mexico. Hopefully the international mail will work out o.k. I've heard bad things about mailing stuff to mexico.
I picked up a high gain wireless antenna for my laptop, which is what I'm using now to write email from the boat. I hear there are wireless networks available in many ports in mexico that can be reached from the anchorages with a good antena. I'm a little bumed that the antenna turned out to be pretty cheasy cheap plastic, the software sucks, and it only runs in windows, but it's doing the job. Maybe I should have made something with a pringles can :-P
I bought charts this week for much of the south pacific. there's a $100 chart book that covers the west coast of Mexico and central america all the way down to Panama, that sold out. I had to get an old edition of it shipped to me, and almost couldn't get it at all. It could have cost hundreds of dollars just to get the mexican charts if I couldn't get that book. I hear it's hard to find other charts in Mexico, and after my experience almost missing out on the good deal on mexican charts, I'm playing it somewhat safe with the pacific charts. I bought charts for the galapagos islands in case I go there, and the marqueses islands, and a chart book / guide for some of the other islands near tahiti, and larger scale charts to take me all the way across, up through papa new guinea and the philipines to china. By the time I get to the philipines I should be able to get more charts to take me into ports in China, and back out to continue west. I should have bought more charts in sausalito, because they do photocopies there cheap. doing photocopies and then having them shipped here would have cost almost as much money with slightly less quality, so I didn't bother, but if I'd bought them there I might have saved half my money.
I'm thinking that after China I want to go down the coast, by thailand, down to singapore, up the malaca strait, and over to india. We'll see how it works out though with wind, weather, and the political state of the world when I get over there though. I think I remember hearing of piracy in the malaca strait...
David got sick, and had some neck problem, and is still helping his father, so he didn't come back down. This will be my first solo passage, which is kind of exciting for me, although it will be more difficult.