Captain's Blog #2

Puerto Vallarta, or, more specifically, Paradise Village Marina at Nuevo Vallarta, was a much needed rest. And, much as the name implied, a paradise. I found a mechanic to install a new autopilot – an authorized raymarine dealer (the same manufacturer as our chartplotter, gps, and radar). I had a good feeling before I even met him because his estimate was on a letterhead with a painting of Rotterdam harbor circa 1750. He was Dutch.

Having worked extensively with the Dutch in Aruba, I know their work ethic. They are meticulous, at times frustratingly so, but their attention to detail is exactly what you need when dealing with a system as important as an autopilot.

His estimate was actually less than I expected, yet over my insurance deductible. Of course, I forwarded it to my insurance company, Lloyld’s of London, who quiclky rejected it, discounting the value of my old autopilot by 90% due to it’s age. This is exactly what I had heard about Lloyds and why I tried to avoid them, but no other carrier would take us. Oh well, it would all be on me. I budgeted for the estimate plus 20% - every marine estimate I’ve ever had has come in at least 20% over budget and a week over due.

He examined our system on Tuesday, ordered parts, and started installing on Friday. He worked all weekend, until 7 PM on both Saturday and Sunday. By Monday, everything was working great, and he asked me to wire the rest of the money to him.

The he went German on me. He took out the control panel, refusing to reinstall it until the transfer went through. I could somewhat understand this – we were leaving Tuesday, and he had little recourse without us being present – but I had left him alone on the boat with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment on it, he knew where the safe was on board, I had wired the down payment to him with only a handshake, etc. There was room for a little trust here.

Unfortunately, he didn't ask me to wire the additional funds until 2 PM PV time on Monday, past the 4 PM EST cutoff for wire transfers, so it would have to wait until Tuesday morning and then sit in the backlog of fed wire transfers. So we sat with him Tuesday morning. I finally convinced him around 11 AM that the money was on its way. I called my bank; he heard the conversation. I showed him where the money had already left my account. He re-installed the control panel, and we were off.

He not only completed the job on time, he was under budget. That doesn’t happen. Ever.

But back to Puerto Vallarta. PV was amazing. The marina had a great grocery store (though overpriced), beautiful beach, pools, everything. The bus in to town was $1 each way. I found Monte Cristo Cuban cigars for $9 each. Jeff found love at the local chandlery. Just kidding. A week was enough.

On to Bahia Navidad. While our way out of PV, the VHF radio started to get active. At first just pangueros checking in on each other. Then what sounded like a distress call – overturned panga.

Then the Mexican navy (or what I presume was the Mexican navy – they’re the equivalent to the US Coat Guard) issuing what sounded like a sea condition warning. I had checked the weather of course. It was forecasted to be moderate (Jeff claims he saw they system on passageweather, but I only look at seas so I would have missed the wind – and Jeff always knows everything, so I’m starting to get a little suspicious) – nothing we hadn’t seen.

The winds kicked up, then the seas from the wind, and in no time it was baja all over again. 10 feet at ten seconds, sometimes in pairs.

A distressed sailor looking for sea conditions came out over vhf – she and her husband were having difficulty with their main, and were getting blown on to the beach. Apparently they were paralleling another sailor who they had taken a class from and were asking for his advice. He didn’t have any. They had already contacted the Navy who I seen pass to port a few minutes earlier. We passed them about an hour later, sail still flapping in the wind.

The new autopilot held course perfectly – too perfectly, in fact. It was correcting so fast that it kept the stabilizers from doing their job. Okay, I may have lost a few of you there.

Stabilizers are big fins that stick off the sides of your boat in to the water and adjust their tilt through some sort of voodoo magic to make keep your boat from rolling. They are really awesome, mechanical masterpieces, and they work. Waves can be coming from a right angle and they simply adjust and your boat sort of shimmies over them rather than getting tossed about.

So these two fins are working in tandem, adjusting every second through their voodoo ways. Usually, the rudder (essentially another big fin) is only turned every few seconds, if that. The stabilizers are therefore working faster than the rudder, so they can adjust to it easily.

Enter the new autopilot. This thing is a beast. With the old autopilot, you would set a magnetic bearing, hit autopilot, and it would steer towards that bearing. Depending on conditions, you might have to adjust it every so often – current, wind, etc. With this new one, I enter a waypoint on the chartplotter, send it over to the autopilot, and it steers to the point. And it is constantly adjusting the rudder to keep you dead-on course. Cool, right?

Well, in 10 foot seas, it was swinging the rudder wildly back and forth, doing it’s job, but making it impossible for the stabilizers to do theirs. I realized later that I could adjust the sensitivity, but until then it would be a bit uncomfortable. The only thing to do would be to pick up the speed, which would burn more fuel and change our arrival time for Bahia Navidad.

Bahia Navidad, Barra Navidad, or just Barra, is about 8 nautical miles north of Manzanillo. We were going there instead of Manzanillo because they had actual slips. We would have to med-moor in Manzanillo, a process where you drop anchor and then back in to a spot between two boats. I’ve never done this, and single screw (one engine) boats are not easy to maneuver in reverse because of the prop walk (see first blog entry). Also, Manazanillo sounded expensive. And I forgot ask the price at Barra.

We arrived at Barra around 8:30, so I wasn’t expecting the best service from the dock. I tried to hail them on VHF. Nothing. I entered the bay, tried again. Nothing. I called on the cell phone. Someone picked up. Language barrier, so she hung up on me. When I called back, rather than answering, she just picked up the phone and dropped it back down – no hola. On my third call, I just said, “Que slip?”, she said, “eh, largo?”, so we decided we’d take a big slip and figure it out from there.

The marina was empty, and I soon figured out why. $2.60 per foot per night. Plus electricity. But it beautiful – a jungle on one side, and a resort reminiscent of the French Riviera, not Mexico. On the other side of the bay, the town of Barra, a laid-back little fishing/tourism town. 10 pesos for a water taxi ride there, worth every peso.

While at the marina, we (by “we” I mean Jeff) took the opportunity to do a full “servicing” of the boat – change all the fluids, filters, etc. Remember what I said in the first entry about dirty fuel? About half way through the process, Jeff brings me a bucket. “Damn Jeff, that’s a nasty looking oil filter!” “That’s not your oil filter Greg. That’s your racor (fuel filter).” The thing was so filthy with gunk that it looked like it had been filtering oil, not diesel. We will be checking and changing the racor more frequently.

Our next leg, to Ixtapa, would be a 40 hour run. I prefer to run at 6 knots – we sip fuel at 6. The boat (and crew) prefer to run at 7.2-7.4 because this seems to be the “sweet spot” for the stabilizers. If we’re cooking or seas are rough, we’ll run 7. Otherwise, diesel isn’t getting any cheaper.

I had planned on checking out of the marina and leaving around 5 or 6. Due to the shallow entry at Marina Ixtapa, we had to time it to arrive at high tide, 10 AM.

I got my bill from the marina and noticed an extra $30 for power. At the last marina, we had stayed an entire week, done countless loads of laundry, run power tools, and didn’t break $10 in power usage. I complained. They lowered it to $20. I offered them 10 pesos and told them to check their meter. The dock master was called. I was asked when I would be leaving. I told him 5. He said power would be free, but check out was at one.

So now we run at 5 knots . . . or arrive in the middle of the night . . . neither were good options. We hit favorable currents, and couldn’t keep the boat under 6. So I got out the Mexico boating guide – maybe there was somewhere we could anchor for the a few hours to get us back on schedule.

There was, Caleta De Campos. A small anchorage, nice beach, even the Michoacan Technical School of Navigation and Fishing. I set the autopilot to Caleta, and did my watch from the upper helm, mostly staring up at the stars, looking around every few minutes just to be sure we weren’t going to hit another boat. There weren’t any out there to hit. It was beautiful.

We arrived at Caleta around 3, only to find the anchorage completely untenable. Even the pangas were pulled far up the beach due to the size of the breaking waves. We turned around and headed back out to sea. I did the math, and there was no way to avoid going in to Ixtapa at night. I did more math – we’d have to run at 9 knots to even make the 10 PM high tide. This boat doesn’t do 9 knots.

Then, a stroke of genius from the engineer. “What about z-bay?” “Z-what?” “Z-bay (insert lots of Jeffy info about z-bay here).” Turns out that there is large bay south of Ixtapa that is where we’d be cabbing it in to anyway. Large enough to anchor at night, and if we wanted to go to the marina the next day, we could – though this would conflict with my strict no-northbound travel policy. The first mate hopped on the internet to check for recent security reports, all was clear, and we were off. I checked with Sam (the first mate) that she was okay with maybe anchoring out for our first anniversary, and it was agreed that we’d like to be able to have showers but that the engineer could make the water pump work.

I caught a fish around sunset – a jack crevalle. Tough fighter.

Z-bay was beautiful at night, sparkling, and, fortunately, well-lit even at 2 AM.

Anchoring was smooth and easy, and a first - at night.

The next morning, I finally got to dive off the upper deck of Henrietta II. It felt as great as I thought it would. We swam, went in to town, provisioned, ate. We watched a local basketball game in the town square that everyone came out to watch. Later on, I listened to the best Mexican reggae band on earth from the upper deck – full horns section, blaring until 2 AM. Nice place, z-town.

I’ll let Sam cover the anniversary, except to say we’re in Mexico and when I negotiate a price for something, I assume it is in pesos, not dollars. $45 for a 2 minute panga ride? You get a 30 minute paragliding session for that. Now if he’d offered to paraglide us to the boat, that would have been different . . .