My Nana & Maia's Great Grandma

Maia did such a nice job of putting together this beautiful post in remembrance of my Nana--that I thought I would borrow it from her blog and use it as well.

May 24, 1920-November 12, 2010

 My Great Grandma was a war bride. She came to Vancouver Island on a ship and then on a train with her two baby daughters, Mary and Margaret, from Scotland in January 1944.

She didn’t know if her new husband would ever return from the terrible war that was tearing the world apart.

She settled on Vancouver Island and had two more children, John and Jim. Her children grew up playing and working on the beautiful Island and they had children of there own. Her family has grown amazingly—she has seven grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.

 My Great Grandma loved to knit, and bake (she made the best scones ever) and to garden. And she had some of the most delicious apples I’ve ever tasted—one year we picked so many we had to have apple pies for weeks. She loved jewellery and cats. But I think most of all she loved her family. And we love and will miss her.

Give Your Sails Some Lovin'

sail repair in paradise--who wants to swim when they can get all sweaty while wrestling with dacron?

 We’ve heard the story at least a dozen times while out cruising: someone hoists a sail, it fills nicely, then the next thing they know there’s a big pop, a ripping sound, and a whole lot of swearing.

Fortunately for us, we met Jamie from Totem before experiencing this unhappy event for ourselves. When we were all in La Cruz he took a long look at our mainsail and informed us that without a few basic repairs we’d be flying scraps of fabric within the year. You should listen when someone gives you advice like that… So a few hours later, a period which included a lot of swearing at the sewing machine, the main was fixed back up and good to go for the summer.

Thanks to Jamie though we now have a routine. EVERY time we hoist the sail we look it over carefully—concentrating on the high stress areas. If we see something untoward (like we did while in Bay of LA)—a tear, broken stitching at a batten pocket, excessive fraying—the sail comes down and the cursed machine comes out.

washing (and drying) a spinnaker takes space

 The next step in our routine is to take advantage of water when we’re at docks and wash the sails. The build-up of salt and dirt accelerates the speed that sails wear out at. And because the things are freaking expensive—we’d like ours to last.

Washing also gives us a chance to inspect the sails up close and personal—something we try to do at least twice a year. And it makes you sort of noticable. So now everyone in the marina at Guaymas knows I'm real.

Well, Crap

 In the cruising life, there are a few things you don’t want to hear your kid say. While, ‘I shot Timmy with the spear gun,’ would be the worst, it only barely outranks, ‘I can’t make the toilet flush’ in terms of crisis status. Even then it might be a toss up, given in some places hospital care is usually easier (and cheaper) to obtain than boat parts.

Our head (marine talk for toilet) is pretty much the cheapest, simplest version on the market. It’s easy to service and comes with its own handy rebuild kit. It’s also been virtually problem free for the entire time we’ve owned the boat (although there was that holding tank issue). But considering this is the week for plumbing setbacks (I’m talking about the brand-new leaking water tank that I’m ignoring) it wasn’t too surprising when Maia informed us that our toilet had also packed it in.

Marine heads are, by reputation, shitty pieces of crap. And pretty much every boat owner has at least one story about an exploding holding tank or seriously backed up hose that led to a gag worthy incident (followed by a long hot shower with bleach). Everyone has a recipe for maintaining smooth and regular function (when talking about toilets folks, bad jokes are mandatory)—but even with liberal doses of vinegar and oil things can still go to hell.

Ours didn’t really go to hell though until after Evan finished the repair. Just as he was tightening the final screw that holds the pump together he heard a suspicious crack--the result of a screw fitting breaking off inside the pump housing. Now the thing leaks, and we need a new pump—a relatively easy to replace item that is found in any West Marine, but not, it seems, locally.

When Evan asked about ordering one he was told it would take two, maybe three, maybe more weeks. That’s a long time to hold it for.

Many modern boats have two heads—something that often struck me as redundant, especially because I can only think of a very small number of people who actually use their second one. Most have transformed the space into a closet, or pantry, or in one case, an office. The benefit I’m now realizing is in the redundancy. We had just about every spare part you might want for a head, except for the pump housing itself. Carrying an entire housing just seemed excessive—but if we carried around an entire spare head? Problem solved...

Have Water, Will Wash aka I have deadlines, I'm not dead

 

  Evan and Maia pulled the boat into the Guaymas marina the day before they joined me in Tucson. We’ve been back for a few days, but we haven’t gotten around to pulling back out yet. For one, it’s cheap--at around $15 a day it’s not too huge a splurge. We’re also really taking advantage of the convenience of dock life to get stuff done.

Well, mostly Evan’s doing that. I’m so snowed under by deadlines that I’ve barely left my desk. And because I’ve been so scarce, for the second time while out cruising I’ve run into someone who thought I was a figment of Evan and Maia’s imagination—and didn’t actually exist. That’s a weird conversation to have with someone by the way…

 Anyway—we’ve acquired a lot of crap this year. I really don’t know where it came from, but we (meaning Evan) have been making our way through each locker and offloading stuff. Then he (yup, I'll admit it, I’m totally not involved) wipes down each locker and carefully repacks it with way less stuff.

Partly I think what happened is when we moved aboard our good intentions gave up on about day three of unpacking. Catamarans have big storage areas, and after a while it’s just easier to stuff them full of bits and pieces rather than making yet another decision about the value of yet another piece of rope, or which of the selection of kid’s lifejackets we own, we should keep…

 When we’re not (meaning Evan) cleaning lockers, we’re painting (I point out the flaws). We’re also installing a new water tank. After making five (and counting) attempts at making the newly rebuilt integral tank on the starboard side watertight, we decided to go with a fabricated plastic tank on the port side.

Evan assured me this would be a much simpler solution. So we’ll (meaning me) just ignore the fact the new tank is currently sitting on the dock leaking…

Macarena on the Malecón

 There’s a musical beat to Mexican towns—an incessant, driving, often out of tune exuberance. It starts as the sun gets lower—and hits its peak around the time we’d like to head to bed. In most towns we’ve visited it’s muffled by distance—and is no more noticeable than a neighbour’s TV through a too-thin wall. But in Guaymas, where we’re just steps from the Malecón, the heart-beat of any harbour town, we’re in the thick of it. And after a few days of trying to live at our own rhythm we gave up, and embraced Guaymas’s beat.

We head out after supper—walking the few steps to the colourfully lit square. Last night it was filled with a fitness group—a hundred or more people taking a dance class from three instructors up on a stage. A huge sound system pumped out the songs they dance to three nights a week. They dance to everything from the Macarena to Texas-style line dances. When the class is over the line for the churro stand (the Mexican version of ‘those little donuts’) snakes past the stage.

Last night we talked about joining the dancers—but decided to hit the churro stand instead, before it got too busy. We ordered 15 pesos worth—about $1.25. The bag was huge and the snack left us coated in sugar and grease. We had no choice but to keep going to walk off the calories.

Down the walkway from the dancers we encountered a marching band. Often there are two—a military band and a high school band. They seem to compete from opposite ends of the harbour in a cacophony of drums and squealing trumpets, but last night there was just the school band—methodically working their way through a program of songs and marching moves while an audience of dancing children and sceptical adults looked on.

Near where the band practices a traveling market has taken up residence—and pan flutes competed against the Macarena and the marching band to pull us in for shopping. The stalls were filled with local mescal, woven clothing, carvings and herbs. But the press of sound pushed us out and toward the church’s more peaceful square. Maia giggled when we noticed who we shared the shadowy square with: young couples, still in school uniforms, stealing kisses in dark corners.

When we’ve finished our circuit—past three town squares, two streets of shops and a line of market stalls—the music had faded. The bright lights that called us in were being shut off. By the time we were back aboard all that was left was the marching band—it’s drums now beating a gentle rhythm we could sleep to.

If I had a Pony I'd Ride Him on My Boat

Maia and Jeeves

 We’re back aboard—painting, cleaning and catching up on work (for me). But occasionally the waves lapping the hulls sound a bit like hoof beats, and in the right light the mountains that rise up around Guaymas look like they have horse trails on them.

Me on Dusty--getting dusty

 All three of us were captivated (much more than anticipated) by our visit to the wild, wild west. It wasn’t simply that it’s darn fun to ride a horse through the desert—although it is. It’s that in many ways ranch life reminds me of the cruising life.

The night we arrived at the White Stallion Ranch near Tucson we began making new friends. Within minutes Maia and Kaia (both brown-eyed redheads with freckles and quick smiles) had everyone confused: Sisters? Old friends? Random chance?! Really?!

But our best friends? They are called Jeeves, Dusty and Buffalo—and by our second ride all of us understood that bond between a rider and her horse: So much like the bond between a sailor and her boat.

learning to pen cattle--a skill we'll no doubt need again sometime...

 Not all of our visit was a ride through the desert or songs around the camp fire. We went off ranch a bunch. Honestly considering how little we sometimes do in a day it astonishes me how much ground we covered: Old Tucson, downtown Tucson, Tombstone and Kartchner Caverns. But despite our packed schedule--or maybe because of it, we've come back to the boat relaxed and ready for the next adventure.

Our wonderful guides in Tombstone: the town historian and the Chamber of Commerce Prez...

On the Road Again

We're back in Mexico--After a great visit to Arizona (except for the part where were were stopped and asked for ID because of the MX plate on our rental), we crossed back into Mexico. Our goal had been to make Guaymas tonight, but a two-hour horse ride up through suicide pass, a late lunch with wonderful friends, a stop at the package place to collect all our stuff, stops at Whole Foods, Home Depot and a few other not-to be-missed shops, we had a late start. And as the sun set, and it became clear that headlight use is indeed optional on Mexican highways, we decided to spring for a night in a hotel.
Tomorrow we'll be back aboard--rested and excited to be home—with a few new stories to tell. If there is anything we've learned while cruising--it's that breaks from the boat are essential. It almost seems counter-intuitive. If you've spent years of effort and loads of $$ getting a boat ready—mentioning that a long weekend, or occasional vacation away is important is sure to get you mocked by friends. To most people it's sort of like suggesting dessert after spending the day at a chocolate buffet.
But time away gives you a new perspective—you get to hang out with people who don't know how fascinating it is to calculate their fridge's amp hours, or endlessly speculate about which water maker causes the least amount of grief. Instead you converse with people who may know who the celebrities on the magazine covers are but who also have an opinion on this week's world politics.
We're eager to go home again after a visit away. But it's good to be reminded that whenever you immerse yourself in just one way of looking at the world—the world becomes smaller, even when you're sailing around it.

Halloween Redux

Diana--goddess of the hunt

As it turns out, Maia had a great time. The boats in the anchorage and marina discovered there was a wee trick-or-treater in residence and all did a good job cooperating with candy. Except one. When we (Ev & Maia--Di's still away and deeply jealous) knocked on their hull and explained our mission, they were pretty pissy saying they knew nothing about Halloween and didn't have anything to give. Maia didn't care because she had already done very well--and every Halloween requires at least one curmudgeon to make it complete.

Later we headed over to the church area, where the Day of the Dead festival was underway. I forgot the camera. Big ooops because it was very photogenic. Earlier in the week we'd passed a little art gallery where we noticed a welder welding up the steel armature for a giant skeleton. He beckoned us in for a look see. The finished skeletons were about 12 or 15' high. The covering (bones, skull etc) were all paper mache on a very big scale.

Now they were erected in the square. And there were Halloween movies for the kids (who were all in costume), live singers, snack stalls (of course), artists, giant skulls, and best of all, personal shrines to people's dead relatives. My favorite was a black and white photo of somebody who looked like Pancho Villa's dad. It was surrounded by two toy air rifles, a bottle of tequila, crosses, and cowboy boots. Very cool, very Mexican.

So in short Maia had a great time and didn't feel like she missed a thing. And she may have even gained something--aside from a very, very big bag of chocolate.

Mom's away

So what is a kid to do?  Go camping in the cockpit:

 

And create art about her impending trip to an Arizona dude ranch.  

Where we will be riding horses, not dudes.

Cross-Border Shopping—What do Mexico-based Cruisers Buy in the US?

 We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to get almost everything you need in Mexico. There’s so much more available now than 14-years-ago--especially in the the bigger cities with their Costcos and Walmarts. The stuff that’s still hard to get are the specialty items—brand name shoes, marine electronics, good chocolate, affordable wine... That’s the stuff you need to bring down with you—or do without.

Like just about every other sailboat we know, we keep a running list of ‘stuff we want’. The idea is that whenever someone is coming down (or someone from down here is doing a trip up) we can put in an order and stock back up.

This time it’s us doing the border run. I’m off to Arizona for a work conference and Maia and Evan will be picking me up. So for the past two weeks we’ve been ordering up a storm. First on the list is a VHF radio with an AIS receiver. An Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a tracking system that identifies big ships and gives their course and speed. We have a black box AIS receiver we never hooked up thorough our computer—but the simple VHF version has been getting such rave reviews (and it takes a few levels of complexity out of the process) that we’ve decided to go with one.

Next on our list are a couple of spare high power adapters for amplifying shore-based wi-fi signals. We’re not sure if we’re simply really hard on the little adapters (they’re not marinized and the components tend to rust despite having sealed the unit in a watertight box) but we’ve gone through two in the past year. So we’re ordering two more.

We’re also getting a new prop for our outboard engine. Although the goal is to avoid whacking the prop, we’ve clearly hit bottom with it one too many times. We had it welded and pounded back into shape in La Paz—but the distorted prop is taking its toll on our speed and fuel consumption.

While we’re up there we’re also going to stock up on other items where quality is an issue: sunscreen (US sunscreen has better active ingredients than Mexican versions of the same brands), shoes for Evan and Maia, chocolate (of course…), vitamins (because we drink RO water our diet is lacking in trace minerals so vitamins are important) and favourite food items. We’re also planning to pick-up loose-leaf paper and three-ring binders for Maia—for whatever both are nearly impossible to find here.

The key though is that list. It’s all too easy in the land of consuming to get a bit carried away. Purchases that seem perfectly reasonable in the store end up eating up our cruising budget and sinking our water line…