January 20th – Bahia Navidad – Jim’s Blog #17

We are still in the lagoon at Bahia Navidad, but have taken excursions into a town further north along the beach, Melaque. The bus offered the usual hard-plastic seats with minimal suspension that wound its way down a variety of dusty dirt streets before depositing us at the town square. This town had a vast beach to offer vacationers, a store that was a cut above the small tiendas in Barra, and more restaurants to choose from. We smelled some curry coming from one of the restaurants and seized the chance to eat some non-Mexican food. This restaurant turned out to be owned by an English-speaking expat with excellent food, English magazines to read, and a lending library (if you leave a book you can take one). Sheilagh had the Thai salad and I had the chicken curry – a great treat when most of the palapas serve nothing but Mexican dishes.

We also took the opportunity to visit the surfing beach we had seen as we were coming into the harbor. The waves came straight into the beach with a riptide going right back out that made steep towering waves for an instant and then the in-and-out-going waves would neutralize to flat, and then back up to towering. I fancy myself a good body surfer, but these were not waves that I would try to ride. Apparently no one else thought so either. However, at one end of the beach the waves formed a left break that the board surfers were enjoying. I may have to get a surf board and relearn how to ride a board. The main problem is that it is difficult to find a place to put the board on the boat and not have it block the deck or be a danger in high winds and seas.

The days here have started feeling very tropical – hot and sweat-inducing with little wind to cool things off. We rig our wind scoop in one of the front hatches to get the air circulating, but it flaps uselessly when the wind dies. We have mechanical fans in each of the main cabin areas that run off the 12 volt batteries, and these help quite a bit, although they are a bit noisy. Some sailboats have air-conditioning installed, but most can’t run it unless they are plugged into the AC power of a marina or run their engine or a generator to power it. We don’t have a generator, but we use an inverter that translates DC battery power into AC for run the water heater, the microwave oven, the TV, and to power up the batteries on out laptops. It seems a bit strange to be converting the boat’s battery power to AC power and back to the laptops’ battery power, but it’s convenient.

We need to run the engine about an hour or two a day to keep the refrigerator and freezer cold enough to make ice cubes and keep them from melting. The engine also heats water in the water heater without the use of AC power, and it charges the boat batteries at the same time. We use two solar panels to keep the batteries topped up, and we usually try to use our inverter to generate AC power during the heat of the day, when the solar panels can keep the batteries full. Although we have a very small carbon footprint, we still need the diesel fuel to run the engine to keep everything charged up, since the solar panels can’t do it by themselves.

Why am I going into all this? Sheilagh and I don’t want everyone to think that we do nothing but lie about in paradise sipping Margaritas. We have to have an intimate knowledge of all the systems on the boat – electrical, mechanical, plumbing, communications, engine, etc. And we also have to manage the systems in such a way that we maximize the energy we have available and minimize the impact to our resources. A good example is the subject of communications, which we have been asked about by some of our readers. We have several forms of communications available to us including:

1) a VHF marine radio that allows us to communicate through line-of-sight with other ships and the coastguard (effective range is about 12 miles)
a. we have a control and speaker in the cockpit that allow us to communicate while steering the boat without having to go below,
b. we also have a separate hand-held radio that we can carry with us in the dinghy or in the life raft, if that should happen,

2) a high frequency HAM radio that can be used to communicate around the world with other boats, family at home, weather stations, etc. – we can communicate with voice or email and we can download weather FAXes (the range here depends on atmospheric conditions and time of day or night)

3) a marine single-sideband radio (actually the same radio as the HAM radio) that does much of what the HAM radio does, but it has fewer frequencies available and can be used for commercial purposes such as ordering parts to be sent to various ports (HAM radio does not allow commercial use of the frequencies),

4) a wi-fi antenna to connect with internet servers in some of the ports we enter through our laptops (if the signal is strong enough from the marina or hotel on shore, otherwise we take our laptops ashore and find an internet café),

5) three GPS receivers to give us navigation information – one of these is at the chart table inside and a separate one is mounted in front of the steering wheel in the cockpit (the third one is a hand-held one that we have,

6) underwater sonar and a fish finder to show us the depth of the water, the presence of fish (and at what depth they are), and the composition of the bottom,

7) an AM/FM radio with a CD changer to provide entertainment (the radio we use very little, but we keep the CD changer filled with 6 CDs and play them until we get tired of those six and then change them – incidentally the AM/FM radio has speakers in the cockpit so we can hear music underway),

8) a TV that we seldom use,

9) a flat screen display where we show DVD movies through our laptops,

10) an EPIRB (Emergency Position Information Radio Beacon) that we would activate if we need to be rescued – this has a built-in GPS that would send our boat information and position to a satellite for use by the Coast Guard and other boats that might be in our vicinity.

It’s great to have all of these means of communications, but we have to know how to use each of them (okay the TV is not that difficult to learn) and we had to get HAM radio training and get our HAM licenses to be able to use that means of communication. Naturally there are radio courtesies that have to be learned and used, although I’m not sure where some folks have learned theirs. As a pilot, I was trained to use the radios with a minimum of talk and only when necessary. That does not seem to be the case with many cruisers, who feel the need to hold conversations of long duration if they get through to someone. Thankfully, most of them agree to use a different channel than the main contact frequency; so they switch to a new frequency and talk without bothering anyone.

Since everyone can hear when two boats plan to switch channels to talk about something, any of us can switch to that same frequency and listen in. At times someone will ask a recognized expert to switch channels to discuss a topic, and several of us will listen in to learn something. In this case there is a strong temptation to insert oneself in the conversation, if one has a question on that topic that isn’t being answered. At first I used to wait for the conversation to end, listen for them to switch back to the main hailing channel, and then I’d ask the expert to go back to another frequency to ask my question. Since then I have learned that everyone expects that others will be listening in; so it is really no problem to introduce oneself into the original conversation and ask a question to “the group.”

This ability to listen in to other people’s discussions must be similar to the old party lines on the early telephones. You can listen in for valuable information as described above, or you may learn that you are not invited to someone else’s dinner party; so there are drawbacks to this form of party-line communication. Once Sheilagh mentioned to some other cruisers that she was sorely tempted to listen in to other conversations at times, and they all wondered why she didn’t. Apparently snooping is alive and well on the cruisers’ net. At another time I’ll go into the “cruisers’ net” and explain what we do on the radios to stay in contact and help one another with emergencies. That’s all for now, more later . . .