On Monday, St. Patrick’s Day, we left Tenacatita for the first of three legs to get to Puerto Vallarta. The first leg to Chamela would take about 5 hours and we knew that strong winds were expected in the afternoon. As a result we got up at 7AM to get the boat ready to go, and pulled up the anchor at 8AM, right on schedule. As soon as we put the engine in forward gear, we heard a lot of squealing from the engine compartment, which stopped as we pulled back the power. Sheilagh ran down to the engine compartment and reported a burned rubber smell. We immediately dropped the anchor, stopped the engine, and took a look at the belts on the engine. Both belts were a bit loose; so we pulled out the tools, took turns crawling back into the rear compartment of the engine, and discussed ways to tighten the belts.
Sheilagh fits more readily into the compartment than I do, but this fix required my strength to loosen the appropriate nuts, lever the two adjustable accessory motors to tighten the belts, and then retighten the nuts. The way into the back compartment is through a small door behind the toilet, where we have to sit on the toilet backwards to get through the opening. Facing aft there is a holding tank on the left side and the engine on the right side, with just enough space straight ahead to be on one’s hands and knees on a sloping deck to get at the engine. The engine is actually installed backwards in the boat to position the drive shaft correctly for the propeller shaft; so the belts that would normally be in the front of the engine are facing aft. We finally got the belts tightened, raised the anchor once again, and the engine worked fine. The only difficulty is that we got started an hour late, and we knew the winds would get stronger before we got to Chamela.
On the trip up the coast we had the wind directly ahead of us; so we ended up motoring all the way. The difference this time was an autopilot that worked like a charm, which allowed us to relax and enjoy the trip while the autopilot did all the work of keeping us straight – something we had been forced to do manually during this entire 4-month trip whenever we had to motor. It was a gorgeous day with 2-4’ seas, a clear sky, and even a school of porpoises that passed us going north on the starboard side. The wind was fairly strong at 15 knots, but we were able to make about 6 knots headway for the five hours it took us to get to Chamela. On the way we passed three sailboats heading south with all sails flying and apparently making very good time. I was tempted to turn around and follow them just to get a chance to sail.
I spent the entire morning just sitting on one of the raised seats on the stern and observing the autopilot to ensure that it worked correctly. I pulled out my IPod and listened to music for awhile and then switched to an audio book, World without End. This was one of those days that I etched into my brain so as to remember it when I am too old to do this anymore. Sheilagh got tired of the wind blowing in her ears and went below to read and snooze. After lunch the wind picked up (as predicted), the swells increased and the waves developed whitecaps, which caused the boat to porpoise a bit and send spray flying all over the decks and dodger windows that we had cleaned in fresh water just a few days before. We finally got under the shelter of some islands in Chamela Bay and worked ourselves up to the protected area of the anchorage in the northwest corner of the bay.
The wind was still blowing at 15-25 knots, but the waves in the anchorage were quite a bit smaller than what we had just been through. As we dropped our anchor in 40’ of water I put the engine into reverse to set the anchor and then attempted to move it back into idle. The shift lever moved, but it did not affect the transmission. A screw on the handle of the shift lever had suddenly severed and the handle was useless for getting out of reverse. I quickly shut down the engine and we let the wind help us set the anchor. As we cracked open our post-anchoring beers – something we do to relax while we watch how well the boat is holding – we had the added concern of what to do about the shift lever.
We ended up having to drill out the remnant of the screw imbedded in the shaft, but we had no replacement screw of the right size or thread number. So we drilled a hole through the gear shift lever itself and used a thinner screw, wrapped in tape to give it more bulk, and inserted it through the gear shift lever and the shaft with a bolt to keep it there. This could have been a serious problem if it had happened in a crowded anchorage, but it was minor under these circumstances. Naturally we checked out the similar throttle lever on the opposite side of the control pedestal and found the screw there was in good condition. My reason for mentioning this is that it is a common occurrence for something on the boat to break with no replacement part immediately available. Then it is a challenge to come up with a solution to the problem based on the materials available on the boat. Sheilagh thinks we would need to drag a whole extra boat behind us to have all the parts we would eventually need in the case of breakdowns, but she is not willing to tow that much freight behind us.
The next two days, Tuesday and Wednesday, were predicted to have strong winds; so we decided to set out for Ipala on the second leg of our trip on Thursday, when the winds should have diminished significantly. We used that time to change our zincs on the engine and replace the raw water impeller, both as preventive maintenance activities based on the time on the engine. Our preventive maintenance schedule includes an engine oil change every 100 hours, which will come due about the time we reach Puerto Vallarta, where we can also buy the oil we need.
On Tuesday we spent the entire day on the boat, anchored in Chamela Bay with the wind and waves howling past at 25 knots most of the day. Mainly we stayed below decks and didn’t even take our dinghy off the boat, unwilling to fight the conditions in the bay to get into shore and back. We spent the day making sure that the restaurant onshore to our right stayed immediately under a specific cut in the hills behind it, indicating that we were not moving away from our anchored position. By the end of the day we were very tired of hearing the howling wind in our rigging, and were confirmed in our commitment not to sail offshore when there is any chance for a storm.
A second boat came in with us the previous day, Morningstar with Ron and Linda onboard. We got on the radio with them and invited them over for dinner that evening. We had mentioned at that time that we had planned to go shopping onshore to get some diet coke, so we could continue with our rum and cokes in the evenings. We didn’t make it in, but they did. That afternoon we were cozily ensconced in our boat, when we heard knocking on the side of our boat. We popped the hatch and there sat Ron and Linda bouncing about in their dinghy and handing over a sack of diet coke they had purchased for us. They saw that we hadn’t put the dinghy in the water yet and didn’t want us to have to miss our drink of choice at the end of the day. Now that’s what I call a good cruising neighbor!
We had Ron and Linda over for dinner that night and learned that they are from Loyalton, a town near Truckee, California, where I used to do a lot of soaring. When I mentioned that I had crash-landed my glider near there in the town of Chilcoot, their first question had to do with whose yard I had landed in – Chilcoot is not a large community. Apparently they knew the current reporter/editor for The Chilcoot News, but not the one beside whose property I had landed in some 22 years ago. At that time I was big news for that small place and made it on the front page of the weekly paper. Ron and Linda had been spending the last several winters cruising in the Sea of Cortez and going back home to work in the summer months. They were able to give us a lot of information we can use this summer for our own trip into the Sea of Cortez.
During that blustery day, the boat, Triple Stars, with Rob and Jan onboard, came into the anchorage to find refuge from the winds that had been battering them down the coast from the north. They had experienced 35-knot winds, which are considered gale-force winds, but were lucky to be heading in the same direction as the winds and waves. We had met Rob and Jan on the Baja Ha Ha in November and got to know them in La Paz. We invited them over to join Ron and Linda and ourselves on the boat for dinner that night, but they needed the evening to recuperate from the pounding they had gotten all day coming down the coast.
We met up with them for lunch, and then again for happy hour, on Wednesday and caught up with them and their adventures in the Sea of Cortez. Now they were heading south to the Panama Canal with a number of other boats, where they planned to avoid the hurricanes by heading south on the Caribbean side of the canal to the northern edge of South America. From there they will be heading up to Maine, where they plan to spend summers sailing in the Northeast, and then sailing south to the Caribbean each winter.
Tuesday night I was awakened from a very sound sleep by Sheilagh’s exclamations that “Jim, you have to see this! There are dozens of dolphins surrounding the boat! Come on get up!” It was about 11PM at night with an almost-full moon that allowed a lot of visibility. Sure enough there were dozens of dolphins (or porpoises) swimming back and forth under the boat lengthwise, sometimes bumping the bottom of the boat and periodically giving a gasp as they emerged from the water for a breath of air and then went back under water. Imagine the sight of multiple gray bodies swimming alongside the boat and the sound of a series of gasps from all around the boat. All of a sudden I saw a phosphorescent fish seeming to swim sideways from under the boat and then noticed that it was being held in the jaws of a dolphin. Apparently there were a school of fish beneath our boat, and the dolphins were feeding.
We turned on a spotlight we have at the stern of the boat to get a better look, and we saw very distinct gray-colored dolphins swimming into and out of the light as they went after their dinner. We almost expected them to leap up and do somersaults, since they were as close as we had ever seen them in a water show. We watched them for half an hour or so, and continued to hear their gasps and feel their bumping us on the bottom late into the night. When we asked the other boats in the anchorage the next day if they had experienced the same thing, we were met with complete blanks. They hadn’t seen nor heard anything. On Wednesday night we had the same thing happen; so either everyone else in the anchorage is blind and deaf, or the dolphins’ favorite food fish liked the bottom of our boat. Quite an experience! More Later . . .
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