I’ve made it to the last stop along the Baja Peninsula before reaching Cabo San Lucas: Magdalena Bay. However, before continuing on for the last ~ 160 nautical miles to get to Cabo (which will mean sailing overnight and through the next day, in case you were wondering), I needed to do some repairs on the boat. Duck Sloop had been doing pretty well, but I needed to go up the mast to take the light bulb out of the anchor light to try to get a replacement and to replace the topping lift. (The topping lift is the rope the holds the boom up when the main sail isn’t deployed and holding it up, so it’s rather important and had developed large abrasions on it. If it had broken, it could very likely have hit Dima or me in the head, which would have been a bad day, which is why it needed to be replaced.)
We had thought this could be a pretty quick in and out of Puerto San Carlos, but that has not be so, at all. Instead, we seem to be causing more problems than we are solving and really beating up the poor Duck.
The misadventures started when we arrived at the dock. We motored past where they were indicating we should come up alongside another boat to tie up to check it out, and started looping back around. However, halfway around, our forward progress stopped even though the motor was still running. Uh oh. We had grounded the boat. We tried to rev the engine to get out, but no luck. Calling on VHF channel 16 to try to get someone to pull us out, we were told that we should just wait a bit because the tide was rising, so we should be able to get out in a little bit.
A few minutes later, as we sat there, stuck, debating whether to get out the oars and try to push ourselves sideways, a call came on the radio from someone on the dock telling us to turn ourselves in the direction of where he was waving his hands and turn up the motor and we should get out. That worked and we were able to push ourselves out and headed over to tie up next to a shrimper.
The next step was sending me up the mast to retrieve the anchor bulb and try to see if we could replace the quarter inch topping lift with a spare 3/8 inch line we had onboard. I got up there and was trying to pull myself around to see the topping lift, and I felt the metal in my hand give way. I had snapped the mount for the wind vane. *Sigh* Another item that would need to be fixed for us to reasonably continue sailing. So, I took the wind vane off, inspected the topping lift and determined that the pulley it was currently on would not work with the bigger line, so I took that off too, and removed the light bulb from the anchor light before coming back down with more issues than I started with.
From there we proceeded to walk into town, with Dima carrying a gas can, and me trailing the broken wind vane like a doll whose head has come off, trying to find someone who can put it back together for me. We found a hardware store, where we struck out almost entirely: no bulb, no replacement wind vane, no pulleys, no quarter inch line, but they did give us a hint as to another hardware store that might carry some of what we needed, but wasn’t open yet. So, we continued wandering around town trailing the broken toy and found a place to get some provisions we were lacking.
The new hardware store also didn’t have anything that we needed, but it gave us another hint, which eventually led us to a random gate with welding equipment on the other side of it. We knocked and eventually a child answered, but told us that the guy who runs the shop wasn’t around, but would be later. When? Just later.
So, we continued wandering around town and found a place to have dinner. We returned to knock on the gate again afterwards and showed the broken toy pieces to the shop owner who was now home, and he told us to come back after 8am the next morning. So, we dejectedly trailed the broken toy back to the boat, still not having found someone to put it back together.
Fortunately, the next morning when we showed up at the metal-working the shop, the man was very helpful and made us a new mount, which is now solid aluminum rather than a hollow tube, so it will hopefully hold up much better than the former one. Unfortunately, when I headed back to the boat and climbed (ok, really got hoisted, Dima was doing all the work) up the mast, the mounting holes were just a hair off, so I couldn’t install it. Also, to add insult to injury, as we were getting back on the boat, Dima slipped and grabbed on to the lifeline, and the metal bar that it’s attached to at the stern of the boat snapped. (In case you were wondering, that’s exactly what the lifelines are there for, and no, they are not meant to break when used.) However, the upside was that I did manage to wedge my fingers into the tiny space at the top of the mast where the small pulley had been and installed a slightly bigger one that was in the spare parts bin. This allowed us to rig up the new topping lift. So, basically, one step forward, two steps backwards.
In the afternoon, we headed back to the shop and got the holes widened a bit in our new mount, but when we then returned to the boat the wind had picked up a bunch, so I couldn’t go back up the mast. So, now I’m sitting at a restaurant using their WiFi to write this post. Hopefully the wind will have lessened in the morning, and I can go back up the mast and actually install the wind vane, and then we can resume progress toward Cabo.
Update: Success! It was nice and calm this morning so I was able to go back up the mast and install the wind vane.
