La Paz, Mexico
May 7, 2011
Its 5am and in a couple of hours we will be leaving La Paz. We have been here almost 2 weeks getting the boats ready for what we hope to be a 3 week trip to the Marquesas. Solstice's new crew members arrived yesterday and we are all excited to get underway. We have decided to do our international clearance out of Mexico in Cabo and should be there bright and early Monday morning.
I will post an update from there and share more about our stay in La Paz. But now its back to work....
Jake.
Monday, April 25th
What an amazing past 24 hours in the Sea of Cortez.
This sea is so alive.
We have had humpback whales breaching
next to the boat, pilot whales,
dolphins, flying fish, and jumping sting
rays.
Flat seas, beautiful sunset,
stars everywhere, and best of all it
is finally
getting warm.
Check out the
picture of
Jackie in Cabo as she
looks like
she is
dressed for an
Antarctic
expedition.
We entered La Paz around 9am this morning. Our original
plan was to
anchor,
however
both Hokule’a and Solstice need
some repairs that
require dockside
access. Our friends, Jim and Emma on the boat Blue
Sky, were kind enough
to arrange slips for us in Marina Palmira. We
have
not seen them since they left on their circumnavigation over 6
years ago.
As I mentioned yesterday, the trip down was great even with the
mechanical and electrical issues. Jackie was amazing on her first real ocean passage. As most of you know, we were a little concerned about how she would manage her seasickness underway, but amazingly she did not experience any seasickness. We attribute a lot of this to us spending a few nights on a rolly mooring in Catalina before heading out to sea.
Probably the hardest part about the trip down was getting use to the watch schedule and dealing with being tired all the time. As you know someone has to be awake and in charge of the boat at all times. We did a 4 hour on 4 hour off schedule. We started to acclimate by Wednesday but then hit some rough weather where it was nearly impossible to get good sleep.
For the sailors in the group, here are the cliff notes version from our daily log:
They say cruising is all about working on your boat in exotic places. Well we not only get to work on Hokule’a in beautiful La Paz, but had to make a few repairs underway in some not so exotic conditions. On Wednesday, we went to turn on the generator to charge the batteries. Turned the key and nothing happened. No problem, we will start the main engine to charge the batteries while I sort out the generator issue. Turned the key and nothing happened. Now I notice that we have no electrical power at all including no autopilot. Well at least the solar panels are still working…wrong. Not good. Had enough battery power to call Solstice on the VHF radio to let them know we had a problem. Somehow both crews were enjoying the sailing conditions and didn’t notice that we had sailed nearly 15 miles away from each other. Solstice kindly fired up their engine and headed to us with a long set of jumper cables (just kidding about the jumper cables). It was great to have the moral support knowing they were there. After an hour or so of hanging upside down and sideways in the engine room and various spots in the bilges, I found that one of the electrical busbars had completely shorted out and melted. It was obviously undersized and fortunately I had a larger one in our spares. By the time Solstice arrived, I had the generator and engine going, and sometime after that found the fuses to get the solar panels and alternator working again.
The other issue was with our steering. The day after the electrical issue we had the roughest weather of the trip. We started hearing a noise in the hydraulic steering system that we had not noticed before and by the next day the autopilot was having trouble steering. Decided to hand steer for awhile and found that the steering was really unresponsive. Great…. now we not only get to hand steer the remaining 250 miles to Cabo, but we get to do it with the emergency tiller. For those who don’t know, Solstice and Hokulea’s emergency tillers are located in the aft cabin, meaning that you drive the boat from the aft cabin with no way to see where you are going. You therefore need a handheld compasss /GPS with you in the aft cabin and communication with a person on deck to make sure you don’t hit anything. Since there are only two of us, this is a big problem. It is also nearly impossible to diagnose and repair underway. Fortunately, we were able to shorten sail to reduce the load on the steering and keep the autopilot working.
Had a few other minor issues such as Solstice and Hokule’a breaking their boom vang attachment points on nearly the same jibe and nearly getting run over by Mickey Mouse, but I will let Bill and the Solstice crew tell you that one.
So as you can imagine we are really happy to be here in La Paz and looking forward to a beer and a long nap. But first, it’s off to go do our clearing in with the Port Capitan, Immigration and Customs. Hopefully this won’t be as exciting as the trip down…but you never know.
Sunday, April 24th
Buenas Dias!
This morning at 6:30am we had our first sighting of land since leaving
Catalina six days ago. As we approached Cabo San Lucas we enjoyed
a glorious sunrise over the Sea of Cortez and were welcomed by
several spy hopping humpack whales. Welcome to Mexico.
The trip down here was great, even though we had some mechanical
and electrical issues to work through. Our new motto for Hokule’a is
no engine, no steering…no problem. More on that later, when we get
into La Paz and catch up on some sleep.