We had some wonderful days of motor sailing from La Cruz to La Paz. There were a few times we could have turned off the engine and sailed but each time it would have slowed us down enough that we probably would have had to come into the next anchorage in the dark so we motored along. The first few days the wind was mostly on our beam, but then it slowly clocked around until it was almost behind us. Other than the risk of an accidental jibe (the wind getting on the wrong side of the main sail and having the boom come flying across the deck), running with the wind is a very comfortable way to sail. I was even able to sleep well underway when I was off shift, rare for me. For a while we were sailing “wing and wing” with the wind directly behind us and the jib of the other side from the main, very sweet:
The weather here is wonderful, warm in the middle of the day (mid 90's) but the humidity is low so it doesn't feel too hot and it gets almost cold overnight (mid 50's but with a 20 mph southerly breeze, perfect sleeping weather).
There is a (quasi) joke in the sailing world that boat stands for “Break Out Another Thousand”. We’ve decided in our case it is “Break Out Another Tool”. When we left La Cruz we discovered our autopilot wasn’t working. It took us a while to decide it had a problem since all of the lights lit up and under sail the boat is well balanced and she stays pointed in the direction we set her up. Intermittently the autopilot would work then suddenly we couldn’t make any course corrections so eventually we went to hand steering, though the conditions were so nice it only took an occasional correction (but you don’t dare leave the helm), this made for long nights though. When we got to Mazatlan, Tom found not one but two problems; a cracked relay switch and one of the solder joints on the circuit board was cracked. He was able to fix both, we’ll keep our fingers crossed that this solves it. Then the afternoon before we left Mazatlan, Tom got a funny feeling and decided to run the engine a while at anchor. After just a few minutes we heard a sparking sound, opened the engine door and saw sparks coming out of our alternator. Lucky we had a spare alternator but it took more than an hour of swearing and bloody knuckles to replace it. We were in a calm anchorage; if it had happened underway it would have been 100 times worse.
On the passage from Mazatlan to la Paz, both the autopilot and the alternator worked great!
We'll leave La Paz Wednesday morning and will probably be out of internet access for at least a week or two (or longer if we find a wonderful anchorage :-). We’ve heard rumors about whale sharks spotted further up the Sea, that would be so cool to spot one of those gentle giants.
Carolynn (& Tom)
