Vol 2 Iss 2: The Incredible Mr. Fix-It

October 7, 2022 | Bahía Willard | 29°49’N 114°23’W | Weather: Winds 10 kt N, 90°F Partly Cloudy

Bahía Willard

I married The Incredible Mr. Fix-It.

‘In every cruising couple there is an optimist and a pessimist. Without the optimist, they’d never leave the dock. Without the pessimist, they’d sink as soon as they leave.’ Beth Leonard, A Voyager’s Handbook

Today is the day we’ve been working toward since July. The day we’ve been eagerly anticipating: the day Ana María finally goes back in the water after being hauled out onto land for maintenance.

Today is the day we’ve been dreading for a week: the day we see if, when we splash Ana Maria, she still floats after spending the summer in the heat of the Sonoran desert.

We’ve had plenty of material for our nightly nightmares this week. Cruisers have told us story after story of seals breaking, o-rings splitting, and thru-hull sealant melting in the 115° heat. You don’t discover these problems until the boat hits the water. Any of this happens to us and we have to haul out again to fix them.

The Lingo

‘Haul-out’ and ‘Splash’: The process of using a crane to pick the boat up out of the water, i.e. the haul-out, stage it on land, complete repairs below the waterline, and put it back in the water, i.e. the splash.

‘For a vessel made to be in the water, you boat spends a lot of time on land,’ remarked our friend Christine. Haha! She’s right. Ana María spent much of her refit years on land.

Now she comes out of the water once a year so we can varnish the teak, repaint the bottom below the waterline, polish the hull, and check the thruhulls. Thruhulls are holes in the boat with hoses attached to allow water to come into the boat (e.g. to cool the engine) or allow water to drain from the boat (e.g. scuppers to drain water from the cockpit). A leak in a thruhull below the waterline can sink the boat.

The Wildlife

Tropical storms bring fresh water to this arid land. Fresh water brings bugs - swarms of ‘em: Bobos, no-see-ums, flies, and mosquitoes.

Finally the moment has arrived and the crane lowers the slings holding Ana María into the water.  We’re gonna stay in the slings supported by the crane while we check thruhulls for leaks. We scamper from thruhull to thruhull checking for any sign of water ingress.

Andrés Jacobo spots 2 leaks in the cockpit scupper drain thruhulls.  As he is describing them I see our ‘dripless’ shaft seal is dripping water. A leaking shaft seal could sink the boat - or at the very least make a huge mess.

Last summer Helen, our Swiss cruising friend, imparted sound wisdom when I asked her what to do when things go wrong at sea.  ‘Andrés Jacobo is your captain. Give him the time and space and silence to think. Do what he tells you to do. He’ll be able to fix it.’

I was able to put her guidance into practice not 2 weeks later when we splashed the boat in Bellingham and caught an air bubble in our engine raw water intake. I tried to stay quiet. I tried to be patient. I tried to hand him every tool he requested. Sure enough within the hour he had diagnosed and fixed the airlock.

Now, after analyzing the 3 leaks we have today, he thinks we have all the tools necessary to fix them. (Thank goodness we made one final trip to the hardware store last night to get a new bottle of threadlock!) Worth a shot. Like the Artemis mission that failed to launch in August resulting in an additional month of storage, we’d hate to put Ana María back in storage on land.  If we take her out, she might be out another month and who knows what else could break while she is back on land.  Besides, on land without the seawater trying to make its way in, how can we be confident we’ve fixed the leaks?

We poke our heads out of the engine compartment to see 10 pairs of eyes staring expectantly at us.  The crane operators are standing by to take the boat out of the slings.  Our friends Tiemo (s/v Coconut), Richard (s/v Leilani), Stephanie (s/v Credence), Bob & Bonnie (s/v Scout) are standing by, holding our docklines, graciously ready to lend us a hand or a tool.  The boatyard owner, the always friendly but stoic Salvador Cabrales Sr, is waiting for us to say we’re ready to leave.

“I need an hour to fix this.”  Andrés Jacobo calculates before yelling up to Salvador. “I need to fix some leaks.  Can I have an hour in the slings?” Salvador contemplates the request before responding with a relaxed shrug, “Yeah, sure, you can have an hour.”  He nods to his crane operators to give them a break and casually wanders off himself.

Having negotiated only 1 extra hour, we switch from troubleshooting mode to operation mode. Andrés Jacobo calls out for me to hand him the various scalpels of his trade (‘Screwdriver with 9/16” hex.’ ‘Vice grips.’ ‘Rubbing alcohol.’  ‘Teflon tape.’ ‘Set screws.’) and I scurry about the boat, fetching the items from various tool bags and boxes.

I watch him, crammed into the back of the tiny engine compartment. It’s so hot that sweat is dripping off his bare back and it’s hard to tell which drips are from the leaks and which are from his perspiration.

He carefully inspects the thruhulls and valves. He loosens the hose clamps on the scupper hose. With brute strength he removes the hose from the plastic elbow fitting then with vice grips, he twists the elbow off the thruhull. Just as he expected, the Teflon tape has melted and crumbled, allowing water to seep through.

Watching him work methodically reminds me of our other life when he worked as a software programmer.  At 11 p.m. or 4 a.m., he’d get a call from European colleagues, “The servers are down.”   Frustrated architects in London or Tokyo would be impatiently standing by as he worked to diagnose and fix the problem to bring the servers back online.  Hunched on the floor, rubbing his chin, typing furiously for awhile before tapping ‘return’ to implement his fix then waiting to see the proverbial green light. Soon enough, he’d get the servers back to working order and architects around the world would be back to designing their 3-D models.

He works as efficiently and effectively today as he did back then. His fingers deftly wrap Teflon tape around the fittings and spread an even coat of sealant paste to seal them. All of his attention, thoughts, energy are concentrated on fixing the problem.

Thirty minutes later,  Salvador returns to the crane, a little less casual than his departure.  “Ummm, how is it going?  Are you finished?  Can we set you loose?”  I look at the time, confused.   Surely an hour hasn’t passed.  Nope. Only 30 minutes.  “Going great.  Just need a little more time,” I assure him, as he checks his watch.

“Hey chica!” Our friend Bonnie calls out.  She leans a little closer to warn me, “They have another boat waiting to come in so they are getting stressed waiting.  You need to hurry.”

I run interference between the onlookers and Andrés Jacobo, trying to buffer him from the pressure so he can work with a clear mind.  I wish I had a zipper so I could physically zip my own mouth shut to stop myself from asking him panicked questions every 2 minutes. ‘Are you done?….what about now?’ I am able to muster up enough self control to keep quiet.

Ten minutes later, Salvador appears again.  “Um we have another boat coming in that we need to haul out. Are you finished?”

“Very nearly! He’s already fixed 2 of the 3 leaks - just finishing up the last!” I try to portray confidence and ease to Salvador to buy Andrés Jacobo precious more minutes to fix the final leak on the shaft seal.

It is in situations like these I am so thankful for the partner I have chosen.  Right now my heart is pumping adrenaline throughout my body. So much adrenaline that it comes out in jitters and I begin to drop things and make mistakes.

In situations like these, Andrés Jacobo is cool as a cucumber as he carefully but swiftly switches out and tightens the set screws on the shaft seal, effectively ending the persistent drip…drip…drip of the sea water into the boat.

Two minutes later, Salvador, clearly close to panic himself, pleads, “There is another boat waiting.  I am about to lose my crane operators for the evening.  I need you to leave.”

Andrés Jacobo pops out of the engine compartment. Stressed but triumphant. He’s fixed 3 leaks in 45 minutes, coming in 15 minutes under the hour grace period he was promised.

We close the engine hatch and we pray the engine starts. Sure enough, she comes alive and purrs just as she ought. Salvador gives the order and the crane operators slip the slings from Ana María’s underbelly. Our friends untie the dock lines and hoist them into my waiting arms. We putter slowly and carefully out of the concrete slip and tie up to a dock not far away so we can check once more for leaks and clean the salt water off the transmission.

Andrés Jacobo’s fixes look strong and reliable still so we feel confident leaving the Peñasco harbor. We hope to sail through the night tonight back to Bahía Refugio but we’re not quite out of the woods yet. Before we make the 100 nautical mile jump, we need to ensure the engine works, the sails work, and the watermaker works. Otherwise it’s back to a roach-infested marina and the ‘thrill’ of the shrimp boat/bumper boat rally that is Puerto Peñasco.

The Galley

We can’t leave safe harbor without a working watermaker.

I first learned about a reverse osmosis Watermaker in third grade during the Oceanography module at WINGS. Little did I know one day I would come to depend on one to live.

When living off the water grid, boaters have 3 ways to get water: collecting rain water, spending days lugging jerrycans with water of questionable quality from shore to the boat, or using a reverse osmosis Watermaker to turn salt water into fresh potable water. As we are cruising in a desert where it never rains and as we prefer snorkeling to carrying water all day, we elected to install a Watermaker.

Our spectra Watermaker uses a high pressure pump and a series of filters and membranes to filter the salt out of the seawater to produce 6 gallons of fresh water per hour. It fills our water tanks for the week in about 10 hours. It produces fewer gallons per hour than some other models available on the market, but ours is able to run off the solar panel energy without us having to run the engine.

The WHO considers any water with less than 1000 ppm to be safe for long-term consumption. The manufacturer says anything below 500 ppm is good. Our watermaker puts out water with less than 100 ppm. It tastes delicious!

A watermaker is a luxury on a small boat like ours, yet it affords us other little luxuries that make this life a bit easier: daily showers for the crew, a weekly wash down for Ana María, and as much drinking water as our hearts and parched bodies desire!

The Entertainment

Currently reading The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific.  Catchy title for a book that ironically doesn’t say much about sex or cannibalism. Instead it recounts the cultural assimilation of an American as he adapts to living on an atoll in the Kiribati Islands in the Pacific. Highly entertaining and informative read as we set our own sights westward.

We run the engine all the way out of the channel to exit Puerto Peñasco. Everything looks and sounds normal.

We purge the Watermaker of its storage pickling compound then taste the water. Tastes delicious.

We hoist the sails and trim them for the close-hauled sail to Refugio. They’re working beautifully.

I look to my Captain, The Incredible Mr. Fix-It, and smile.

Engine: check!

Watermaker: check!

Sails: check!

All systems go!

We can sail straight for Bahía Refugio. We don’t have to turn back to Peñasco.

We’re out of here baby!!!!

I dish us up some of the Mediterranean pasta salad I made last night for the passage dinner. We eat here together in the cockpit, our bodies and minds only now starting to relax as we recount the day.

‘Man, what a stressful splash,’ he sighs.

‘Yes incredibly stressful. And I am so incredibly proud of you.’

Together we watch the sun set over the Baja Peninsula with the warm wind in our face as Ana María sails at 5 kts towards our destination and I think ‘Home. After 3 months of boat work and travel, this…this feels like home.’

The Challenge

Making it out of the boatyard and Puerto Peñasco.

The Mainsail

Making it out of the boatyard and Puerto Peñasco …and arriving in Bahía Willard. We intended to land in Puerto Refugio but the resident angels on Isla Angel de La Guarda must have been standing on the northern coast blowing Ana María toward Bahía Willard and we are so glad.

Bahía Willard has been our favorite anchorage in the Sea of Cortez: pleasant breezes yet flat calm at night, a restaurant and convenience store a short kayak ride away, hikes and sandy beaches where we could swim and cool off in the heat of the day, and Jacques. In the evenings, Jacques, our French boat neighbor on Arpatas, would swim over from his boat to ours for 15 minutes of human interaction and a mix of French/English/Spanish conversation after a long day of boat work. What a character!

The Horizon

We’re hoping to celebrate All Saints’ Day / Día de Los Muertos in a town or village somewhere. We will hunt for a traditional candy my mother-in-law recommends we taste.

Fair winds and following seas,

Katherine

P.S. A quick update on my dad: After months of chemo and radiation, the PET scans and labs this week show no sign of cancer.

Wooohoooo!

We are so relieved and grateful for this outcome. Thank you for all your prayers, encouraging words, meals delivered to their house, chauffeuring to doctor’s appointments, and the many ways you supported our family in this time.