Right now I have a backlog of at least three blog posts. In fact, I have started to draft or envision three particular topics and just haven’t gotten around to it. One is the long-promised post on food. It’s a huge post and the things I want to say about it keep growing to the point where I feel I should write it as four posts – an overview and the three detail sections (advice for those who want to cruise on how to prep their galley and food thoughts, provisioning in Mexico, eating out in Mexico).

The other two posts are about Guadalajara where we spent four nights in December and Mazatlán where we spent time in January and December. In light of the recent cartel response to the arrest of El Chapo’s son and the temporary shutdown of everything in Mazatlán for a few days, I’d say I still recommend visiting Mazatlán – the violence there was far less than in some of the smaller towns in Sinaloa. In case you were wondering, we were already far from Mazatlán when those events happened and all cruisers we know in the area stayed safe on their boats or close to the marina areas.

Right now I am in Barra de Navidad. It’s our fourth time here – we stopped in twice last year first in the marina, then headed south to Ensenada Carrizal for a while, then came back up and anchored in the lagoon. This year we came in a couple days earlier than planned because we were in Tenacatita for a week and needed to go out of the bay to dump our holding tank. We discovered that what we thought might be happening was in fact happening: our holding tank vent was clogged from somehow overfilling the tank at some point so we were unable to get the tank to fully empty.

Noj got in the dingy and tried to clear the vent from the outside as we drifted on the ocean. We saw other boats passing either going from Tenacatita to Barra or other way. We were hoping to get back in to Tenacatita that same afternoon to hang out with other boaters that were due in during the next few days. The bay was fairly rolly and we could see that we would not be able to fix the problem without removing the hose and clearing it so we started to make way for Barra de Navidad hoping we could get a slip in the marina or at least have calmer waters in the lagoon.

There was a slip for us and we got in and managed to clear the head vent by late evening and go into town for ice cream, tacos, and flan pie. It was not a fun job and we were really happy to have the dockside water spigot and access to garbage cans there to help us with cleanup and then afterward being at the marina gave us the ability to use showers on shore.

This was our second head failure this year. The first was much worse and took three or four days in late December to solve. We had just left Isla Isabel when that problem started to cause issues – we were unable to empty our holding tank on our crossing to Matanchen bay. We knew that barnacles could sometimes clog through hull fittings and we stopped the boat while Noj dove in and tried to clean the through hull from the outside. We could not get that to solve the problem and didn’t want to start taking the hoses apart while underway.

Once we got to anchor in Matanchen we moved forward with the problem. In solving it we first disconnected the hose that pumps from the bowl to the y-valve. Noj did some work to clean that hose out and also replaced our Jabsco pump with the new spare we had on board which meant quite a bit of effluent going into our shower pan that needed to be cleared up. I was standing by with tools, heavy duty paper towels and garbage bags. After doing that we were thankful for the onshore garbage bins kindly offered to us by the ramada operators on shore.

However, we still had a problem and eventually had to disconnect the hose from the y-valve to the holding tank (yes, more effluent to clean from the shower pan below – perhaps this is one benefit of not having a separate shower area in head – the nice shower pan for capturing this mess) and found that the bronze y-valve was completely blocked with the calcification that forms over time if marine heads are allowed to sit with too much C₅H₄N₄O₃ inside (we decided to flush much more salt water through in the future with each use). Since Noj did all the dirty work the prior day, this day was my time to get in there with the mess. Before doing interior work, I got to make a try at the through hull from the outside. The water in Matanchen is so rich with life from the nearby estuaries that I could barely see one foot ahead to the through hull and had to feel for it. I had a nice long wooden dowel I could work around in there without having to be underwater but the challenge with trying to clear a clog from the outside is that the fitting has a 90-degree bend about 4″ inside the boat so if the clog is above that (which is most likely) it is very hard to get to from outside. And I was not able to clear it.

I disconnected the hose from the tank and caught as much as I could in a Costco assorted nut canister (these things are square-ish and great for storing stuff on the boat so we have a lot of them but not air/moisture tight so we use them for storing non-perishables) and the rest of that effluent went into the shower pan for cleanup with towels. I could use a wooden dowel to see that the hose going up to the holding tank was not at all blocked. We already knew the blockage was not up there because we were also unable to pump overboard directly from the bowl – so there had to be clog somewhere at or below the y-valve.

Once I had the hose off, I could see the bronze pipe looked okay from what I could see on top, but I had a 1/4″ wooden dowel that I could only get into the pipe about 2″ and then right where the y-valve part was I could only push the dowel a little way into one tiny hold in the middle of some clog in this fitting that should be giving me over 1″ of space for stuff to flow out. I tried chipping away at the clog with the dowel and then with a screwdriver. I didn’t want to damage it with the screwdriver and remembered we had 6 or 8 stainless steel drinking straws. I asked Noj to bring me one of those (which is forever a non-galley tool now) and a hammer and I was able to carefully chisel away at the mess without damaging the bronze fitting. I used the wooden dowel to feel around that I’d caught all the crust. Noj dove in and tried one more time to make sure all was clear from the outside.

We then reconnected hoses and were able to pump saltwater into the bowl and out through the y-valve! Success! Back on open ocean, we later confirmed that we could dump the tank too… or so it seemed. We’ve come to the realization that during that ordeal we probably overfilled the holding tank leading to the clog in the air vent which was preventing us from fully emptying the tank over the past month. We think it’s all good now but since we’re in the marina we are using the shore-based facilities as much as possible. We will soon be back out on the open waters and be able to test it fully.

So, that sucked. You’re just here for the pictures and the nice stuff. Between these two painful fixes, we had a ton of great times in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle and Tenacatita hanging out with other cruisers. I’m not going to make special blog posts about that as we were in those places last year and I think shared some details about it. Here’s a quick slideshow of some things that keep us motivated, not pictured are all of our wonderful friends both from last season that we’re meeting again and new friends made this season, thanks for reading!