This year we decided to have a longer off season than we did last year. Last year our season came to an end in late June as we were trying to get out of the heat in the Sea of Cortez and bringing our boat to Marina San Carlos in Sonora state. San Carlos was a good place to store the boat in the off season for a few reasons, not least of which was the fact that our insurance excludes coverage for damage resulting from named storms on the western side of Mexico from May 15 to November 15 if we are between 8°N and 27°N and San Carlos is one of the few marinas in Pacific Mexico that far north. Also heading to San Carlos gave us a chance to see the Sea of Cortez.

This year we started the year thinking we’d go to Panama but got slowed down by diagnosing and fixing issues with our head and a bad bout of food poisoning that took weeks to recover from. So we ended up spending a lot of time bouncing between Barra de Navidad and Tenacatita from late January to late March. At the point when it was clear we weren’t heading south we considered our options for the summer and made a reservation at Paradise Village Marina, Nuevo Vallarta in Banderas Bay. While our insurance doesn’t cover us for tropical storm damage here, we feel we can do a lot to reduce our exposure to risk and we feel the Marina is generally in better shape (and much more comfortable to stay at) than Marina San Carlos. So far we’ve been pretty happy with the facilities: showers in an air conditioned lounge (as opposed to San Carlos where the bathrooms were very run down and ventilated through open windows and you wished cold water would come out of the shower head), potable water coming out of the faucets at the docks (as opposed to San Carlos where you have to lug 20L garrafones to your boat without a dock cart or wait to have them delivered on someone else’s unpredictable schedule), a swimming pool and a pretty walkable area with a mall (that has more self-service laundry machines than they had at San Carlos) and lots of easily accessible restaurants. We also can easily get to gringo-friendly supermarkets though we miss the larger cruiser community and friendlier small tiendas in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle selling fresh produce, meat and tortillas (we considered Marina La Cruz but they don’t have the potable water, their showers are less comfortable and frequently their water stops, many dock cleats are in rotten wood and are questionable for big winds, the theft security seems to be less good, and its farther from the airport and apparently every summer they rip up sections of the street to repave).

So anyway, here we are in Banderas Bay and this morning we saw Hurricane Beatriz weaken to tropical storm after hitting land south of Manzanillo this morning and then she died off and passed with little trouble. So that gave us more time to work on some boat maintenance today instead of worrying about the storm more. The first project we looked at today was to look at how we would install a fan in a new hole in the wall between the cabinet under out sink where our fridge compressor sits and a nearby cabinet with a vented door. The fridge compressor has trouble keeping up in the heat and we learned it actually has a place to plug in a fan. We tried connecting the fan we bought and it wasn’t coming on. We tested the fan on some other wiring and it worked. Noj decided we should check the voltage and we discovered that the voltage coming into our compressor was significantly less than he could measure at the electrical panel. We took a look at where the wires were run and thought about what replacement or additional testing might look like. Then before ripping the wires out we tried one more thing first. We had noticed mild corrosion on the connectors, possibly related to some leaking saltwater from the whale pump, so Noj took some sandpaper and cleaned the connectors a bit. After doing that, we read the voltage we expected, were able to plug the fan in and see it working. We decided to leave the cutting of the hole in the wall and installation of the fan for another day.

I decided I wanted to get to the bottom of the whale pump drip issue. When we got back to the boat a couple weeks ago I noticed this salt crust on top of some containers under the sink. I hadn’t seen that before and I figured it had to come from the whale pump. As we were looking at the compressor, I stuck my head all the way under the cabinet to see the gap behind the sink where the taps go through and I could see a huge salt ring at the base of the whale pump and some salt along the seam of the countertop right above the compressor. I could not see any salt around the area where the salt water hose attached to the base of the pump so I figured it was not an issue of a loose hose but an issue of the leak that happens at the top of the pump when pumping up and down. So I cleaned all the salt from under the countertop and then got to work at prevention above the countertop by loosening the base of the whale pump, giving it and the counters a good clean, and then applied a thin bead of caulk along the back wall of the countertop, along a seam in the countertop where the salt seemed to be dripping, and around the stem of the whale pump. Now when it inevitably leaks from the pump up top it will have less opportunity to leak through and corrode the connectors on the fridge compressor!

Today was a perfect example of one maintenance item that was already on our list leading to a new maintenance item or increasing the urgency of a maintenance item that was lower on the list. One thing I didn’t mention about San Carlos and Nuevo Vallarta is that they are both hot and humid in summer. In San Carlos last year we did not have any AC when getting the boat ready for off season but we did buy one when we returned in September and were starting pre-season maintenance projects. This was the first thing we did after getting back to the boat here two weeks ago. Much easier to do here as there are more transportation options in this larger more populated area than there were in the San Carlos / Guaymas area. Why not use the AC from last season? We don’t want to sacrifice the space on our smaller boat to carry around a bulky window unit AC and we can only use it with marina power anyway so we bartered it to one of our boat maintenance guys in San Carlos before leaving there in October. We did a better job setting up the AC this time around (used sheets of Reflectix held together with gorilla tape instead of cardboard).

For more flavor, here is a list of some other maintenance items we’ve done over the past two weeks:

• Serviced three of our winches
• Replaced zipper and reinforcing panels on stack pack
• Cut off first two links of anchor chain that were worn down by anchor rescue system collar and reconnected anchor
• Replaced wires going into propane solenoid, replaced clogged solenoid and painted bracket to reduce corrosion from saltwater splashing in
• Installed new feet on the boarding ladder legs
• Made a laminated instruction sheet for Ditch bag manual water maker
• Made winch covers for 4 winches (only had for 2 of 6)
• Repaired the cracking winch handle pocket at the mast
• Better secured our nav lights to reduce chance of getting pulled off by flapping sheets
• Redid caulk in bathroom
• Make Replacement furling line
• Setup router with VPN on it for better entertainment on the boat.
• Cleaned and sanitized our water tanks (the water in there got pretty green while we were away for a month)
• Fairing caulking on deck using Mozart knife (in progress)
• Built a dock-water filtration system so the potable water is even cleaner before going in our tanks

We also did some maintenance before leaving the boat in May including:

• Worked with a local painter and his guys to get our blue stripes repainted and our boat name and new HR decals applied
• Revarnishing the companionway teak that the hatch boards slide into
• Tested our galvanic isolator
• Opened autopilot reservoir and drained out excess hydraulic fluid using syringe, clean and reseal.
• Made a sun cover to put over dinghy while stored on bow

And here’s a preview of what’s yet to come this summer:

• Replacing boom gooseneck roll pin
• Arranging interior cushions steam cleaned or remade/replaced (labor price and availability in Mexico is better than back home and some salon cushions are feeling pretty flat)
• Making some sort of cockpit sun cover we can use underway without needing to the the HR Bimini frame shipped to us (local talent can help with building a similar Bimini frame but they are all booked until fall) – my solution may involve PVC pipe but I’m still puzzling over whether I can get the geometry to work the way I want it to
• Applying lip seal grease to the prop shaft
• Replacing our windex instrument that fell off (the electronic one is still OK, this is a secondary that is more visible from the cockpit)
• Get the bottom paint refreshed
• Finish working with the service provider who repainted our stripes on some repair of gelcoat nicks
• Replacing the windlass buttons (one has been non-functional since January 2021 so we only have an electric windlass up function and use the manual system for down)
• Restitching section at top of genoa where thread is UV damaged
• Touching up exterior varnish on the cockpit trays and hatch boards
• Maybe touching up some interior varnish
• Replacing the hinges on the toilet seat in the head
• Full cleaning of the standing rigging including removing the antenna holder from the backstay and cleaning there (the rain here is helping a lot with getting some grime off)
• And much much more…

Stay tuned for part 2 of this series which pertains to what we did this year to get ready for the off season this year. It looks a lot like what we did last year, but we did such a better job of it this year. How do we get so much done and make sure we stay on top of it? Shared Excel workbooks with automatic color coding, sorting, filtering and lots and lots of planning-related columns of data! Obviously someone on the boat is a spreadsheet jockey… I even build pivot tables of the lists and the Done/In Progress and other key fields so we can enjoy watching our progress. So nerdy. So very nerdy. But I CAN NOT STOP IT!