2023 is our second year where we find ourselves wanting to prepare the boat to be tucked away in a marina over the summer months when the weather makes hopping from anchorage to anchorage uncomfortable (if the heat doesn’t stop you, the annoying ocean swell size and direction make some anchorages worse) and potentially dangerous (eastern Pacific hurricane risk) in Mexico. As mentioned in my prior post, last year we actually kept sailing well into June and got as far north as Santa Rosalia before crossing back to the mainland of Mexico and putting our boat in Marina San Carlos near Guaymas, Sonora for the summer. This year we did not want to return to San Carlos and because of the weather patterns, the ideal conditions for heading north to the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) didn’t materialize until much later in the year so we ended up effectively sending our sailing season in early April.

We didn’t start putting the boat away for summer in early April as we were in Marina La Cruz at the north side of Banderas Bay and our summer reservations started May 1 in Paradise Village Marina in the north east side of Banderas Bay. We could have kept sailing a bit longer south of Banderas Bay but the we had already spent a lot of time in Tenacatita and Barra and kept running into a mix of problems each time we wanted to head down to Manzanillo for a chance of scenery. I had some virtual meetings related to volunteering for the CAS Exam Committee in early April and we had a flight back to the US later in April because our six month tourist visa was about to run out of time. We ended up going back to the US for 11 nights staying with both sets of parents in San Rafael, California and Modesto, California. We got back to La Cruz for the start of their annual fiestas patronales, ten days of celebrations with loud rockets calling everyone to 6 AM and 8 PM mass services and party in the town square from 8:45 PM to as late as 5 AM every night. During that time we both had a terrible cold and were working with a local service person to get the blue stripes on our boat repainted. Once that was done we headed to Paradise Village Marina about a week later than our reservation, eager to get started on our boat put away projects for the season.

We got to Paradise Village on the 9th and we wanted to be back in the US before the 23rd in order to see a concert in Oakland that we’d purchased tickets for earlier in the year (Geek Show Tour with Mr. Bungle and The Melvins and amazing opening band Spotlights – it was a total barrage of sound). Suffice it to say we ended up getting tickets that got us back to the US on the 23rd, we took the BART from SFO to Oakland, checked into our hotel and had enough time to get ramen across the street from the Fox Theater and still get in there in time to hear most of the opening set. But to do this, we had to work in an organized and smart way to make sure the boat would be ready to be unoccupied for potentially over a month during the start of hurricane season in an area becoming increasingly hot and humid.

Luckily, we already had a spreadsheet we created last year for doing the same thing in San Carlos and had notes and takeaways such as things we did that we could do better and things we decided not to bother doing and whether it was okay that we didn’t. But we also had the reality that this summer we wanted to put the boat away in such a fashion that we could still live inside it off and on as we came and went from the area. One benefit of keeping the boat this far south is that the Puerto Vallarta airport has direct flights to many places in the US and elsewhere and is pretty convenient to the marina location.

A few key things we wanted to improve on vs. last year and what we did instead:

• Last year we had sails and our electric outboard and lots of other stuff stacked up on our salon settees so we couldn’t use them. This year we took more care to re-arrange things so that we could fit the sails and the outboard in the v-berth – one thing we did was take the sewing machine out from under the berth since we knew we’d want it out for off-season projects. Another great thing about this rearranging was we gave the storage under the v-berth a nice deep clean which we didn’t get around to doing last season.
• In San Carlos we ran out of time and energy so we didn’t take the stack pack all the way off after getting the sail off, just rolled it up tidily. It wasn’t a problem in terms of reducing windage on the boat, but it did expose it to extra dirt and UV over the summer. This year we took it off, cleaned it really well (you would not believe how dirty the lazy jack lines were…) and tucked it away in the v-berth. Taking it off also made it accessible for some zipper and other repairs it needed.
• We had issues with our head this season that may have been caused by not getting the head clean enough before leaving last season. This year before leaving we had access to plenty of fresh water and a good quality pump out at this marina. San Carlos did not even have a pump out. We spent the last two weeks flushing only with fresh water and before leaving put a fair amount of vinegar in the system to prevent urine/seawater crystals forming.
• Last year in San Carlos, washing and drying the sails did not go well. First of all, in San Carlos if you don’t request a permission slip to do even standard work like washing or folding your sails in the marina, they will issue a citation. Second of all, the docks were narrow and the water pressure wasn’t always great. Finally, by the time we got to San Carlos it was much hotter than it was when we got into Paradise Village so working on these things was very very hard. The first time we tried to fold the jib after washing and drying it, we had a “creative” idea to simply try to keep it tidy and clean by rolling on the dock and then realized our boat interior had no space long enough to put it and still be able to open key cabinets so we had to return in the evening and try again to fold it the traditional way. Ugh!
• Last year we bought a “highly UV resistant” polypropylene tarp to tie on top of our dinghy while it was stored upside down on our foredeck. Within a month, the man who was watching our boat let us know it was starting to rip and one day it just disintegrated. So this year we wanted to make a proper canvas cover and we brought back 10 yards of Top Notch 9 fabric we bought from Sailrite and folded to fit in our larger travel duffel on our way back from the US in April. I started work on making a fitted cover in La Cruz and finished it while in Paradise Village – there is a photo in my prior “Part 1” post. I used some of the same fabric to make some cinching wrap-around covers for the top and bottom of our jib furler (last year we covered them with foil and tape).
• San Carlos was also a really rough place to be in terms of getting food to eat while working on putting the boat away and so on… we did find some gems there like a female run coffee shop and a few nice places to eat but walking to them was just such a pain most days. There were about two weeks when all the grocery stores we went to had packages of raw chicken that were over a week past its sell by date, even the so called “good” carniceria, Santa Rosa market, had actually stripped the sell by date stickers off the chicken they had on display. And I can’t digest beef (Sonora state is known for beef) and pork was very hard to find there. We even took a bus into Guaymas and the chicken at the Walmart was past the sell by date! We did get pretty good at bussing into Guaymas and taking a bus or cab back for provisioning when we returned to San Carlos in the fall. Oldest, most dilapidated busses we’ve seen anywhere in Mexico and the fare was like triple what it was in Mazatlán.
• This year I took more pictures of under-floor and under-berth compartments as I was cleaning them and we did some inventorying of what was in our cabinets and got rid of or moved around some stuff while we were doing so.
• Last year we left our soft dodger up because we were about to replace it and it helps cover the companionway from rain but this year we have the new one in place and we don’t want it to get ruined by rain and bird shit so we decided to take it off.

To orchestrate all of the work, we copied the Decommission tab on our spreadsheet from last year, added the year to the name of both tabs to keep it clear (wanted to keep for reference), and kept the same priorities and notes and deleted all the markings of Done or In Progress that remained from last year. The spreadsheet also has a tab for listing devices with batteries (and whether we took the battery out, did a final charge, stored it more safely etc.) and location of all through hulls (and whether they should be closed and whether it has been done or not). We also started a tab called “Ready for Transport” last year as we were considering shipping the boat on a trailer to Florida in the fall. We ended up not doing that but we may be transporting the boat north sometime in the next year, so it will come in handy to revisit. We have a shared family Microsoft 365 account which, with internet access through StarLink, lets us both be updating the spreadsheet at the same time on our own devices.

As we got toward the last week of getting the boat ready, I added a column called “day to do” which helped us make sure that we weren’t overcommitting or focusing on things that would get in the way of doing critical items on the last few days. The spreadsheet also helps us see which things shouldn’t be done until near the end of our list as they make the boat unusable for living on (closing throughulls such as the kitchen and head drains will make those sinks unusable) or they should be done one last time near the end (taking out the trash and adding vinegar to the head).

This year we completed all 75 items in the spreadsheet that were labeled as “Must b4 summer” and 19 that were not considered “musts.” 6 more non-must items were partially completed. Cleaning and drying the sails at Paradise Village marina was a breeze because when we first came in we were assigned to the very very big docks where they had two or three boats tied up along a finger and the fingers were very wide. So we got our sails cleaned as fast as we could using the advantage that provided us before we got assigned to our regular size smaller slip. Cleaning, drying and folding the two sails were the two largest tasks on our lists so it was great to finish them first. We had some challenges with another large task – finding someone to watch/maintain our boat while we were away. One service person came highly recommended but three times was unable to meet with us and only sent a worker who didn’t speak enough English to talk to us about what we wanted done for boat watching, luckily in our last few days before going back to the US we got recommendations from the marina office and other cruisers and found someone we felt we could trust who has been working on boats at this marina for around 20 years.

Being even more at risk of hurricanes this year meant we really had to get everything off the boat. We are surprised how many boats do not remove all the gear and sails from above deck. Even in winters in puget sound, we’d see storms that would rip jibs off furlers and cause chaos in marinas – we always went to check on our boat after a storm and we can’t do . We expect far worse if a hurricane hits so we take everything off (sails, canvas, solar panels, StarLink receiver, electric outboard, etc.) and we take a lot of hardware down below too just to spare it the UV damage and/or exposure to theft risk. Speaking of UV, we do not go so far as to take all our running rigging out of the mast, but we do run mousing lines attached to the shackles of each halyard and pull the halyards all the way back into the boom then stuff the other ends into these two large sheet bags I hang on the mast in the off season. Keeping our lines in good shape is critical to our safety. Making sure nothing gets stolen (or more falls in the water because it was left loose) is more important from a frustration standpoint (finding replacements and getting them to Mexico is really really challenging) than a financial standpoint.

Another concern is humidity and heat. We want to get things that are heat/humidity sensitive stored as well as we can and in the potentially coolest area of the boat that we can find. I don’t get rid of all food, just perishable food and some (but not all) opened shelf stable food. Opened shelf stable food that I’m keeping or non-opened shelf stable food that isn’t packaged securely against humidity or bugs gets put into bins like the snaplock brand type that seal with pressure on a rubber gasket. So many types of storage bins do not really keep humidity out sufficiently well (for example, I have a lot of the square-ish plastic containers with screw-on lids that Costco sells mixed nuts in – they are great for organizing things like my sewing kit but they are not airtight – you’d need to add some kind of fancy foam gasket in the lid and still not be sure).

Shade covers can do a lot to keep temperature a little lower in the boat while we’re away (we don’t want to run an AC while we’re not here) but they also collect wind and we didn’t have anything other than our giant covered-wagon-like ShadeTree shade tent for shading the boat. We can’t subject that to heavy winds so we ended up leaving the boat without shade. We have now acquired a rectangular and triangular sunsail type fabric sunshade with grommets on the edges of the type folks use in the backyard. They are pretty common for use on sailboats to give a little off-season shade without being as expensive as marine canvas and the time or cost of getting custom fitted covers made. When we leave the boat again in August this year (we’re back for month of July doing the projects mentioned in Part 1 and just living) we will deploy the rectangular over the boom and the triangular in the front and trust our boat watcher to remove them if a giant hurricane blow is forecast that necessitates it (but also they are not so expensive that we’d be sad to lose them). Last year we left our boat completely disconnected from shore power but this year we decided to leave it connected and left a small tornado fan on a timer to run 6 hours on and 6 hours off while we were away so air didn’t stagnate in the boat. We were gone for almost a month from late May to late June and I’d say this strategy worked pretty well. We also set up little DampRid dehumidifier tubs and ask our boat watcher to dump them and refill the crystals as needed. We also remove and/or leave open some of our cabinet doors while we are away and remove all electronics from the upper shelves of our cabinets – the teak decks and sides of boat can get pretty hot in the sun so it’s good to think about that.

We do our best to clean every surface in the boat but we also leave behind and and roach baits and spray vinegar on a few likely-to-mildew surfaces where we’ve seen condensation in the past. I don’t think we really do much of anything that isn’t already covered in the standard “getting your boat ready for off season” lists but the difference is we have a spreadsheet and a communication system that is customized to us. And in our second year of doing it the system is working well and the communication is getting better. Noj wanted to color code things that were done or in progress, so I set up conditional formatting to look at the status and automatically color rows. Noj wanted to have a way to not see items we had decided we weren’t going to do because they were either too unimportant or not something that made sense but I wanted the priority 6 to mean unimportant but still of marginal value so we settled on adding an N/A category to the status column and that we would only use it for things that we weren’t doing for the reason of it not making sense (for example, it no longer made sense to disconnect shore power with this year’s battery management plan for the off season), not due to lower importance. A list doesn’t work unless both people are interpreting it in mostly the same way.

We are back at the boat for a month and all the things we hoped to achieve in terms of still having off-and-on livability for the summer are working and our biggest challenge is making sure not to buy too much food for the next time we leave (I got so excited when we got back to the boat from the US in April to go to the gourmet grocery that I bought a block of KerryGold butter which is twice as big as a regular butter stick and I forgot I had less than two week left on the boat – so I started cooking everything in butter instead of olive oil. Bank error in our favor!).

Stay tuned for potentially more sharing about stuff we did during the main sailing season and some land travel we will be doing this summer.