SV Gallant Fox

28deg.56 min. N, 113deg. 24min. W

Left San Carlos 19 days ago. Crossed N Sea of Cortez @ Midriff Islands. Now in Ensenada Quemada 10 mi. SE of Bahia de los Angeles. Barren but beautiful bay sheltered from SE swell, ringed by red volcanic reefs. Days: clear, sunny & hot, cooling breezes in pm. Deep underwater canyons make H2O temp a brisk 64 deg. midday. Coyotes roam beach; octopi, guitarfish & rays cavort in shallows. No storms or hurricanes & the weather pundits call it unprecedented. So far, so good. m

Random Sightings

When there is no fire extinguisher, you can always try prayer.

You may need prayer to keep these wires on this public electrical pole from catching fire, too.

Whimsical, artistic public seating is not necessarily comfortable public seating.

Sometimes, even grimy boat yards can support things of beauty.

m

Marina Singlar Guaymas: The Place To Be

Through circumstances beyond our control we spent two months and four days at the Singlar dock in Guaymas, Sonora. This is not a bad thing. I said it last year and I'll say it again now: Guaymas is a great cruiser's destination. The town has history to it, construction improvements of the waterfront and malecon continue, and from a cruiser's perspective you can accomplish much here in the way of repairs, outfitting and provisioning. You can get your boat's fire extinguishers refilled or recharged on Calle 26, a mere two blocks away from the Singlar marina. There is a chandler selling fishing tackle about 6 blocks to the SE near the fishermen's darsena. A large fabric store is in the opposite direction, down the main drag (Serdan) at Calle 18; you have a classic Mexican market, barber shops, pharmacies, restaurants, candy stores, a well-stocked liquor store and at least two large hardware stores all within easy walking distance of the marina. The bus lines are inexpensive and easy to figure out - you can ride one all the way to San Carlos for 12 pesos. There's so much going on hereabouts, someone ought to put together a cruisers' guide.

Then there's the Singlar marina itself.  I hear the fuel permits are expected to finalize this month (June 2009) so that the Pemex fuel dock will finally be allowed to open adjacent to the marina. The rooftop bar & restaurant, and the ground-floor cafe, are all up and running right now, as is the lap pool and hot tub. Excellent Internet access in the marina buidlings and along the dock. Big showers, nice laundry area. All the staff are great people and management works hard to build morale and a sense of community. Very nice.

If for some reason you can't find what you're looking for either in town or at the marina, meet Horacio, Singlar's dock supervisor, lift operator & yard boss. He knows everything and everybody. And on the off-chance he doesn't know where something is, he'll find out.

Here's Jared, marina manager and lift operator. Look at him in action, here, with the TraveLift:

We're not the only cruisers who have had good experiences at Marina Singlar Guaymas. In its year and a half of operation we have seen it grow rapidly into a dry dock that is now at full occupancy, and a floating dock that generally runs from 2/3 full to almost completely full. In short, if you are considering Guaymas as a place to haul your boat for some quick work, or to store your boat for longer term, get in line quickly and make your reservations early. (The dry dock was at maximum capacity in May. When everyone returns to splash in early November for the start of next boating season, they'll fill Singlar's floating slips to capacity while they clean & provision their boats for travel.) If you're nearby, you can meet the Singlar gang in person or hail them on VHF 16. Mind you, contact information goes stale rapidly in these parts, but as of May 2009, one of Marina Singlar Guaymas's telephone numbers is 52-669-9133-720, and the marina manager can be reached via email jared_martinez@hotmail.com. Check it out, people. You're missing out on some good times.

m

Hauling Out in San Carlos - Some Observations

Our approach to big boat projects involving tool skills or physical demands is this: GB does almost all that sort of work while I handle the parts/supplies procurement, keep myself available to help GB when he asks for it, follow the instructions he gives me, and otherwise keep myself out from underfoot. Meaning, I had some spare time to look around at the life around me in Marina Seca's boat yard. Up here are 2 views of their long-term storage yard in San Carlos, from up on jackstands in the work yard. There are a lot of boats of all types out there - some old, some new; large and small; some have been there for just one season; others for many seasons; still others have been abandoned and languish under the hot Sonoran sun. Some are fiberglass; some are wood.

Speaking of wood, every day just before sunrise, from my perch in the work yard I heard the sound of woodpeckers tapping on one mast or another in the distance. I pitied the poor wooden boat that was under attack, and heard tales from other cruisers who had seen one boat in particular whose mast was riddled with woodpecker holes. We all speculated that it had been abandoned and Marina Seca kept it there as a sacrificial boat, to keep the local Gila woodpeckers from going after other wooden masts throughout the yard. It seemed like a fine idea to me, if true.

But soon I heard another sound - the unmistakable sound of a woodpecker tapping on metal: pingpingpingpingpinnnnnngggggg. Man, I thought, that little guy must have one huge headache now...

The next morning, same pingpingpingpingpinnnnnngggggg, different location.  Assuming the woodpecker was going after aluminum masts, I contemplated that repetitive head injuries must indeed lead to short term memory loss.  And then one morning I saw two of them alight on a sailboat closer to ours. And I saw that they were not beating on the aluminum masts after all. They were going for the masthead instruments.

Yikes. THAT'S an expensive bird toy.

So, an FYI to all you cruisers out there:  when storing your boat on the hard and leaving it unoccupied for any length of time, you may want to consider removing those fancy masthead instruments. Because it might not be high winds that mess them up.

m

Hauling Out in San Carlos - as the Job Progressed

It took GB 6 days to sand, fill and paint The Fox's hull at Marina Seca in San Carlos. To be sure, it's a big job and physically demanding, but GB's been there before and knows what to expect. In this photo on the left, GB has filled the dings and dents left by mostly-vegetative marine growth; you can see that the greatest erosion in the bottom paint has occurred along the waterline.

Over there on the right is a shot of GB, totally in his element. Which in this case happens to be the Comex Amercoat paint we bought in Mexico and is specially formulated for tropical waters and to resist aggressive marine growth. That's right, folks - GB's using no mask, goggles, full-length paper suit, or other protective gear. Please do not try this at home:

All told GB used 3 gallons of Comex Amercoat paint to cover The Fox in 2 to 3 layers of paint depending on the location along the hull. The first, base layer was a very sexy-looking black that we used simply because the Comex store didn't have enough blue. But a pleasant surprise for us was that the blue paint that Comex did have, was the slate-blue color of The Fox's original Swedish bottom paint. Check out over there on the right, how nice the rudder looks after GB's work:

Bottom line (so to speak): GB did a fine job and thanks to him we got out of the water and back in, in a very reasonable length of time and with as little expense as possible. I bet y'all are wondering what I did during this process.

to be continued...

m

Hauling Out in San Carlos - Before Work Started

Late March is a good time to haul out in San Carlos to work on a boat. The Marina Seca there is a large and busy place, but the end-of-season rush hasn't begun so it's easy to schedule a haulout and gather supplies.  The weather is generally warm, dry and sunny, yet still cool enough to be comfortable for working.  Paint and epoxies spread and dry properly - unlike a couple months later, when the heat starts rising rapidly and paint begins to clump before you can brush it on.

Once the good folks at Marina Seca rolled The Fox down the boulevard and got her positioned on jackstands in the yard, they pressure washed the hull and we examined the dings, nicks and marine growth on the hull. Overall it looked in better condition than we'd expected, but the marine growth in the hard-to-reach bow thruster tubes was so extensive, the wee props were completely buried. Check out what the thrusters look like when clean...and what they looked like after 2 years in progressively warmer waters:

Yeeeeah. Looks like a reef to me. Good thing we didn't have to file an environmental impact statement before disturbing that little ecosystem in there.

We saw the typical level of growth of acorn barnacles on the propeller and up the drain tubes, as well as general slimage along the water line where vegetative matter really enjoys the sunlight. Plus there was a wee rubbed place on the forward base of the keel where I'd momentarily nudged us aground on one of Topolobampo's shifting sand bars last year. Ahem.

Anyway, the job of sanding, filling and repainting the hull appeared to GB to be a straightforward and uneventful project - and so in fact it was.

 to be continued...

m

Hauling Out in San Carlos

So, here I am: I got my blogging mojo back just in time to leave Internet connectivity again. Sailing is like that sometimes.

Anyway, the last thing that went according to plan, occurred waaay back in late March when GB dove on the hull in Bahia Concepcion over on the Baja Peninsula and advised me The Fox needed its hull repainted.  We'd gone almost 2 full years since GB had sanded and painted the hull in Seattle with the finest bottom paint available in the Pac NW. The paint was so well traveled by now, in these warmer southerly waters, that the barnacles and whatnot were attaching themselves with greater vigor than GB could exert to scrub them off. And so we left Bahia Concepcion and made a northern crossing of the Sea of Cortez to a popular cruisers' boat yard on the mainland, in San Carlos, Sonora.

San Carlos has its Marina Seca, where over 1000 boats haul out every year to be put on the hard during Sonora's long, hot summertime hurricane season; and it has a work yard where owners can do whatever maintenance, repairs and upgrades are necessary, with a view toward splashing again as quickly as possible. We fell into the latter group.

I've never liked hauling-out. It is unnatural for a boat to be out of the water. (I do not care that that's how a boat gets built in the first place - it just doesn't feel right) It is also unnatural for the likes o' me to live aboard a boat on jackstands: I'm not partial to scrambling up & down ladders, especially not while bound for the washroom carrying a bucket full of dirty dishes in one hand.  And even more especially, I do not like scrambling down said ladder at 2 in the morning, all bleary-eyed and fuzzy-headed, bound for the washroom yet again when nature calls. Anyway.

Marina San Carlos has a launch ramp that Marina Seca also uses to haul boats. The launch ramp area and the main fairway are shallow - there's a portion of the main fairway where boats with 6-foot-or-deeper keels tend to run aground; and the launch ramp area itself is so shallow, that Marina Seca's haulout schedule is based on the right height of the tides coinciding with their regular business hours. Which for us, meant that we had to wait over a week to get water deep enough around the launch ramp and its approach. Fortunately, there was enough prep-work to do in San Carlos and neighboring Guaymas to keep us busy.

Marina Seca does not use a conventional TraveLift sling-type contraption for yanking boats out of their watery environment. Instead they use a tractor and an 8-arm hydraulic lift on a flatbed trailer-type dealio. Having now seen it in action up close, I think I might prefer it to a TraveLift. But here's a series of pics that better explains how the tractor operator eases the trailer into the water at the launch ramp; the hydraulic arms are separately raised to hold the boat steady; the tractor pulls the trailer - now supporting the boat - out of the water; and then the tractor pushes the boat and trailer for about 1/2 mile down San Carlos's highway toward Marina Seca, while the boat's owners trot along behind, taking pictures:

It seems from a first-timer's point of view that one advantage of this hydraulic-arm flatbed arrangement, is that each arm can be adjusted to fit any shape of hull, possibly better than a TraveLift's straps & cables can.  Another apparent advantage of the flatbed, is that the boat is already positioned at the general height the jackstands will be, once the boat is in the yard. It looked to me as if this made it easier on the yard workers to position the jackstands quickly and safely.

It was an interesting experience watching the tractor push The Fox down the highway, with The Fox and the flatbed trailer in reverse. So, if you're ever driving a car around the San Carlos area, keep a sharp eye out for any masts moving along, backwards, in areas where you know there's no water...

to be continued...

m