Surging Between Repairs

Time Line

Many milestones were observed during our Simi-residency.  Big plans were made for celebrating Christmas in Costa Rica.  Amy, the pragmatist in the family realized early in December, that was not going to happen.  Christmas, and then quickly to follow, New Years were enjoyed in the quiet bay with our friends who we thought we would never see again, but easily were able to catch up with us.

Mexican's love their fireworks, and it does not take much of an occasion for something to be shot into the air.  So when New Years Eve came, what ever was happening in Times Square had nothing on Z-Town pyrotechnics.  Four hours, the mortar rounds were fired into the air over the unarmed observers out in the bay, floating without refuge.  Robert tried his best to stay up till midnight, but in the end it was just Amy and Mark who watched the competing shows from the bow of the boat.  The great line from the movie Apocalypse Now, "Nothing gets me going in the morning like the smell of napalm in the air", was very much appropriate all that night.

Marine Life

I find it interesting how much the animal and plant life in the water varies in each location we travel to.  In Puerto Vallarta, the barnacles were the primary organism which brought much suffering to us.  In Zihuatanejo Bay, the primary organism was extremely small crabs, which would carpet the side of the boat like "thick" brown carpet.  This required every two weeks or so, that the "crew" would need to get in the water with or without the scuba gear and use plastic scrapers to remove the bio-mass.  Robert took great interest in this activity and so did about 5000 fish who would wait for the brown mass to be scraped off and then come in for the good eat'ns.

Most times that I got in the water, Robert would also get in to either swim with the fish or actually try and clean the boat.  Apparently, he thought his technique needed practice, because when we would go to the pool, he would ask for his orange plastic scraper, and then proceed to swim underneath his boogie board and try and clean off the crabs.

Having become very comfortable with snorkeling with literally thousands of fish swimming around his body, Robert is now eagerly trying to catch one.  His technique varies between using a small fishing net which m/v Navigator gave him, to his new Spiderman fishing pole.  He realizes that the Spiderman pole already has a fish on the end of the line, and he constantly is asking to have a real hook put on the end.  His father is not sure what the protocol is for 3 year olds and fishing gear.

Speed Transducer

A new maintenance item on my list is regularly pulling out a 3 inch plug from the bottom of the boat, which is our speed transducer.  The transducer is essentially a fancy paddle wheel which spins as water moves past it.  The spinning wheel will tell you how fast the boat is moving through the water.  Our's has not worked all year because critters will climb up into the wheel preventing it from spinning.

So I have learned on the internet, that the best practice is to quickly pull the transducer out of its sealed 3 inch hole and quickly install a plug into the same hole, all the while water is shooting up through the hole.  (This is where we pause to revisit that the first goal of boating is to keep the water on the outside of the boat).

The first time I was attempting this heart stopping drama, I thought all had gone well, with only about 1/2 gallon of water getting into the boat. 

I then noticed something crawling along the bilge (floor) of the boat by my foot (Amy will claim she heard a small scream).

Upon a more "distanced" inspection, we found that an Octopus had shot up INTO our boat through the column of water which was coming in through the open transducer hole.  As shown above, I tried to pick it up with a green sponge, it then leapt onto a pair of khaki pants laying nearby.  Being a friend of the sea, we wanted to get it back into the water with no harm done.  As I moved to put it back in the water, I was reminded of the 5000 fish swimming around our boat, who were looking for sushi that night.

Our plan was to keep our pet Octopus (not many can say that), in a bucket until sun down when he/she could have a fighting chance.  Robert was greatly interested in what we had caught in the bucket, so I used a plastic zip tie to try and encourage it to swim a bit.  It showed it's annoyance with me by shooting out two pea size ink squirts.  Everyone jumped simultaneously as the Octopus shot out the ink, (Mark will claim he heard a small scream).

3 1/2

On January 14th, 2008 we observed Robert's 3 1/2 birthday.  Amy took the initiative to use our boats small oven to bake chocolate cupcakes for a small party she planned.  Normally our oven is used to catch things on fire, so it was very impressive that the cupcakes turned out looking just like the picture on the box.

The party was held on our friends Mike and Michelle motor boat, m/v Michelle.  Steve and Wendy from s/v Elusive came and Wendy had made a hat for Robert and a coveted Hot Rod - Match Box car.

s/v Volcano

This event is really deserving of its own stand alone entry to properly cover all that occurred and all that I hope I and others have learned.

Most of the last week we were in Zihuatanejo, my time was spent trying to assist a family get their dad/ husband out of the country on a chartered life flight to Seattle.

Tom had suffered a heart attack while reading on the beach which then resulted in a silent stroke.  We transported Tom to the specialty hospital in Zihuatanejo, where it became clear to me over the next 12 hours I was going to watch a man die.  The "hospital", which all said was the best in town, had no diagnostic equipment other than an x-ray machine and the ability to do simple blood work.  It was nice to know he did not have AIDS, or elevated cholesterol, but they had no ability to identify what was the mater.  The first diagnosis, with absolutely nothing to back it up, was that Tom had cholera.

The only active medical therapy he was given was oxygen.  And that was a guess in itself because they had no equipment to monitor his blood / oxygen level, nor EKG, nor MRI, nor nothing......

Oxygen mask, I.V. drip of potassium and that was it for a man who needed to be in Intensive care.

As I said, this will be a much longer entry later when I can get all the details down on paper.

Farewells

So we come to the end here.  Nothing fancy, no clever ending.  Just an observation that we have moved on now.  There is much we will miss, but it will not include the daily grind of a Normandy style beach landing each day to get ashore.  Nor will it be the hauling of containers of fuel, which weigh 140 pounds each, from the gas station in a taxi, down to the beach by hand, into the dinghy, out to Calpurnia and then siphoned into our tanks, all to keep the lights on.

Amy has been with my mom in Cartersville, Georgia all this week collecting all the parts and things we think we need to move on down the road.  She returns in two days to Acapulco.  We hope she arrives with an autopilot.