Monday, November 9, 2009

Hard Work! 11.9.09

Man this is hard work! This is cruising stuff is not for the unorganized... There are so many things to keep straight from day to day! Monday Night Football, Tuesday night Domino's Pizza parties,

Dock 6 pizza party, the 1st of the season!

Wednesday dinghy out to Deer Island for a much needed day of rest from all this tough work,

Deer Island dinghy run!

Most of everyone who went to the Deer Island dinghy run!

Thursday Dunia's shrimp ladies run, Saturday night baseball games....whew! And let's not forget the every afternoon, 4:30 dock party on Dock 6. haha... It's tough keeping our social schedule straight at times! It's a rough problem to have... It's great to see everyone returning to their boats, almost daily, and catching up, hearing about what has happened since we last saw them, and what their plans are for this season! We have such a wonderful group of cruisers on Dock 6 - the dock is very busy - and we all can talk for hours it seems when we get together. At the 4:30 party, it is often difficult to walk down the dock as there are so many chairs gathered.

And of course our organized trips are a ton of fun as well. This past week it was a planned visit to Dunia's, one of our favorite shrimp experiences in Mazatlan. You take a bus downtown (or a pickup truck taxi in our case!) and on one block in the downtown area are the 'Shrimp Ladies'. They have buckets of every different type of shrimp you can imagine. You purchase your uncooked shrimp and then head over to Dunia's, a bar just around the corner, where they will cook your shrimp for you for little to nothing while you enjoy some ice cold beers while you're waiting. We were bummed to find that Dunia's was closed (apparently for tax issues) but were directed around another corner to 'La ankla de oro' or 'The silver anchor'.

Shrimp & cold cervezas at the Silver Anchor

We were escorted inside to a small side room where our waitress was intent on getting us drunk as you weren't even finished with one beer when another one appeared! There were buckets of beer right on the side of the table and they brought lots of appetizers for us to enjoy - ceviche, marlin, and a fried fish that turned out to be very yummy! Our shrimp was cooked to perfection with most of us getting garlic & butter or just boiled. There was a live band which was deafening but entertaining.

Of course it's not all fun & games... Work, work, work...that's all we seem to be doing! And there's lots more where that came from, but we're getting through it slowly but surely. We escaped the boatyard on Saturday morning with no leaks (woohoo!) and are getting settled again in our old slip in Marina Mazatlan.

Ahea Kali heading back towards the water!

Finally we have some space to use and not keep throwing everything in the van! When we were in the yard, we took all of the sails to the van and anything that was in the way because, of course, we had projects going in all areas of the boat so no area was safe!

Back at the slip Michael has been working to re-insulate the refrigerator using a 2-part pourable foam. Our refrigerator was working a little too hard down here in the heat & warm water so we figured we would pull up the bottom and re-insulate it. That has turned into a fun project! The bottom of the refrig was sawed out & all of the old insulation was removed, which turned out to be styrofoam. Once it was cleaned out he made a false bottom with lots of holes about 5 inches up from the real bottom and then poured in the foam. Next the bottom will be reinstalled and fiberglassed in.

The bottom of the fridge

Hopefully that will be today - we hired Rick from Capestar to take care of that for us. They should only have to put the bottom down & tape in the seam! Of course it is about 2 feet down inside a hole that measures about 16" x 14" and the worker will spend most of the time upside down, feet in the air, leaning on his hip. It's not a fun job...hence why it's been tasked out!

In the meantime, work is still being done on the boat. Halyards raised, lots of cleaning, systems checked, rearranging, etc, etc. We're still targeting leaving the marina around the end of November, after Thanksgiving, which Michael is again in charge of putting together. Whew! As I said, it's WORK!!! ;-)

More to follow...
Rene

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