Muchas Tortugas! Nautical Speed bumps?

Monday, March 10th

One can miss quite a lot if you don't get out and look around. This morning we cut through a mine field of sea turtles sunning on the surface. No worries about hitting them tho. The close ones would get nervous, flap around a bit and get out of the way. Others would poke their heads up and take a dive if we passed too close. This went on for several miles or at least more than an hour because I missed a log entry due to the neat distraction(oops). It's good to see so many of them.

We cut down the revs on the motor (1200) to slow down a bit, and this also saves fuel. There is no sign of wind yet and ETA on Huatulco is around 5am so why rush? We still have about 80 miles to go. Over the last few hours the winds are starting to build a bit. It would be nice to get some sails up and some quiet time though. That's baja sailing I guess!

1330 hours and sure enough we got the wind we were hoping for. We put up the main sail, rolled out the jib and hoisted the fisherman. We turned off the motor and the silence was deafening. Now we are schooning along at 7.5 knots in 10.2 knots of wind. Very nice!

Newest crew member Amit(ah-meet) is doing well and seems to be enjoying the cruise. He is 25, and hails from Israel. His sailing experience and passion of the sea comes from many years aboard their family yacht "Lou" a 38 ft Jeanneau. As if that sea time was not enough, we are currently borrowing him from the Israeli Navy as he is between contracts. It is required for all young adults to enlist for at least 3 years, but he has been in for the last 7. Plans are to renew when he gets back and continue until retirement. It is common to take a break between contracts and he thought he'd try something different. That is when he saw an opening aboard Astor on "Find a Crew". Welcome aboard Amit.

Farewell to Acapulco

Sunday, March 9th

With fond regrets, we bid farewell to Acapulco this morning around 0730 and have had light winds so we are motoring. We are expecting a current so we are trying to first guess where it is, then avoid it. We'll see how we do.

It's a beautiful day and we were seen off by a small pod of dolphins. Shifts have been assigned and now that everything has been secured for the moment all hands are off in their lost corners of the boat. Throughout the day we have chased variable winds and had the jib out for a while, but still motoring. We have the lures out and managed to hook up to a small dorado but that poor little guy would have barely been a snack for Amit so we tossed him back so he can grow a bit more. We went through the most amazing frenzy of churning water for quite a while and were surprised we did not hook up again.

Sundown now and the skies grow darker by the minute. There is only a sliver of a moon and the night is cooling off. It's going to be a neat night to sit in the cockpit under the stars.

Exploring Acapulco

Hey, it's been fun.
Yesterday was a bit busy running around town and exploring sections of the city. We got into the big vendor area that exists more for the touristas seeing as it is placed directly off the docks from the cruise ships. We got away from that and picked up some stores for the boat, as well as a bit of trinkets from the best jewelry shop in town. Right in the door they handed us all marguritas as we shopped. NICE tactic!

Today we sorta scrambled up early with 5 blasts of an air horn. Richard was up and saw the nearby boat "Marythought" was drifting down towards us. We had our dink launched in record time and ready to assist but they missed us and had their engine started before the got into too much trouble. It was a good exercise.

We dove right in to a bunch of boat chores. Richard dove right into installing the new inverter and new crewmate Amit and my job was to replace a blown out piston hank on the main staysail and while the stuff was out we replaced a few others that were really worn.

Around noon we snuck off to the cliff divers and had a few drinks, chips and salsa. Some of those guys were pretty good, but they had quite a racket going. We hit a few more shops on the way back looking for a few things but got out of town when we saw yet another cruise ship docking. It's going to be a busy night on the strip tonight. We can hear the clubs across the water till the very late hours every night.

With only a few things left to stow, and storm covers to put on, I hear we should be out tomorrow morning for Hualtuco. There we sill spend a few days, check out from Mexico, and continue south.

A start with style

What started out as a very busy day turned into a flawless transit from a to b. From gettng out the door a bit late, we got to the airport with just barely enough time to get thru the LAX check-in procedures ONLY if everything went perfect. It did. It might have also been the fact that there were minimum crowds because it was midnight. The boarding was non-event and the flight was a bit rough because those seats were not designed for the sleepy in mind. I think I'll have to write a memo.

The stopover in Mex City went off without a problem. We managed a quick breakfast before boarding the next plane without problems, off the plane and thru customs was a breeze, straight to a waiting taxi and a quick tour through the very clean surrounds of Acapulco over to the 'yachtie' parts of the city. The only glitch that caught up to us was that our driver did not know exactly where the "Club de Yates" was located and tried to drop us off at the cruise ship docks. We drove down the road a bit farther and spied Astor sitting on her mooring (not too difficult to spot tho). We got out at the fishing village and figured I'd talk my way onto a ponga. I was led directly to a very friendly local named Vicete who was very familiar with the boat because he owns the can Astor was on. He was waiting for me. He has been the personal Astor ambassador since they have been down here.

Can you believe the luck?

I sit here enjoying a very pleasant breeze, poolside at an awesome yacht club tapping out an update.

Very nice, but I didn't come all this way to play on a computer.

(I was going to upload some pics, but I seemed to have left my card reader in another bag. I'll post later when I find it.)

And so it begins.

Ready or not the day has come. If all goes according to schedule, tonight Paula and I are on a red-eye out of LAX and headed down to meet up with Astor once again. I have been buttoning up things for the last couple of months as best as I can, and trying to predict the odd things that might come up, but it's time to go.

Some of you might know P and I helped crew her down to PV over the xmas/nyear weeks. It was a great trip, but tough. The boat has hopped south a couple of times since and mostly enjoyed the mexican coast but it is time to head south a bit more. The plan description is billed as a few overnight jumps, a few stops along the way(I've heard that before), and eventually ending up in Costa Rica . That is about another 1000 miles.

When out in open water, I'll be sending in updates via HF radio uplink from time to time and my assistant will post them here and maybe even mailing raw copies to assorted people. When in port and I get wifi access I will upload pics and do a few updates from the field. I'm not sure which accounts I will have access to- so for now you can send messages to [prestoffcenter@gmail.com] and it should find way to the boat. This may change as I try different things.

Enjoy the logs. Feel free to comment here, and even send notes out our way. We like mail. No spam, or long winded jokes tho. Images will get filtered out in the radio mail system.

Off to find the edge...
Arrrrrrgh.

B

Beauty in chaos

Amidst all of the daily druge reports, city hustle, bad economic times and the generally dark news it doesn't take much looking around before one feels down. Maybe if you put on some different colored glasses one just might realize we live in some pretty cool times. The tech we get to play with today is pretty cool, and around the corner are creative people making even cooler toys.

One of these toys just happens to be another set of those "glasses" but when applied it allows a wearer to see things in a different light. I wish we had this stuff when we were kids.

Today's point? How many people cruise the highway every day and just see it as means to get to the other end? I stumbled upon this particular interchange when following wife Paula and her sis as they drove to Ohio one summer. Just for fun I installed a tracker in the car and checked on their progress. I found them in Amarillo, Tx that day, and caught this as they drove by.

I just had to stop and appreciate the guy that sat down and scratched this interchange on paper. He could have taken less time and done alot worse for sure. I bet the crew on the ground paving and striping didn't even know how neat this looks from above. Just like the giant hieroglyphs scratched in the sands by our ancestors, man still makes pictures for aliens to enjoy in case they wander by. Maybe it's a form of large scale graffiti?

Thanks Google Earth for being the cool tech that shows us the beauty in the chaos. It's actually all around but we usually don't stop to notice it. (btw- yes, Paula and her sis missed it too)

Ok- so I might also be a road geek. But if I'm ever in Amarillo, I'm gonna go try this thing out.

Unauthorized use of s-vac

So it's been pretty busy month around here as I run around in an attempt to close up projects so I can feel good about leaving again for a while. A few weeks ago I am working in the yard and I hear the most amazing and indescribable noise that I can only describe as 20 weed whackers going at once. It was right over my head. Someone decided it was a great day to move and my house was picked as being pretty cool. I could only watch as a HUGE swarm of bees slowly disappeared through a little crack in my eve and into the attic somewhere.

Egads... something else to deal with. Add it to the list! [sigh]

For the next couple of days I watched as a few bees would come/go but it showed no signs of what actually went in there. If I hadn't been a direct witness I would never have believed it and might not have even noticed them. When called, exterminators said the bees might actually just be using it as a rest stop and they won't send anybody out for about a week. There was a bit of hope when we had a real cold couple of nights and I hardly saw anything for a while. Upon the next warm day they were quite active again tho.

I decided it was time to deal with it, but I needed to reduce the numbers a bit. So I set up a bee-sucker. I had a 10ft section of 4 in plastic pipe that I propped up with a ladder towards the opening they were using and duct taped the hose of my shop-vac to the lower end. That worked very well. Once the little guys wandered over to see what this big new thing was, there was no going back. An unplanned bonus was the tumbling down the pipe and hose broke up the little guys into bits so I didn't have a 6 gallon drum of really angry buzzers in the end. After a couple of days of this (random running) I had about 100 in the catcher. I picked another cold evening to go hunt for the rest of them. I got lucky that they had not ventured into unreachable depths of the attic, and only had to pull down a couple of boards until I found them.

I had my sucker hose ready in case I pissed them off, but they actually were quite docile. They had been busy. There were about six layers double sided, many all filled up with honey and some even capped off. I watched them crawling around for quite a while and I momentarily thought of some sort of capture/recovery, but decided I had no way of knowing if they were violent (Africanized) or not. If I wanted to try the sticky business, now would not be the time to do it.

In an attempt to suck up a few more before I decide what the next move would be, I stuck in the end of the shopvac hose. I kept getting closer, and found out those little guys can sure hold on. Then my nozzle stuck to the first layer of comb which tore off and plugged up my only line of defense. In a brief personal moment I thought "this is gonna hurt" and as I fought off the urge to scream like a little girl and run, the bees surprised me and stayed clinging onto the comb as the chunk slowly sucked into the end, turned and fully disappeared with a big "floomp". It was then that I was glad I bought the 6.5 hp shopvac instead of a lesser model. With new warrior confidence the rest of the combs went like the first and the whole process was almost as much as a non-event as I could have hoped. I never did spot the queen, but I'm pretty sure I got everybody.

I'm kinda bummed about killing the whole colony, but wild bees are quite a problem in the area and they don't really belong in the city. Besides, they had no bizz-ness hanging out in my attic.

I can now add bee-executioner to my long list of talents.
-B