Kill me now, please.

Yesterday I wanted to put my fist through a wall. Today I am smiling and I don’t give a rat’s ass. We are planning to leave on Tuesday, which is the day after tomorrow. I am not sure that we will make that goal.

After Gary and Odie left we got to our projects with a vengeance. Everything from stitch work on the canvas cockpit cover to finishing off the insulation on the fridge has been occupying our last three weeks. We have been working so hard that there have been days when I wish for the days when I was only responsible for the work of an employee who can clock out at night, even if that night consisted of a one hour commute and just enough time to get some food into me before sleep. At least in that life my decisions did not effect my ability to survive for the next three years and were only of a momentary concern. The biggest job we have had to tackle was the refrigerator insulation. I am proud to say that after three weeks of discomfort and over one thousand dollars spent we have succeeded in making a very, very noxious smell. This is not the kind of smell that can be ignored. This is the Bog of Eternal Stench type of smell. This is the type of smell that drifts into your subconscious just when you think you have gotten used to it and makes a fresh assault on your senses. This is the smell that is in my refrigerator. This is the smell that has permeated my food and has cost me over two hundred and fifty dollars, the price of any food that was not vacuumed sealed, since all the food that was wrapped in seran wrap or put in loose had taken on this taste of paint and plastic and had to be thrown in the garbage. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The saga of the refrigerator began with the insulation. We needed it in order for our three thousand dollar new system to work properly. So while Brett went out and purchased all the things that were necessary for the refrigerator I did all the other small chores around the boat and kept myself very busy. The insulation took forever and by the time that it was ready for fiberglass there was a race week at Paradise Village and we needed to move our boat to a new marina where we could get the work done: it ended up being Marina Vallarta. Marina Vallarta is probably the oldest marina in Puerto Vallarta and is right in the center of town so it is very convenient for running errands, this is its only upside. When we were coming into the marina they told us that we would have no power, which was fine as we only planned on being there for a week, but when we arrived we discovered that when they say it has no power they mean it has nothing. They had no water hook up, no power hook up and most shockingly they had no cleats to tie the boat to. So when we arrived and Brett maneuvered the boat into the last slip in a tight marina between two row boats that were expertly set before us like some kind of sick obstacle course we had to take our lines and wrap them around the dock. Ridiculous! The marina is no cheaper than any other marina that we have been to, its just worse. We were also in a small cul-de-sack that had no current and no breeze. The boat was full of little pieces of styrene and floating nodes of plastic but there was no use in cleaning when we knew that the fiber glass and gel coat where going to make an even greater mess. I had no idea how bad it would get. We knew that we would be leaving shortly after the fridge was done so while Brett helped around the boat and kept an eye on the workers I was out shopping for provisions and getting the boat stocked to the gills with all of the non perishable goods that I could carry.

Much of this provisioning could have been done earlier but we were waiting for Shane, our crew mate who was to arrive on the 24th February. Not only is provisioning a huge job when you have no car but if we are to spend up to thirty days at sea I would want everyone to have what they needed to eat. We were having a hard time getting in touch with him: we had sent a few emails to him but we got no reply. We were asking around to any of our friends who might be in touch with him and Guy, Brett’s brother, had been keeping up with his My Space blog and told us that it sounded like he was coming, so maybe we should try to get in touch with him through My Space. When we emailed him through My Space we got a response pretty quickly to the effect that he had been trying to get in touch with us and had not heard from us so had decided to take another opportunity in the Caribbean. This was a two edged sword. On the one hand we would get more sleep and have less chores if he came but on the other hand it is awfully nice to have the boat to the two of us and I was of a mind to let him move on and go his own way. We decided to let fate (or Shane) decide. In the end the other opportunity was something he did not feel that he could pass up and he will not be coming. S o we are taking the biggest leg (and at this point, I suspect most of the journey as well) with just the two of us. So we have now stepped everything into high gear: we thought we were to have help with many of these last minute chores but we will be doing it all with just the two of us so we have taken a new approach and have started splitting our efforts, often going our separate ways and using the philosophy of divide and conquer.

Once we had that bit of unpleasantness behind us it was back to the refrigerator. While Brett was attempting to insulate the freezer box we heard an ominous hissing sound and knew immediately that the integrity of the closed cell system had been compromised. This means that we would need a new cooling plate. Arrgh! We are trying to get into the cruising community, there are quite a few boats that are leaving for the Marquesas at the same time as we are and it is normal for everyone to stay in touch and watch out for each other. So we have started listening to the morning “Net.” This is an informal check in of boats in the area where everyone tunes in at the same time, on the same channel and it is a really neat little system. They have trades, questions and answers, public announcements and it is a good way to know if the boat that you saw in the anchorage in some out of way port has just arrived in the harbor. So we have started to tune in in order to stay up on the cruising community and we discovered that there is a group of people that are keeping in touch and arranging an informal net for the boats that are crossing. We went to some of the meetings and met some of the folks that will be crossing at roughly the same time as us and there are some really nice people who will be out in the deep blue with us.

We also were able to hook up with one of Brett’s father’s friends from Bent Water and we had a night of dinner and drinks with them and then offered to take them out for a day sail. It was a nice day, we went out to an isolated little beach that had no roads going to it, only boat traffic: my kind of place. I know that we have not seen Mexico, we have had to bypass many of the islands along the coast and in the Sea of Cortez due to our hectic schedule and the extensive boat repair and upgrades that we have done. It was so nice to be out of the marinas and doing what we are supposed to: seeing the remote countryside and enjoying the pristine waters that can’t be found close to the cities. It was a reminder of what we are here for and it was a balm on my soul to remember that this is fun! So with my heart lighted and a little rest under my belt I got back into the business of getting our boat ready with the secure knowledge that this too will pass and we will be enjoying ourselves soon enough. Right now we just have to get through this tough time, but the rewards will be substantial.

Any-hoo… We found some people on the Net to take our old refrigerator and when they found out that we were waiting for a the new cooling plate they very generously offered to have it shipped to their house and we could pick it up. Meanwhile back on the boat Brett had constructed a tent to go over the kitchen to separate it from the rest of the boat and hopefully to keep all the dust localized, the two Mexican workers who were promised to us to work on our boat had magically diminished to one… who disappeared without a trace at random times throughout the day. The smell was bad, the dust was worse. When they finally finished the fiberglass and the gel coat in the fridge we took the tent down and it took us two whole days of cleaning to get the boat back into “ship shape.” We oiled all the teak and cleaned out all the hatches under the floors, dust was everywhere. That’s why when we saw a crack appear in the gel coat and were faced with the possibility of having them come back in here to fix the problem I nearly cried. I can’t take this. It is soooo bad. We spoke to the owner of the fiber glass operation and he promised to deal with this personally so we shut down the fridge and emptied it out (again) and when he was done the fridge looks like a factory job. It is really nice inside. We then went to turn the fridge back on and it did not work. Did I mention that I wanted to cry? Yea, this was testing me beyond patience and endurance and we had reached our planned leave date and the fridge was not working. We had to postpone our departure.

The other problem is that we are trying to provision the boat for a three to five week passage. During the time that the boat was torn up and there was fiberglass dust everywhere I was able to provision all of the non-perishable items. As soon as we got the go ahead to turn the fridge on I went out and filled it right away, it takes less power to cool a full fridge than to cool a bunch of air. The night after we filled the fridge we had a pizza and the smell of paint had become a taste, it didn’t take long to discover that everything in the fridge that was not completely sealed tight (a zip lock bag was not enough and neither was Tupperware with a gasket) also tasted like paint. There was a ton of food that went in the trash. Right now we have our frozen items at a restaurant in town and we are trying to open the fridge and air it out.