Hi folks, been a busy week to say the least and so not able to get you any updates since we left Puerto Angel and Mexico last Monday, March 26th headed South for San Jose Guatemala. As you may recall from the previous postings and Emails this is a potentially tricky leg of the journey south as we have to sail across the Sea of Tehuantepec which is notorious for sudden severe storms at any time of the year and particularly now at the start of the hurricane season. There were some storms brewing down south near Panama that were looking like they might produce the first tropical storms of the season and were headed North. But for Tehuantepec area our weather forecasts said it looked good for the next 3 days and there were some much better protected areas in Guatemala and more so in El Salvador so we decided to take advantage of this clear spell and go for it.
As per the previous posting I sent out just before we left Puerto Angel we were supposed to go to the next port of Huatulco about 5 hours sail to the South, in order to properly check out of the country as Puerto Angel did not have a Customs or Immigration office, however we still had our official check out of the country papers from La Paz when we had originally left there last month for the Marquesas, or so we thought before we had the rudder seizure problems. So we pulled up anchor at 12 noon on Monday, waved goodbye to the lovely anchorage at Puerto Angel and set sail to cross Tehuantepec on a heading for San Juan Guatemala.
The rest of the day (Monday) went very well with not much wind at all so we motor sailed at about 6.5-7 kts/hr thanks to some following seas that have been helping us for months as we continuously headed South. I don't envy the folks who are going in the opposite direction headed back for the US or Canada. Not the time of year to be doing that if you can possibly help it as the winds and the seas are all against you.
We were again joined by lots of dolphins and here you can see Ms. Ruby at the bow checking them out as they crisscrossed our bow. She was a bit concerned because these dolphins were quite the show offs and were jumping way out of the water just to show us how acrobatic the could be.
The sail went well for us even when there wasn't much wind we had the seas (waves and current) going our way which makes both the ride and the speed MUCH better. That evening however we started to pick up a lot of storm and squall action on the Radar and so we spent the night dodging these but were able to maintain our course to San Jose pretty well and we made good progress for the rest of Monday and Tuesday.
Radar Rules!
For those who don't know it, I didn't either till sailing, storms show up quite well on Radar, I believe it is the concentration of water in the air that they pick up. I have a very good 4kw Raymarine Radar system I installed on Learnativity last year and it has been in use pretty much every day we've been underway. Amongst its features, you can set up a "zone alarm" either a cone shape or a full circle of whatever size you like and whenever anything enters that zone the alarm goes off. While I scan the horizon about every 15 minutes for a visual check you can appreciate how valuable this feature is to have to help alert you to what's around, especially at night when some boats are not lit. Now we were using one of its other features which is this ability to see where the storms are around you and using this I was able to watch the shape and direction of the storms ahead and change course if necessary to go around rather than through them. Its not so much the rain but the wind gusts and lightening that you worry about and try to avoid. So with lightning lighting up the horizon all around us we were able to sail through the night without much trouble, keeping the wind below 20kts and no lighting directly around us. One down side during storms is that they pretty much dominate your Radar screen and so you can't see any of the blips that are ships! So a keen eye out for ship lights is more called for. Fortunately traffic has been amazingly light the whole trip and this evening we only passed 3 other boats, all commercial freighters and none closer than about 4nm from us. But with the great natural light show all around and being able to successfully dodge and dart around the storms themselves it was quite an enjoyable sail actually, just not much time for sleep.
Wednesday morning I was able to get updated weather forecasts (thanks John!) via sat phone text messages and Email downloads. The storm we'd been watching was in fact starting to turn into the first tropical storm of the season but it would not reach our area, if at all, until about Thursday. So as the weather, the boat and I were holding up well we decided to sail right past Guatemala and take another day to continue on to El Salvador. While disappointing to miss out seeing Guatemala the priority was getting south and to a well protected "hurricane hole" if needed to wait out any storms that made it this far north. So El Salvador it is, full speed ahead Captain!
Spinnaker Wraps are NOT a new dessert topping!
With the wind light and directly behind us I put the spinnaker up to help give us a bit more speed and get to port ASAP. Spinnakers as you may recall from previous posts are those large billowy sails you often see in dramatic sailing photos and you can see Learnativity's big blue and white spinnaker here. They work great but are a real handful, especially when you are single handed as they can be a bit temperamental when the wind shifts or dies as they collapse and start to flail all around the rigging on the boat. And sure enough this happened and so I spent an exciting few hours late Wednesday afternoon dealing with a dreaded spinnaker wrap. This is NOT a new dessert topping I assure you, but rather a nasty mess where all that lovely blue and white nylon wraps and twists itself all around itself and your rigging. After a few hours I was able to get it off the rigging and pull the sock down over the spinnaker sail which was twisted into quite a mess. But I could at least now wrestle the sail down onto the deck and stowed into the bag as we lost our light with the sun going down.
Water Flow; NOT!
It is said that all the nasty problems when you are out sailing occur at about 2am and sure enough at 2:40am on Wednesday the engine alarm (a giant red school fire alarm bell) went off and the indicator lights for lack of water flow was on. Not good! Fortunately I had the main sail up and we had enough wind to maintain a forward speed of about 2 kts which was enough to let the auto pilot keep us going in about the right direction while I went below to figure out the problem. Without going into too many details, you might want to know that marine engines use what is called a "wet exhaust" system where you pump sea water into the exhaust system to cool it down as it exits the turbo charger and then goes out through large rubber exhaust hoses to the back of the boat. The temperature coming out of the turbo charger is about 600-800º F this would pose a problem trying to route such high temperature pipes through the boat, which in my case is over 25 feet, so by injecting cold sea water into the exhaust pipes you drop the temperature to about 100-120º F and can use large 4" diameter rubber exhaust hoses to transport the exhaust gasses and water that are not hot at all on the outside. (got it? there will be an engine quiz at the end of this posting!)
The alarm that went off was from a flow meter that is inline with the hose from the water pump that is pulling sea water in from the ocean and through to the exhaust, indicating that there was no flow of water going through, hence no cooling of the exhaust, hence big problem! Removing some hoses I found a bit of sea grass and what I thought at the time was an old bit of rubber from the vanes of the water pump impeller blocking the water from flowing through the inline oil cooler and so I cleared that out, put it all back together and fired up the engine again. No luck! The alarm was still going off. Back down in the engine room (temperature about 120ºF BTW) I was able to determine that there was indeed no water getting through to the exhaust, but not figure out why. The pump was pumping, hoses seemed clear but it wasn't making it all the way through to the exhaust water muffler. Blocking off the hose with my finger it suddenly seemed to prime itself and pump water well so I hooked it all back up, started the engine and Voila! no more alarm! So at 07:10 we were back underway though we had lost a lot of time and distance towards our destination.
Look out El Salvador here we come!
Conferring with my charts and shore based "pose" via sat phone I redid the calculations for the port I was heading for in El Salvador, Marina Barillas (13.15.74N 88.29.19W) and realized that we would not be able to get there till Friday and that might be cutting it a bit close with the tropical storm potentially headed north. Instead I changed course and headed for the closer port and marina at Bahia Jaltepeque (hahl-tay-PAY-kay) also known as Bahia del Sol (13.15.9N 088.53.0W) We would be able to get there by Thursday just after noon and give us lots of time to get in through the breakers (more on that later) and docked well before dark, which was now happening by about 7pm down here.
Look out El Salvador and Bahia Jaltepeque, ready or not the good ship Learnativity is on headed your way!
Comments