People in La Paz take their Christmas celebrations very seriously. City streets downtown have been closed all week to make room for stalls selling Christmas gifts and decorations and in the supermarket entire aisles are dedicated to Christmas chocolates and shiny toys.


We've been having a great time out at anchor, generally working in the mornings on our graduate applications and in the afternoons heading into town or working on boat projects. Our biggest project at the moment is our dodger. It's still in the works, but once we get it finalized we'll post more info and photos.

This afternoon I'm going to attempt to roast a 5lb prime rib in our boat-sized stove, this will be the first time I've ever cooked prime rib, let alone on a boat, so I'm going to open the wine early and hope for the best!

Merry Christmas!

After a quick stop in Escondido to see how Noah is living (think lots of fiberglass and hot dogs and sleeping in the back of a pickup truck with Virgil his dog and his new engine) we had a great sail down to La Paz. Conditions were pretty ideal, with between 5-15 knots behind us the whole way, and a clear night with some of the most amazing meteors (apparently the Geminids) we have ever seen.

We are currently anchored in La Paz, where we plan on staying through the next little bit as we work on graduate school applications.


Lat 24 09' N, Long 110 20' W

It's a bit hard for us to believe that it's already been over three weeks since we arrived back to Pisces. At that point she was covered in about a centimeter of yard dust & dirt, had no sails or halyards on, and was missing a rudder. We were fortunate that Pisces had weathered the summer well and we did not find any unexpected problems.

For the past several days there has been a constant barometric contour running down the middle of the Sea of Cortez, bringing steady wind from the North & Northwest. Yesterday, after a last minute filling of our water tanks, we said goodbye to San Carlos, and we headed back out to do some sailing!

It didn't take long to find the wind, and fairly quickly Pisces was flying downwind under jib alone making an easy 6-7 knots. The seastate was a bit confused, with 3-6 ft chop at about a 4 second period. It wasn't always the most comfortable sailing we've done, but it was incredible to have Pisces back underway, Brutus (the windvane) steering, and everything back to how it should be. Even better was that the wind held steady between 15-20 from the NW all night, allowing us to reel off an easy 135 mile or so day. At about 3AM we decided that by beam reaching a bit West towards Baja we could tuck in to Salinas on Isla Carmen, and then go visit with Noah & Chris in Escondido. So, at about 10AM this morning (mainland time, we're still pretty confused on the time zones down here) we anchored under sail, the only boat in this huge anchorage.

Our current plan (weather permitting) is to spend tonight here on Isla Carmen, tomorrow in Escondido (Noah promises he's going to take us to the best hot dog stand in the world -- or at least Loreto), and then leave Sunday morning for the sail to La Paz.

Lat 26 00' N, Long 111 07' W

We've been happily at anchor for a few days and punching through our list of projects to accomplish on Pisces. Some of our projects are routine maintenance such as servicing the winches, tuning the rig and removing rust from our propane tanks but my favorite projects are the ones where we are actively improving on systems that were in place last season to make things better and more convenient this season. I think of this latter group as giving Pisces some loving attention.

These loving projects include things such as: re-designing the dinghy lifting process and hoist, rebuilding the galley pumps so both salt and freshwater pumps are fully functional, creating chafe protection between the mast and boom gallows and making changes to our cupboard latching system so they positively latch (this last project has been "in the works" for a couple of years now and I'm optimistic that we've finally found a lasting solution).

I've also started provisioning for this season and spent a super fun morning re-discovering the joys of shopping in the massive super-mercado in Guaymas.

We trust everyone at home is gorging themselves on the traditional Thanksgiving meal, we miss you and would love to eat ourselves into a food coma with you today! Instead we are celebrating by paying someone else to sand the bottom paint off Pisces, thereby saving us hours of standing in a cloud of toxic copper-based paint dust, it's well worth the cost.

Equally as exciting as having the bottom sanded is that we are in the home stretch of our monster rudder/skeg project. Here is a bit of a recap of the steps we undertook to rebuild the skeg:

1) Grind...grind...grind...angle grinder with 24 grit disks...lots of disks...

2) Have a brief freakout about how much fiberglass we took off of the hull of the boat.

3) Apply 6 layers of medium weight fiberglass cloth with epoxy.

4) 2 coats of unthickened epoxy to fill the final weave.

5) Dry fit the rudder, mark hole positions.

6) Drill out all thru-bolt hulls oversize (3/4") and fill with chopped fiberglass and epoxy.

7) Patch small hole where we got too enthusiastic with an orbital sander.

8) Re-fit rudder, drill bolt holes.

9) Apply 3 layers of epoxy barrier coat (generously donated by a fellow cruiser!).

10) Go to local bar, check internet and write this blog.

11) Put rudder in place, seal bolts with 4200.






That's all for now, today we are going to dinghy out to Tao, grill some arrachera and enjoy being on the water. Miss you all!

As most boat projects tend to, this one has cascaded a bit, and what was originally a rudder repair has now also turned into a rudder skeg rebuild. (For those of you who don't know, a rudder skeg is the bit at the bottom of the hull where the rudder attaches).

As we mentioned in a previous post, we decided to have IdaSailor Marine make our new heel fitting before we came back down to Pisces. We raved a bit in the previous post, so I'll be brief, but IdaSailor did a fantastic job. There was a slight hiccup in the production schedule, but Joel at IdaSailor was completely on top of it, and went way out of his way to ensure that we had the piece in our hands before we were in Mexico. I think that in some ways this is a better testament to their great customer service than if everything had gone completely smoothly, there was a slight problem, but they were all over it and made it right. On top of the great customer service, the fitting is a real piece of art, and we've already gotten a lot of interest in it around the boat yard.

While the advantage of having this piece built ahead of time was that it supposedly minimizes boat yard time, the disadvantage is that we didn't have access to the boat for accurate measurements, so we more or less guessed at sizing (we had very rough estimates, but that's it).

As it turned out, I ended up spending about 15 hours in the last week with an angle grinder, full tyvek suit, respirator, standing three feet deep in a hole (I know the guy if you need a hole dug in the Mexican desert), grinding the hell out of our rudder skeg. We got everything in the right shape, and have been doing some serious fiberglassing work to make our new shape permanent and watertight. So far so good, we've got 6 layers of medium weight glass & epoxy on, and will be putting some finishing coats on tomorrow or the next day. Everything is looking great, and in the end will definitely be a big improvement on what it was before, but this project has definitely been huge, perhaps the biggest one we've done yet. You know you're in trouble when a day laborer comes by and tells you 'mucho trabajo'!