Progress

Our cruising friends keep taunting us with gorgeous pictures and amazing stories of their travels around the islands north of La Paz, so we are trying to finish our projects as soon as possible and finally start exploring.  We are making progress; Christian finished converting our icebox into a fridge this week and yesterday we finally turned it on. It looks great, and is much larger than the cooler we have been using to keep food cold. It is so neat we won’t have to buy ice anymore and can keep items like butter and cheese without them getting soggy in ice water!

Dry fitting the fiberglass reinforced plastic over the foam insulation.

The finished fridge!! Isn't it beautiful?

Now that the fridge is done, Chris has moved on to installing our wind generator. We got a great deal on the wind generator from China; it cost about a third of the price of one in the States and looks just like the expensive ones.  We, along with everyone on our dock, are very curious to see if it will actually work. In order to install it though, Chris has to construct a pole to mount the wind generator. He was able to find 2” stainless steel tubing in town to use for the pole and our dock neighbor, Albert, was able to weld some connectors to the pole so we can mount it on the boat. Now we just have to do the wiring, which will take a little while. Stay tuned.

Fitting the wind generator pole on our transom (it has a swivel connector at the base so we can still bend it down to attach the wind generator), We'll attach the generator once the wiring for it is complete on the inside.

Another big addition we will have on our boat soon is a dodger. A dodger is a canvas covering around the companionway hatch that protects people in the cockpit from the wave spray (very useful when heading into waves). We decided this is something we should really have on our boat if we are going to cross the Pacific.  And as luck would have it, we found a really great canvas guy, Hector, who is able to make us the dodger within our time frame and budget.  He has already completed most of it, and will be installing it on our boat next week. And besides being great with canvas work, he also speaks German! We’ve really enjoyed having him work on our boat.

Hector fitting our partially completed dodger. It is looking good already!

On the domestic side, I finished repairing all of our seat cushions, sewed sailbags for the sheets (ropes that attach to the sails), put new screens in our windows (the old ones had some large holes), and added fenders to our dinghy. Hector has given me some great tips on how to improve my stitches with the sewing machine and how to work with canvas, so my projects are starting to look a little better. Next up will be a binnacle/wheel cover (a binnacle is the pedestal in a boat’s cockpit where the wheel is connected).

One of the seat cushions I repaired (we didn't have the same fabric, so used the closest color fabric we could find). There used to be a huge rip across the top, so we always had a blanket covering it.

Two of the sailbags I made for our jib sheets.

We have checked off some large projects, but still on our list before we can leave La Paz is to finish installing the wind generator, install two new 120A batteries (which will require building a housing in one of our lockers), install a used watermaker we will soon be purchasing, and hook up our VHF and Ham radios.  Yikes.  But at least we can have some cold beer while we tackle these projects! And the weather is sunny and warm every day and we live in a great community of fellow boaters so we can't really complain. :)

A complete crab exoskeleton our friend Michele on Pelagia found on the dock. Even the eye housing is still intact! Amazing how crabs can exit their old skeleton without damaging it at all. I couldn't find which species this is - anyone have an idea?

No one wants to get sick down here. When our dock neighbors came down with the flu, some of our other dock neighbors decided they better warn everyone to beware.:) 

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