John's Blog Updated. Original post with photos: http://travel.reservationkey.com/?a=1&p& Latitude: 20.691867 Longitude: -105.293009

After waiting almost a month to get some basic welding done, it has finally started. Yesterday Hilario sent five workers to the boat who quickly worked through our projects. They first installed the new bowsprit pole which will be used for attaching our new spinnaker. They made the pole at their shop by following a detailed drawing Bruce gave them.

Next they helped remove a stubbornly stuck bolt on our gooseneck fitting. Then some work on our emergency rudder mountm which is now just about completely finished. We are thinking about leaving the whole thing assembled in place (except for the rudder) since that would be easier than storing it somewhere in the boat.

Bruce decided to move the solar panels closer to the boat, and raise them up a bit. So that required welding extensions to the bottom of the bar and welding the whole assembly in a different spot on the dinghy davits. They started doing the welding while everything was attached to the boat, but ended up removing the whole thing and taking it to their shop.

While all this work was going on, one of our boat neighbors showed up with a cooking pot that had a loose handle. The welders fixed it up for him. I told the neighbor that he could only have two minutes of their time since we had waited almost a month for them to show up.

Hilario's shop also created a new gooseneck fitting for us which looks really strong. We hope to install that today. All of our metal projects should be wrapped up today, which is amazing considering how long we have been waiting to get these projects moving. If only the people we originally talked to about doing the work had been up front with us and said they were to busy we could have saved a ton of time. And also if we had known about Hilario's shop earlier. All the people we were talking to kept recommending Chava, but Chava was way to busy and unreliable for us. Hilario's group is doing great work and actually showed up when they said they would.

Our barometer, which had been promised to arrive at the boat by Friday, and which I gave only a 5% chance of happening, surprise, did not show up. Supposedly it is in PV, but the finally leg of its journey did not happen. It should be delivered Monday though. One thing that did happen as promised is that our new spinnaker actually arrived at the airport Friday night. We will pick it up today. Our replacement watermaker pump also was installed yesterday, basically a full week after it had been promised to arrive.

To wrap up, our major fabrication projects should finish today. All of our outstanding packages should arrive by Monday. What remains is to finish some provisioning (fresh produce) and trips to the usual stores for a few more random things. At this point we are looking at a possible departure date of mid next week.