SV Panta Rhei Retirement Trip

Wonder of wonders, I found where the bolt fell out of the hardware that connects the sail to the mast track. I had all the parts to put it back together again, only this time with locktite and with the bolt installed facing down (apparently our sailmaker installed it upside down). We also took apart the existing hardware, locktited it, and reinstalled it. Three of the assemblies were done incorrectly...now corrected.

I've also fixed the leak between the filters in the watermaker so with luck the engine room will continue to stay bone dry. I hope. I hope. We've reached watermaker country. There is no water available for probably 600 miles and maybe more.

We went ashore and I got a lesson in how not to manage mexican "hustlers". As we went ashore Pedro met us. He wanted to show us the way to the Pemex station...something I didn't need directions to even though I was carrying my dinghy gas tank and intended to fill it with dinghy gas. This town is smaller than small. You can't NOT find the only Pemex station in town. It is a distance of about 3 blocks up the hill from the dock. But I allowed Pedro to come along and he "showed me the way". When we got there I offered him 10 pesos (about a dollar US), a gesture of appreciation. But no...that was not enough. he wanted 20 pesos. So I offered him some change I had (total 14 pesos) but still that was not enough. So I put the money back in my pocket and said OK. "Hasta luego" Then I couldn't get rid of Pedro. He wanted to carry my gas can back to the dinghy. NO, I said. Eventually I gave him the 20 pesos and made it clear that I wanted no more services. My mistake was that when he originally approached me I either didn't make it clear enough that I didn't want his services OR I needed to make an agreement what they would cost me before anything else happened. Leaving it until later is not the way it is done. It was a cheap lesson. We also paid people on the dock 20 pesos to watch our dinghy. (They demanded it before we landed at the dock so we had a choice and we chose to accept their offer) That worked out fine. We came back and our dinghy was safe and secure.

This town has half a dozen restaurants and a couple auto parts stores. One auto parts store was about the same as we had in Ballard....pretty good. The other was clearly not used often. The cars are all covered with dirt if they have been parked for even a little time...and I mean covered, not just dirty. Its a dusty down. Imagine North Dakota only instead of snow, think piles of dirt. That is how the town streets look. We did manage to figure out where the best restaurant in town was (I think) and we had fish tacos there. There was a nice view of the lagoon where our boats were and the restaurant was clean. We got lemonade to drink and it was pretty good (I think it was fresh squeezed). The fish tacos were ok, but we all decided that they were really beef tacos. We couldn't find any fish in them. Of course we couldn't find any beef either...but the taste seemed closer to beef. It might have been the flavoring of the beans in the taco?

Kat and Bill brought over some tuna that they had caught so tonight Karen is fixing it for me. We'll do some fishing on this next leg of the journey. We'll let you know how we do.