Los mapaches! Ay Ay Ay!
09 November 2013 | San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico
Julie, calm, sunny and 86
Raccoons! They are cute in the wild. Not so much in the galley.
Picture waking up to an unfamiliar sound, getting up to check it out and finding a sticky faced raccoon standing on your stove, a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s with her head gnawed off laying at its side, a box of pasta opened and strewn about, and a bag of rice mixed in. Now picture the mad and naked man chasing it out of the boat in the middle of the night. Luckily it wasn’t on our boat and that naked man wasn’t Ken.
A week later on another dark night a raccoon falls though a hatch on another boat. The boat owner, I’ll call him Eric to protect his privacy (Okay, his name really IS Eric) traps it in a cabin and says to his wife “I’ve got it trapped in the starboard cabin. We’ll get it out in the morning”. “What?!?” says his wife Pam (real name also). “That is where we keep all of our food!” Eric quickly realized the fault in his plan, picked up a kayak paddle and started swatting hoping that the critter would get a clue and escape through the hatch that Eric had opened. I don’t have any idea how intelligent raccoons generally are but this one must not have been the brightest light on the Christmas tree. Even though Eric had opened the hatch and then made a ramp to get up to it, the raccoon just wouldn’t leave. Time to change weapons. Get the gaff.
After an hour and a half of screaming, swatting and bonking the raccoon, chasing it all around the boat (except the cabin where Pam and the cat had hid out), the raccoon finally realized that it could leave through the door to the cockpit. Eric claims that there is now a raccoon with a concussion wandering around.
Last night Ken and I were sitting on the aft deck of our boat. In the dark I noticed some movement on the starboard side deck and then in the cockpit. I called Elliot’s name and when he didn’t meow a response I knew what it was. Not just one raccoon but two! And in the cockpit, heading for the galley! Ken shooed it off the deck then chased it down the dock all the way to land. Ten minutes later they were back, in force this time. Three raccoons headed right for us. I guess the banana bread I had just made was too great a temptation. Like a mad man, Ken chased them down the dock again. As far as I know, they didn’t come back.
You are probably wondering why we don’t just close our boats up at night. If we do, they just break it. Our neighbor saw one trying to claw through a screen on his boat trying to gain access.
We’ve been really busy since we returned from the States. I’m made 124 cones for a series drogue, created a giant bag for it, sewed a new wind scoop/shade, made a new grocery bag from left over fabric, made some screen type sun screens for the aft deck, and spent 4 hours reattaching the sacrificial Sunbrella strip of fabric to the head sail. The sun really eats at thread even though I use heavy UV thread. I’m so happy that I own and brought with me a Sailrite LSZ-1 sewing machine. It has paid for itself as I used it to reupholster the whole interior, made new cockpit cushions and made a new sail cover for the main.
The Hylas 44 comes with 2 4D house battery. Although they’re perfectly adequate for trips of a week or two, we found that we needed more for how we want to live. We’re not energy hogs but even with solar panels to recharge, we found that because the fridge runs so much here where it is warm that we wanted more capacity to store power. We also don’t like to run our engine and don’t like to use the generator. Ken did quite a bit of research and decided to buy 6 Trojan L16 6 volt batteries at 430 amp hours for each set of batteries (1290 amp hours total). Now we have power to spare and probably don’t even need all 4 135 watt solar panels.
Because we placed all 6 batteries forward, we found that we were plowing through the water and were in need of rebalancing the boat. The answer: move all 480 pounds of stored cat litter to the aft end of the boat instead of the forward end. Ta da! We don’t look so silly going through the water and the boat has better motion in the swells.
Why so much cat litter? Mexico isn’t exactly cat friendly yet and cat litter, treats and toys are hard to find and even harder to haul on public transportation. When we find it, we buy it.
The other big upgrade we did was adding an AIS transceiver. The AIS transceiver allows us to see other AIS boats and ships on our chart plotter and also allows them to see us. AIS is especially helpful at night. More than once I’ve hailed a ship by name to make sure that they knew we were in their vicinity. We had an AIS receiver installed a few years back but realized how much we’d appreciate the extra safety of being able to transmit our position also.
We are getting ready to head south. In a few weeks we’ll pull out of San