Planetary Exloration on Senta II

Now that our Lemon® Macintosh laptop is unusable we can no longer update our blog or access our old contact lists.  So our connectivity is going to be spotty at best for the time being.  Sorry about that !  Sorry if mail has gone unanswered too,  my mail archive rests in the Lemon® until we have a way to restore it from the back-up.

We wanted to wish you all a VERY happy New Year and update you on our journey.

We are now in Puesta del Sol,  Nicaragua.  Next we will stay here for a week before we head out to some safe anchorage.  In the anchorage we will wait for a weather window when the feared Papagayos are not expected to be howling for a few days.



We think it was Papagayos we ran into on the way here from Bahia del Sol.  We had to give up on getting into Gulfo Fonseca after spending a night adrift among nets and pangas.  During the night while we were doing a no-sail heave-to Nancy woke me at one point because there was an unmarked/unlit panga about 50 feet from us.  The guy on board finally lit a light and we wondered what to do since it was hard to tell if he was drifting too,  or anchored,  and what our relative motions were.  We could not start the engine as he probably had a net down so it was a bit dicey,  if not dangerous.  We safely drifted past him and as we got downwind of him we could smell the cigarette he lit up.

Later we started getting blasted with wind and waves on the nose as we set sail in the AM.   Now we know what it is like to sail among floating trees !  Trees,  branches and all sorts of other trash and floating debris.

Since we would not make it into a safe anchorage without beating up Senta we turned tail and had a spirited sail out of and across the gulf,  towards Nicaragua.  Once we got around the point things calmed down and we had a pleasant almost close-hauled sail in about 10 knots of wind with still just the jib up.

We'd heard about the sudden onsets of the winds,  like being slammed by a door.  We were not disappointed.  With no warning whatsoever we were suddenly in 28 knots of wind and the sand from the cliffs some 3 miles to port actually got in my eyes.  Nancy came back up from below and helped me reef the jib and we were soon in noisy but reasonably comfortable control again.  The gusts only peaked at 30 knots but the suddenness is what was so startling and unsettling.

When we got in hailing range of Marina Puesta del Sol Nancy called them on the VHF and let them know that we would be outside the marina entrance by late afternoon and we would like a pilot to bring us in at about 22:00 since that was pretty close to high slack tide.  We'd read warnings about entering when the tide was not slack since the current can be 5-6 knots and while the channel is marked the markers tend to go walkabout.  We were told they had space for us and they would wait for us.

Once we got there we once gain did the no-sail heave-to for the next 4 hours,  barely drifting and just repositioning ourselves every 90 minutes or so,  to keep away from a rock near the entrance.

At 21:00 we tried to start the engine (which had worked like a charm ever since we left Bahia del Sol).  For some reason the battery voltage was down to 12.6 and the starter would not engage.  We turned on both the house and starting batteries and now the engine came to life.  Suddenly it speeded up once again,  and then died.  This was not fun.  After many many hours of no-problem running and re-starting we once again had an air leak.  We tried restarting it but it had no interest at all in running.

In Bahia del Sol we'd picked up two large WD-40 cans to use if we needed to bleed the engine.  Now we would find out if it works.  I opened the small inlet to the air-intake and sat there with the WD-40 spray-tube pointed into the intake while Nancy got ready to crank the engine one more time.  We had had the electric fuel pump running all along to bleed the system up to the lift-pump,  but that does not bleed the line between the lift-pump and the injector-pump.

The WD-40 instantly fired up the engine but the red WD-40 spray tube disappeared !?

The engine now ran perfectly once more and the vacuum reading was perfect too.  I kept looking for the red tube but it is nowhere in sight.  In the worst case the tube got sucked into the air intake !!  Best case is if it simply fell into the bilge.  (I opened up the air intake cap and tried to look inside with a dental mirror but no luck).

Once I got to the helm Nancy started hailing Puesta del Sol to tell them that we were ready to come in but would definitely need a pilot in case the engine was going to die during the entry.  No answer ?

Since the house battery voltage was lower than it should have been Nancy checked the charging current and it was -3 Amps or so with the engine running !!  Choice words were uttered in abundance.  We once again removed the companion-way stairs and the engine cover - no we still did not see the red tube - and I started checking the connections on the charge controller.  Success,  one of them had been loosened with all the engine work we'd been doing.  Now the charging current was +35 Amps !

While I had been down below diagnosing the electrical problem Nancy had been slowly steering us to port of the lit entry buoy ... suddenly she saw that it was not the entry buoy but two startled fishermen in a panga who looked like they thought we were the Titanic and ready to run them down.  It turns out that the buoy is not lit and what we saw were there work-lights !  Pangas without nav-lights are a real problem.

Nancy and I alternated hailing the marina until 22:30 when it would be too late to start in.  We never got any reply.

Oh shit was our most polite thought at the time.  We went over our discussion with the dock-master and concluded that since he had said you will pay $1.25/foot tonight (reduces later) he must have known we were talking about tonight.

Well,  if the Papagayos pick up during the night they will blow off-shore and if we anchor 1 NM from the shore there is not enough fetch to worry about wave action even if it really picks up.  So we anchor in 30' of water which will drop to about 20' at low tide and let out 150' of chain.

We set up Bill's (from Bahia del Sol) anchor light rather than the masthead anchor light to protect us from speeding pangas.  It was great,  illuminating the cockpit and much more.

After that we crashed and the next moring we got into the marina with no more problems.

More later :-)