Boat Yard Blurb
12 November 2024 | Baja Naval Boat Yard, Ensenada
Alison Gabel

When the boat yard is starting to feel like home, it's probably time to leave ...
Baja Naval Boat Yard in Ensenada was our "home" for 7 weeks in 2021, and we're at 3 weeks this time around. When you add those two together, it starts to feel like home. We know the guys who are working on our boat - Allan is compiling a list of their names on a piece of paper that floats around the cabin - Jaime, Mario, Caesar, Paco, David. We're learning what kind of music each one prefers, and who's got the better English. We know some of the other boats in the yard and their stories, we're getting comfortable with the roads around town, the lumps in the sidewalks, the best fish taco place, the best birria place, the fun vegetarian places (few and far between,) where to shop for the freshest vegetables, how to park the car, when the cruise ships come in, and which of them will play "The Love Boat" as a departure song on their array of ships horns. We watch the town spruce itself up when the cruise ships are in town and lay low for a breather when they're not.
Since our arrival on October 21st, progress has definitely been made, but we've had a few 2-steps-forward and 2-steps-back events. This is why we're still here when we thought we'd be gone a while ago. It's all good - the folks here are great and we're glad to see our beautiful boat slowly get the attention she deserves. We really don't have a grueling schedule to keep since our first real official commitment isn't until January. We have lots of things we'd like to do in the meantime, but there's no rush.
Our initial boat yard to-do list: touch up the bottom paint; remove the blisters on the sterns and repaint; service the sail drives; apply "Prop Speed" (something to inhibit growth) to the engine props; remove and re-bed the four large windows in the main cabin; do some gel coat repair here and there; add a "boot stripe" to the hull at the waterline; polish and wax the hull.
So far: bottom paint is a patchwork of fresh, coppery CopperCoat; the blisters are all smoothed and filled and repainted; sail drives are serviced with new oil and seals; the folding props have new parts so the tiny amount of slop is gone, they're prepped for Prop Speed; we've picked the color of the boot stripe; and then ... we start running into the inevitable snags.
Along the way, a new project got added to the list: in the window rebedding project, small chips occurred in the fiberglass around three of the four windows as they were being removed. We can't fault the guys doing the work - they were meticulous and incredibly careful, but it's a tricky job and the fiberglass is getting old. So, New Project! The options: #1 - patch up the chips and touch up with matching black paint, which would look admittedly touched-up, with new, shiny paint on top of old, faded and cracked paint. #2 - light sand on the whole area and do a fresh coat of black paint, which would fill the subtle cracks and look consistently black and shiny, but the cracks would return in time. #3 - deep sand, prime, and paint, which would take longer, cost more, but be the better long-term solution. We opted for the Full Monty, Option 3. That would add a few days to our stay but no big deal.
Paint dramas: on the first try the primer was bad and something ugly happened. Mario, the lead painter, (who speaks very good English) had to sand it all off on day two and start over. Day three, second try, wind! Wind - spewing particles and bits into the wet, fresh paint. Grrr! Mario says, "Now it looks like non-skid!" (A process in which a paint-like goo is applied to the walking surfaces of a boat and then a grit is applied to prevent slipping.) They had to wait until day four for it to fully dry before they could sand it off yet again and re-prep. On day five they painted early in the morning in calm air, but light winds snuck up and, well, you know. Finally Mario wisely decided it was time to tent us and give it a fourth and, hopefully final paint. They could have tented us to start with, but that's a huge job for a small area of the boat and I think they had just hoped it would work.
Overall, life here is fun. Between 8am and 5pm, there's a lot of activity. The guys who work in the yard are a hoot to listen to as they banter in their lilting, rolled-R's Spanish, play little radios with perky, cheerful Mexican music or American classics, and have rousing volleyball games at lunch. It feels like a happy place. I giggle at some of the scenes that flash by, like a painter in his white head-to-toe hazmat suit - footed, hooded - walking into the wind with the air inflating the papery suit so it looks like a giant dough boy, the feet and hood puffy and animated. A number of new boats have joined us here in the last week, it's quite crowded. We have a few huge power boats, a bunch of nice sailboats and most recently a very cool wooden double-ender sailboat owned by a young couple with a cool story, we'll share more about that later. The camaraderie is also nice, and since the hassle of cooking and doing dishes on board when you're not connected to water makes going out quite tempting, we all find our favorite cheap places to eat, and share a little time together.
Despite things being mostly fun, I decided to escape for a few days to Tecate, an hour-and-a-half north, where we have a little vacation casita, and took my boat yard neighbor Julie with me. Julie and her husband Curtis have been in the boat yard since August, so it's really feeling too much like home to them, and she was ready for an escape. While Julie and I were hiking and eating great food and taking long hammock naps and hanging out with fun neighbors, Allan and Curtis stayed behind and manned the ships, hung out with the other guys, teased each other, made man jokes, ate fish tacos and birria, and geeked-out talking electronics. When Julie and I returned, Fly Aweigh's main cabin was obscured under a complex structure of metal poles, plastic, vents, hoses, fans, double-layers - fancier than a Cirque do Soleil tent. They spared no expense this time, it's impressive. And somewhere, beneath all the tenting and vents and fans, the fresh black paint is now curing in a dust-free environment. I think we'll see it tomorrow, and welcome it to the world as one would a newborn child.
So now the gel coat repairs are largely done and awaiting the final coat of white, the boot stripe will go on toward the end, as will the Prop Speed, the boat will get a good washing down, and the polish and wax will be, of course, last. We have our own list of onboard projects, too, but some of them have to wait until we can get at parts of the boat that are currently tented or otherwise engaged. So we do other stuff. Allan has been dealing with the drudgery of paperwork and finances, and doing the wiring for the ongoing alternator project. He's given the dive compressor a good overall check. I'm cooking, writing, reading, and working on my Spanish - I've engaged the services of a wonderful online coach in Chihuahua for weekly Zoom classes.We've dropped all 300 feet of anchor chain onto the pavement below so Allan could reapply blobs of fluorescent paint every 33'. We have hot pink, bright yellow and glowing green, which make it a lot easier for the person on the bow to monitor how much chain has been dropped during anchoring. We do have a chain counter thingy in the cockpit, but if it ever failed, well, we like backups. The science and geometry of anchoring is important, you need to know how much chain is out there to keep you from dragging anchor in the middle of the night, never fun.
But right now, it's hard to imagine anchoring. We're just here on solid ground with dirt and paint dust all around, watching the cruise ships come and go, listening to the sanding and clunking and banging and drilling, the laughing and the whistling, the Love Boat serenades, the marching band in the park next door, the happy families strolling the malecón. We're just here, in our current "home," being in the moment. We hope to splash into the salty sea by the end of the week and put Fly Aweigh in a nearby marina. Then, a car trip to our other home in California for Thanksgiving. After that, we'll start our next adventure, sailing south along the Baja, finding more homes along the way.