We were in a hurry to head north as the customary north winds were on hiatus and we had 5 days to get as far as we could. Our goal was to sail 335 miles to Bahia Los Angeles, where the desert like conditions and relatively few cruisers make the experience special. Each day we sailed or motor-sailed 50-70 miles, getting as far as Santa Rosalia, 175 miles North, before the North winds returned, making further progress difficult. The winds were not the only challenge. In November, conditions are often balmy, with temps in the mid 70's and water temps in the low 70's. We were bummed as we watched the water temps slowly decline from 84 in La Cruz, 78 in Muertos, 75 in La Paz and a chilly 68.5 in Santa Rosalia. The forecast was for lows in the 40's in Bahia Los Angeles, so we decided to head South to Bahia Conception and further South for warmer temps.

Our only other visit to Santa Rosalia was by car in 2009 as conditions were grim for a sail, with 4x4 wind waves (4 feet tall and 4 seconds apart) all the way from Puerto Escondido.

We spent a week at the Marina, hanging out with sv Vaya, Lil Gem, and Isabella at the local restaurants and bars, catching some "football Americana" and good tequila. Unusual for this time of year, we also got a couple inches of rain.

On the way up the coast our genset died and we spent hours troubleshooting. I have an intimate relationship with this little 1 cylinder Kubota engine, with only a couple of sensors to distract from the basic principals of a simple diesel engine. Careful readers will recall we refurbished the heat exchanger this summer but it was not throwing any heat related errors. Instead it was not producing any amps, over-reving and shutting down after 15-20 seconds. 10 years ago we had similar problems in Tonga and the problem turned out to be defective capacitors. I dutifully inspected the capacitor, which I had last replaced in 2017 as a precautionary measure, putting the old capacitor into spares. Capacitors can be dangerous, as they maintain a charge even if disconnected from a power source. I put two rubber gloves on and carefully placed an insulated screw driver between the two output wires but did not get any discharge. This was a clue... I exchanged the capacitor for an older one and as I wrapped them with insulation and placed them back inside the genset noticed a minute bit of wire exposed on one of the capacitor leads. Upon further inspection it seemed that the capacitor lead had grounded on a sharp edge of the air intake and stopped the genset from producing any amps.

After taping up the exposed wire and carefully wrapping them and the capacitor with insulation, Rina and I crossed our fingers and fired up the genset. Within 3 seconds, amps came rushing into the batteries and the genset purred with a 100 amp load.

It's funny how failures like this affect us, as we have lots of redundancy with our power generation, but when we go from 3 sources (solar, main engine alternator, genset) to just two of those, we get a little anxious. This results in us cutting way back on our power use, turning off the fridge/freezer at night and watching every amp coming in from the solar to make sure it goes to the batteries. Once we went back to 3 sources of power, we relaxed greatly, splurging on a movie on the big screen while at anchor a couple of days later!