Sequitur

Michael & Edi have headed out on a slow, thorough exploration of the globe.

Vessel Name: Sequitur and Zonder Zorg
Vessel Make/Model: 2007 Hunter 49 and 1908 Wildschut Skûtsje
Hailing Port: Vancouver, Canada
Crew: Michael Walsh & Edi Gelin
About: For our current location click, on Map & Tracking, then on the Google Earth logo.
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13 January 2014
26 April 2013
24 April 2013
27 October 2012 | Harlingen, Friesland
29 September 2012 | Sneek, Netherlands
19 September 2012 | Hoorn, Netherlands
13 September 2012 | Aalsmeer, Netherlands
20 August 2012 | Sequitur: St Augustine, USA - Michael & Edi: Vancouver, Canada - Nieuwe Zorg: Aalsmeer, Netherlands
11 August 2012 | Sequitur: St Augustine, USA - Michael & Edi: Vancouver, Canada - Nieuwe Zorg: Aalsmeer, Netherlands
10 August 2012 | Sequitur: St Augustine, USA - Michael & Edi: Vancouver, Canada - Nieuwe Zorg: Aalsmeer, Netherlands
08 August 2012 | Nieuwe Zorg: Aalmmeer, Michael & Edi: Vancouver
28 July 2012 | Nieuwe Zorg in Aalsmeer - Michael & Edi in Vancouver
26 July 2012 | Nieuwe Zorg in Aalsmeer - Michael & Edi in Volendam
17 July 2012 | Michael & Edi in Leeuwarden, Netherlands
07 July 2012 | Edi & Michael in Vancouver, Sequitur in Saint Augustine
27 June 2012 | Saint Augustine, USA
07 June 2012 | Saint Augustine, Florida, USA
20 May 2012 | Fajardo, Puerto Rico
11 May 2012 | Terre Le Haut, Les Saintes, Guadeloupe
01 May 2012 | Carlisle Bay, Barbados
Recent Blog Posts
13 January 2014

Another New Book Released

I am delighted to announce that my new book: Carefree on the European Canals is now in print and is available on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca [...]

26 April 2013

New Book Released

The proof copy of my new book arrived by courier today. I have approved it and it is now listed on Amazon for pre-order, with a publication date of 30 April. It is a rather large book at 680 pages in an 8.5 by 11 inch format with 315,000 words illustrated by over 2400 colour photos, charts and maps. [...]

24 April 2013

One Year Out of Brazil

One year ago today we sailed Sequitur out of Brazil after enduring more than six weeks in the least-friendly country that we had experienced during our three-year voyage. In the early evening of 24 April 2012 we crossed the line on the chart dividing Brazil from French Guyana and breathed a huge sigh [...]

27 October 2012 | Harlingen, Friesland

Planing a Metamorphosis

We have added a new post to the Zonder Zorg blog at: Planing a Metamorphosis.

29 September 2012 | Sneek, Netherlands

Onward to Friesland

We have arrived in Friesland and have added a new post to the skûtsje's blog at: Onward to Friesland

19 September 2012 | Hoorn, Netherlands

North From Aalsmeer

We have moved northward from Aalsmeer and I have added two new posts: Heading North From Aalsmeer and North From Amsterdam

13 September 2012 | Aalsmeer, Netherlands

Taking Possession

We are back in the Netherlands, and I have added some new posts to the ZonderZorg blog at: Taking Possession and Settling-In and Making Plans

20 August 2012 | Sequitur: St Augustine, USA - Michael & Edi: Vancouver, Canada - Nieuwe Zorg: Aalsmeer, Netherlands

Added a New Website

We have added a new website: Skûtsje ZonderZorg. Zonder zorg in Dutch means without worry. Our intention with the site is to provide a place to share some of the history, geography and culture of the skûtsje as we discover it. We will also use this place to document [...]

11 August 2012 | Sequitur: St Augustine, USA - Michael & Edi: Vancouver, Canada - Nieuwe Zorg: Aalsmeer, Netherlands

Still More Skûtsje History

We continued to attempt to track-down Douwe Albert Visser, who was the owner of Nieuwe Zorg in 1941 when she was re-registered. One of the problems we repeatedly encountered in our online searches was the effect of currently having Albert Visser and two Douwe Vissers as very competitive skûtsje racers, [...]

10 August 2012 | Sequitur: St Augustine, USA - Michael & Edi: Vancouver, Canada - Nieuwe Zorg: Aalsmeer, Netherlands

Some More Skûtsje History

While I was researching the history of Nieuwe Zorg, I finally found her first registration details obscured by an apparent typographical error in a transcribed online spreadsheet. She was listed as having been built in 1901 instead of 1908. I emailed the webmaster of the [...]

Preparing to Leave Mexico

22 April 2010 | Acapulco
Michael
We sat on the mooring ball in Acapulco and relaxed from our passage. Among the emails in my inbox, once we hooked-up to a free wifi signal, was a reply from Club de Yates de Acapulco on my request a few days earlier for availability and cost of moorage. They confirmed availability and quoted US$3.50 per foot per day plus 15% tax, plus electricity plus water. That is just over US$229 per day not including power and water, more than ten times what we had paid in Guaymas and Mazatlan.

On Monday morning we launched Non Sequitur and headed in to the Pemex fuel pier at Club de Yates de Acapulco. There was no dinghy landing area, and the concrete pier was elevated a metre and a half above water, so while Edi held us alongside a piling I scrambled up onto the pier top to speak with the pump attendant. He indicated that we needed to go first to the yacht club office to apply for fuelling.

We motored between rows of Med-moored yachts to a ladder, which was the dinghy landing. We were assisted there by an annoyingly overzealous fellow who to us seemed to see only the possibility of dollars. Eventually he directed us to the office, which he said we must visit first, but insisted we come to him afterwards for all of our needs.


Other than Mary behind her desk, there was only one other person in the office, and he was sitting at Mary's desk waiting for her to finish on the phone. Eventually he was dealt with, and we replaced him in the two seats at Mary's desk while she went back to the phone. After some fifteen or twenty minutes, Mary had finished a series of phone calls, went outside for a meeting, and then turned her attention to us. We asked her the procedure for fuelling and learned we could go alongside the pier and then walk up to her office to apply for fuel and water.

In response to our question, she confirmed that for US$75 she could arrange an agent to handle our out-clearance from Mexico. She also told us it was US$35 per day to land a dinghy in the marina and leave the club facilities. This, she explained was for the gate pass needed to exit and re-enter the compound. We had thought of having brunch ashore, so in reply to a question on dining facilities, she told us the club restaurant was for members only. I mentioned we were reciprocal members from the Bluewater Cruising Association. She looked it up on her computer and confirmed, saying; however, that we would need our membership card, which I had left onboard.

Edi and I decided to head back out to Sequitur to eat and to rethink our direction. We managed to ignore the shouts of the steadily approaching annoyingly overzealous fellow as we scrambled down the ladder and escaped in Non Sequitur before he had managed to coax his sixty-odd-year-old body back in from a pier and across the seawall to the dinghy ladder. We motored out to his continuing insistence that he could help us with all our needs.

As we were finishing lunch Hugo, the mooring ball owner knocked on our hull and hollered Hola. He had brought Alfredo, a friend who spoke a bit more English than did he. We talked of local transportation options and learned about the local buses and routes. We discussed fuelling options, and he suggested they ferry it out using an 80 litre portable tank and siphon the fuel into Sequitur's tanks. Buying it from a shore station would save the 15% alongside facility surcharge from the yacht club fuel pier, or the 12% surcharge at the other fuelling dock. Paying cash would also save the 15% sales tax. All he would want was 10%. However, when I mentioned we needed about 800 litres, the thoughts of ferrying that much seemed to cause him to lose interest in the project. I asked him of the other marine fuel dock, and he pointed it out.

He also told us we could land a dinghy at the old marina by the lighthouse, but that it was under repair, and landing was awkward. Their charge was 80 pesos per day for landing. Mid-afternoon Edi and I took Non Sequitur to the old marina to find new concrete floats moored as rafts waiting to replace near-totally decayed floats that were randomly held in place by the few steel pilings that hadn't yet rusted through and collapsed. I nosed the dinghy onto the riprap wall and we landed. Alfredo was there to take the painter and he rafted across with it in an old inflatable tied between shore and one of the new floats some five or six metres offshore. There he secured the painter.

We walked to the office to pay for the landing facilities, but the manager had no change for our 500 Peso note. He said we could pay on our way back. He told us the marina had new owners and was in the beginning stages of being revived. The marina/hotel complex was in a superb location and its good bones showed that it was once of high quality, but it was apparent that it last rubbed shoulders with any semblance of quality a decade and more ago. We walked out through a construction site that looked more derelict than new, and up past the only construction worker in sight; he was tamping soil with a gas-powered tamper. The site gate consisted of a chain stretched two-thirds of the way across a mud road and a guard in a hut. At the rate of current progress, the project should be completed in a decade or so.


We caught a yellow bus for 6 Pesos each, and rode along the bustling, business-lined waterside road past attractive public beaches to Parque Papagayo. We walked through the shade of the trees in the zoological gardens, past ponds of birds and enclosures of small animals and past such incongruous attempts at history as a full-sized fibreglass rendition of the unrigged hull of a sixteenth century Spanish galleon.

Out the other side of the park we spotted Home Depot, exactly where Google Earth had shown it to be. We left the 33 degree weather and entered the air-conditioned relief of the store. Our first mission was to attempt to find replacements for the seven cap screws that Mexican Customs had erroneously returned to San Francisco. Being US-centric, of course Home Depot had mostly American hardware, though there was a small section with drawer bins with metric fasteners. The contents were completely jumbled and mis-sorted.

After nearly an hour of going through each of the bins in all of the drawers, I had found no socket-head cap screws of the proper size, but I did find some hex-head cap screws. After going through to the bottom of absolutely every bin, I managed to find all of the 8mm x 35mm hex-head cap screws they contained. The two 2-packs will replace the three missing 8mm pieces. To replace the four missing 6mm x 16mm pieces, I eventually settled on the only package of two 6mm by 20mm in the bins and one of only two packages of 6mm x 25mm, which I will have to cut down to length. I bought some additional hack saw blades.

We walked back along the street to the end of the park and then down toward the water to the Soriana supermarket. There we bought just over 3 kilos of chicken breast fillets at just under $4 per kilo, and a couple kilos of frozen cooked and peeled medium-large shrimp for less than $8 per kilo. We found wonderful fruit and vegetables and left the check-out with our two large cooler bags stuffed full. The bus stop was right in front of the door, and the air-conditioned yellow bus arrived within a minute to take us to the entrance to the marina. The marina manager still had no change for the 500 Peso note I pretended was the smallest I had. He said manana, so we recovered our dinghy and left.

On Tuesday morning, as we were half-way through our yogurt with fresh oranges and mangoes, Hugo and Alfred pulled alongside in their runabout. We chatted and they offered to take me over to the commercial fuelling wharf, so off we went. I spoke with the pump operator and confirmed diesel and facility prices, discussed approach and mooring procedures and confirmed that water was freely and easily available. We went back to Sequitur and I finished my yogurt and fruit, and hoisted Non Sequitur onto her davits.

At 1100 we slipped from the mooring and headed over to the fuelling wharf. The Pemex facility is at the root end of the cruise ship centre, in the corner made by the wharf face and the steel pylons of the adjacent small craft marina floats. We needed to drop our anchor and back into the corner, securing with a line from the port quarter to a bollard on the wharf and with one from the starboard quarter to a cleat on the float. We eventually settled into position and the hose handler came aboard to fill the tanks. We also were passed a water hose to fill our water tanks.

As the diesel tanks were filling, I took careful note of the tank gauge readings and the pump's litre count. We put 508 litres into the main tank, which holds 568 litres, so with the needle at the top of the empty mark there remained 60 litres in the main tank. Into the auxiliary tank we pumped an additional 227 litres, bringing its gauge from just below the bottom of the empty markings to the top of the full. The specifications show the size of this tank at 272 litres, so there remained 45 litres in it. The total for the 735.13 litres came to 7144.08 Pesos, including the 12% mooring charge and the 2% credit card fee.

At 1220 with our diesel and water tanks full, we let go the lines from the quarters and I shortened-in the anchor chain to haul us away from the wharf and the float, and then we weighed, and leaving the anchor acockbill we headed out to find an anchorage. At 1240 we came to 70 metres on the Rocna in 22 metres of water a quarter mile south of the cruise ship terminal and a cable clear of the shoaling around the isolated rocks, Las Dos Piedras off the point to our west. We secured and had lunch.


The pump attendant had confirmed that we could come back in and use the float as a dinghy dock, so we re-launched Non Sequitur, grabbed our two insulated bags and headed back in. At anchor to the west of us was a Panamax cruise ship from the Norwegian Cruise Line and alongside the wharf was her sister the Norwegian Star. On our way to the floats we passed under the bows of Jesus Boat, a somewhat less impressive cruiser.

Once ashore again, we walked along the malecon past the cruise ship terminal, weaving our way through the pale pink cruise ship crowd as it waddled along. We crossed the broad, busy boulevard to the offices of the Capitan de Puerto, arriving at 1530 to find that the office closed at 1500. We moved the visit to our manana list and crossed the boulevard again to catch a 5 Peso bus eastward to the other end of the city and to Wal-Mart.


Among the great buys we found there was white or brown eggs at one Peso per egg, less than $1 Canadian per dozen. Edi picked-out two-and-a-half kilos of oranges at 3.9 Pesos the kilo, totalling about 80 cents Canadian. We also added a wonderful big bunch of cilantro, which cost the equivalent of 24 cents.


Firm, blemish-free white potatoes were 8.9 Pesos a kilo, but the winner of the day had to be the Roma tomatoes at less than 50 cents a kilo. The continuing crowds around the frequently replenished bins told us this was an unusually good buy.

We picked-up some coloured markers so Edi can make our courtesy flags for Ecuador and Peru, both of which have coats of arms as part of their designs. We also replenished our supply of Lamasil, the toenail rot cream for 46 Pesos off-the-shelf. Our last supply came through a doctor's appointment in Vancouver and a prescription for exactly the same product at $48 for an identically sized tube.

On Wednesday morning we packed our folio of ship's papers into our shopping bags and took the dinghy over to the marina at the fuel dock. We went into the office to pay the 150 Peso landing fee and then walked along the malecon to the offices of the Port Captain. We were ushered into a third-floor, air-conditioned corner office overlooking the water to meet the Port Captain, a young lady in her mid-to-late-twenties, most likely a political appointee, who appeared to us to be in way over her head. She needed to constantly ask for assistance and advice from much older and very subservient staff.

She passed on to her staff for photocopying our passports, entry visas, ship registry document, crew list, vessel importation certificate and our exit documentation from previous Mexican ports. The documents were soon returned to us along with an Acapulco arrival document. I asked when the exit zarpe would be ready for our pick-up, and she told us Friday afternoon. We said we wanted to leave first thing on Friday morning, and would like to have the zarpe on Thursday afternoon. As simply as we tried to convey to her that we wanted to leave Mexico early on Friday morning when the winds were good for sailing, she didn't seem to comprehend that the winds or even the weather could play any role in timing our departure. She finally relented and told us the zarpe would be ready on Friday morning. I said we would be there when they opened at 0800, but she countered with 1000.


While we were sitting in the Port Captain's office waiting for her to return from one of her consultations, Edi spotted a plaque on her wall with a familiar looking name on it. There above a calendar was the only plaque on the wall, and it was from HMCS Qu'Appelle, a Canadian destroyer in which I was a Bridge Watchkeeping Officer and the Assistant Navigating Officer in the early 1970s. I told this to the Port Captain and asked if I could take a photo of her and the plaque, which would have been presented to one of her predecessors on a visit by QuAppelle to Acapulco.


HMCS Qu'Appelle was in the squadron of ships in which I visited the South Pacific islands, New Zealand and Australia in 1969, while I was in HMCS St Croix participating in the Captain Cook bicentennial celebrations. I joined Qu'Appelle in 1970, and in 1972 we again crossed the Pacific through Polynesia to New Zealand and Australia, and I have fond memories of my times in her.

We thanked the Port Captain for her kind services and told her we would see her early on Friday morning. When we left the building we caught a westbound bus along the waterfront boulevard, intending to go to the marine hardware store we were told was across from the entrance to the Club de Yates. After that we were planning on finding our way to Costco. As we passed the marina where our dinghy was secured, the bus turned inland. We decided we may as well go along for the ride, using it as a tour bus; a bargain at 5 Pesos.


The bus ran through thickening pedestrian, car and bus traffic in a street that was frequently blocked or narrowed by double-parked cars. Within a block of the facade of show along the malecon, we were in a slum, and the further in we went the slummier it became. After a few blocks, the bus route bent eastward and after a quarter hour or so, we spotted a Home Depot sign high above the scene a few blocks ahead. Beside us we recognized Parque Papagayo, and realized we were paralleling the coast a couple of blocks in from the downtown strip.

The bus then began climbing eastward up into the hills as the coast curved around to the south. We knew that Costco was supposed to be in the next valley along from downtown, so we stayed aboard as the bus climbed through increasingly desperate housing and and then went through a three-kilometre-long tunnel. We descended into a broad valley and got off the bus in front of a Soriana and across from a Mega. We asked for directions to Costco, but nobody knew of it, not even the aggressive taxi drivers. It seems we were in the wrong valley.


We jay-walked across the broad road with its three medians separating service lanes from divided through-traffic lanes, and there we waited for a returning bus. We asked several bus drivers if they went to Costco, but were met with blank expressions. We were really in the wrong valley. Eventually a driver nodded, so we boarded and rode along as he bypassed the tunnel and wound his way up the steep road leading over the pass above the tunnel. We were definitely in the low-cost section of town.


Every available space was being used either for housing or for business. I attempted to record a few examples of the businesses as we rode by in the bus. This cooling fan repair shop looked to be less than a metre in depth, and was using the entire sliver of space between a building's front wall and the sidewalk line.


These two businesses, a key cutter and a typewriter repair shop (how long since we've seen one of these?) were crammed into tiny ramshackle buildings, probably no more than five square metres in size and plunked onto a residential driveway verge.

We changed buses shortly after we had started down from the summit of the pass. This new bus took us back down to Parque Papagayo and to Home Depot, where we got off. We went in to use their air-conditioning as a temporary respite from the 33 degree day, and to picked-up a cold bottle of water. After we had quenched our thirst, I went to a check-out to pay for it while Edi got a very detailed briefing over maps on how to get to Costco. We thanked the floor manager for his help and headed back out into the heat.

We walked past the park and back down to the main downtown strip, where we flagged a yellow-fendered collectivo labelled Colosio as instructed. For 12 Pesos each the collective taxi took us on a fifteen-kilometre ride up a road winding through up-scale residences and past the entrances to gated communities that spilled over the hillsides and cliffs above the southern rim of Acapulco Bay. We continued for fifteen kilometres up over a pass and then down onto a flat coastal plain and along it to Costco.

It was 1430 and we ordered a pizza from the Costco food windows and sat on the patio eating away at it until we were full. Their only pizza size was just shy of half a metre in diameter, a tad much for us at lunch, so Edi had the counter attendant foil-wrap the remaining slices.

This is the first Costco to disappoint us this trip. The store was not at all busy; the aisles were clear and easy to negotiate and at the checkouts there were no line-ups. Missing was the wonderful selection of fresh vegetables, the crimini mushrooms, the portaobellos, the fine green beans, the asparagus, the red, yellow and orange peppers. And it was not only the vegetable selection that was mundane; there were no specialty fruit. It was not at all like the range of specialty produce that all of our previous Costco visits had caused us to expect here. The fresh bakery churned-out mostly sweet stuffs; there were no bagels, no English muffins, no nice breads.

We did pick-up some hard salami, some thick ham steaks, some boneless and skinless chicken thighs and a nice selection of cheeses. We also replenished our stocks of nuts, artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes and Mexican coffee. Among the other things we bought were a huge bale of paper towels and a collapsible hand cart to help us carry it all. The wine selection did not inspire us to buy any, though we did buy some Torres 10-year-old brandy to augment our depleting stock. We were the only customers at the check-out, and we couldn't help thinking that the Costco expansion department had blown this site selection.

We loaded our purchases into our two cooler bags and three other boat bags and pushed the shopping cart out to the street edge of the parking lot. There I flagged a yellow-fendered collectivo and we loaded our purchases into the trunk and hopped in. A couple of minutes of slow driving netted the remaining two passengers, and off we sped back over the pass and down into the centre of town. We rode to the end of the taxi's run, when it turned at the corner by the Port Captain' office. We loaded our booty onto the two wheelies, our old luggage carrier and the new one, and walked along on the shady side of the street the four blocks to the marina. Just before the crosswalk, as we passed the open front of a farmacia. Edi spotted stacks of bottled water. I asked the clerk for the price per dozen of the 1.5 litre size, and we bought two twelve-packs for 96 pesos and re-organized our loads.

We loaded the dinghy and ferried our purchases out to Sequitur in the anchorage, unloaded, stowed and relaxed. In the evening we enjoyed the remainder of the pizza washed-down with chilled Argentinean Cabernet.

On Thursday morning I hauled four packages of sierra fillets out of the freezer and after they had thawed, boiled them in a quarter litre of water and then added a half litre of chicken stock from a tetrapack and a half litre of white rice. To this simmering pot I added a diced small white onion, a diced large carrot, a diced large cauliflower stem and after tasting, some salt. After half an hour I added the cauliflower tops and some chopped zucchini and poblano, and the pot yielded four one litre Lock-and-Lock containers of passage dinners for the freezer.

After lunch a couple of Mexicans in a runabout knocked on the hull and asked whether we needed any work done or any supplies. I asked if they could find Spectra watermaker filters, and the one fellow said he could. I showed him one as an example and wrote out the part numbers for him. I also asked whether he could find some Tef-Gel and some Locktite, and added them to the written list I gave him. We agreed to meet at 0930 Friday on the float at the marina.


At 1400 we went ashore to the marina by the fuel dock and paid the 150 Pesos dinghy landing fee. I offered a Canadian twenty and was given 240 Pesos for it. We walked around the western lobe of the bay, which was thick with small boats. After nearly two kilometres we arrived at the entrance gate of the Club de Yates, where we had been told there was a marine supply store.

We asked the guard where it was, and in reply he let us through the gate and indicated the first door on the left. He monitored to ensure we went into the shop and not into the marina. The shop was more oriented to boating knickknacks than it was to marine supplies, and prices were double to quadruple those at we see at home, even at our highest priced store, Westmarine. They had never heard of Tef-Gel. We were shown to the shop next door, which had an even less appropriate stock mix. We were monitored to the gate and locked back through.

We caught a bus and rode back along the waterside boulevard. Unfortunately we had hopped on one of the buses whose driver prides himself with the loudest music and deepest bass in the city. With fingers in our ears, we endured it until we were past the Port Captain's office, then we got off to walk the remaining half dozen blocks to the Mega supermarket. Its thin selection of produce was mostly seconds and culls, and this very quickly told us we were still too close to the slums.


We continued walking along the malecon, passing as we went an itinerant fish stall on the margin between sand and sidewalk next to moored and beached pangas. After several blocks we arrived at Bodegas Aurrero, another supermarket. Its produce also screamed at its location in the cheaper end of town, so on we went.

We flagged a collectivo and rode the remaining five-and-a-half kilometres to Wal-Mart for the equivalent of less than $2. The selection of produce was diverse and in excellent condition. Edi picked out a couple of nice papayas, one slightly greener to last a bit longer, plus some avocadoes in varying stages, mostly green. She also found some fresh strawberries at an excellent price. I added some nice Portobellos and some firm white mushrooms, plus red peppers and poblanos. We also bought two dozen frozen bagels and a big block of Chihuahua cheese.


We browsed the wine selection, but could see nothing to enthuse us. Besides, the Blue Nun had left the wine department and was last spotted eyeing the cucumbers.

Outside Wal-Mart we were accosted by hoards of taxi drivers, but we shook them off and went to the bus stop to wait for a yellow, air-conditioned and tinted-windowed bus. For less than fifty cents each we rode in comfortably upholstered seats with quiet music for the nine kilometres back to the marina.

After some cramming and juggling, we managed to fit most of our perishable purchases into the fridges and freezers. We are once again stocked-up for independent cruising, and are ready to head out to the Galapagos Friday morning, if the Port Captain comes through on her promise of a zarpe at 1000.

The winds are predicted to be light and variable the first three days out, but a building depression south of Panama on Tuesday and Wednesday should give us 15 to 20 knot south westerly winds and a beam reach for the middle half and hopefully more of our 1200-mile passage.
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