We are currently more than half way across the Sea of Cortez, outbound San Blas and inbound La Paz. This 7th crossing of the Sea of Cortez has been our roughest from a sea state perspective and if we didn't have the last few years of experience, it would be our most stressful. We are after all a sail boat, but with winds dead on our nose and a transmission that's leaking oil we are motoring the straightest line for La Paz and adding 750mls of transmission fluid about every 8 hours. A little quick math on our location and time to La Paz tells me that we will run out of ATF transmission fluid, so I've started to cut ATF fluid with motor oil to help us make La Paz. Meanwhile, I'm checking the transmission temperature every hour and if I see it raising above the normal 115 degrees, I know it's time to add more fluid. I've seen it at 220 degrees yesterday afternoon, and with a max temp of 190 degrees, we knew we had trouble.

If something like this would have happened on our first Sea of Cortez crossing, I'm sure we would be in a panic at this point, but we are a sailboat and can always figure out how to sail if we needed to, I mean I'm sure we have a copy of Sailing for Dummies aboard somewhere! Amy just cooked a breakfast of chorizo, eggs, and potatoes. Jason is on watch. Lori is sleeping and decided that I should make a blog post so people know we are alive. We are alive all right and I'm reminded of it each time I have to crawl next to our hot engine to check and refill the transmission!

I'm sure this transmission problem is related to the sea water intrusion incident of a few months ago. I replaced the faulty transmission oil cooling heat exchange, but it appears that something else did indeed happen and now when we reach La Paz we will have a little transmission project on our hands. Other than a little time and money there really isn't anything that can't be repaired or fixed in La Paz so we are not too worried. Come to think of it, I have already repaired one v-drive in La Paz back in 2008, so where better than La Paz to repair our current Warner transmission and if all else fails, San Diego is only 24hr away via bus and 2 days via a $20/day rental car!