No Good, Terrible, Horrible, Awful Day

The sunrise on January 10 created a red sky. Isn’t there a saying, red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky at morning, sailors…..?

We had a wonderful sail with the full main and genoa (the primary head sail) in 12 knots of breeze for about an hour.  

Then we saw water overflowing from the galley sink. Unfortunately, the starboard sea cock (water intake valve that goes through the hull of the boat) was closed, but still about a cup of water per minute was coming up into the sink. We tacked over to get the galley sink above the water line, bailed the water, and tried tightening the sea cock.  This was all fine for about an hour, until we had to tack back to avoid land and test the quick repair on the sea cock. After about a minute, water again started coming up the sink.....and that is when the genoa ripped.

Now we have two torn sails, which is just as well because we cannot have the boat heeled over or the sink overflows.

We furled the sail, bailed the water out of the sink and mopped it off the floor, and motored another 3 hours to Bahia Agua Verde (water didn’t come in when the boat was flat). We saw a pod of dolphins just outside of Bahia Agua Verde, between the San Marcial reef and the mainland, but even they were subdued.

We anchored in the lovely green waters of Bahia Verde, dried the galley, took the genoa off the roller furling, flaked the sail and packed it up.  As we straightened things up, we discovered the genoa halyard (rope that holds the genoa up) was surprisingly frayed!  Something up at the top of the mast is rubbing.  This will require a trip up the mast, but no one was going to do that today with our current string of problems.

We deserved an ice cold beer at the local restaurant in the village, maybe even a home-cooked fresh fish dinner, but as we neared the village beach we realized the surf was up and we couldn’t land Tubby. Well, Tubby could have surfed over the waves and onto the beach, but leaving would have been a wet and tumbling activity. So we returned to the boat. Bad luck all around.

The next morning we took Tubby to the shore near the boat and hiked around a mountain to the village. We were rewarded with fresh goat cheese and fresh tortillas. We were back at the boat by noon. Malcolm got in the water to check if anything on the outside of the hull was causing the sea cock to leak, but from the outside, all was fine. While we had lunch, Dina tried fishing off the back of the boat. With no success, either fishing or fixing the leaking sea cock, and seeing that it was another calm afternoon perfect for motoring, we raised anchor and headed to Puerto Escondido hoping for maintenance and repair services.  The scenery was spectacular.