We're looking for the trash fence...

If you need an SSCA Burgee I have one available for free. Just need to swing by the boat and pick it up. Current Location is Chacala, Nayarit, Mexico. We will be in Puerto Vallarta eventually. Contact me via the blog or on Winlink, my callsign is W7PEA.

OK, not really, but a rock tried to.

We tidied Deep Playa last night and went to bed early with the idea that we would pull up anchor around 0400 to depart beautiful Isla Isabel and head to Chacala. Well, our anchor was hung up on a rock so we let the scope back out and went back to bed to wait for daylight to deal with it.

At daylight, I first tried to snorkel down and put a trip line on the anchor. A trip line is attached to the anchor opposite the boat and let you pull the anchor backwards, (i.e., away from the way it is set) to hopefully unstick what is stuck. The anchor was in about 3.5 - 4 fathoms of water (21-24 feet) and I just couldn't get down that far. The pressure in my head was too much.

I got out and we consulted Nigel Calder's Cruising Companion for ideas. The book suggests running a line down to the anchor by shortening the rode and using a length of chain around the rode which will weight it down and let it slide to the anchor and hopefully around the shaft. From the dinghy you can can then pull the anchor out backwards and clear it.

Well, it worked like a charm! We cut 2' off our stern rode and the old furling line, I ran it down the main rode from the dinghy. With the dinghy going slowly in reverse I let out about 60 feet of line so I could get a good angle. I basically had the dinghy holding steady as it coudl in the considerable swell and I yanked and pulled on the anchor for about 5 minutes until it seemed like the main rode was moving every time I pulled. I then held my line tight as Dawn pulled up the remaining 30 feet of rode with the windlass.

We were now off the hook, with me in the dinghy, with the outboard and the main engine running. Dawn put the engine in gear so we would not was up on the beach or into our friends anchored 30 feet away on sv Camanoe. We managed to get the outboard and dinghy back aboard which was difficult but without incident.

I highly suggest if you don't already have it, go cut 2 feet off your stern rode or pick up and extra 2 feet of chain so you can do this yourself!

We are now underway to Chacala about 4 or 5 hours out. We owe lots of posts on Mazatlan and Isla Isabel (amazing!) and a ton of pics and videos need to be uploaded. We'll do that when we have unlimited data uploads so we don't use up the data plan on the card.

We're about 71 NM from Mazatlan and we're sailing along on a beam reach in 11Kts of breeze with all the sails up doing just over 5kts.

We should reach Mazatlan just after sunrise. We plan to head to Isla de la Piedra (Stone Island anchorage) just outside old town. Sv Journey left Muertos right before we did -- actually, we left first, came back tightened the stuffing box on the prop shaft and then headed out. They have been about 4 miles ahead of us the whole way. They are also heading to the Stone Island anchorage.

Today we're also experimenting letting the Alpha Marine 3000 autopilot drive the boat instead of the Hydrovane windvane. A bunch of other cruisers have been using their autopilots instead of wind vanes, so I wanted to see how ours does under sail. The autopilot can only steer a compass heading, but the wind is consistent enough right now that its working great. The AMP draw is 9-12amps right now, but the stereo, computer, and NMEA network are also on and the refrigerator (6amps) cycles onoff occasionally as well. With the input from the solar panels we're only actually draining at 4.5Amps. Not too bad. We need more solar for sure...

Just wanted to drop a note to the blog. Dawn wrote a post last night with pics which we'll upload when we reach port.

All is well. Life is good!

Current Location 23°27.60'N 107°40.41'W

Just a quick hello I turned 40 day. So go drink a beer in my honor! We caught two Bonitos this morning and they will be our special dinner tonight.

Currently sailing in very light winds but 70F and sunny. We're on our way to Bahia Santa Maria. Will be there in two days or so.

Talk to you soon!

After many months of motoring into the wind and being cold, we're officially sailing wing on wing and to top it off we're in Mexican waters ! Woo Hoo!!!

We started the Baja Ha-Ha yesterday about 11am and the entire fleet was instructed to motor due to light winds. This morning after the 0730 position reports on SSB everyone was told to start sailing and tracking any time spent motoring. The Ha-Ha isn't really a race so motoring is something they just ask that you track and report with your self tracked times. We don't really care about "our time". Nor do we even know what they will do with them, but we're using the fleet directions as an opportunity to compare what we're doing with others. We actually started behind most of the fleet and passed by some of the smaller (slower) boats during the motoring. At this mornings position reports we seem to be within 5-10 miles of most of the boats in our division (boats of similiar size) so that was reassuring.

Sojourn, a sister Pearson 424, is also in the Ha-Ha!! We had no idea, Scott the owner isn't very active on the list. I got some pictures of him as he was motor sailing yesterday. I'll upload them next time we have WiFi.

If anyone has information on taking Spanish lessons in Cabo San Lucas, La Paz or anywhere else, drop me a note. I'm thinking about doing that, but the one place I saw was over a thousand dollars... or was it Pesos.. it wasn't clear. ;-)

Anyway, things are good. Things are Sunny. Viva Mexico!

We thought we were going to be stuck in Eureka till Thursday because the Englunds Marine that runs the fuel dock was closed for inventory. They were kind enough to sell us diesel so we could get out of town and try to make another jump down the coast before a real storm comes through. We got off the fuel dock around 2pm and motored into the wind and seas all night.

From about 5:30pm Saturday to 3am Sunday we had winds on the nose of 20-30kts and swell on the nose of 4-6 feet and occasional 8 feet as we rounded Cape Mendecino. All of that conspired to hour upon hour of being lucky to do 3 knots! It was never dangerous or particularly scary, just tedious and uncomfortable.

Originally planned to push for Bodega Bay which we hoped to reach on Monday morning before a storm comes through the area, but decided to go to Fort Brag Noyo River due to our poor progress. This is where we are now, at the Noyo Basin Marina. This was our first bar crossing in the daytime in good visibility!! Bar entrance is about 60 feet wide but its well protected and it was flat as we came in. Narrow windy river and awesome little fishing town to explorer... more on that later!

We will probably be here till maybe Thursday when the winds are forecast to return from the North after a storm front moves through.

Everyone in Neah Bay's Makah Marina seems to be either a recreational or trade fisherman and as such the Marina and its facilities have that well worn trawler look and smell. ;-)

We're using the Marina for its shore power connection to fully charge, fill and equalize the batteries. Today we'll doing the equalization so we will have most systems offline. There is also no ATT Wireless here, and only place has WiFi which works (Linda's Wood-Fired Pizza), although even it is spotty. This means we're not our normal webFoursquareFacebookTwitter updating selves.

We're looking at the weather and maybe going to head offshore Thursday or this weekend depending on the battery equalization and how the weather looks.

With the HAM Radio we can still update the blog and get weather forecasts. I LOVE the radio!! I've still yet to make to a voice contact, but probably will call in to one of the nets tonight for my first contact.

All is well here and we hope the same is true with you!

I just made my first contact with a winlink post office via HAM Radio. This will be the first post to the blog directly via HAM Radio. All I can say is WOO HOO !!

A few days ago I got the Postie plugin for Wordpress working and tonight I'm testing that the WP to Twitter plugin is working as well. Normally I use Windows Live Writer to author my blog posts and when I publish to the blog, there is a Live Writer plugin which also sends a tweet. With these two plugins I can email over HAM or SSB radio and still post and send a tweet and it will work like magic!

I've been working on this for months, and moved hosting companies to one which had the right base images and policies to let me run Wordpress as I wanted with the plugins I wanted. Happy to be on http://www.bluehost.com/ thus far things look pretty good.

One thing you might want to notice is that to date you have seen the author as Patrick or Dawn when we post from the web or using Windows Live Writer. When I post from the HAM radio the posts will be from "sv Deep Playa". Minor thing really but I think it's fun to keep the posts separate.

One more geeky toy is working. :-)