I will tell new crew, that haven't done this trip before, there are mostly two types of days; some days you can't believe you're getting paid to have such fun, then others you're not getting paid enough for this crap! Not much In-between.
This one was 12 days of the latter.
This is the first delivery, in15 years, that I was crew and not captain. Because of this I didn't do a complete inspection of the vessel, which turned out to be a mistake.
I met the owner in Cabo, where he'd been anchored for a couple days. It was to be just the two of us on this trip, which is normal, but just means less sleep then if we have 3 on board. I got there on a Friday. There's a old wise tale that you should never leave on a long sailing trip on a Friday, or you'll have bad luck. So we left the next morning, but that didn't seem to help.
The owner and captain on this trip was a soft spoken man that just bought the boat less than a year ago and spent many months fixing a verity of issues. Up to this point, he told me, he hasn't had to much time sailing her.
I've never sailed a boat much like this. It's a Fantasa 35. These boats were built to motor up wind and sail down. It's a foot shorter than our Cal but has 4 times the water storage and 3 times the fuel. It is also more roomy inside and has much more food storage. But all this extra storage comes at a price. Her fat bottom and heavy weight means she can only point about 55 degees into the wind, on a good day. To compensate for her poor pointing ability the designer put in a huge 77 horse, turbo charged desiel engine so she can at least motor up wind. ( ours was over powered with a 40 horse).
On a normal bash you'll get a mix of winds, from 0 to 20, and almost always right on the nose. But at least you have a few low wind days from time to time. But this trip we had 20 to 25 knots for 11 of the 12 days. Like most bashes we motored right into it, until the motor decided to start its series of issues.
I should have known this wasn't going to be a good trip when we were 5 hours outside of Cabo and he came up from the bildge with a 5 gallon bucket full of oily water to throw overboard. I asked if everything was alright and this is when he desided to inform me that the boat takes on 2 to 4 gallons a hour and none of the bildge pumps worked! So for 12 days we would bucket out 3 to 5 full buckets every 4 hours.
Without going into to much detail, we ended up fixing the engine 7 times before she finally just gave up and nothing would get her to fire up again. At this point we were just 60 miles from Turtle Bay, about the halfway mark on this delivery. Without that engine we tried for 20 hours to sail closer to Turtle Bay but actually lost a few miles. After hours of contemplating we desided the only course was to sail 3 days backwards to Mag Bay and try to get parts in the small industrial town of San Carlos.
Because it was going to take weeks to get parts, he desided it would be to expensive for me to hang around waiting, so he sent me home on the bus.
I let him know that I am still available to help in any way I could, including delivering parts, finding him crew or anything else he needs.
The good news is that the owner learning a lot about his boat that he didn't know before this trip. He also learned how to sail into and off of anchor as well as other sailing tricks I was able to show him.
On a side note, I also learned that Mexico has a great bus system. I took two buses a total of 140 miles. I never waited more than 10 minutes to board and one bus had wifi, movies and extremely comfortable seats, all for under 28 bucks.
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