Wow – its already February! Peggy’s broken arm is out of the cast and she is working on getting back her strength and range-of-motion. She will be joining me on Calista in La Cruz on Valetines Day! I returned to Calista mid January and have been working on boat projects and doing a bit of racing on a boat called Wings.
We have done several Wednesday afternoon ‘beer can races,’ which are very informal but fun. We also raced in the Vallarta Cup which had 4 races over two weekends. It came down to the very last race where we won by 22 seconds! 🙂
The new batteries arrived Saturday and I installed them Sunday. It is nice to finally have that project behind us! I have also been working on tuning the rig (getting the tension right on all the cables holding the mast. We had a number of ‘spider cracks’ in the gel coat that were fixed as well. Most of these were probably just cosmetic, but a few could possibly leak water into the fiberglass core of the boat – that would be bad – so we had them fixed. Another project was to add a new block and line clutch at the helm on the stbd side to handle the sheet (a sail control line) on the downwind sails (our asymetrical spinnaker or our Code0). They had been run directly to the winch but that meant the winch could not be used for anything else, which could sometimes be a problem. To fix this, I had to build up an area at the helm for the block and clutch to sit on so that the lines would run fair (straight). I carved a model out of foam and had a fiberglass piece built locally. That work is done and the pieces mounted. All that remains is to get bolts that are long enough to hold the block in place.
Monday I injured my left shoulder. I was trying to rescue a chamois rag from sinking (it blew off the boat because I had not put a clothes pin on it) and my shoulder gave out resulting in a ‘subluxation’ which is kinda like ‘almost dislocated’. Pretty painful. Yes, I did rescue the chamois, but I ended up in the water. 🙁
I can’t do much right now, but it is healing quickly and I should be able to do most things within a week or two.
We are working on our plans for going to the South Pacific. It looks like there won’t be a problem getting permits to go to French Polynesia or Fiji. And we hear that New Zealand is going to be opening up soon, almost certainly in time for us to go there in September. So things, while still not certain, are looking good! That means I have a few more boat projects to work on to get Calista ready.