LEAVING LA PAZ FOR THE SUMMER

Today is June 20 and we are headed north from La Paz for the rest of the summer. I know, I know - we've said that before. But this time we have to be serious about getting north since the real Sea of Cortez hurricane season will be upon La Paz in about three weeks. We want to be at least 200 miles north of here by the middle of July. Our chance of encountering hurricane force winds is about 50% less if we are north of 26° 45' than if we stay here in the South Sea.

The local VHF cruisers net included quite an argument yesterday about the strength of the winds that occurred in Bahia La Paz during the last July hurricane. The locals were split 50/50 about the max gusts being either 111 knots or 150 knots. I really don't care - if it was over 100 knots we would be in trouble!

Our last two WEB page updates told you about our problems with the La Vac toilet gaskets. We had Defender Industries ship them 2nd day delivery to a customs broker in San Diego so that they would arrive there on Monday monday June 10. The broker was supposed to take the gaskets thru Tijuana customs and then to the TJ airport where he would place it on the next flight to La Paz. The gaskets should have been in La Paz Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. We paid Defender $23 for the expedited shipping and the broker $28 for the special handling.

Well this is Mexico and things don't work that way! The gaskets finally arrived here in La Paz on Friday afternoon, June 14 - a full week after they were shipped from Defender. No one had any idea why the gaskets took four days to get from San Diego to here. But we still had to pay $51 for the expedited shipping and handling to get the $18 gasket to La Paz.

Our next big dilemma is how to get our new USCG Certificate of Documentation mailed to us somewhere in the North Sea. Our current Certificate expires on June 25, 2002. Each Port Captain wants to see the current Certificate when we check in. In prior years the USCG has just mailed a small sticker that you affix to the back of the Certificate. The Port Captains never look at the back so it didn't matter if we were a couple of months late putting the sticker on. Now the USCG is sending out an entire new Certificate of Documentation each year.

The local cruisers recommend that we have the document mailed to

SV Mirador
c/o Port Captain
Loreto, BCS Mexico.

That is the entire address that goes on the envelope. I am a little nervous about that plan but can't find a better one. There is no DHL or FedEx package delivery between La Paz and Ensenada so the US/Mexican mail service will have to suffice. I asked a local cruiser, who has lived here for 12 years, about the Mexican postal code for Loreto. He said not to use it 'cause it was almost identical to one in Ohio. Things addressed to Loreto Mexico with a Mexican postal code often end up in some small town in Ohio, USA.

For now we are going to hope that the Port Captains don't realize that our current Certificate of Documentation expired on June 25.

One of the great things about La Paz is the number of high speed Internet connections that are within five minutes of the anchorage. On Saturday I hooked my SONY PC to the El Faro 512Kb DSL connection with the expectation of spending an hour or so surfing the net.

On Tuesday afternoon, after 20 hours of effort, I was finally able to connect to the net.

Starting on Saturday morning whenever I entered an address such as WWW.YAHOO.COM I would receive a message that my system could not find the DNS (Domain Name Server - the service that translates an address such as YAHOO.COM into a standard IP address such as 192.168.0.1). Without the DNS translation there was no way to surf or do anything useful. My Windows ME system said there was no problem with any of the hardware - in fact I could PING any IP address I wished, including the DNS that the other El Faro computers were using.

I thought I was very lucky when I discovered that the net surfer sitting next to me was a retired network programmer. Actually Graham is a retired 32 year old dot com genius who founded a company that wrote software for mail servers. Graham's company was purchased by another larger company and Graham is now cruising full time on his beautifu new Moody 46 center cockpit boat.

During the next three days Graham applied all his knowledge to the problem and finally determined that there was no apparent reason, or even not so apparent reason, that my PC could not locate the DNS. In fact I could PING the DNS and get a quick response. Even more research then showed that the Winsock process was failing when Windows tried to contact the DNS. That is BAD -Winsock is about as fundemental as it gets in Windows.

We finally decided I needed to re-install Windows ME. I did - and it didn't help. Nothing changed - I could PING any IP address but still couldn't acess the DNS.

I did the Windows re-install off our Windows ME Upgrade CD. After some discussion with Graham; we decided that maybe the Upgrade did not replace some internal Windows code. We then decided that I needed to re-format Drive C (that is erase every bit of data on the disk and return it to a totally blank state) and re-install Windows ME from a full install CD.

I did the format and re-install after spending six hours moving all my user data to the D Drive and trying to back up Drive C to a CD burner.

I was able to connect to the WEB and browse to my hearts content on the first try after the re-install.

The other reason I had to solve the Windows ME problem was that our Jeppesen MarineMap charting software would only occasionally connect to the GPS. This problem first started just after the high humidity episode that I previously described (JUNE_5_2002). Other programs on the PC, such as HyperTerminal, could reliably listen to the GPS but, most of the time, Marine Map refused to do so. This is a known problem in MarineMap Version 3.2 so I re-installed MarineMap 3.1, applied the 3.2 upgrade, and then reapplied the 3.21 patch to the program. The 3.21 install program said that it had worked correctly and upgraded Marine Map to 3.21.

When I re-started Marine Map it still would not connect to the GPS. When I used Help/About I found that MarineMap was still at version 3.2.

After I did the full Windows re-install the MarineMap 3.21 patch installed correctly and the software can now talk to the GPS.

While anchored in San Evaristo we could hear boaters talking on the VHF from much further north. They were complaining about the lack of staples at the small stores along the coast. They couldn't find things like eggs, onions, and diet cokes. So, while here in La Paz we purchased yet more groceries for the summer in the Sea:

32 Two liter bottles of Diet Coke
2 cases of beer
12 pounds of onions
72 brown eggs (they really do last for six weeks if not refrigerated - but they have to be clean and dry)
12 cans of black beans
12 cans of brown beans
4 kilos of steaks
4 kilos of hamburger
4 kilos of pork chops
30 bags of chips
20 pounds of avacados

etc... There is no danger we'll starve to death this summer.

The weather in La Paz is wonderful so far. Each day the air temp gets up into the high 90s with 25% humidity but the Coromuel wind comes up at dusk and brings the cool Pacific Ocean air in across the La Paz Gap. By midnight the temperature is back down to the mid-70s and by daybreak it is in the mid-60 degree range. The Coromuel blows at about 10 to 15 knots all night long and really makes the evenings enjoyable.

We're going to leave here around noon today and sail 42 miles direct to the Hook on Isla San Franciso. The afternoon breeze blows from the SW while close to La Paz and the from the SE as we get further north. The course to the Hook is about NW so I hope we'll have a nice relaxed sail all the way up there.

We'll let you know in our next update.

Last minute update - just before hauling the anchor to head north we ran into the Cash Machine near our anchorage where the ATM refused to give us any cash AND kept the card. The Bancomer Bank manager says there is nothing they can do and they will destroy the card when they get it out of the machine. They have no idea why the ATM ate the card.

It will now be easier to stay on our budget since we can only spend the money we have in our pocket. Once we leave La Paz there are no ATMs and no place that accepts credit cards. AH - Cruising in foreign countries!