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Sailing down the Baja coast was a pleasure. Good wind, well behind us, we managed to set the new balloon jib, 'Dave' of several days out on the pole, with a best day's run of 175 miles, averaging 7 knots. Blue sea and sky, dolphins playing every day, and great company to enjoy it with.

I need to do a bit of catching up, as I left off with this s crawling into Ensenada in December with a broken engine. Well, I managed to jump through all the hoops required to get a new engine into Mexico, and arrived back out to the boat with Katie, Emma and the girls, ready to haul the boat out and fit the new engine, as well as working on the leaks around the rudder trunking and stem. After a long flight to LA, we drove through the night to arrive at Ensenada around 2am, I managed a couple of hours sleep before getting down to the boat to meet Oz and prepare for our lift out at 9am. We had a tow arranged with a fisherman, who arrived a little late, but pulled Anne Marie out of her berth with impeccable skill, and got us to the rickety rackety travel hoist with just enough time on the tide. I am sure all the bells and alarms had long ago been disconnected on that hoist, but after a couple of hours of lifting, restropping, lifting, lowering, belches of black smoke, hydraulic oil misting everything, we got high enough to clear the ground by 1" and were out! Then started a two week yard session, which was pretty intense. We achieved a huge amount of work, installing the new engine, renewing the exhaust system and repairing the leaks. It was a hot, dirty yard, but all the guys were great, and had a real 'can do' attitude, ably led by Guillermo, the manager, who was a pleasure to work with. The nights were still chilly in Ensenada, but they were warmed by plenty of the 4 buck local rum, and by late morning the temperature was well up.we hit our launch date, once again on the tide, and motored back to our berth, with the boat handling radically differently with her new 4 blade prop, turning the other way. I still haven't completely got my head around that....! It took several days to clean the yard filth off he boat, and around that time we were joined by Emre and Tugce, a charming Turkish couple who turned out to be great crew members. Emre is a ships captain, and probably the most qualified person I have sailed with. His experience was a great bonus, and along with the rest of the crew we made a hard working, enthusiastic and laid back crew. Oz still leads the way being the nuttiest guy onboard, but emre, Tugce and rupert all embraced the crazy trip in the old boat, and within a few days had all been normalised to the situation. As we completed our preparations, I saw an ugly weather system moving in, and did my best to get us cleared out before it arrived. Unfortunately the Mexican Port Authority closed the port for small boats on the day I was clearing us out, so although we could have got away before the storm hit, wreaking great damage all over Southern California, we were unable to obtain the all important Zarpe, which we would need later on arrival at Panama, which cost us a valuable 4 days of frustrated waiting.

When the storm had abated, and we were given our clearance, it took all of 30 minutes before we were hoisting the mainsail and heading out of the harbour. A couple of hours motorsailing out of the bay, and we were on to the sleigh ride south. Hopes were high, we were making good speed, and all of our dreams of getting to the Panama Canal in time to get through and make it to the Antigua Classic yacht regatta were real. We had one tough night in particular, when we had a horrible cross sea and high wind, plenty of pumping and a lot of strain on the old boat, but apart from that we had a scorching sail. As we approached the end of the Baja peninsular we lost our wind, and thanks to our yellow brick tracker and Mark Stainer's meticulous weather routing, we found our way inshore to some light breezes which kept us moving without consuming too much diesel. Unfortunately, we realised that we were going to have to stop and refuel, as the wind was just not there, and we had a massive calm ahead of us which we were going to have to motor through. We made a sharp left turn and headed into Acapulco. Unfortunately we didn't see elves or any cliff divers, but we did find a fuel berth, where we tied up for the first time in 10 days and patted ourselves on the back due to our good passage so far. This trip being this trip, however, things were not quite so smooth, as when I went down to turn the engine off I discovered the bilge full of water. The stainless exhaust muffler we had made in Mexico had blown one of its welds, and was discharging exhaust and water straight into the boat. Hmmmmm. Find a welder? We were cleared out of Mexico and did not want to get into the lengthy bureaucratic nonsense of clearing in and out again, so decided to just remove it, and instigate a practice of disconnecting the exhaust at the engine whenever we tuned it off, to prevent water backfilling. So, up at the crack of dawn, disconnect shaft, remove muffler box, cut stubs off it to use as joiners, cut the flexi hose to the right length( no mistakes as we didn't have any more...) reconnect everything, fuel up, then off again into the blue Pacific Ocean before midday. Not a bad pit stop at all!

Writing this from the Balboa yacht club at Panama, my back is getting sore and I have got to move, so more later as we keep going south past the dreaded gulf of tehuanapec, and onwards to Panama.

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