Lil' Rumi Boat

It’s hard to believe that almost two months have passed since we were last on the water. We’re writing this from our home in Durango, Colorado, a little more than 700 miles from our lil’ boat Rumiko. It’s not a bad place to be, but we do miss the water. And while neither of us tend toward attachments to stuff, we both miss Rumiko . She was more than “stuff.” She was our little home, our vehicle, and the medium by which we learned a new way of living. Yes we miss her, but feel happy knowing she is safely stowed on in a boatyard in Guaymas, and that she will be waiting there until we are ready to head off on our next sailing adventure. We know we will return to sail again in the Sea of Cortez. That place has seeped into our psyches. Or perhaps it was always there. In 1940 the author John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts spent time in the Sea of Cortez/Gulf of California and collaborated on book about their experiences entitled “ The Log from the Sea of Cortez .” In the bo...

First, a few clean-up items: 1) The Navy won 2 out of 3, the best 'our side' has ever done. We then went on to play many many more games, from 3-on-3 to 6-on-6, and drank many beers with them. An excellent time, and a great Spanish lesson. 2) The next day we played the "employees" of the restaurant at which the games were held at (none of the players worked there), and got slaughtered 2 games to zilch. However, later, during the following hours of games and drinking, we had a match of 4-on-4, a strong four on both sides, with a wager - proposed by them - for the losers to go swimming in the ocean. We won handily. 3) Our public has spoken, and the font for Rumiko is Font #4 (see our previous posting for an example). This is the theory, anyway. We'll see how it turns out when Lisa actually tries to paint Rumiko in that font. Now on to the main part of our life here - the Bercovich Boat Yard ( Talleres Navales Bercovich ). Luckily, in a way we did not under...

It’s April – several weeks since our last posting – so we thought it was high time we wrote something. For starters, we’re several shades darker than when last we wrote (although some of the “tan” disappears at the end of the day, down the shower drain). And we keep noticing muscles that were not part of our Reno bodies. It’s good to remember that our arms can serve a purpose other than acting as a conduit for messages from our brains to our computer keyboards. Most evenings our rediscovered muscles ache from the day’s activities. Part of the strain has definitely come from contorting ourselves to fit into tiny spaces in order to clean them, sand them or replace hoses, etc. We just realized we have not taken any photos of ourselves in these awkward positions. It’s probably for the best. It wasn’t pretty. The majority of our arm pain, however, comes from repetitive motions like sanding and scrubbing, and removing and tightening screws. But it’s all very much worth the pain. We’re seeing...

First impressions on being new boat owners: excitement, dismay. Yesterday we visited Rumiko . And yes, we still think she's a beautiful little boat. We looked up at her, and our hearts started beating faster as we thought about what adventures we have in store. She's up on stilts or "on the hard" in the Bercovich boat yard - a sunbeaten, dusty place, downwind from a Pemex (state-owned) petroleum refinery. Great neighborhood. Also, beside our boat is the boat yard's welding, painting and machine shop - great fumes coming from there. . . We opened up Rumiko and started poking into all of the holds and cupboards. The boat had previously been owned by a bachelor, who was going to sail it single-handed. But before he could get into the water, he had a heart attack. So he'd been living on it for the past year or so. The layers of filth are akin to living in a shared-house during university, where the common spaces (kitchens/bathrooms) are disgusting because...