Rough week, but a good end. Marvelous Marvin the mechanic was too sick to come work on the boat for several days, but showed up on Wednesday with the rebuilt injection pump his toolbox. A couple of hours later we fire up the engine and it sounds completely different than I have ever heard it. Instead of the clattery thumpety sound of a small truck, it sounds like a sewing machine singing along. I have probably never heard it when it was running properly before. Perhaps this will all work out after all. I am sure I saved about a million dollars by having it done here instead stateside.
When we got back from Guatemala, I noticed a toothache and went to see a local dentist. He spoke english about like my spanish, so we gave each other lessons. As luck would have it, the toothache turned out to be an abscess which will require a root canal. He drills it out and drains it, but the root canal is out of the question until I have a few weeks to do it right. I return to the boat to see about the next challenge. The pain does not go away as advertised, but by Sunday I have developed tourista and am too distracted to worry about the tooth. A couple more days of lying about holding my guts in all day and running to the head all night leave me completely exhausted, dehydrated, and sleep deprived. On Wednesday I felt like I could cope with a return to the dentist, so I called him and he said come right in. When I went to the office to tell Joan about the dentist, Marvin was back, so he and Joan set off to fix the boat and I headed for the dentist. I gave up on the collectivo and got a local taxi driver to agree to take me to town, wait for me and bring me back for about $16. He got pretty lost in town and had no map reading skills, so the map on my tablet could have been hieroglyphs to him. I finally coaxed him to the address and he sat on the sidewalk in front of the dentists office while I went in and had the abscess drained again. He must have missed a spot the first pass, because relief was instantaneous this time. He gave me antibiotics to take at sea just to be sure. The driver stopped at the pharmacy, and an ATM on the way back and it was pretty deluxe having all my errands dispatched without standing on a corner waiting for a bus.
Upon return to the boat, Marvin is about done and I am soon rewarded by the happy purr of the engine.
Things look a lot better this evening than they had looked in the morning. My stomach was settling down, the boat was running, my toothache was gone, and life looked a lot more positive now. Next morning I scheduled the formal checkout from Mexico for Saturday morning. We have done all but the final inspection by the military which is supposed to occur at 07:00 tomorrow. We're thrashing all about getting the tanks full, papers in order and generally getting ready to go. After the inspection, we set sail for Ecuador. It is 1100 miles as the crow flies, but we have no idea how long it takes as there is just too much unknown about the weather. If we have good wind from a favorable direction, we could show up in 4 days. Owing to the fact that we have never experienced that kind of wind and we will have to cross the inter tropical convergence zone, a more reasonable estimate is a week or two. The ITCZ is the area where the northern trades meet the southern trades and duke it out for some prize or something. The general effect is a band of high precipitation and variable winds which wanders around west of Costa Rica and Panama. With luck it will move north as we move south and we will just enter the southern trades for some excellent sailing in consistent 15 to 20 knots winds. Another scenario might be drifting in light air dodging squalls for a few days before we pick up the trades. It looks like we should be good to go tomorrow and the rest will just have to play out as it will. Next post should come from another hemisphere.
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