Guaymas - End of the trip

Monday, July 18, 2011

027-55.350 N
110-53.171 W

Ahoy from Guaymas, Mexico!

Ok, I'll admit it...I'm actually writing this from the relative cool comfort of home in Marlborough, MA. We've been home for a little over a week and we've been flat out resetting our lives to land mode and getting the house/gardens back into some semblance of what we want them to be. As nice as it is to have the luxuries of land life, both Sue and I have said that we miss the simplicity of life aboard BlueJacket. However, what we don't miss was the intense heat that we had just before we departed from Mexico.

When I last wrote we were in San Carlos enjoying AC and the relative cleanliness of the marina there. We got a lot of work done in preparation for moving to Guaymas where BlueJacket was going to get hauled. Both San Carlos and Guaymas have what's known as a Marina Seca, which translates to a dry marina or on-the-hard storage. While many boaters chose San Carlos, we chose Guaymas as boats are stored on a concrete pad rather than on dirt. A few years ago a hurricane came through which dumped huge amounts of rain, saturating the dirt and causing some boats to fall over. We didn't want that to happen to us, so we chose Guaymas.

Guaymas is a large, working class town with lots of industry and resources within walking distance. It can be quite loud, dusty and smelly if the wind is from the direction of the fish processing factories. The marina facilities are nice, but there are very few slips that are deep enough to handle cruising boats and there's a large southerly fetch which allows good sized waves to develop. To me, Guaymas is a place to get hauled or stop to re-provision. It's not a place that you want to stop and hang out.

One of the things that we quickly learned was that it gets HOT towards the end of June. Nightly lows were in the mid-80s and daytime highs were in the 90s and it even hit 107F one day. We also had humid southerly winds, which really increases the heat index. One day we had an 88 F dew point and a 127F heat index! I can't tell you how much water I drank and never felt hydrated.

It's challenging to store the boat in this environment as you not only have to prepare for the desert heat, but you also have to prepare for monsoon rains. It was interesting to hear recommendations on things to do to prepare the boat for storage. For example, due to dust storms (which we actually experienced), we had to pull most of the lines and replace them with stringers to keep them from getting coated with dirt. We also had to pull all of the blocks (pulleys) and wrap any that remained in aluminum foil to keep the dirt out. Due to the extreme heat, we also constructed a sun shade which covers the entire deck using three sheets of 12x16' awning fabric. That alone took a day and a half, but it turned out well. All in all it took us a week to get the boat ready to haul and then several days of work once we had been hauled.

Sue had managed to find good airfare from Guaymas to Boston via Phoenix. Only July 9th we flew home and due to time changes and flight times, we didn't make it home until about 2 AM. Other than the gardens being a bit of a jungle, everything was fine and it was nice to back at home. Now it's just a matter of catching up on 4+ months of mail, appointments and all kinds of normal life stuff that were put on hold.

I'll have one more log to wrap up this cruising season and to provide information on resources that we found to be useful. Thanks for reading and hopefully we'll see our local friends before too long!

-- Geoff & Sue

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For the cruiser:

Dockage is $5.71 pesos/ft/night. Back in to slip to avoid wave slap. We were warned that water may not be potable. Good security.

30 Ton travel lift. Storage is $2.52 pesos/ft/day, minimum 3 months.

Log ID: 1463