Ravenswing started her long trip home with a 120 mile run from Loreto to Isla Partida off LaPaz on Sunday. It was Colin’s (our elder son) first overnight sea sail and the heavens treated him to an amazing meteor shower thru the Milky Way as I slept around 2am or so. This was hours after we tried out those pink squid lures made in the last video. Ten mins in the water and the kid pulls in a Mahi for dinner!!!

Colin filleted and we ate like Kong’s; Fish tacos on night one, and lovely pan seared fillets over rice last night.

LaPaz was our first trip goal, to meet up with Brizo and do our repairs / prep / provisioning. This was the first time I’ve been too early, meaning I slowed the boat down to 3 knots from 5-6am so we could pull in to an anchorage at Partida Cove for daybreak. We anchored in 8 feet of turquoise sand and went to sleep. The afternoon was an amazing long paddleboard exploration. A sea turtle visited Colin on his board. Then we did boat underwater scrubbing – the divers last Wednesday did a decent but not thorough job. Sadly Colin found a big gouge in the daggerboard, which has me worried for the trip. Finished the day with a mast climb to install better (ie finctioning!) lazyjacks turning blocks, while looking at a desert/sea paradise

Got up this morn after a peaceful night and motorsailed in to LaPaz. Damien and Beth drove us around to various shops and we got everything on the list, including underwater epoxy that I plan to dive and fill the board hole tomorrow morn. Yikes.

Great dinner tonight with our Brizo heroes, having made their dream come true and are living a new lifestyle on the boat in LaPaz. Their playground is the Sea of Cortez. They are on to something here…

Back on Saturday we finished up the mainsheet base strengthening project, and it worked just right on the journey’s first leg. The mobile workshop:

Here are the reinforcements laid inside, and the new carbon compression-resistance bridges on deck.

The bird theme continued as we uncovered the main for the first time in five months to find a bird nest at the outer end.

Tomorrow morning we’ll hit it hard with a new brace to better anchor the autopilot, the dagger patch, resealing a leaking saloon window, installing a new windlass circuit breaker and some minor stuff. We broke a tiny trip lever on the breaker, which surprisingly rendered the windlass dead as we tried to drop the hook in AguaVerde. But it got me to open up the electrical area and learn about manual free-falling the windlass (which doesn’t seem to work on ours).

After work we’ll hopefully get in a visit to see Brizo’s fancy new dinghy and in-boat air conditioning. That’s a must for living aboard and still working a remote business job during the summer down here! We’ll try to pry them away for a little beach time and Mexican Independence Day tomorrow before we have to shove off.

Feeling better about the journey prep, and keeping our eye on the tropical storm that has thankfully taken the expected left turn out deeper into the Pacific.

Leave you tonight with our feet at the pool of Puerto Escondido, minutes before departure, sucking up the courage to start this trip…

What a huge relief! Colin and I got to Ravenswing around 4pm yesterday and found her in good shape. Our biggest problem is copious amounts of bird poop. Like, enough to block out two solar panels. Gross!

Early today we dove into the mainsheet base problem. After sanding back paint and drilling small core-sample holes, I’m thrilled to say there is no core damage! I LOVE our western red cedar hulls :)

The first fix is to replace strength in broken unidirectional glass. I’m pointing at the cracks here.

We sanded back the paint inside the aft cabin and laid in two layers of big reinforcement patch (1708 bidirectional glass). These should have been added when I originally installed the mainsheet with this flying Vee system. Oh well, doing glass work in paradise…

We prepped everything for replacement uni on the outside of the hull, and to add little foam core ‘bridges’ made at home to now create a flat plane from the tops of these little towers over to the deck. Tonight we’ll lay down uni carbon to handle the forces that pull from the boom running sideways across the boat.

We also cleaned out the bolt holes and reapplied epoxy to seal the wood fibers where the bolts pass by.

I brought supplies and tools to remove and replace damaged wood core. None of that was needed, and this whole thing is a single day repair, so we can get moving Sunday. Tomorrow we’ll do normal trip-prepare stuff, including restarting the PredictWind tracker for you guys.

The dinghy motor didn’t store well, and needs some work tomorrow. So for now, we have a long paddleboard upwind from the restaurant here, back to the ship. Time to put the phone down and grab a paddle.

So far, so good. Thanks for all your good wishes. We love your energy, good people.

Hello Good People, here’s what it looks like when the skipper has no one else to talk to for a week. This is the late-March trip repositioning the boat from Puerto Vallarta to Baja, thinking she would get hauled out at Puerto Penasco and be stored on land during the summer COVID scare. Funny how things change, isn’t it?

Today Colin and I are finally flying to Loreto and should be at the boat in a few hours, to begin the long journey back to San Francisco Bay. I should have the real-time tracker running again by Saturday, and we’ll post short text updates on the map. I set up an account with Commander’s Weather for personalized forecasting. We’ll have PredictWind satellite updates at sea, and Colin’s Garmin InReach as a backup. We should be adequately informed in advance of any bad weather.

The boat’s tracker is here:

https://cartersboat.com/tracking-ravenswing/

We got a message today from the family that took over the Coronado 15. Liam and his dad got on the horse to fix their new ship, and it’s already out sailing! The original owner is thrilled to see this result. Here’s the new owner taking his grandfather out on a lake a couple hours north of San Francisco.

It was a little overwhelming taking the five boats from this Sacramento family, but seeing them getting used again makes it all totally worth it. I love these rehab stories (and figure Sewell Mt. Bob does too!)

Meanwhile, our thoughts have turned southwards… we’ve made the big decision, due to COVID disruption, to postpone tropical cruising and sail Ravenswing back home to San Francisco this month. Colin is on his way to California, and we will fly to Mexico together in a few days. We’ll start with a 300 mile trip in the wrong direction, to get around the corner at Cabo San Lucas to the Pacific coast. The 1,200 miles from Cabo to California is considered the Baja Bash. We of course will be hoping for a nice southerly push. Sometimes it happens! Normally, it’s a long upwind slog. We’ll probably take a bit of a rest in the Los Angeles area before the 400 mile leg back to SF.

I will let you guys know when the real-time boat tracker is going live.

Right now, it’s the pre-voyage mad scrum. My main worry is that we have to start with a boat repair. When I sailed in March from Puerto Vallarta back to Baja, the port side mainsheet anchor point had caused some skin delamination from the hull. Sharp eyes might catch this coming up in the next video; watch for the black-line barber hauler being used to steady the mainsheet block. This is the part in question.

The triangle shape thick carbon piece is very securely attached to the hull, but I didn’t build sufficient reinforcement onto the hull in this area. That will be our task before setting sail next week. So I’m packing a suitcase of West Systems epoxy, various cloths, festool sander, cutoff saw, and all the working supplies.

Supposedly I have the boat all set up to simply drop in without packing. But there’s always a list. Beyond the composites repair stuff this time, the bag includes:

a dozen new vinyl-graphics feathers to extend the Ravenswing logo on each hull side :)

backup solar charging controller

jackline that came home to get 15″ chopped out (to tighten it up) and resewn

spare maintenance parts for the suzuki main engine

an extra water bladder to carry another 13 gallons of fresh for the long trip

dog latch cams to hold the dodger windshield closed

2nd attempt at a proper pin for the boom’s new reef-lines sheave box (there’s been a temporary bolt in use, and the one I fab’d and took last time was 3/8″ too short)

another propellor. Recall last year we switched to a larger (10″ vs 9″) 4 blade (vs. stock 3 blade). The Suzuki people recommended the 5″ pitch; the new prop was game-changing good for low speed maneuvering, but being so shallow it cut our max motoring speed too much. This new one is a 10″ x 7″. Sounds quite similar, but I’m expecting to get another knot of cruising speed. That can really matter if we spend a couple days motoring northbound!

We also made some 3″ inspection ports for the forward bulkheads inside the float hulls. The forward solar panels sit on top of the occasional-access ports on the forward float decks. So we need a new way of accessing those watertight areas for airing out, and draining if necessary. We’ve had great success with the Armstrong hatches, but they don’t offer them small enough. So we made these for just a few dollars.

You just slip the white bar through the new hole in the bulkhead, center it up, and wing-nut tighten the whole thing to press the watertight rubber ring against the bulkhead. So yeah, I’ve packed a 3″ hole saw in the suitcase, and there’s already epoxy work happening so we’ll seal up the newly exposed foam edges before installing these little ports.

OK, I’m certainly anxious about preparing and executing the very long upwind trip. Been watching the weather everyday, and thankfully the tropical cyclonic activity in the Pacific is calming down. But we’ll stay ever diligent, and expect that here in 2020 we’ll be dealing with some crappy weather issues. Or some other calamity. And of course, all the worries about traveling during the ‘it ain’t getting no better yet’ pandemic :(

It wasn’t quite right looking, that ’90s motor on the ’69 boat. So Griffin realized the motor hood should be white, the way they used to do it. Good call. While we’re at it, might as well fix the various paint flaws all around the whole thing.

Got the dashboard buttoned up, and it was finally time to take this boat for a real spin. Anyone know where this is?…

Launching from Korth’s Pirate’s Lair in the California Delta, near Rio Vista, was the perfect return to the water spot for this rebuild. We got her fired up and set out on the San Joaquin River to do some exploring in the nearby sloughs. Unfortunately, we only made it about a mile before we hit some day-ending engine trouble, in the electrical / spark control system. Anton did a great job troubleshooting, and I was working on keeping us off the rocks as, of course, the afternoon wind and chop built up. Managed to flag down a fancy boat, and they towed us back to the Pirate’s Lair while they sipped their Chardonnay. Do any of you have long stem wine glasses on your boat? Dad and Valda would approve.

So, Griffin & Taylor’s new boat needs one more go-through by a pro engine mechanic, and I’m sure Bill at Outboard Marine in Sausalito will easily sort it out.

Well, no one said they couldn’t stand edited video #1, so we’re going to keep going. Here you go, take a look at how Ravenswing and her various crew enjoyed February and March on Banderas Bay, before we abandoned the boat in the COVID rush home. This was a helluva good spring break, before 2020 went to hell…