This morning I went in to town to try and track down a belt for the refrigerator. A typical automotive style belt. I walked up through town which is just a shabby little place laid out all along one road about three blocks inland from the ocean, back behind the dunes. I stopped three or four times to ask directions and kept being told “Toques, Toques.” I didn’t know what that meant but everybody else did and they kept pointing the way.
Eventually I stumbled on El Toques. A house on the end of a long dirt road, over a one lane bridge that I somehow managed to meet a car on every time I crossed it. The cars never slowed. The auto parts store consisted of one room about eight feet by eight feet, but just like in every auto parts store there were belts lining the walls right up against the ceiling just like the wall paper borders that our mothers all put up in the kitchens back in the eighties.
Of course there were no perfect matches, so I bought the three closest and went home. Turned out only one was big enough, and just barely. I stretched it on but knew it wouldn’t last, and within minutes of running the engine it was toast. Back to the store later on in the afternoon for the next size up and back to the boat again. This time I also dug around and found my spare alternator belt to replace the one that was a little too stretched out on there now. With everything back together again we fired her up and, success.
An hour later, while Ali was laying Lowe down and I was in bed reading with Ouest, the engine suddenly died. I ran out and opened up the engine hatch to find one big mess of coolant. The coolant hose I have to remove to replace the alternator belt had popped right off. I know I had tightened it, but obviously not enough, and as if to teach me a lesson, it was the only hose in there with only one hose clamp on it.
What a day. Honestly, it feels as if not a day goes by lately without at least one negative boat issue cropping up. I seem to remember writing more than once in the past, “Boats. Never again.”
On top of all of our woes, a guy on a neighboring boat flagged me down last night and asked me if I could do him a favor. He broke two ribs when he slipped and fell a couple hours south of Puerto Vallarta. Then in the ensuing trip his boat wouldn’t do over 2.5 knots. He was sure that his prop needed to be scraped or that it had been fouled. He needed me to go under and scrape it for him so he could continue to Barra to see a doctor. So today I dove down on his big fifty-four footer and found, well, nothing. There were some barnacles on the prop, but nothing major and there was nothing else hanging off the boat. I scraped it off for him, but suggested he may have some other problems because that shouldn’t have slowed him down even a half a knot. For that bit of business his big Polish wife served me a plate of some sort of apple pancakes and I couldn’t leave without a big bottle of Sangria. Personally I would have been happy with just a little bit of good karma onboard my own boat.
I make it sound as if I’m the only one doing anything around here, but while I’m off gallivanting around town Ali has been hog tied with two kids that seem to need full attention twenty-four-seven. We need a vacation from this vacation.
I went swimming tonight after the kids were asleep and found the water to be full of phosphorescence. As I swam the green lights exploded off of my fingers and as I kicked my legs left long streaks of radioactive green behind me. Pretty cool. I remember sailing to a specific bay in the Spanish Virgin Islands for this, and now I just stumble upon it here.
