Venados

Last night was the first Venados game of the season for the Slacker crew. Even with a marina that is half full we got 14 people to go to the game. We always arrive too early; the game started at 7:30pm and did not get really going until the final couple of innings. Again the most fun was people watching and watching the Venados mascot.

Joanne gets up close and personal with “Venny”.


The game went into extra innings and all us cruisers were happy to call it a day at 11:30 pm, full of bacon wrapped hot dogs, tacos, beer and peanuts.

Halloween

The Dock 6 Kitty unveiled his make-up for Halloween this year and it's...






The "Phantom" of Dock 6

 How the Phantom feels about having his picture taken

And away it goes!

There is nothing like the beauty of new, shiny varnished teak. But there is down side here in the semi-tropics, For 6 months Slacker gets to sit here in "Beautiful Downtown Mazatlan" with nobody attending to her beauty regime. The varnish all goes to pot and we spend lots of our 6 months with her scraping and re varnishing. We have slowly worked to get most of her outside painted.  Mind you we still have to varnish, but once you get 5 or 6 good coats of varnish on the teak, you then put on a layer of exterior latex.  We just think of it as her winter coat and another way for her to accessorize.

And the cat watches every move to see if there might be a shrimp under all that old varnish.

A Sailboat Again!

We have been here one week and despite the heat and humidity (86 at 10am this morning) We got all the sails and halyards up, the dink and outboard in shipshape and the engine running!  We are offficially a fully operational sailboat again. Yeah!! Now its time for the fun stuff, scraping off peeling varnish, and prepping for paint.

Anyone want to come down and help?

Jova no more

Hurricane Jova turned out to be a bust here in Mazatlan, but down in Manzanillo and Barra de Navidad it hit with vengence.
We wish the best for everyone in those areas. 




We stowed everything in the truck and boat thinking we would have some big rain, and now out it comes again.  Oh well it's what we Slackers do.

Were here! Who's this Jova guy everyones talking about?

We arrived in Mazatlan Saturday about noon. What a difference having an air conditioned car makes. At the end of a long days drive your just board, not board, wind burned and covered with dust. Slacker looks fine after her long summer nap. An extremely rainy summer meant a bit more mold but other than that all is as we left it.

On Sunday one of the dock workers came over and asks if we had heard anything new about the hurricane. "Oh, that was a week ago and it never came anywhere close to here'" then I replied " No the one that will be here on Thursday" he said. "Well, we haven’t turned a computer on since Wednesday" so SURPRISE!


Hurricane Jova should be arriving in Manzanillo which is about 300 miles south of here tonight. It is suppose to cross move inland but following the coast north. As it moves inland across the mountains it should loose much of its strength. We don’t expect much more than 50 knots of wind but should get a lot of rain out of it.  The guys at Rick's Marine Services and Tony's boat watching are running around taking down awnings and checking lines along with the few boat owners here.  So far so good.  We are getting the boat back to livable condition, with a minor hurricane delaying some things for a couple of days.   

You see the strangest things

While we were repacking the truck Julie snapped a picture of the car parked next to us.  Always interesting down in that area.  We did not see any butts or naked people but will keep a look out. 

Fill 'er up

When the alarm went off at 0530 it was not the first alert of the morning.  My phone began ringing at 0500 and as I tripped over piles of bags to get to it I thought "WTF who calls this early in the morning"?
Well, it was one of our friends in Mazatlan asking if we would zip by San Diego Marine Exchange on our way to Mazatlan.  And by the way, they don't open until 730 in the morning. 
Sure we will.  Anything for another cruiser.  We have always subscribed to the "pay it forward" attitude and it has worked for us in the past.
So at 0700 we were in the parking lot of San Diego Marine Exchange waiting for them to open.  We made good use of the time by repacking the back of the truck.  You see, when we packed it yesterday it was raining and we didn't do that great of a job.  Passersby looked at us like we were homeless and that's kind of true!

Cats and Dogs?

Raining that is. 
For the last 3 years we have left the first week of October and it has rained on us every time.  The new camper top for the truck came in this morning and by 1:30 we were back at the house packing.  The truck was loaded by 3:00 and that's when the rain really started coming down.  Lucky I guess.  It always seems that no matter how much we plan we are always running around until the very end.  I guess that's just the nature of things. 

Out with the old

Out with the old

We bought our van (Morrison) back in 2002. Its been a good car and has never let us down. That is until the last couple of years. On the way back from Mazatlan it developed a wicked shimmy coming from the right side. $600 later all was well. Flash forward to last October when we are loading up to head back to Mazatlan. Strange clicking sound from the left side. Only $350 and its healed. This summer the engine began taking a nap when I was driving. Yep, a nap. As soon as you tried to restart it would fire right up but 5 minutes later it would shut down again. That was enough.


We tend to drive our cars almost to death so there is never any trade-in value. Father Joe’s is a local charity who loves to take cars just like ours. Call them in the morning and its gone by the afternoon.


Bye-bye Morrison.



In with the new

In with the new

After quite a bit of searching we found this 2005 Ford Ranger. Its was super clean and with only 38k miles it fit the bill. Now I just have to get use to driving a manual transmission again. We ordered a fiberglass camper top for the back and as soon as that comes in we are off to Mexico.

! Viva nuevo camión



Croquet with Ceildth

We try to get in at least one game of croquet with Jay and Janice each year. Jay got knocked out early and decided to watch from the sideline. I'm sure that Jay & Janice have a ton of pictures like this but who can resist another "boy and his dog" pic.