I love colours & I love Brio, so how could I not put the two together?? Just in case you wondered how navy blue and yellow go together…

I took 2000+ photos this winter… I think I can keep this “photos that never made it” thing going for a while…

A sunset shot...

Shrimp-stuffed hot dogs, Coke in a glass bottle, and some hot chili peppers -- what else do you need for a Mexican meal?

This is my "on watch" look -- scarf, safety harness, slightly blurry eyes, and a head lamp for the latest Maeve Binchy or Sci-Fi book

The buses in Topolobampo were so colourful we thought they deserved a picture of their own!

Jon puts up with me taking 'self photos' of us for only so long -- then he gets that sort of "Not This Again." look on his face

Brio at anchor in front of the famous 'Goat Tits' mountains in San Carlos

...And Vancouver's latest weather forecast, just in case we needed more motivation to work hard & get back to Brio!!!

Just a few photos that never had their chance on the blog… back for a second shot:

Our windy but beautiful anchorage in San Evaristo, on the Baja of Mexico

At anchor in San Evaristo

Tacos on the street in Navajoa

A shrimp volcano in Topolobampo

The 5200 Patch (band aid thing) on our mainsail -- in combination with a few hand-stitches, she held like nothing else!!

Jon on watch while we fly the colourful drifter

“You’re either making excuses or you’re making it happen”

I’ll try not to get too Billy Graham** on you, but I feel like I need to preach a little for a minute:

Cell phones, schedules, deadlines, daytimers, traffic, rush hour, paychecks, “the Man”, labels, $3000 bathtubs, square footage, payment plans, interest-free loans, 12-page essays, $4 coffees, umbrellas, dark skies, dark clothing, dark expressions, credit cards, debit cards, endless discussions of plastic, blank-eyed stares, people in a daze, noise, so much noise, automated answering machines, rain rain rain, the cranky lonely isolation only a city can provide, broken dreams, unlived lives, wishes put aside for another day, and “Tell Me Allllllll About It!”.

These are the things that I am afraid of.

Don’t get me wrong — I am happy here. I love Vancouver on a sunny afternoon, being back in the swing of running a business and working for myself, drinking coffee and watching the world go by, rediscovering yoga and healthy foods, enjoying every moment with my family, my friends, my people.

But it’s the things I’m afraid of that get me really fired up. Get me hustling (a good word, I think). Get me dreaming and scheming. Get me planning. Get me going.

The question, in my mind, is pretty simple: “How do I earn time efficiently?”

And then, much more interestingly, “How would I most like to spend that time?”

(Note: I’ve had little diagram for a long time. I’m still not sure I even fully understand it — I just know that when I realised I was spending time to buy time, and losing time in the process, something seemed whacked.)

The moral to this story?

Life life with brio*.

———————————–

*Brio is “the quality of being spirited, vigorous, and alive”

**I once watched a very good movie that was sponsored by Billy Graham (the evangelist). At the end of the movie, Billy Graham came on TV and urged the viewers to “donate whatever you can, even if it’s only a dollar”. So, feeling emotional after the movie and urged by Billy himself, I sent a loonie ($1) to the Billy Graham Foundation… and mailed it with my Grandma’s return address.

I really didn’t think anything would come of it, but since that day my poor Grandma has been just inundated with Billy Graham promotional material, flyers and letters. I definitely got my $1 worth.

A few people have asked what will happen to the blog, now that we’re regular joe schmoes again (for a while anyways) While I can’t promise any dolphin pictures or exciting mechanics stories, I will say that I like this blogging thing way too much to just abandon it!

And if you’ll allow a little moment of bragging, I just had a quick peek at our google-analytic stats, and since the site was first created (3 days after buying Brio last May), we’ve had 1055 unique visitors. Nothing compared to some of the super sailing sites, but I think it’s pretty darn awesome.

(I do wonder a little about who all these amazing people are — because other than every MEC employee that mom has forced to read the blog, I’m not sure how we got to such a number! I also want to know if the person that googled “making vee berth sheets”, and then spent 27 minutes on our site (the top hit), was satisfied with what they found!)

So, in short, I will keep rambling on to you about our dreams and goals and plans and hopes for the future, and I hope that some of you might keep checking in with us too!

And if you ever feel like connecting a little more, please feel free to send an email because I love, love, loooove getting your comments and thoughts! Email address is:

crew(at)withbrio(dot)com

That’s all for tonight,

*Leah

A winter of weekends…

Of waking when we wanted,

Wandering ’round the roads of towns we’d never seen,

Waving, smiling and laughing when there were no words,

Washing down decks, canvas, clothing, the fabrics of our lives with water from the Sea,

Willing moments to be captured on film or in words, any way to hold on to the memory forever,

Wonder-ing, wide-eyed, at the wholeness, the width, the wow of the world,

Waiting for weather windows of calm,

Wigging out when the weather was wild, with waves way above us and ocean all around us,

Wishing on falling stars and meteors showers and shooting phosphorescent torpedo trails from dolphins leaping through the dark,

Witnessing real life, real moments, all around us,

Wanting it to last forever.

We wished, we wanted, we worked, and we went:

1341 miles.

And now…

Willing to wait, to want, to work again,

Until the next winter of weekends

***

Brio is tucked away in the storage yard in San Carlos. Jon is back in Maine where he is running his business (I will be visiting throughout the summer). And I am in Vancouver, pulling pieces together and dreaming of the adventures we’ll have next year.

Continuing the “haven’t you always wondered” series…

“How Fast is a 15hp Outboard?”

The testing grounds -- Jon zipping around with the handheld GPS to clock speed results

Since we tote around a long-shaft 15hp outboard (to go with our 10′ dinghy, on our poor little deck), we figured we might as well gather some stats to go with her. The results?

16.0 knots with two people in the boat, 18+ with only one (it's hard to read the screen when you're banging around on your own!!!)

If you’re wondering, that’s approximately 4.5 times faster than Brio’s 21hp inboard engine will push us.

That's why we joke that we live in a trailer, but we drive a porsche

Haven’t you always wondered how the rudder on a Nor’West 33 is put together? Sat around scratching your head, consulting google, Calder, and all other holy reference materials, trying to figure it out?

I thought so.

Ever since we read the line “small amount of play between the rudder and the rudder shaft” in the 2005 survey (that the previous owner had done), we’ve known that we would need to dig in to the problem and determine exactly what the cause was. Rudders being, you know, a little important to a sailboat.

So without further ado, please allow me to overwhelm you with the trivial minutiae that make up our daily existence (aka photos of every detail on this damn rudder):

The Source of All Our Fun: The Rudder (Bronze rudder cap recently unveiled at the top)

The problem was that the rudder could be moved a very small amount (less than 1/8″) independently of the rudder shaft. (Sing along with me: “The rudder is connected to the… rudder cap, the rudder cap is connected to the… rudder shaft, the rudder shaft’s connected to the… steering quadrant, the steering quadrant’s connected to the… steering wheel…lala deeda lala”)

Close up of the rudder cap. The play we've discovered is between the bronze cap and the actual shaft (also bronze). Here Jon is working on removing the second bolt that connects the two.

We thought that once we’d taken out the two pins, the rudder would spin completely independently of the rudder shaft. But it didn’t! (Are you with me? Are you feeling the excitement?? Can you stand the tension?!?!). A new mystery… until this discovery was made:

Which means good things for us. Since we can now see where the play comes from (a small amount of wear between the key and the shaft), and we can see that we have some redundancy in the system (from the 2 bolts), we can actually cross this project off of the “urgent to do list” and move it to the “to be monitored over the next few years list”. That never happens around here!!

Now to balance out the workyard boat-project photos… here are a few from our last days in the water.

Brio looking quite pretty (if I do say so myself) at anchor in San Carlos

Token self-shot from our last little dinghy trip around the bay

Brio being hauled -- we were sitting in 5'6" of water when they got to us (we draw 5'4"), but we made it

“Only two more watches until we’re there!”

Never, ever, ever utter these words on a sailboat.

That was me, at midnight, happily calculating how much longer it would take us to get in to San Carlos. As the last leg of our trip back North, this passage had been pretty smooth… no wind, no waves, no problems! (Because we’re a little early in the season to be heading north, we’re looking for the windows between Northers where we can just motor like hell and make miles).

But, being me, I had to go and offend the sea-gods with this clearly jinxable utterance.

So at 6:00 am (why do these things always happen just as I’m supposed to go off-watch???), when the temperature gauge suddenly shot up to 240F, I wasn’t even really surprised. You just can’t say some things on passages (Mom’s favourite: “Isn’t it nice we haven’t had any squalls in a while?”… guaranteed to elicit a nasty one).

I woke Jon up with the happy news (“Guess what honey! We only have 14.5 miles to go but the engine is overheating and there’s zero wind so we’re now drifting backwards from our destination! Oh and would you like some coffee?”).

What to do but take pictures??

I should say at this point that I refer to anything involving the general engine area as “Mechanics“. Changing the oil? “Mechanics“. Checking fuel filters? “Mechanics“. Overheating engine? “Mechanics“. So it was up to a bleary-eyed Jonathan to take charge of the situation (while I tried to ghost along on fictitious zephyrs… or at least keep the bow pointed in the right direction).

Process:

• Engine compartment dismantled (very tricky to get to the back of the motor — and where else would the heat exchanger and water pump be??)
• Heat exchanger dismantled (where we found pieces of the shot water pump impeller — ‘we’ being maybe a bit generous) and cleaned out
• Water pump dismantled (without a 13mm wrench… the one we apparently *really* needed)

Do you like the pie pan in the corner? Figured I might as well have breakfast while Jon worked

• Impeller removed
• Calder consulted (not my favourite book, but even I was disappointed at the 2 measly pages provided to describe overheating engines!!)
• New impeller dug out of the ‘impossible locker’ under the vberth
• A few choice words uttered as broken tools flew overboard (apparently a broken ratchet is about the most frustrating thing in the world, followed closely by trying to make crescent wrenches do anything useful)
• Impeller changed, pump re-installed, heat exchanger re-installed, engine compartment put back together…

…and (my) hero Jonathan saves the day, again.

Oh Mechanics.

So it took us 9 hours to make our last 14.5 miles… (can you say ‘last 5%’?)… but we are now in San Carlos, with 600+ miles of north-ing behind us. This is also our final destination for this year.

But I don’t want you to go thinking that we had no highlights to this passage! At about the halfway mark between Topolobampo and San Carlos, Jon woke me up to see quite a sight:

A school of over 40 dolphins (babies included) had spotted us & come to play…

Which way should we go? Both ways:

This one is not in focus, but look at the baby jumping just in front of her mama:

We’d never had a glassier-smooth passage:

A few people have asked for more details about Hotel Colonial — so let me add a few!

Breakfast in the ballroom, looking out to the back garden

Hotel Colonial was originally built in 1875. It is currently 100% open and ready for guests (as you see in the pictures!!). The renovations they are doing are small additions to the already wonderful grounds They have a website at www.alamoshotelcolonial.com, which gives rates (that include their full breakfast & home-roasted coffee) and more information on Alamos itself. You can also contact them directly at info@alamoshotelcolonial.com.

To get to Alamos, you have a few options — within Mexico, you can take any Tufesa bus to the city of Navajoa, which is 45 minutes west of Alamos. From here there is a frequently-running connector bus that will take you right to the heart of Alamos.

If you’re coming from the USA, you can drive from Tucson (approx. 10 hours) or fly into Ciudad Obregon (CEN), which is only 2 hours out of Alamos. When I last looked, flights from Vancouver to Ciudad Obregon were about $930 CDN.

Let me know if there is any other information you are looking for — we are still in complete love with this place!