September 27, 2017

Starting to prep for a Mexico adventure...

Well, it is officially official - Jessica and I are taking the boat south to Mexico.

The plan is to depart from San Diego in December and head down the Pacific side of Baja - hopefully arriving in La Paz in the first or second week of January. I will be cancelling my mooring at Marina Villiage in Mission Bay, San Diego. So, this is the end of an era...

The Alize' has had a great home at Marina Village and I recommend the marina to anyone in San Diego - but all good things must pass.

My boat is old but she still has one last wild adventure left in her. We are still uncertain with the long term plan, but I would like to keep the Alize' on an anchor or else a mooring ball in either La Paz or Puerto Escondido - possibly for a full year. Jess and I will continue working in San Diego, but we can drive down and island hop in the Sea of Cortez when we get long weekends off...

I still have a long list of items I need to purchase in order to make this trip a reality. However, we just checked one item off the list last week. Jess and I picked up a very fancy solar generator from a company called Kalisaya. The unit we have is the larger unit called a Kalipak 601. It has a large lithium ion battery and is set up to charge many USB devices and 12 volt components. Here is the solar powered generator on the bow of my boat.

solar generator on a boat


That is a foldable 40 watt panel - that can be used to top off the lithium battery. We will use the panel to keep the battery charged as we are anchored out for long periods of time. Our thinking is that - this is a nice system to compliment the 20 watt panel that is topping off our battery bank.

I'll write more as we continue prepping for the Baja cruise...



September 7, 2017

Smoke emitting from the engine...

My Yanmar diesel has been very good to me. Knock on wood...

I have been in more than a few tight situations and this engine has saved the day.
And now it looks as though my Yanmar is in need of some love.

Jess and I took the boat out last weekend and started smelling smoke after about 10 minutes under engine power.

When I removed the engine hatch, I saw black smoke rising out of the mixing elbow. Here is an image of the front end of my 2GM20 diesel.


credit: PHGCOM [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.

The mixing elbow is just out of view, but it sits on the top left corner of this photo. This component looks like hell, very rusted out... But it always has looked bad. Now it is also smoking when I bring the engine up to max RPM.
I will keep you posted - I am hoping this is a reasonable job in terms of price and effort...