I get up early, like as soon as it gets light. Sometimes I lay in bed awake just waiting for it to be "late" enough to get up. At this time of year, the sky does not lighten until 7 am , and the sun is not actually up until 7:30 or so. I consider myself an expert on this subject because I take the night watch that has me awake at sunrise.
I love this time of day. Part of it is because I am almost always all by myself, as Mike is still sleeping, and when I go out on deck, there is no one visible on the other boats, if we are in an anchorage with other people. Depending on where we are, sometimes I watch the panga fishermen (pangeros) heading out or in. The night fishermen are coming back, and the day fishermen are heading out. Or maybe they stay out all night, and who knows when the ones leaving will return, maybe in a couple of days. Those little boats go amazingly far out. I sit there with my coffee, and watch the seabirds and the jumping fish. When we were in the Sea of Cortez, I watched rays jump out of the water every morning. (I miss the Sea - the anchorages here along the Mexican Pacific coast are more populated - a lot more cruisers.) The water becomes colored with pinks and lavenders in the west, and warmer oranges and reds as you look east closer to where the sun will rise. Early mornings are probably the best time for me - I am alone with just my thoughts and reflections. I suppose if I were (1) religious and (2) not such a slave to the flesh I might have made a good nun.
This morning I stood out on the deck and thought about where I was standing and what I was looking at and how this is my life now. I have spent a good portion of my life waiting for my "life" to start. I learned pretty late (but not, I think, too late) that you have to start your life yourself, and you can't wait for it to start itself and then let you know things are underway. Now I feel more in control over where I am going and why I am making the choice to go there. When I was working, my life was controlled by the need to earn a living, and therefore to do what my boss told me, or else I would no longer have a living. And a big part of obeying bosses is to be a certain place at a certain time. So one's whole life has to be worked around that. Now I am under no such constraints. The only outside forces that control my choices now are the weather, geography, and, I suppose immigration rules and regulations. Otherwise, it is pretty much up to me.
One thing that is new - yesterday we lost our refrigeration. It just stopped working. Mike and I (well, mostly Mike, with me handing him tools, holding lights, and making generally unhelpful suggestions) spent quite a bit of time messing with it, to no avail. So at this point our refrigerator has just become an icebox. We stopped last night (after the two extremely sad football games) and got two big bags of ice and poured them both in. This morning the ice does not appear to have melted at all. So we will just live with this. I am not that upset about it, surprisingly. I have several books that talk in depth about living with no refrigeration, and when we are in port, we will just have to eat out, or only buy a few days worth of perishables at a time. When underway, we can make a lot of meals with TVP (fake meat, Texturized Vegetable Protein). After all, I was a vegan for about two years, and learned to make many really delicious meals without meat. We can also used canned meats. And finally, at this point, we are not sailing more that a week or so between ports at the most. By the time we are making a long passage, we hope to have this fixed. But Mike is not really interested in fixing it - he wants to get a new, more energy efficient system. And truthfully: I have woken up every morning with the expectation that the frig could and is likely to die. There are not that many systems on the boat that we did not either replace or upgrade or something, and this is one of them. I suppose the next thing to go will be the toilet! But that is not a big deal because we had the foresight to buy a replacement system all ready to go if (more likely when) the situation presents itself. And by the time all the things we did not replace go bad and get fixed or replaced, it will be time for the stuff we DID fix to start breaking. But so be it. It will be interesting to see how this situation progresses. And the real problem is we are not in a good location to either get parts to do the work ourselves or to find someone who does this. But we will see. The people here in Mexico are ingenious when it comes to fixing things. People even fix blenders and things like that. In the US, we just throw things away when they appear to be broken. And Mike often comes up with a solution himself after mulling it over for a period of time.
So that is all for today. We really like it here - the vibes (for lack of a better term) are comforting and welcoming. Everything is accessible from the anchorage without any trouble, there is a service that delivers things to the boats, and there is a great dinghy landing with locals who will babysit the dinghies for a small tip.
Oh I forgot - one of the best things about being here is that Guerrero (the state in which Zihuatanejo is located) is the pozole capital of Mexico. For those who do not know, pozole is a soup made usually with pork and hominy in a broth. There are many variations on the theme - the broth might be seasoned differently, some people make it with chicken instead of pork, and so on. Pozole is one of my absolute favorite foods of all time and I consider myself a connoisseur. When we landed in Ensenada after that first difficult trip last year with me being seasick so much of the way and the bad weather when we had no idea what we were doing and the bilge filling with water to the point we thought the boat was sinking, I had pozole for my first meal in Mexico. But last night I had the best pozole ever, with sort of a green chile broth. I thought I had died and went to heaven. I also discovered this same restaurant has another regional specialty - tamales wrapped in plantain leaves instead of corn husks. I can hardly wait to try some of those!
So - this really is the end for today. Mike will be up soon and I want another cup of coffee.
"For talk is evil: it is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god." Hesiod
