John's Sailing Notes
posted: August 19, 2006
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August represents the high off season. The sunshine is intermittent between rain, overcast skies, and days of beautiful sunshine. When it rains it comes down in buckets. One storm alone dropped six inches in just two days! You can see the rain coming from miles away. It does not sneak up but steadily approaches on the wind and you can see the falling drops from a long way off. It is usually accompanied by heat lightening and rolling thunder at incredible volume. We can sit on the patio and watch the storms come or go up and down the coast depending on wind direction. The rains cool the temperature rapidly but just before the rains arrives the humidity increases ten fold. This is a sure sign that it will be a good, steady rain and that a storm is fast approaching.

It is very quite here this time of year. The nearby Grand Bay Resort occupancy is well under 20% most days and weekends are not much better. None of the guests are American - mostly Mexican families looking to escape the heat of Mexico City or Guadalajara or the occasional international tourist taking advantage of the low, low off season rates. Generally, Vicki and I are the King and Queen of the hotel pool and many times we are the only ones using the resort amenities. Keeping the boat in the marina grants us resort privileges. We are catered to by a bartender and wait staff, security, towel attendant, and service personnel poolside Ð a staff of approximately twelve for two guests. This time of year we have yet to see more than one or two foursomes on the golf course on a given day. The grounds keeping staff numbers sixty employees working six days per week. Most use brooms and hand clippers to trim the greens and each one is provided with one large plastic trash bag to pick up after themselves. Labor is cheaper here than the cost of line trimmers, leaf blowers, and other gas operated equipment. The average wage for a worker here is meager Ð around $4.00 US per day for about 10 hours of work. This is the average wage for about 80% of the country! No wonder they want to come to America and work for minimum wage and who can blame them. Generally they are god fearing, religious, family oriented people who are very kind and always have a smile and offer a warm greeting. This happens wherever we go and frankly it is addicting. We grow to love it here more each day.

Vicki and I have stayed active and have worked like beavers on the house the past two months. We had promised ourselves we would not over do it but we have the time, inclination, and the house is coming along nicely. We will be ready for guests soon and have had a few already. Accomplishing tasks is very different down here. We have been told that if you can finish one thing in a day you have done well and should be satisfied. The pace of life is much slower and trying to coordinate workers, schedule projects, and actually get things done battling a ma–ana mentality can lead to frustration. We left California to eliminate stress from our lives, so to maintain a worry free existence has involved compromise, patience, and a good deal of planning combined with a carefree attitude. It has taken two months and air conditioning is finally completed in two rooms of the three rooms in which it is being installed. The third is still delayed as the unit purchased did not work out of the box and acquiring parts for it seems an insurmountable task. Fifty phone calls later, using broken Spanglish combined with begging has led to the importer agreeing to replace the unit with a new one but it may be several more weeks before it arrives. Colimilla is off the grid and getting it here is quite a challenge. By then it will probably not be necessary until next June - September when it really heats up again. By October it cools down considerably and October to January is the colder winter season where the night time temperature can drop into the 60Õs and many days may not reach 80Écertainly better than an east coast winter! We have completed the installation of custom windows to keep the A/C in and the bugs and heat out. It was finished this week and took only seven weeks for a very skilled carpenter, Pedro, to make three sets of windows and one set of French doors for the house. He worked in the garage at the house for 5 days a week and cut and planed the wood from rough stock with hand tools. It is beautiful workmanship but a slow, tedious process to watch. He is a patient and calm soul and was very pleasant to have around but at this rate he is lucky to complete one major home construction project per year and make more than a couple of thousand dollars annually.

We have painted all exterior walls on the inside of the house as there is no point in painting the outside at this time. Major construction is underway in the neighborhood and two nearby homes are under construction creating a great deal of dirt and debris. Watching those projects have been entertaining to say the least. Mexican construction projects take on a life of their own. As many walls go up as get torn down in the rainy season. They bulldoze the earth flat, build a stone and concrete foundation, and begin putting up brick and concrete walls. It rains, things settle and shift and they tear the walls down again because they are no longer plumb. Most contractor bids involve a quote for building the house twice in the rainy season. Not that that makes the project expensive with labor costing so little, but I highly recommend against building from scratch and you would never want to be an absentee owner during a construction project. In both local construction jobs the owners come and go infrequently. There is very little in the way of building codes here, and sometimes that is a good thing. In the states our home could never be built as it was designed. Railings would be required and many of the most unique architectural features would have to be eliminated. We were very lucky to buy a well built, solid foundation home that was completed with care Ð except for the upgrades we are making. We have a well on our property. Both homes under construction do not have wells and water is a rare and valuable commodity in Mexico. Both have built large pools. The working is underway on faith that plumbed water will arrive in Colimilla soon. There are no guarantees here where ma–ana is a business concept and everything takes much longer than anticipated. Both homes should be ÒdoneÓ in the next few months as far as basic construction is concerned but the devil is in the details and the only water these places have got falls from the sky and delays the process.

Vicki and I took a road trip at the beginning of the month and visited some friends, Ken and Laura and their son KJ in Punta Mita Ð a beautiful area just north of Puerta Vallarta for a few days. It was great seeing them and catching up. They too are building a large home on the water just north of La CruzÉWe then drove to Guadalajara and spent a day and a night visiting Ramon Dipp whom we bought the house from here in Colimilla. We spent a night in Colima, the state capital, and stayed at the same quaint hotel we had visited a couple of months ago right on the main plaza next to the Basilica. They start ringing the church bells every 15 minutes beginning about 5 a.m. each day. We had forgotten that! In all we drove about 700 miles throughout Mexico and it was a fun get away. Mexico is very beautiful and the majority is nothing like the barren wind swept hills of Baja familiar to most. It is lush, tropical, and every shade of green in the spectrum. The highways are lined with trees that overhang the blacktop and form living tunnels of sunlight infused shade. The forests are thick and wildlife is rampant. Iguanas, tropical birds, and squirrels flit from tree to tree. Traffic is light but moves slowly as large trucks monopolize the narrow two lane roads that wrap the curving mountainside and near shift from low gear. Passing these big slow moving semis is dangerous and is usually best avoided so we slow down, pace ourselves, and enjoy the scenery. You are lucky to make forty miles in an hourÉbut thatÕs the pace of things and you soon adapt.

After a few months of paperwork we now have our FM3 Resident Visas. The process was not difficult but is time consuming. Luckily we have plenty of time. Vicki and I are now Ògreen cardÓ carrying legal residents with documentation which allows us to come and go from Mexico as we please without concern about the time limit placed on tourist visas. We have little pale red passport style booklets with black and white photos, that would not pass the smell test as legal documentation in the states, but is the real thing here in Mexico. They will allow us to import our belongings duty free next month and Vicki looks forward to getting our land ÒstuffÓ here at the house.

We both are anxious to get back on the boat and shove off for secluded bays and tropical waters again soon. Just a few more weeks now and weÕll be getting the boat out of mothballs and preparing to sail again!

Best Wishes to All...