26 Oct - 03 Nov  It's been a steady week, hence the lack of posts, but when trying to recount what has happened of course we realized we have still covered a lot of ground.  Last Monday and Tuesday we more days working on the boat and exploring the town as well as preparing for our haul out.

The local Cathedral - spotted whilst strolling around town.

On Wednesday morning we were up bright and early and over to the boatyard before 08:30 to get hauled out.  After some tricky maneuvering around the fishing fleet we were soon lined up and after a couple of false starts we were out of the water by about 10:30.  The rest of the morning was spent dropping the rudder.  Other than some rust on the rudder arm (which we knew about) thankfully there were no other dramas with that.  That was pretty much all that got done the first day.  Although we had planned to stay on the boat in the yard we soon realized how impractical this would be and so, finding a Marriott in town we used points to book into a hotel for the full seven days (costing us in points not much more than 1 night in a US hotel!)  Hot and cold water, as many showers as we wanted and free breakfast included.  In addition, we had met up with some other friends from BCA (Glen and Sheryll) who were in another marina (Marina Coral) close by and they invited us for dinner on their boat.  Marina Coral is definitely the high end marina here and we thoroughly abused the facilities as well as enjoying Glenn and Sheryll's company for the evening.

Tough life at Marina Coral

When we got back to the boat on Thursday the prop shaft was out (no problems there) and there were on with cleaning it up.  Unfortunately they found some bad corrosion on the shaft - which hadn't been picked up by the team in Canada! - and so the hunt began to find a new prop shaft in the timeframe we needed for the haul out to complete as planned. We also serviced all the through hulls on the boat.  all but one were fine; the problem child had part of the fitting that just crumbled when we took it apart though - thankfully the yard had another part that fit exactly so - disaster averted!

On Friday not much work was progressed but we realized that the chances of finding a replacement prop shaft were slim to none in our timeframe so we looked again at the pitting and decided to take the risk of fitting the old prop shaft back in, sourcing another one in due course and perhaps doing a quick haul and fit when we can (sometime in the next year or so).  As ever, this is another calculated risk but any failure is not going to sink the boat and we always have the sails and the dinghy to get us into port if it goes. We also picked up our sunshade which works a treat and will be of great value as we get further south.

Friday night (Halloween) there was also a pot luck at our marina that we went along to.  It was good to catch up with some of the crews that we had made friends with and we also went off to explore the town as the celebrated Dia de Muertos (Day of the dead).  Gringo Gulch was humming with locals all in fancy dress and there was an event that we went into at the cultural center with live music and food.  Lovely to walk around and get immersed in the action.

Parade down main street

Selfies with 'La Catrina'

Saturday morning is a working day in Mexico (48 hour weeks) and when we arrived the team were hard at work painting the bottom.  We think they got two coats on today.  In addition we worked with the yard workers to remove the injectors for servicing and finally got the pipping to the autopilot free'd up.  We will swap out the autpilot fo rthe spare in due course - don't want to change too much at once

On Sunday there was no one else working on the boat so Heidi and I set too with the polish to try and brighten up the lower parts of the hull that we can't get to when in the water.  Hours of arm aching polishing later it started to look a bit better.