NEWS FROM GOLFITO
Golfito, Costa Rica, Thursday, January 14, 2010
Just because this little town is quiet doesn’t mean that nothing at all ever happens.
Visitors from Canada
Yesterday, for example, I received a visit from a young Canadian couple who were holidaying in Costa Rica as a break from rigours of an Ottawa winter. They have been surfing and sightseeing along the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica and had arrived by the early-morning, fast passenger ferry from Puerto Jimenez. It wasn’t completely by chance that Thomas and Tanara had stopped by Golfito specifically to see me. Thomas’ dad and I were in the same regiment back in the late 1960s; we met on the RCAF plane going to Duesseldorf, in other words before Thomas was even a gleam in his daddy’s eye. We two old-timers werew also post-graduate students together in London around 1970. The last time I saw Thomas albeit briefly was in Strasbourg, France, some dozen years ago and before that he had visited my flat in Frankfurt back with his parents when he was about twelve. We had time today to reminisce and get to know each other somewhat better now that he is an adult. Pure pleasure for me. His partner, Tanara, is also a most lively and interesting person. Too bad they couldn’t have stayed longer.
Another face from the past: Port Hadlock/Port Townsend
And you can file this one under The Good Old Days, too. After the young couple left on an early-afternoon bus headed towards San Jose, I walked back along the waterfront (there is only one street between here and the bus terminal!), did some shopping on he way and was later drinking a cold beer with some other cruisers back at Land & Sea. As John, another cruiser, and I began to compare notes, we realised that we actually knew each other from Port Hadlock’s Old Alcohol Plant Marina near Port Townsend, Washington. That is where we had originally found and bought Vilisar from Roger van Stelle back in 2001. Vilisar came with a permanent slip in Port Hadlock, which, however, we soon gave up after a month or so since we intended to become real cruisers and sail around the world. Sailing experience (as opposed to boat maintenance) is strictly limited if you are in a marina, I reckon. John lived and lives on a Pacific Seacraft 27 called Veracity and he was docked only a few slips away in Port Hadlock. He is the one who put now together all the clues, remembering that I had been a translator back then, and was determined to get some sort of under-way communications so I could continue to work while cruising. He ran into us again, he said, the next spring in Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. I can just barely remember all this, since no doubt we were being more than somewhat overwhelmed with new things s and new people at the time. We were on our way to Alaska and John was circumnavigating Vancouver Island or going to Alaska too. “You look much more salty now,” he said with a slight chuckle. I guess we were pretty green at the time.
Yacht transporters
S/V Terre Firma was delivered here by (Jan and George of S/V Claire de Lune) from Ecuador a few weeks ago and has been patiently awaiting a cargo ship’s arrival. I promised to help Tim of Land & Sea get the yacht onto the yacht cargo-ship. For the un-initiated, instead of making a long passage yourself or having a paid skipper and crew deliver your boat for you, you can actually have it shipped aboard a commercial vessel specially designed for this task. Most motor vessels don’t carry enough fuel for very long sea passages and are not really designed for offshore work. I think the Dutch started this trade. There is no need to unstep masts, etc., so all-in-all loading and unloading quite simple and the boat has less wear and tear than sailing her back and forth. Crewmen or owners can also be carried on aboard so arriving with their yachts. The ships travel at 15-18 knots, i.e., a lot faster than the yacht could travel by itself. (http://www.noonsite.com/Members/doina/R2004-09-30-3)
The M/V Mary Green arrived a few days ago and picked up or delivered a number of boats. They were mostly power boats, but of all shapes and sizes. At a guess, less than about one-third were sailboats. On some ships, boats can be driven straight into a flooded hold (e.g. http://www.yacht-transport.com/) hoisted by slings and cranes. These specialised cargo ships sail regular round-the-world routes picking up and dropping off boats at important yachting sites as they go along.
This morning a second ship took the place of the first. It was the Singapore-registered ship Pac Deneb (http://www.vesseltracker.com/en/Ships/Pac-Deneb-9304019.html or http://www.pacl.com.sg/PAC%20Deneb.pdf ). If I read this correctly, Pac Dineb can also be used for other cargo, like trucks, or steel pipe, etc. If anything it had even more motor cruisers on board than Mary Green. We are notified to be ready with the yacht alongside Pac Deneb at 1330.
It was all rather simple. The officers and petty officers were Chinese form Singapore (I assume). The loading hands were all Latinos from Mexico or San Diego. The loading hands only fly out to each port to load and then home again when the loading is completed. There’s no point in just sitting for the offshore portion; it is cheaper for the shipper to pay off the hands between ports. The next stop on Pac Deneb’s itinerary is Manzanillo, Mexico, but they might continue on to San Francisco and/or Vancouver. According to Tim, foreign-flagged vessels may only touch at one port in the U.S.A. That’s the way the airlines were until just a year or so ago. Some of the vessels are heading north because yacht owners have to go back to work, or they simply don’t want to make the long passage to windward up the Mexican and California coast.
One sports-fishing guide from Port Aransas, Texas, told me he keeps one boat in Texas and one in Costa Rica and uses them for half the year in each place. But he is considering saving money by owing only one boat and having it shipped back and forth as required.
It depends of course how expensive his marinas are. If he still has to maintain two marina slips, for example, even though he only has one boat, it might not calculate. $10,000 in shipping charges works out to about $833 a month for marinas. If he has to pay for two marina slips at $500 monthly each (total $1,000 monthly x 12 + $12,000 p.a.) the calculation doesn’t look so good. But assume he only has to pay for one slip all year: $6,000 p.a. So, two boats cost $12,000 (his pays flight tickets in both cases, we assume). One boat that he ships back and forth costs $6,000 (marina) + $5,000 (shipping) = $11,000. He is already making money. And we have not figured in the direct costs of owning two boats, i.e., the insurance, maintenance, interest expense and depreciation. And one boat is surely a lot less work and worry than two. So I guess it makes sense for him.
Fire in the lounge
I am normally up and about before dawn. It comes at around 0500 CST. This morning I was still dozing when I heard a loud fire siren that pulled me fully awake. Looking out of the companionway hatch I saw grey smoke pouring out of the upper level of Land & Sea’s building, i.e., from the direction of the cruiser lounge. There were no flames that I could see, but since there was no wind whatsoever the still billowing pall of smoke was spreading listlessly all along the line of houses and out over the anchorage. A half-hour later, the smoke had cleared. When Tim comes to get me for the yacht loading, I ask him. “so, how was your morning?” He rolled his eyes. There was an electrical fire in a fan that had been going all night in the guest room at the back of the lounge. They got it out quickly, but the firemen arrived and blew ashes all through the upstairs facilities. Now all that has to be cleaned up.
Ship care and maintenance
Each day I sand and prepare another portion of brightwork and then give it a coat of Cetol Marine. For those not in the boating world, I guess you could call Cetol a synthetic varnish; we use Cetol Marine, which is said to have a higher UV-protection factor. You can also add a final ‘gloss’ coat which is even better against UV rays. We don’t have any gloss aboard at present, however.
Real varnish in my opinion looks great, better than Cetol, which in the traditional formula tends to turn orange and darken over time (Kathleen actually likes the look of Cetol compared to varnish). But varnish is much more work to keep up, especially here in the tropics. There is more than enough cosmetic work to do aboard Vilisar without getting into natural varnishing as well! Many surfaces that real yachties might want to keep as brightwork are on Vilisar painted surfaces, our caprails, for example.
Since keeping up varnished surfaces is frequently the job of the mate, is this why Kathleen says she prefers Cetol? With varnish you have to sand carefully each coat, remove the dust, keep touching up if there is any local damage. Inother words, endless work! But, after you get the three base starter coats of Cetol on the bare wood (no sanding between coats; 24 hours waiting time between coats), you should thereafter only need to do one coat a year. As annual preparation, simply go over a clean and grease-free surface lightly with 120-grit sandpaper (some even use just a Scotchbrite scouring pad) and slap on the Cetol Marine. No sanding between coats if you put on more than one. A gallon of Cetol Marine seems to be stretching a long way. I use a really good-quality two-inch brush, and clean it well with mineral spirits (Aguaras, in Spanish); we keep this on board also as fuel for our petroleum lamps (it’s much cheaper than lamp oil and much less stinky than most kerosene).
Sections that have been exposed to a couple of years of tropical sun and rain – tiller, rudder, handrails, cleats, coamings, wooden sheet blocks, for example - are really dull and the sanding soon turns the old coating to powder. I take the opportunity to repair a slightly damaged wooden sheet-block and fill the cracks that have appeared in the laminated tiller using 5-minute epoxy glue before applying a coat of Cetol Marine. All the very exposed surfaces are getting two coats. Wooden hatchcovers and the skylight, on the other hand, have been protected by Sumbrella slipcovers or the sun awning (when we are at anchor). They look much better by comparison and one coat should suffice.
I am surprised at how much I am enjoying this work. As a matter of course I avoid overworking physically. I start as the sun is getting up (wiping off any dew and allowing surfaces time to dry), and then I get out of the sun by 0930. I don’t go back at it until after 1630 or unless it turns overcast. That tropical sun is just too hot for Ol’ Gringito! Although I am doing all the sanding by hand (our inverter is hors de combat and we don’t have a gasoline electricity generator aboard), and although my shoulders are somewhat stiff each morning, the work progresses quickly. Any Cetolling has anyway to be done in the late afternoon or early morning as the direct sun leads to gas bubbles on the surface. On the other hand, if the Cetol has not dried enough before the dew falls at night, it will leave spots. If I do Cetol in the morning, once it is tacky to the touch I get some shade over it before the sun can harm it.
Painting gives you a good feeling of achievement. Things sure look better once they are coated, but of course – and here is the only downside! - now it makes the white-painted deck house and decks look even shabbier!
Palm oil
There is a steady stream of heavy tank trucks down the nearby coast road, ‘Aceite Vegetal’ lettered on the sides. I discovered that palm oil is an important agricultural product for Cost Rica. Of the 160 million tons of oils and fats produced worldwide, 48 million tons is palm or palm kernel oils. That’s the biggest single source of oil and fat. Palm oil is used in processed foods, soaps, cosmetics, bio-diesel, etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil and http://www.indexmundi.com/en/commodities/agricultural/oil-palm/2005.html )
Here locally, there is a hardly-noticeable station on the water’s edge just opposite the big banana docks. Only a few pipes peak out of the earth near a little ‘watchiman’ shack. There always seem to be at least one or two rigs standing there, their diesels idling.
As I walk past there on the way back from the bus terminal (basically a little hole-in-the-wall ticket office down near the road to the Port Captain), I stop to ask the 20-something-year-old attendant what is going on here. He tells me that the tank-trucks bring the palm oil to this terminal from processing plants inland nearer the oil-palm plantations. Here in Golfito the oil is stored in an underground or underwater tank. Once a month a tank ship comes and pumps it into the ship’s hold and delivers it somewhere, he didn’t know where. The guy’s job is to help the drivers hook up the flexible, fire hose-type connectors and keep track of who brought what and when.
Du lernst nie aus! (literally, ‘You never learn out!’)
Golfito, Costa Rica, Thursday, January 14, 2010
Just because this little town is quiet doesn’t mean that nothing at all ever happens.
Visitors from Canada
Yesterday, for example, I received a visit from a young Canadian couple who were holidaying in Costa Rica as a break from rigours of an Ottawa winter. They have been surfing and sightseeing along the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica and had arrived by the early-morning, fast passenger ferry from Puerto Jimenez. It wasn’t completely by chance that Thomas and Tanara had stopped by Golfito specifically to see me. Thomas’ dad and I were in the same regiment back in the late 1960s; we met on the RCAF plane going to Duesseldorf, in other words before Thomas was even a gleam in his daddy’s eye. We two old-timers werew also post-graduate students together in London around 1970. The last time I saw Thomas albeit briefly was in Strasbourg, France, some dozen years ago and before that he had visited my flat in Frankfurt back with his parents when he was about twelve. We had time today to reminisce and get to know each other somewhat better now that he is an adult. Pure pleasure for me. His partner, Tanara, is also a most lively and interesting person. Too bad they couldn’t have stayed longer.
Another face from the past: Port Hadlock/Port Townsend
And you can file this one under The Good Old Days, too. After the young couple left on an early-afternoon bus headed towards San Jose, I walked back along the waterfront (there is only one street between here and the bus terminal!), did some shopping on he way and was later drinking a cold beer with some other cruisers back at Land & Sea. As John, another cruiser, and I began to compare notes, we realised that we actually knew each other from Port Hadlock’s Old Alcohol Plant Marina near Port Townsend, Washington. That is where we had originally found and bought Vilisar from Roger van Stelle back in 2001. Vilisar came with a permanent slip in Port Hadlock, which, however, we soon gave up after a month or so since we intended to become real cruisers and sail around the world. Sailing experience (as opposed to boat maintenance) is strictly limited if you are in a marina, I reckon. John lived and lives on a Pacific Seacraft 27 called Veracity and he was docked only a few slips away in Port Hadlock. He is the one who put now together all the clues, remembering that I had been a translator back then, and was determined to get some sort of under-way communications so I could continue to work while cruising. He ran into us again, he said, the next spring in Port Hardy at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. I can just barely remember all this, since no doubt we were being more than somewhat overwhelmed with new things s and new people at the time. We were on our way to Alaska and John was circumnavigating Vancouver Island or going to Alaska too. “You look much more salty now,” he said with a slight chuckle. I guess we were pretty green at the time.
Yacht transporters
S/V Terre Firma was delivered here by (Jan and George of S/V Claire de Lune) from Ecuador a few weeks ago and has been patiently awaiting a cargo ship’s arrival. I promised to help Tim of Land & Sea get the yacht onto the yacht cargo-ship. For the un-initiated, instead of making a long passage yourself or having a paid skipper and crew deliver your boat for you, you can actually have it shipped aboard a commercial vessel specially designed for this task. Most motor vessels don’t carry enough fuel for very long sea passages and are not really designed for offshore work. I think the Dutch started this trade. There is no need to unstep masts, etc., so all-in-all loading and unloading quite simple and the boat has less wear and tear than sailing her back and forth. Crewmen or owners can also be carried on aboard so arriving with their yachts. The ships travel at 15-18 knots, i.e., a lot faster than the yacht could travel by itself. (http://www.noonsite.com/Members/doina/R2004-09-30-3)
The M/V Mary Green arrived a few days ago and picked up or delivered a number of boats. They were mostly power boats, but of all shapes and sizes. At a guess, less than about one-third were sailboats. On some ships, boats can be driven straight into a flooded hold (e.g. http://www.yacht-transport.com/) hoisted by slings and cranes. These specialised cargo ships sail regular round-the-world routes picking up and dropping off boats at important yachting sites as they go along.
This morning a second ship took the place of the first. It was the Singapore-registered ship Pac Deneb (http://www.vesseltracker.com/en/Ships/Pac-Deneb-9304019.html or http://www.pacl.com.sg/PAC%20Deneb.pdf ). If I read this correctly, Pac Dineb can also be used for other cargo, like trucks, or steel pipe, etc. If anything it had even more motor cruisers on board than Mary Green. We are notified to be ready with the yacht alongside Pac Deneb at 1330.
It was all rather simple. The officers and petty officers were Chinese form Singapore (I assume). The loading hands were all Latinos from Mexico or San Diego. The loading hands only fly out to each port to load and then home again when the loading is completed. There’s no point in just sitting for the offshore portion; it is cheaper for the shipper to pay off the hands between ports. The next stop on Pac Deneb’s itinerary is Manzanillo, Mexico, but they might continue on to San Francisco and/or Vancouver. According to Tim, foreign-flagged vessels may only touch at one port in the U.S.A. That’s the way the airlines were until just a year or so ago. Some of the vessels are heading north because yacht owners have to go back to work, or they simply don’t want to make the long passage to windward up the Mexican and California coast.
One sports-fishing guide from Port Aransas, Texas, told me he keeps one boat in Texas and one in Costa Rica and uses them for half the year in each place. But he is considering saving money by owing only one boat and having it shipped back and forth as required.
It depends of course how expensive his marinas are. If he still has to maintain two marina slips, for example, even though he only has one boat, it might not calculate. $10,000 in shipping charges works out to about $833 a month for marinas. If he has to pay for two marina slips at $500 monthly each (total $1,000 monthly x 12 + $12,000 p.a.) the calculation doesn’t look so good. But assume he only has to pay for one slip all year: $6,000 p.a. So, two boats cost $12,000 (his pays flight tickets in both cases, we assume). One boat that he ships back and forth costs $6,000 (marina) + $5,000 (shipping) = $11,000. He is already making money. And we have not figured in the direct costs of owning two boats, i.e., the insurance, maintenance, interest expense and depreciation. And one boat is surely a lot less work and worry than two. So I guess it makes sense for him.
Fire in the lounge
I am normally up and about before dawn. It comes at around 0500 CST. This morning I was still dozing when I heard a loud fire siren that pulled me fully awake. Looking out of the companionway hatch I saw grey smoke pouring out of the upper level of Land & Sea’s building, i.e., from the direction of the cruiser lounge. There were no flames that I could see, but since there was no wind whatsoever the still billowing pall of smoke was spreading listlessly all along the line of houses and out over the anchorage. A half-hour later, the smoke had cleared. When Tim comes to get me for the yacht loading, I ask him. “so, how was your morning?” He rolled his eyes. There was an electrical fire in a fan that had been going all night in the guest room at the back of the lounge. They got it out quickly, but the firemen arrived and blew ashes all through the upstairs facilities. Now all that has to be cleaned up.
Ship care and maintenance
Each day I sand and prepare another portion of brightwork and then give it a coat of Cetol Marine. For those not in the boating world, I guess you could call Cetol a synthetic varnish; we use Cetol Marine, which is said to have a higher UV-protection factor. You can also add a final ‘gloss’ coat which is even better against UV rays. We don’t have any gloss aboard at present, however.
Real varnish in my opinion looks great, better than Cetol, which in the traditional formula tends to turn orange and darken over time (Kathleen actually likes the look of Cetol compared to varnish). But varnish is much more work to keep up, especially here in the tropics. There is more than enough cosmetic work to do aboard Vilisar without getting into natural varnishing as well! Many surfaces that real yachties might want to keep as brightwork are on Vilisar painted surfaces, our caprails, for example.
Since keeping up varnished surfaces is frequently the job of the mate, is this why Kathleen says she prefers Cetol? With varnish you have to sand carefully each coat, remove the dust, keep touching up if there is any local damage. Inother words, endless work! But, after you get the three base starter coats of Cetol on the bare wood (no sanding between coats; 24 hours waiting time between coats), you should thereafter only need to do one coat a year. As annual preparation, simply go over a clean and grease-free surface lightly with 120-grit sandpaper (some even use just a Scotchbrite scouring pad) and slap on the Cetol Marine. No sanding between coats if you put on more than one. A gallon of Cetol Marine seems to be stretching a long way. I use a really good-quality two-inch brush, and clean it well with mineral spirits (Aguaras, in Spanish); we keep this on board also as fuel for our petroleum lamps (it’s much cheaper than lamp oil and much less stinky than most kerosene).
Sections that have been exposed to a couple of years of tropical sun and rain – tiller, rudder, handrails, cleats, coamings, wooden sheet blocks, for example - are really dull and the sanding soon turns the old coating to powder. I take the opportunity to repair a slightly damaged wooden sheet-block and fill the cracks that have appeared in the laminated tiller using 5-minute epoxy glue before applying a coat of Cetol Marine. All the very exposed surfaces are getting two coats. Wooden hatchcovers and the skylight, on the other hand, have been protected by Sumbrella slipcovers or the sun awning (when we are at anchor). They look much better by comparison and one coat should suffice.
I am surprised at how much I am enjoying this work. As a matter of course I avoid overworking physically. I start as the sun is getting up (wiping off any dew and allowing surfaces time to dry), and then I get out of the sun by 0930. I don’t go back at it until after 1630 or unless it turns overcast. That tropical sun is just too hot for Ol’ Gringito! Although I am doing all the sanding by hand (our inverter is hors de combat and we don’t have a gasoline electricity generator aboard), and although my shoulders are somewhat stiff each morning, the work progresses quickly. Any Cetolling has anyway to be done in the late afternoon or early morning as the direct sun leads to gas bubbles on the surface. On the other hand, if the Cetol has not dried enough before the dew falls at night, it will leave spots. If I do Cetol in the morning, once it is tacky to the touch I get some shade over it before the sun can harm it.
Painting gives you a good feeling of achievement. Things sure look better once they are coated, but of course – and here is the only downside! - now it makes the white-painted deck house and decks look even shabbier!
Palm oil
There is a steady stream of heavy tank trucks down the nearby coast road, ‘Aceite Vegetal’ lettered on the sides. I discovered that palm oil is an important agricultural product for Cost Rica. Of the 160 million tons of oils and fats produced worldwide, 48 million tons is palm or palm kernel oils. That’s the biggest single source of oil and fat. Palm oil is used in processed foods, soaps, cosmetics, bio-diesel, etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil and http://www.indexmundi.com/en/commodities/agricultural/oil-palm/2005.html )
Here locally, there is a hardly-noticeable station on the water’s edge just opposite the big banana docks. Only a few pipes peak out of the earth near a little ‘watchiman’ shack. There always seem to be at least one or two rigs standing there, their diesels idling.
As I walk past there on the way back from the bus terminal (basically a little hole-in-the-wall ticket office down near the road to the Port Captain), I stop to ask the 20-something-year-old attendant what is going on here. He tells me that the tank-trucks bring the palm oil to this terminal from processing plants inland nearer the oil-palm plantations. Here in Golfito the oil is stored in an underground or underwater tank. Once a month a tank ship comes and pumps it into the ship’s hold and delivers it somewhere, he didn’t know where. The guy’s job is to help the drivers hook up the flexible, fire hose-type connectors and keep track of who brought what and when.
Du lernst nie aus! (literally, ‘You never learn out!’)
posted by rjb @ Thursday, January 14, 2010
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