Mexico wintertime

Today it was wintertime in Mexico.  It rained a little bit, here and there, and the wind blew pretty hard (about 30 kts) and I was cold.  Not REALLY cold, but my liver began to quiver a little bit.  Mind you, I wasn't wearing a shirt, so that might have had something to do with it also....

I haven't been taking many pictures, because I guess I just didn't feel like it, and also my hands are always salty and wet nowadays, but the sunset was very nice this evening with the clouds breaking overhead.  

When I first came down here, it was summertime, and so the hot temperatures brought a lot of humidity into the air, and some of that turned into clouds, but it was convection based clouds...  Anyways, the sky looks very different in the summer versus the wintertime.  So here's a picture of the summertime sunset (for comparison)

So, what's been happening down here?  Last week I went sailing with the mainsail up and I totally destroyed it.  Its a construction of three things glued together, and the glue doesn't last well in the UV sunlight environment (bad design for a sail, right?) and so its been slowly falling apart and then finally the sail let go completely.  Its like it unzipped, from the middle up to the top and bottom.  There was a hole in the sail and air got in and kept coming in and it inflated like a big baloon, so I have two layers of mylar and a bunch of carbon fiber in between, but nothing is organized anymore.  

So I'm working on a new sail.  I got a dacron sail that is for a smaller boat and I'm working on setting that up, but it will be substantially smaller than the big square top (probably about 40% the size) so I'll be able to run it in higher winds, but it will be slow in light winds.  

I'm also working on sourcing a used sail that is much nicer design and hopefully I can get that to work out, but we shall see...

I've also priced out a new dacron sail and its about 4,000 bucks, if I go with a chinese sailmaker, so that's nice to know, except its not a 3d sail.  But North Sails are double or triple the price.  Or more...

I haven't yet hauled out and painted the bottom, I keep taking people out sailing instead, or surfing, or racing on other people's boats.  I keep finding other things to do.  

But life is good down here.