June 18, 2002

"Nordhavn" took a brief side trip to San Martin Island, N30 29.241 W116 06.103. Gary has never seen the island before and although Dennis has passed by several times, he was offshore or at night and couldn't see the island. Seeing the island reminded me of my first trip down Baja with Gil and Susan Roys on board their MASON 43 in 1981, when we anchored and explored the island. At that time there was nothing but a couple of fish camp shacks. Today it is still a fish camp but there are dozens of shacks, boats and lots of fishermen. We can't stay long if we're are going to make San Diego in the early morning so "Nordhavn" is off once again.

We had our first two "mechanical failures" today. We had to do a partial rebuild of the Groco head (one of the most important pieces of equipment on NORDHAVN) and we lost our first NAIAD cooling pump. It could be that the manufacturer of this pump assumes that it will be installed on a vessel that puts 100 hours per year on the pump. Our real world NORDHAVN use of this pump has proven it to be quite unsatisfactory.

As we recall our failures so far on this leg there have been few. We had to replace a bad Iridium antenna that was cracked and kept getting wet, the head and now the Naiad cooling pump. Not bad.

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