En route to Colonia, Uraguay
Friday 01.25.2008

The Schooner Maggie B left Buenos Aires at 1100 on January 25th. We motorsailed across the Rio de la Plata to Colonia, Uruguay, arriving at 1500. The estuary was as brown as ever, and quite littered with shipwrecks. The passage was made more interesting by high-speed ferries zipping past at 40 knots on their way to or from Buenos Aires and Colonia. On the 25 NM crossing, other than the two dredged channels, the deepest depth we saw was 18 feet.

Colonia del Sacramento in a small, old-fashioned town of about 20,000. It was founded by the Portuguese in 1680, to smuggle goods across the river to Spanish Buenos Aires. It changed hands many times over the years as the Spanish and Portuguese fought along their borders. It looks as if it will be great fun to explore its cobblestone streets. It is rather a relief after the size, dirtiness and bustle of Buenos Aires. We are anchored just off the Yacht Club. There are about 100 boats on moorings, many of the Argentinean, here for the holidays. The boats (almost all sailboats, veleros) are generally about 30 feet with shallow draft. We are at the outside of the pack, only partially protected by the breakwater in all of five feet of water under our keel.

The Maggie B is in pretty good shape. The main sail and G2 gennaker, The Bird, have been patched by North Sails Buenos Aires. The autopilot was overhauled by Furuno USA, and they gave us a new Rudder Reference Unit, all of which seems to be working well. We have lots of goodies from home that all together make the schooner more homey.

The generator is still deviling us, having some sort of fuel supply problems. Our chief suspect is that the electric fuel pump is just losing its pull after working so hard these two years. We are getting a new fuel pump shipped to us in Piriapolis, just down the line, where we plan to haul out next week. The Buenos Aires Onan distributor said that they knew the pump, they had it in inventory, but that it was out-of-stock, but would be in “in 10 days to two weeks,” which means “never” in South America.

The crew for this leg is Curtis Weinrich and Hannah Joudrey continuing (Hannah all the way from Cape Town!). New shipmates are Thomas Didier from Quebec and Janet Gibb from Wellington. Thomas is a former shipmate of Hannah’s from her time on the Eye of the Wind. He has been in Montevideo for a year’s apprenticeship at the Canadian Embassy. His fluent Spanish has been a huge help for us and his Portuguese will help as well in Brazil. Janet has been sailing and racing for many years (like every Kiwi!) and her “day job” as manager for a High End Wellington providor should help us nail the finest food and supplies as we coast along.

Our current plan is to spend this weekend in Colonia, leaving Sunday afternoon for Piriapolis, which is about 160 NM East of here. We hope to arrive Piriapolis on Monday and get hauled out either Monday or Tuesday. We will clean and scrape the hull, and repaint the bottom paint, which will hopefully only take 3 days, though it seems you always fine something new (and NOT nice) when you haul out. We also have to change one through-hull fitting, where the handle was broken off, fortunately in the open position (it is the Gen Set cooling water fixture, and, yes, I did check that the cooling water is still getting through).

After hauling and painting in Piriapolis, we plan to reward ourselves by several days in Punte del Este, a very chic Uruguayan summer resort. While we are the biggest boat in Colonia, we will probably be the smallest one in Punte del Este. After Punte del Este, we plan to make for Florianopolis in Brazil, another summer resort for those fleeing Rio and San Paulo.

It is good to be underway again, and heading North.

All is well.