Photos Work in Mazatlan

Nasty engine room and old engine being hoisted out

What a mess we were faced with. The transmission needed to be rebuilt. There was thirty years of grease, grime, and wiring that had been redone over and over without ever removing the old wire.

After a couple weeks of cleaning and striping old wires out, we built a new platform for the generator and at the same time added some storage for spares inside the platform. Teri painted and painted and painted. When she wasn't painting in the engine room, she was painting inside cabinets, cabin sole or painting the new cockpit hatch we built to cover the hole I cut to do the engine exchange.

July 2007. the rebuilt transmission is installed with a new Dripless prop shaft seal. Then the new crate engine is lowered onto new motor mounts and in a sparkling clean engine room.

Mazatlan had a true craftsman named Adolfo. He builds commercial restaurant kitchens and loves doing small projects on yachts. he built this stainless, one piece galley counter top with built in double sinks, custom fresh and saltwater manual spigots and new refrigerator door inserts. Other items included a complete stainless exhaust system, a polished stainless alcove for our wood burning heater.

A local fellow named Pedro seemed to be pretty good at upholstery work. So we had him re-upholster the entire boat including a complete new headliner and a dodger top for the cockpit and aft cabin entry hatch.
Unfortunately, the headliner had to be removed during our work in Texas. It was molding and beginning to show rust stains around the staples.

I had the stainless bows bent to the shape of the eyebrow along the front of the cabin. Once I bent them hired a local welder to add the grabrail on the back bow. Our new sailmaking sewing machine was in the back of our truck when it was stolen. So we made the patterns and had a local fellow stich it together for us. All in all, it came out pretty nice. We also built a dodger for the aft cabin companionway.

Using a piece of 3/4 inch plywood, I cut a new cockpit floor. With epoxy, matt cloth and a ton of sanding, it turned into a nice piece for Teri to really show-off her Awlgrip talents. While I was building this on the dock, people would walk by and look at us like we were some boat scum. In fact, all during the work on Flying Cloud, the (cruisers) would pass by and stay to the other side of the dock. We were turning our boat into something from nothing. A concept the new (West Marine Cruising Fleet ) cannot understand. Strange bunch out there now. Any way, after a week of so, the old board looked like a factory cockpit hatch and the cruisers were starting to look again. Wait until the entire boat is transformed
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Installing the new jib furler with a little help from folks on the dock.

During the time we were at the dock in Mazatlan, from November 2006 to August 2007, we did the work shown above. At the same time we installed a new refrigerator/freezer, new autopilot, all new sails, new jib furler, GPS, radar, Pactor Modem, rebuilt the Onan generator, new mattress and cover, new steering cables, rebuilt Xantrex power inverter, eight new gel-cell batteries. We built a new cockpit floor and installed it so it could be removable in the future. There were two new solar panels added to the modified stern pulpit. The boat originally had roller furling on all four sails. We converted all of that to conventional sail track/slides an changed the jib furler. Since the floors were ancient parque tiles, we had Pedro make us removable rugs for the entire boat.
The new engine install turned out to be much more than anticipated. We ended up buying all new heat exchanger, exhaust manifold, clutch plate, water pumps and coupler.

The many delays came from a couple situations that came up. One, as mentioned on another page, was the disastrous trip back to Arizona just before Christmas. This was to be a quick turn-around after having the transmission rebuilt, a sail modified and picking up a truck load of new parts being delivered to the house in Fort Mohave, AZ.
Then less than a month after our return to Mazatlan, only to discover that nothing had been done in our absence, the truck and a good part of the new equipment we had just purchased was stolen. It vanished in front of a condominium we had just rented so we could have some distance and relaxation from the never ending boat work.
Once again we were off to the states to find a vehicle to drive and to track down the thief that took the truck all the way to Texas. We knew who he was and this turned into yet another very long and unsettling event. But that is yet another story.