A day in the life of...

I spy....a Milagro ancestor

The next day was Sunday and Sharon wanted to explore the town while I needed to take a shot at fixing the generator.  We needed to make some water and the generator kept shutting down. Sharon had a shopping list of places she needed to locate in the town: the laundromat (my supply of drawers was getting pretty low), the grocery store, scope out the restaurants, and identify a hardware store just in case I needed one.  Besides, she just liked to walk and explore.  I would drop her off at the dingy dock, and I would return to Milagro to shake down ole Jenny.

As we were coming into the dingy dock through the marina, I spotted a boat that looked a lot like the shape of Milagro.  Milagro is a 43 foot Spindrift.  The hull of the Spindrift has been used in several different boats, under different names.  I was aware of some of the history of the design and evolution of the design of my boat.  All of these different boats are Perry designed boats and built in several different boat yards in Taiwan.  Regardless of how many different names these boat have had, to see a boat with this design hull is very rare, and I wanted to explore it. 

There was a guy in the cockpit and I motored over to speak to him.  It turns out that this was one of the earlier models of my boat. I could see the differences; the this boat had more teak trim and structure on the deck, and the appointments were different, but the shape, structure and hull of the boat were exactly the same.  It was fascinating to talk about.  His boat was built under the name of Formosa, and was called a Formosa 44.   His boat had been somewhat trashed in a previous life and he was in the process of rebuilding it. 

But then the most improbable thing I could imagine, happened.  He told me that the original wooden boat, from which the fiberglass molds were made in China - for all the boats that had been built with this hull, including mine - was right here in this marina!  I could not believe that such a wild coincidence could possibly be, but he pointed to the berth were the boat was located, and I could see it.

I parked the dingy and walked over to the old boat, and I could immediately see the shape of the hull, and the superstructure were exactly the same as Milagro’s.  But this boat had the wooden mast down and strapped across the crutch, the paint was chipping and fading, and the boat was falling into disrepair; being wooden, would not be long for this world.  But for a few moments I made a connection with Milagro’s great-great-great grandfather, and I felt very reminiscent. Luckily, Sharon pulled me away in just the nick of time, because my mind was drifting toward adoption. 

Sharon had taken the mobile VHF radio, and when she finished her walk some 4 hours later, she called me to pick her up in the dingy, which I did.  All the way back to the boat she told me about La Cruz, and all the neat things that she had seen.  She found out where we could catch a bus to go into Puerto Vallarta, she found a nice laundromat (closed on Mondays) and there were several little hardware stores around.  The only grocery stores were more like convenience stores, but she assured me that we didn’t really need anything that we couldn’t get in a convenience store, and not to worry about it.  She said that the town had several rustic little Mexican restaurants, and identified a couple that she would like to try out.  She was very excited and described the town as being out of a little Mexican storybook.

I had had some modicum of success on getting the generator to run, after many, many tries, and had made a supply of water.  Actually the raw water was so full of algae that the filters kept clogging up, so I didn’t get the tank full but made enough to hold us for several days. 

We made an early day of it, and decided that tomorrow we would have breakfast out, and catch a bus, and explore Puerto Vallarta.   The movie tonight will be “Despicable Me”, and we will have popcorn and beer.  Yahoo!