It's FIXED!

As the new cruising season gets into gear, more and more people ask you the question, ‘when are you leaving to go south?’. Lets face it, if you are still north of Mazatlan in January, you either aren’t leaving or you are having problems. This is also a leading question because, if you are asking it, it’s because you haven’t left yourself and you have a great story to tell as to why.

Our case in point: As the boys and I were delivering Andalucia to Mazatlan across from Cabo after the Baja HA-HA, I noticed a lot of play in the steering. Most cruisers use their autopilot 99.9% of the time and hand steer only as you leave or enter a port. But, when we were 10 miles off Mazatlan, Mike yelled “STOP THE BOAT”! Off came the autopilot and I hand steered, hard left, hard right, hard left, hard right….7 or 8 times to steer clear of long line fishermens gear that would have surly fouled our prop. It was then I noticed a bit of play (1/8 – ¼ turn) in the wheel. There is an adjustment screw way in the back of boat, under the master bed & air conditioner that is very hard to get at, so I put off fixing it until Edie & I returned from the states.

Thus started our week of discovery. While searching the route of the steering cables (very similar to a bike brake cable but a lot bigger) I found what is shown in the picture below. Not good, as this cable is as old as the boat. That’s 32 years old and it’s life was obviously up. It took almost 3 hours to get it out of the boat and into the car (dirty and oily doesn’t describe how it was). Then our real search for a repair or replacment began.

As we keep saying to ourselves “we are sure glad we came by car” as we searched for 2 days to find help. We were told by cruisers that you would have to order it from the states and it would take 2-3 weeks (there goes our cruising season), and by boat repair shops that the old one couldn’t be fixed and we had to order a new one (same result). Finally, someone on the morning radio net said we should try to find a store called FerraMar somewhere in the old industrial park, Parque Bonfil, near the old port and fishing fleet as they may have the parts needed to repair it. So the search continued, but we did find the fishing fleet and asked a few captains if they knew a place that could fix it. Well, as is so Mexico, they scratched their heads and told us where FerraMar was, but it was closed. So we drove around and asked a few machine shops what we could do. Everyone just kept saying we needed to go to FerraMar. The good news was they were not closed for the holidays, only for siesta and would be back at 3pm, whew! Progress.

Sure enough they opened at 3pm and the owner spent a lot of time in broken English, my broken Spanish and help from a customer, to tell me they had the wire, clamps and thimbles but no sheath (the part that was rusted through). So I bought the SS clamps and thimbles and went looking for some recommended machine shops to ask for help putting it back together.  A great thing about most people of the world is if you have a problem and they can’t help you, they will give you ways to fix it yourself. Soooo, it was off to Home Depot (yes even in Mexico) for some copper tubing and back to the boat.

The next day (my birthday) brought hope and progress. I cut off the end loop of the inner cable, cut out the bad section of the outer shield, slid on the copper tubing as a splice, reinserted the inner cable, made a new loop with the clamps, installed the whole thing, stretched out the cable 4 times and we are FIXED! Of course, in all the excitement, I forgot to get a picture of the fixed cable. So now we are ready to head south sometime early Monday/Tuesday.