This shot seems to sum up so much about my dog buddies over the years.  I’ve managed to be friends with a bunch of this type.  Just a sack of unconnected dog parts with no real reason to exist other than to take up space in my house.  Like all my friends.  Bless em all.  I can say that I’ve never had a “pet” but, I’ve had a lot of “friends”, or they had me.  A couple of times it felt just like I’d been had.  Each one of them made me smile and often laugh and each of them broke my heart when they had to go.  They say that dogs don’t go to heaven and I think “they” are wrong.  Any time I meet people who don’t like dogs I know all I need to know or want to.  What kind of God wouldn’t like dogs.  He went to the trouble of making them so I would expect he’d like them enough to let them in the “house”.  I hope so because I don’t think I’d like to go anywhere that my friends couldn’t go too.  It’s New Years Eve and I’m sitting here in Baja remembering all my old friends and couldn’t leave out the ones that loved me every time without question.

For years I have been taking a load of crap from my well-meaning friends about the stuff I eat.  Specifically hot dogs.  “Don’t you know what they are made of?”  “They’re filled with sulfites and red number 2.”  Yes, yes I know all about it.  I’ve even watched them being made and I’m still not put off.  First let me say that I consider the hot dog to be the perfect food and I’m sure your will agree with me once you have listened to the logic.  Consider the fact that they are already throat shaped.  It is all ready to slide perfectly down the inside of your neck with out hanging up on anything.  Just insert.  OK, I can hear some of you now saying, “If you swallow it sideways you could choke”, and I agree but that’s part of the perfectness of the dog, it gets rid of the dumb ones thus  improving the breed.  That’s built right in.  I should also point out that, when I say “hot dog” I am talking about “all beef” of course.  I consider any use of feather meat to be false advertising because it just isn’t what a hot dog was ever intended to be and I think it was God that said that.   You can throw them on the grill or just nuke em in the microwave, steamed, boiled and even raw.  My mom used to make beans and franks and my dad would eat them with peanut butter on them.  Name any other food that is this versatile.  It can be prepared in less than a minute and clean up is easy.  I rinse with beer, the other perfect food.  Show me someone that will turn down a chili dog with onions and mustard and I’ll show you a commie pinko.

OK, I admit it, I killed several VW Bugs back in the 60′s and 70′s.  The fire dept had to extinguish one in Holtvill, Calif. and I still managed to drive it to Dallas before it gave up.  In Dallas I patched up the poor thing and limped it back to Washington, DC where it died in front of my girlfriends house a smoking hulk.  The best of the VW stories happened one Saturday night in Virginia.  I was coming back from a coffee house where I played guitar and sang other people’s songs.  Yep, I was a folksinger.  My buddy Carl had come along that night and we were just getting the Bug up to speed when I heard Carl click his seatbelt.  We were just cresting a hill and doing around 45 mph when I saw four head lights lined up across a two lane road.  That was all she wrote.  Things went real fast for the first split second.  The girl driving the GTO on the wrong side of the road, over the double yellow lines, on the hill, on the curve, doing 65 mph in a 45, managed to lock up her brakes and swing the rear end of her car around like a giant baseball bat.  I had managed to just miss her front grill.  She swatted me deep into center field.  Both front tires of the VW laid down right where we hit and the front of the Bug went away.  One minute I was going south at 45 and the next I was headed north at about the same speed.  We took out a small billboard and began to roll down a small embankment.  I don’t remember just how many times we slowly rolled down it, I just remember Carl saying he’d had enough of it and opening his door to stop the next roll.  The next thing I recall was this girl with her face at my window screaming.  She hadn’t killed me in the wreck so now she was going to scare me to death.  Almost worked.  When I got back up on the road I could see her car was in two pieces.  There sat the frame and engine and next to it was the body with two people sitting in the front seat.  Except for the two people it looked like something you’d see on an assembly line in Detroit.  The fact that all the cars came apart most likely save our lives.  We went to a near by farm house to call the police and she called a wrecker service.  I didn’t listen to her conversation but I did catch that her uncle was the wrecker driver.  When the wrecker pulled up to the scene a guy gets out with a rubber mallet in his hand and looks at the two halves of the GTO, right away goes to his knees laughing.  We he regains his composure he tells the girl, “I think you’re going to have to tell your dad”.  When she called she had asked him to come fix the car so her father wouldn’t know about the accident.  I wasn’t in much better shape myself, I had borrowed my sisters car and was going to have to tell her it didn’t exist anymore.  I carved one more notch on my drivers license.

We were working on the boat, making it ready for the voyage ahead, when I noticed the emergency raft sitting in its fiberglass box on its cradle.  On top was a hydrostatic release that would trigger a CO2 bottle to automatically inflate when it hit the water.  This triggered a memory, followed by a smile.  I had forgotten all about this story.

It was sometime in the early seventies and I was married, living on Walnut St in Rochester, Michigan.  It was a second story apartment that, in any other place or time would have been called a closet.  A 10’x10’ living room with a hallway kitchen that connected to the bed room and bathroom that was even smaller.  Among my hippie friends we had the nicest place.  We had real furniture instead of cinder block and milk crate shelves or wire spool tables.  I wasn’t in a band anymore, I was married. 

I recall the day that my friend Bill asked me if I wanted a 12 man raft.  I thought it would be cool to take it to the lake and anchor it out in the water filled with ice, beer, Boones Farm and Annie Green Springs.  Bill had “picked it up” somewhere couldn’t figure out what to do with it.  He assured me that it didn’t leak even though he had never tried to inflate it.  He lugged it up to the apartment on a Saturday morning in its bag and dumped it in the middle of the living room.  My wife was not happy.  “What the hell do we want that piece of crap for?”  I tried to explain all the cool things we could do with it.  I told her about the lake idea, I told her if we ever got a speed boat that we could tow it and I might have said we could camp in it.  I couldn’t think up things to use it for fast enough.  She had taken me by surprise, how could she not like it.  Why couldn’t she understand that it was just a “cool thing” and let that be enough to want to own it?  As badly as I wanted to own it I still wanted to inspect the dusty goods so I pulled it out of the bag.  On the bag was written “Property of _________airlines”.  I didn’t ask questions and I still don’t believe that somewhere an airliner is flying across the Atlantic with one raft missing.  It was pretty old and I had my doubts it would hold air now that I looked at it.  On the side I found a pocket with a large CO2 cylinder inside.  This had a metal lever attached to it and a lanyard attached to that.  It was a sure thing that this old cylinder had lost its charge years ago.  I pulled on the lanyard just to see how it worked.

My first wife was a tiny thing and a former gymnast but she wasn’t small enough or fast enough to get out of the way.  She was launched into the kitchen butt first.  Bill and I were pinned against the wall along with the furniture and a very surprised Black Lab.  As memory serves me that raft was a double tube and about 16 feet across and if you remember I said my living room was 10 foot.  It all happened in a split second.   There was plenty of CO2 in that cylinder as it turned out.  I could hear the sounds of my wife screaming somewhere and the thumping and bumping sounds of the dog as well as the sound furniture dying.  Bill and I started to laugh which didn’t make the wife happy.  I laughed until the thought crossed my mind that we couldn’t move and this would be an embarrassing way to die.  Bill managed to reach a valve on the side and soon the gas bag began to deflate.  Our dining room table was trashed so we went looking for a wire spool.  I never did take it to the lake.  Now, as I look back, I wonder how I can forget stories like this.

some breakfast.  By this time even Mike is up.  Next we tune in to channel 22 on the VHF radio for the morning report from the Yacht Club that helps the Gringos  along We get our mail their and other information about what is going on in town.  After that we get to work on the boat until the temperature starts to get into the 90’s around 11:30 and then it’s time to get below decks and take a siesta that last until around 4 or 5.  During the last few months the heat index was staying around 117 with the temperature around 104.  The sun goes down about 7:30 and the cool evening wind begins to blow if we are lucky.  Mercifully , the temperature has begun to drop as the cooler season is beginning.  Today’ the heat indes is only 114.  There are two small bars at the marina where we can get something to drink,  I have discovered the Michaladas (sp I’m sure) which is a mix of beer and lime juice with salt  around the rim of the glass like a Margarita.  Except for the salt it’s much like the British Shandy.  There are two small pools on the roof of the marina buildings that offer an escape from the heat.                                                                                                                        After dinner we try to get some work done on the boat with the help of the spreader lights. 
We should have all work done on the boat by the end of December and at that time we begin our trip back to the United States. December also the time of year that the Pacific hurricanes that spin off the coast of Mexico are, for the most part, over.  So, even if the boat was ready right now, we would be staying put.
 We had hoped to be able to buy some more equipment down here but found it was ether not available or just way too expensive.  It looks like we can make it to Panama in about 30 days if the weather is on our side.  Getting through the canal will be a challenge.  Piles of paperwork and hiring pilots and line handlers to get through the locks not to mention the transit fees.  Now we find out that if we can’t make it through in one day we have to pay again for the second day.  We also need four dock lines that are 150 ft long.  Once we get through the canal we will head up the east coast of Central America and up to the Yucatan peninsula.  From there the final leg of the trip is crossing the Gulf of Mexico which will take several days.
We look forward to getting back home but will miss much of La Paz.  We have made many friends here that we will miss.  Mardel, the lady that makes the best shrimp burger in the world, Moi, the local policeman that spars with my son Mike and takes art lessons from me.  Raffa and Martine are owners of one of the small marina bars by night and are computer  programmers and marine biologist during the day.  We drink and talk of the culture of Mexico and sometimes revolution.  Martine’s little girl got on the boat once,  she climbed into a bunk and refused to leave and Shannon would have let her stay if her dad didn’t want her back.  Of the hundreds of people we have run into down here I have met only one that I didn’t care for.  All the rest have been very nice and much more patient with the dump gringos than we deserve.  Trying to learn Spanish from them while they try to practice their English on us is a lot of fun.  Our body language abilities have become extraordinary.  In short, we are having a great time and wish you were here.

I feel like I’ve looked at a load of the William Garden designed Formosa’s.  In the sailing community these boats have the nick name of Leaky Teaky’s.  The Teak deck’s leak like bottomless buckets.  I talked to one owner that told me he removed the teak on his and found that the majority of the bungs on deck had no screw under them but, they had drilled the screw’s hole in the deck.  I’ve had a couple of people tell me that they won’t come about without the aid of the Iron Genoa (engine for the landlubbers).  This one shows evidence of termite damage at the mast partners.  I was told that the roller furling blew apart just before the jib was shredded in a blow.  It has, for me, the least desireable bunk arrangement in the Master Cabin.  So, I put a sizeable deposit down on it and am flying off to Mexico to buy it of course.  I just like the boats.  It’s like having an ugly dog, you just love em and that’s all there is to it.  For those of us that suffer from a bad case of Nautical Narcosis, a boat can be sold with just a well drawn sheer line.  I am sure this boat is waiting for me to arrive so that it can begin sucking my bank account dry like a big floating leach.  A folk singer friend of mine wrote a song with what I consider the perfect line in it.  It sums up the relationship between all boat owners and their boats.  The line is, “My boat only loves me for my money”.  To most of us it is a painful one sided love affair,…that we walk into with both eyes wide open, over and over and over…..

I have just completed an 11,000 mile drive around the country looking for the perfect boat to buy and live aboard, again.  What I found, and I think I knew this already, is that boat isn’t out there unless you build it yourself.  I looked at a steel three masted schooner that was gutted and thought about finishing her out.  I opted not to go back to boat building in favor of boat sailing.  I looked at more boats than I can remember .  Every one of them was in “sail away” condition.  And most of them were ready to go to sea, if you planned on donating the boat to the Artificial Reef Project.  The most fun was looking at the actual boat used in the movie “Capt Ron”.  It was,  if you can believe it, in worse condition than it was in the movie.  The poor owner had a “caretaker” living aboard that made Ron look like Capt Cook.  This week I head to Mexico to look at a couple more boats, wish me luck.