Happy New Year from Nicaragua!

We've been enjoying San Juan del Sur as usual! The resturants are still great and a few new ones have sprung up! There are more surf shops here now and it seems like there are a lot more tourists, but this is the first time we've been here during the xmas/new years season.

As usual most cruising boats skip Nicaragua and that's their loss because this rough and tumble little town is still a hidden diamond.

We were overjoyed to have xmas and new years (a day early) celibrations with our sailing friends Scott and Liz who now run Rancho Cecilia (rated 4.5/5 on trip advisor!) They have built a jungle paradise from scratch and are only 10 minutes from the surf. It's amazing! Here we are at xmas:

And the night before New Years we sort of outdid oursleves. We had a great meal at Colbri and drinks just about everywhere. Here's a nice New Years Prelude photo:

Of course it wouldn't be a complete new year if we didn't have something break on the boat at a bad time. You see the winds here blow often and hard. It isn't a big deal because they come off the shore so the waves are pretty flat. However sometimes your anchor won't hold and you have to be prepared to move the boat and re-anchor to avoid dragging out to sea or onto the rocks.

So one windy day we went to start our engine because we decided we wanted to anchor closer to the beach. No go. Not even a click. Now this is a problem I've had occur randomly for the past year or more. But on this evening unlike in the past, trying again didn't solve it.

That night was a bit unerving because the wind blew into the 40's and if we drug it would be a very bad bad bad bad scene.

The next day I ripped everything apart, climbed in there ready to test for the electrical failure, told Sherrell to crank it...and it worked first try. Damn. Tried again and again. Only once did it fail and thing I was measuring worked during that test. At least I knew it was something else.

So we stripped everthing apart, starter, solenoid, relays, and switches. Cleaned tested and put it back together. I still can't find the problem or get it to repeat now. So I'm going to wire in a completely redunant starting system (assuming the starter is still good because during the failure the solenoid didn't click) until we can buy some replacement Yanmar parts.

We can't have the engine not start, that would suck in these strong winds where it is impossible to sail upwind against it if we needed to.

Needless to say we're going to spend a little more time here getting that sorted out and looking for a weather window before departing lovely San Juan del Sur.