Bees, Mice Fleas, and other problems

Linda and I returned to the boat on November 18th. We arranged last spring to have the engine and transmission overhauled, the mast and boom painted and the main and jib refurbished. We expected to head south to Ecuador in December, however that was not to be. Sometime over the summer, bees established two nests in the boat and despite every type of trap known to man, we also had an attack of mice who apparently contained fleas. We had the boat sealed up and poisoned to kill all of the critters. Unfortunately, this delayed the reinstallation of the engine by a couple of weeks Jon, Carey , Hamilton and Edwin arrived on November 25th and Tony completed the install of the engine that day. More about the kids visit later. After Jon's family left, we took the boat to Opequimar to be hauled and the bottom painted, a 2 to 3 day job. We watched them haul the boat and the bottom seemed to look OK. The next morning, we found that there were more osmosis blisters than we expected and the boat would need to have the bottom paint removed and the bottom coated with epoxy and then the new bottom paint. We flew the Bonanza home the next day (December5th) planning to fly to San Diego to pick up the epoxy and some other boat parts. The weather forced us to change our plans. It rained all day Friday in Prescott and began to snow Saturday night, and kept snowing until Monday. By then another system had moved into San Diego so we delayed the trip until Wednesday. We picked up the epoxy and more bottom paint and left on Thursday for PV. About 50 miles out of Guaymas, the tachometer went to zero (although the engine was running fine) so we turned around and landed in Tucson. A new cable was installed in the tach on Friday and we departed early Saturday for PV, arraiving in the afternoon, and concerned that we and Iron Rose would be spending Christmas in the boat yard. Thanks to hard work by Juan Gonzalez, we were launched on Sat the 22d and headed back to our slip. Our troubles continued, however, as the bilge pump alarm lit up just after we left the yard. On checking I discovered that one of the 5 freeze plugs on the exhaust manifold was spraying water onto the engine and the alternator. I could stop the flow with my finger, so I had Linda hold her finger on it and called the marina office for assistance. Dick the manager met us in the entrance in a panga and tied on so we could shut the engine down and give Linda's finger a rest. On entering the slip, the panga disconnected and we tossed a line to our neighbor to stop the boat, Sadly the line slipped off the cleat and we took out the dock box and broke the water line. I flew the Bonanza home on the 27th to fly back with my sister Carol and picked up 8 more freeze plugs. Tony installed the new plugs and after Carol went home on January a8th, we started to leave for Punta Mita to check out the systems, when Linda opened the door to the engine room and discovered one of the new freeze plugs was spraying water out of two holes. We shut down and called Tony. He had bronze plugs made for the manifold, meanwhile I discovered that he had failed to reconnect the grounding line to the grounding plate so that the electrolysis's went to the cheapest metal (the freeze plugs) instead of the zinc grounding plate. We finally made it to Punta Mita and all the systems seemed to work ok, but Linda still needed to get her confidence back in Iron Rose, so we decided on a shortened cruise this year.