Bahia Tortugas, Baja, Mexico

Hola from Mexico! We're finally here, making our way down the coast of this desolate peninsula still searching for the elusive warmer weather. The Pacific Ocean is a mighty cold place. I know once we do round the corner and head into the sea we will then have to complain about the heat. It amazes me that only a few miles from here, just on the other side of this bar of land, daytime highs are in the 100s and water over 80F while we are still wearing long pants and coats and Jim is even still wearing his long underwear. It shouldn't though after living in SF Bay where it can be 60F in SF and over 100 in Antioch just a few miles away, it's that ocean, it's just cold!

We stopped in the port of Ensenada to clear into the country, get our visas and get out temporary import permit. Found that the anchorage there, which had been charging something like $5/night has been closed, so we were forced to go into one of the marinas which charge something like $1.50/foot/night! We were able to talk them down a bit to $100 for 2 nights and Jonathan did do our paperwork for us at no extra charge. So needless to say, with prices like that, we didn't stay and visit Ensenada for as long as we would of liked. They did offer us a pretty good deal if you wanted to stay 2 months or more, something like 9.80/ft/mo with the liveaboard, so I guess if you wanted to stay there awhile, that wouldn't be a bad deal. Even with the anchorage closed the marinas are still half empty, which I guess is why they closed it so they could get more business in the marinas, but who's going to stop in Ensenada to clear in now, why not wait until you get to Cabo or La Paz? We did stay long enough to purchase fuel, fresh tortillas and a 3G modem so we could get internet while we're here in the country from anywhere there happens to be a cell tower. As for TelCel's coverage, so far the only place we weren't able to pick up a signal is the stretch between San Quintin and Cedros. Otherwise it's been pretty good, works inside the steel hull of our boat even and that's far better than any cell service we ever got from ATT or Verison.

Sunset at Puerto Santo Tomas

From there, we've been hopping down the coast, about 40 miles between anchorages. Taking our sweet time as always. There hasn't been much wind, listening to the motor all day makes for a long day, otherwise we'd probably be making better progress. Boat only moves about 5 knots when the engine is on, with a decent wind we can cruise along at 6 to 7 knots. So far, most the wind we've experienced has been in the anchorages. Although we did have a nice sail a couple days ago, it was right after we caught our 1st fish, a bonito, which we probably should of thrown back since they are not the best fish to be eating, the wind finally picked up nicely. We had the boat cruising along at nearly 7 knots when the sun came out for the 1st time in a couple days. It was a good day until we realized Jim got too much sun and has spent today suffering because of it, can't have everything.

2000' Mesa at Bahia San Carlos

Been off the boat once since leaving Ensenada last Tuesday, would love to be able to do a bit more exploring along the way, but Jim says we're on a schedule, have to get around the point before the next hurricane blows up. So far we've been lucky, no hurricane activity on the Pacific side of things, we're keeping an eye on it though in case something should blow up. Went for a little bit of a hike on Isla San Jeronimo. Tiny little island with an old fishing camp, which is still occupied by at least on fisherman and his dog, a light house, an old graveyard, a shrine, thousands of nesting birds, and a few harbor seals and sea lions. Would of liked to hike around more but found that once you get off the trail you end up in a land mind of gull nests, they make little burrows in the ground to hide their eggs and over the years the earth there has become like swiss cheese with all the holes, can't step anywhere without falling through. Luckily, none of the gulls actually had occupied nests at this time of year, so I didn't actually squash any eggs or nestlings.

Lighthouse on Isla San Jeronimo

We are now in Bahia Tortugas, a nice anchorage in a natural harbor, maybe half way down the coast. We will be going ashore tomorrow to see what supplies we can find for the next leg of the journey and probably top off our fuel tanks while we're here. The next half of the journey that will take us to the Sea of Cortez has a leg that has no good place to stop for a good 140 miles or more between Punta Tosca and Cabo San Lucas. So we will finally have to do an over-nighter, which we have not yet done. I know we can do it, just hoping for some wind so maybe it won't suck so much.

Village on Isla Cedros

So now we have to spend a lot more time working on our Spanish, this language barrier is killing me, I have a hard enough time communicating in English. I've learned quite a bit of Spanish over the years, I took enough years of it in High School and College but have never had the opportunity to use it. I know how to say all kinds of things but not what I need to say when the need arises and I can't for the life of me pick up on what a Spanish speaker is saying. Luckily, so far we've come across enough people who know a lot more English than I know Spanish. At least I have the accent down if I ever do figure out how to say what I want to say.

Mexican Navy vessel cruising by Isla Cedros

Alas!

We're finally going to do it; leaving for Mexico in the am. Going to sail down there and see if that's where the sun made off to, it hasn't been around here at all, not one single ray, for 6 days straight now.

Met some cool people here, some of them heading down south about the same time we are, others heading back north for the summer and plan on returning to Mexican waters in the fall. Had a good 4th, awesome firework show, scared the hell out of the cat and Jim slept through it, but I got some good pictures.

Watermaker was successfully installed and is making good clean water. At a rate of about 40gal/hour we should only have to run the engine a couple hours a week and have plenty of fresh water. After fowling our tanks with bad water we took on in Newport Beach and the hassle of having to flush and sanitize the tanks it's going to be really nice not to have to worry about doing that again. Not to mention never having to haul water or worry about being super conservative is going to be awesome.

The SSB radio is up and running but having trouble figuring out how to set up email and get weather faxes on the computer using the Signalink. In fact, I ended up frying the only computer we had with Windows XP, which is what runs our charting program, while trying to find software online that would work. I'm giving up on that. Maybe I'll meet a Ham/computer geek someday that can show me how to configure it all properly, so until then....
We're thinking we'll get the 3G card from TelCel when we get to Mexico so we'll have internet access whenever we're in range of a cell tower, which I'm told is almost everywhere and works out pretty good.

Would love to hear about what all of you are up to, this blog thing seems pretty one sided to me, so keep in touch.

Maybe Freedom isn't All What it's Cracked Up to Be

Thursday we headed over to the guest dock in order to get away from the noise and motion of the A-9 anchorage, get a shower, fill the water tanks, go to happy hour at Humphrey's and a maybe a good night sleep before heading for La Playa for the weekend.

Really didn't get much sleep though due to the radios on the police boats blaring most of the night because some boat ran aground somewhere out in the bay. Early Friday morning we get up deciding to go to La Playa sooner rather than later, maybe get some piece and quiet. Look around for Zero and he's nowhere to be found. Walk around calling, whistling for him, still no cat. Start wondering if he has stowed away on one of the boats that pulled out that morning to head north, worried that he may have gotten into it with one of the stray cats, and eventually decided that he probably decided that he wasn't ready to leave and decided to lay low for awhile. He's done that before, somehow senses when we're getting ready to leave and goes to find somewhere to hide. When we were getting ready to leave the docks of a yacht club we stayed at a few weeks ago, he ran and jumped through the open portlight of a neighboring boat. He wasn't about to come, not for kitty treats or anything, we finally had the idea that a loud noise might scare him out and so Jim got out the air horn, one blast and one cat comes flying out of the portlight and back onto his own boat. Problem solved. Anyway, on this day, we are running out of time, docks are full, boats are waiting for slips, they want us out of there. We decide, well, Jim decided that we'd leave him there and come back later to look for him. Let him miss a couple meals, he'll be ready to come next time we call him say Jim. So I spend the day, trying to get things done, killing time, trying not to worry about the little bastard cat. Trying not to think of all the bad things that could of happened to him and tell myself that he's just hiding because he was having fun and wasn't ready to leave.

So dusk finally rolls around and we take the dinghy back over to the guest dock, walk up the ramp, give one whistle and out he comes from under the bushes by the shed, howling away as if to say 'I can't believe you guys left me!'. Excited to see us, purring madly. He hardly even protested the ride in the dinghy back to the boat and even enjoyed watching the black skimmers flying along the surface of the water trying to scoop up fish. We get back to the boat, he happy, he's fed and then realizes he's trapped on the boat again, now he's pissed, won't have anything to do with us. I was hoping he would learn his lesson: don't come when you're called, get left behind, no one to feed your sorry ass. Good thing he's got a short memory, he's forgiven us now, back to his old self, resigned to being trapped on a boat in the middle of the water. He's staring at the cat on the boat anchored near us, maybe they're contemplating learning how to swim. I've heard of other cruiser's cats taking up swimming, cat disappears, find their sopping wet cat on someone else's boat. There was a cat at Emeryville that would jump in the water and swim from one dock to the other instead of taking the time to walk all the way around. Knew a guy who said his female cat went into heat, decided she needed to get herself some no matter what, so she jumps overboard during a storm, they thought they'd never see her again. A few weeks later a found cat poster goes up on the bulletin board with a picture of their cat. They go claim her and she then gives birth to a half dozen kittens several weeks later.

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Other than that, our weekend hasn't been as productive as planned. The swap meet that we were going to take stuff to and try and sell only resulted in us acquiring more stuff. Jim decided he wasn't going to try a haul a bunch of stuff over there only for it to not sell and then have to haul it all back. So we just walked down with nothing but money in our pockets and ended up buying 2 stainless cowl vents with the deck fittings for $20, they sell new for around $300 each, so that worked out well, they are much nicer looking that the crappy plastic ones we had and they do a much better job at bringing fresh air into the boat. We were then given 2 dorado boxes that turned out were built by the same guy we bought our boat hull from. He had built them for a guy who had also bought a boat hull from him but never got around to actually finishing the boat. So in the end we end up with more projects and more stuff to get rid of....

San Diego

At times it feels as though we are in the middle of a war zone

Haven't been motivated to write a blog post since returning from New Mexico, so here it is for those of you who have been wondering what we've been up to and where we are. We're here sitting on the hook in San Diego Bay at the Crusier's Anchorage. Nice little anchorage right next to the airport. Spend the day listening to the airliners landing and taking off. Across the bay from us is the Naval base, so we also get to listen to the Navy helicopters and fighter jets taking off. The rest of the day is spent rolling around and rocking back and forth as every boat, and especially the large Navy ships, that passes by puts up a big wake that rolls right through here. Luckily, it all starts to calm down towards sunset and is actually pretty quiet (aside from Jim's snoring) during the night as there are no flights coming in and out after midnight. Although the other night they must of been practicing their war games because there was a considerable amount of machine gun fire going off late into the night then add to that the sound of the fireworks from the Padres games. We're going to head back to La Playa for the weekend, it's much calmer over there and closer to the showers too, but that's also where you have to listen to the partiers all night as that's where the yacht clubs like to go and raft up for the weekend.

Night time view from Cruiser's Anchorage

We've been here for about 3 weeks now. Of course we didn't plan on spending 3 weeks here but nothing ever goes as planned for us. We maxed out our allotted time in Newport Harbor, they let you stay 2 months during the winter and then 15 days in the summer season, which started May 1st, so they let us stay until the 15th at $5/night and then we spent our allowed 5 free days in the anchorage before finally sailing out of there. The distance from Newport Beach to San Diego is only around 60 miles, but it took us 1 week to make the voyage. 1st leg was to Dana Point, which is only 12 miles but took us about 6 hours, what little wind there was that day was coming out of the wrong direction but it was a nice day so we kept the sails up. After 4 hours of that we decided to start the engine and motor the rest of the 10 miles due to the fact we sailed away from the coast further then we sailed down. Spent the entire weekend hanging out in Dana Point watching huge waves breaking over the breakwater. By Tues the seas had calmed down enough to sail on to Oceanside, and then to Mission Bay. Thurs morning we sailed the final 8 mile into San Diego. We spent the 1st few nights at the guest dock at 10.50/night, then headed over to the Cruiser's anchorage, which we found we didn't enjoy much, so then headed over to Glorietta Bay, which is much nicer but they only let you stay there for 72 hours at a time. We also spent some time at the La Playa anchorage, which they only let you stay there for 72 hours and only on weekends and only if you get a permit 1st.

Waves crashing over breakwater at Dana Point

While we've been here we decided to go ahead and replace the bladder tanks altogether since we couldn't get the ones we had to stop leaking. Went with a different brand that cost much more but is of a much better quality and they haven't leak one solitary drop. We also had to replace the VHF radio, the old one shit the bed. The new one works great and even has an AIS receiver in it but we haven't figured out how to get it to work yet as it needs a GPS input in order to work and won't communicate with any of the units we have. We've been told that we will have to buy another gizmo that will do a baud rate conversion. I don't want to spend anymore money. AIS is cool and useful as it allows you to see all the other AIS transmitting boats that are out there, what their direction and speed is and allows you to call the specific boat that you might be concerned about. The big ships are now required to have it and those are the ones you're worried about.

Anchorage at La Playa behind Shelter Island

We'll be here another few days, there's a swap meet coming up this weekend, so we thought we would try and sell some stuff, we still have too much stuff. We still need to make sure the SSB radio works and repair the main sail, it ripped again, I hope we don't end up having to order a whole new sail, can't afford that right now. Maybe we'll finally get to leave for Mexico next week sometime. Then we have to decide if we hang out around Northern Baja for a few months or head down into the Sea of Cortez to wait out hurricane season.

Dolphin escort