Yoders Afloat

1/28/2012 - La Noria

2012-01-28T10:50:00.001-08:00

If Lulu and I ever swallow the anchor, which we probably will someday, La Noria is the kind of town we'll probably settle in. While we were getting our FM3 renewal paperwork done last week, we saw an ad for a fully furnished 1-bedroom apartment, all utilities (including internet) paid, on the second floor, facing Plaza Marchado in the heart of old town Mazatlán, for $500 (US) per month. Although briefly intriguing, we are more small-town oriented and will probably want to be someplace that we can have chickens. Thus, La Noria or some other place of the same ilk.

After the Los Osuna Distillery tour, we returned to La Noria for a look-see and some lunch.

There were no population signs at the entry to the town but, if I had to guess, I'd guess the population at maybe seven or eight hundred people. Maybe. We were there in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, so I assume the heavy traffic that you can see in these photos was pretty much normal.

We saw a few small tiendas but I imagine any major shopping would have to be done in Mazatlán, which is only a short drive away. We also saw a bus that may connect La Noria to Mazatlán. As I said yesterday, El Sazón de la Abuela Tina appears to be the only restaurant in town. But, I wouldn't be surprised but what there are a number of very small eateries that one wouldn't recognize as such unless one spent a lot of time there. But, no hay problema because Mazatlán is so close.

We wandered around the mostly empty streets for awhile.

At first, we were accompanied by a bunch of urchins (all boys) in school uniforms, who kind of clambered around hinting that they wouldn't mind a little handout. Marj gave them each a piece of gum which appeased them for awhile. Of course, she immediately had to follow up with a lesson about littering as a few gum wrappers hit the streets. Eventually, the kids left us alone and, in reality, they were pretty easy to ignore, even when they were hanging around.

We visited a leather shop that was supposed to be famous for tooled leather belts and handmade huaraches and I want to get a pair of huaraches. The belt part was right but he didn't have any huaraches, at least as I define them. He had some sandals but not these:

But, no worries, I saw plenty of them at the mercado in Mazatlán.

Anyway, with the leather shop being pretty much the only place to look for something to buy, we continued wandering around the bustling streets.

This is, to me, the archetypal "sleepy little Mexican village".

But, you can only walk around in a town this size for just so long. And then, it's time for lunch! So, back to Grandma Tina's we went.

As I said yesterday, the molcajete had been recommended to us and we had tipped off the waiter at breakfast that we'd be back for molcajete. Consequently, he didn't even bother bringing us menus. Although they had several varieties of molcajete listed (I snuck a peek at the menu at breakfast): chicken, chicken and shrimp, beef, etc., we opted for Molcajete de Camarón; shrimp molcajete. We all ordered limonadas to drink. While we were waiting for our order, Lulu ventured back to the kitchen area to snap a few photos. One of the things we absolutely love about these little Mexican kitchens is how simple they are. Typically there's a flat place to chop stuff up and put stuff together, a wood fire with a grate and/or a griddle over it, maybe a tortilla press, and a refrigerator. Not a whole lot else.

That's our waiter with the red neckerchief and the cook, probably his mom, behind him.

If you look closely at the photo above, you'll see a couple of molcajetes in the fire heating up. This might explain why the finished product boils long after it's brought to the table.

So, best molcajete ever? No. Make no mistake, it was really, really good. But, you'd have to go a really long way to beat the molcajete caliente at Los 30 in Mazatlán.

Here we all are, completely sated and ready for the next leg of the trip.

Tomorrow: El Quelite

1/27/2012 - Los Osuna

2012-01-27T08:11:00.001-08:00

We drove out of the marina parking lot about 8:30 AM in a rented Nissan; Dave & Marj (s/v Kievit), Lulu and I. Our plans were to go to the Los Osuna Blue Agave farm and distillery and also to visit the little towns of La Noria and El Quelite. But first: breakfast!

We figured we'd stop at some roadside spot as there usually seem to be lots of places to eat without making specific plans. So, we headed out of the tourist/resort area and turned inland. The directions I'd gotten from Google Maps said that we should drive 9 km at which time we could get on Highway 15. So, we'd just find someplace to eat in the next 9 km. But, before we knew it, we were at Hwy. 15! Wow! That was fast. I'm no metric expert but it sure didn't seem like 9 km to me. But, whatever, we turned and headed south. We were only supposed to go about 1.2 km and then turn left off of the highway and on to the road to La Noria. Well, our 1.2 km point came and went without the slightest opening in the concrete divider that ran down the middle of the highway. That's when it occurred to me that this wasn't Highway 15 (in spite of what the sign said) but, rather, Highway 15D, a distinction that showed up on Google Maps but nowhere else. Certainly not on the highway signs. We were well into Mazatlán before the highway ended and we got the opportunity to turn around.

Once turned in the right direction, we started looking for breakfast again. We saw some potential places but nothing really appeared to be open yet. Oh well, we'd find something later. So, back up to where we turned on to the highway. This highway is pretty weird. While we were able to exit where we got on, there wasn't an exit headed east. No, we had to exit westbound, back the way we'd come, and then hang a U-turn at the first opportunity. We decided to chill out about breakfast and just see what happened.

We turned off the REAL Highway 15 on to the road to La Noria. This is also the road that Los Osuna is on and the distillery is first, what with La Noria being pretty much at the end of the road. A few kilometers in, we saw signs for a hotel/restaurant. We figured we'd stop there for breakfast so we wouldn't arrive at Los Osuna too early. A few more kilometers and we turned on to a dirt road, following the signs to the hotel. A little further down the road, we happened on a bright little cemetery out in the middle of nowhere.

While were were poking around and taking photos, we listened to steady thunk-thunk-thunk of a campesino cutting down brush and trimming trees with a machete. Guys alongside the road with machetes became one of the constants of the day.

Continuing on, we passed more scrubby-looking land and finally came to a spot where we had to pull over to let another car get past. As the drivers' windows came together, he rolled down his and told us that the hotel/restaurant was closed. Big surprise. We turned around and headed back to the main road. Oh well, at least we got to see the cemetery and some pretty ranches along the way. Our plan now was to go to La Noria and have breakfast, then return to the distillery and then return to La Noria to do a little sightseeing and maybe get some lunch (okay, definitely get some lunch).

As soon as we crossed under the arch welcoming us to La Noria, we saw our restaurant "El Sazón de la Abulea Tina". But we drove on into town anyway. We knew we were going to eat at "El Sazón..." for lunch because it had been recommended by another blogger so we thought we'd try to find another spot for breakfast just to sort of spread it around. Well, it took no time at all to drive through La Noria and realize that "El Sazón..." was pretty much the only place to eat, at least for tourists. So, back to Grandma Tina's we went.

Turned out to be a good choice. The people were extremely friendly and the food was excellent. I had huevos rancheros.

Huevos rancheros are always served on a corn tortillas as far as I know. But these were served on a black corn tortilla that were being made fresh in the kitchen as needed. Much heartier and more flavorful than the standard masa-based tortillas. Lulu had huevos con jamón (eggs with ham) and Dave had huevos con chorizo (eggs with chorizo sausage) and I can't remember for sure what Marj had. Too busy eating to notice I guess.

If you clicked on the link above, you saw that a fellow traveler had rated Grandma Tina's molcajete as the best ever. You also may have picked up that I have a thing for molcajete and Dave is developing the same "thing". So, nothing would do but we had to come back here for lunch and try some. We told our waiter that we would definitely be back later today for the molcajete. He was such a cute kid (maybe 15 or 16) and seemed pleased to hear it.

So, finally breakfasted, we piled back into the car and headed back up the road to Los Osuna Blue Agave Farm and Distillery. What a beautiful place!

There were already a couple of tour vans parked there when we arrived but, we had no more gotten out of the car than a young man walked up and introduced himself as our tour guide. Later on, I believe I heard one of the other tour guides refer to him as "the boss". He certainly knew his stuff. Wish I could remember his name.

The Los Osuna farm/distillery has been under continuous ownership and operation by the Osuna family since 1876. They don't make "tequila" here. Tequila, like Champagne or Bordeaux, is the name of a place. Tequila is a town located in the state of Jalisco. Mexican law has degreed that distilled blue agave liquor can only carry the name "tequila" if it is made in Jalisco or certain areas of Guanajuato, Michoacán, Nyarait and Tamaulipas. Mexico has also claimed exclusive international rights to the name "tequila". So, being located in Sinaloa, Los Osuna does not make tequila. What they do make is "100% Blue Agave Distilled Spirits". And they make a pretty limited quantity of it. The only places it's available in the US are some cities in California, some cities in Illinois, and, just recently, in New York City.

The blue agave plant is a pretty formidable looking beast.

How anyone figured out they could get anything edible or drinkable, much less marketable, from these guys is beyond me. I guess you work with what you've got. Anyway, after the agave is harvested, the leaves are cut off leaving what is called "the pineapple".

The pineapples are then loaded into an underground pressure cooker where they are steamed under pressure for 40 hours.

The next step is to get the juice out of the cooked pineapples. Nowadays this is done with a macerator and a press but, in the old days it was done first with mules:

And later with steam:

We chewed on a sample of the crushed pulp and the juice was amazingly sweet. The next step (fermentation) in the process was to mix the agave juice with yeast to turn the sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide. They use a special yeast that they've spent years isolating and developing for their needs. Following fermentation, after the CO2 has bubbled off, comes the first distillation. The distillate is about 30% alcohol and 70% "other stuff". Not nearly pure enough for the final product. So, the distillate is distilled again. Following the second run, the resulting liquid is now at 60% alcohol. Our guide referred to it as "to kill ya". We sampled a teeny tiny bit and it was definitely strong! They use some of the to-kill-ya to disinfect their bottling equipment and bottles. Since ~~tequila~~ blue agave liquor is typically about 35% alcohol, the to-kill-ya is diluted using water that has been run through a two-stage filter (including reverse osmosis) and ultraviolet disinfection. At this point, the liquor is clear and is sold as "blanco". This is usually the cheapest form of the liquor and has the unadulterated taste of the agave. Some of the batch is transferred to oak barrels for aging. During the process, some of the wood flavor and color leaches into the liquor, giving it an amber color. The taste also smoothes out a bit during aging. Liquor that has aged 11 months is called "maduro" (or, on tequila labels: "reposado"). Some of it is aged 7 years and gets much darker. This is called "añejado" and is naturally the darkest, smoothest and most expensive variety available. Maduro is the only kind that Los Osuna sells in Mexico. Presumably, you can get the other varieties if you live in San Francisco, Chicago or New York.

We saw some guys sitting around a couple of vats. It looked like they were tearing the labels off of the bottles and uncapping them as well. This seemed a little backwards so we asked about it. Our guide said that some of the bottles had some small residue, possible from the water, possibly from the bottle caps. They were pouring the liquor (fortunately it was the Blanco) in a stainless steel vat. It would be re-distilled and the bottles would be rewashed. They had cases of the stuff to deal with.

We were then shown the correct way to taste agave liquor. Our guide brought out a brandy snifter with some maduro in it. He swirled it to show it's body and viscosity. Then he had us sniff it with our left nostril first. This side was supposed to pick up the wood odors. Then the right nostril for the alcohol odors. Then both nostrils together. Then, take a breath, take a sip and, after swallowing, exhale to get the true flavor. Well, I'm not sure about this right nostril-left nostril stuff. We tried it and did find a difference between one side and the other. However, later we tried it again in reverse and found the same difference: mainly, the first sniff was stronger smelling than the second. Dave and I chalked this up to olfactory fatigue more than the right brain picking up one thing and the left something else. But, it was fun anyway, even if it's bogus, which it may not be.

After the tour was the tasting. There was a pretty spot set up under the trees with tables and chairs, a couple of gift shop booths and a bar. The deal was, it cost 25 pesos for the first shot. All of the shots afterwards were free. You could sit there and get shit-faced if you were of a mind to. We anted up $100 for our 4 shots and proceeded to taste. Lulu got into it and thought she was some sort of tequila bandito.

Don't get between that girl and her shots if you value your life. We spent an hour or so sitting around sipping tequila although we limited ourselves to only 2 shots. Hey, it wasn't even noon yet! We bought a bottle of Maduro and a few keepsakes as well. There was a guy singing for background. He was very smooth and the volume was just right. It turned out to be the same guy who was singing at Carlos & Lucia's on Christmas Eve! We bought a CD.

Finally, it was about time to leave this beautiful spot and head back to La Noria.

Los Osuna, the agave way to start your day. Highly recommend a visit if you're in the neighborhood. Other than the 25 pesos for the shot, which was totally optional, there was no cost for the tour.

Tomorrow: Back to La Noria.

1/19/2012 - A comment about comments

2012-01-19T21:22:00.001-08:00

I've heard from readers occasionally that it's sometimes problematic to make comments on this blog. Most recently I heard from Dani but earlier I had heard the same thing from the Ceol Mors and even occasionally from my Mom. All of them told me that they'd had problems with other "Blogger" sites (those are the ones that have "blogspot" in their name. So, tonight I decided to see if there was anything I could do about it.

I checked with Google since Blogger is a Google product. Turns out that they know about the problem already but still haven't fixed it. In the meantime, they directed blog administrators (hey, that's me!) to switch from the embedded comments that appear at the end of the blog to either a full page or pop-up window. Supposedly, these formats don't suffer from the problem. So, tonight I switched to the pop-up comment window. I turned the word verification off briefly but got a spam right away, albeit on a blog from back in January 2011, but still. So, I turned the word verification back on.

Please let me know if you have any difficulties posting comments. I don't mean difficulties like you have nothing to say, I mean actual technical difficulties. Also, if the problems cease but you experience them on other Blogger sites, please feel free to forward this entry to them. They probably just don't know.

Thanks to everyone who comments (yes, even you, Raoul). It's fun to get feedback to know someone out there is reading this stuff. Thanks especially to Dani, Cidnie and Mom for letting me know the comments weren't always working.

1/19/2012 - You are what you eat...

2012-01-19T14:16:00.001-08:00

...and I'm only 5'3" tall.

I think I ate more shrimp in one day yesterday than I ever have before. After not walking very far for awhile, Lulu and I decided we were ready for another long walk. We had a few minor items to take care of: get a little walking around cash at the ATM, renew the TelCel banda ancha card for another month and pick up some coffee (been enjoying Blasón Espresso and I've only found it at Wal*Mart and Ley's so far). We didn't walk the whole way but we walked most of it. For any Mazatláneros out there, we rode the bus from Marina Mazatlán to the Banamex in the Golden Zone. Then we got out and walked. Sabalo to Buelna. Turned left on Buelna and walked up to Avenida La Marina (the Home Depot corner) with a quick detour to stop at the TelCel store. Turned right on Avenida La Marina and followed it to Revelución where we took another left. Walked up Revelución to Adolfo Lopez Mateos where we turned left, walked a block or so and stopped at Wal*Mart. Got our coffee and some ramen and continued on Mateos until we hit Buelna again and turned left back towards Sabalo. When we got to Avenida La Marina again, we turned right and started working our way back to the marina while also looking for a place to stop for lunch.

We finally saw a sign for Mariscos (seafood) so we stopped. The place was called Mariscos El Chabalo and was basically a driveway with tables and chairs and a cooking area towards the back. There were two tables with two people at each one, all Mexicans. We sat down and looked around to see if there was a menu posted or anything. There didn't seem to be. Without being too nosy, we could see that the guys at one of the tables were eating what looked like ceviche out of a molcajete. The other guys had goblets with some sort of hot-looking shrimp cocktail or something in it. We waited a little longer and the proprietor served the first guys some good looking seafood soup and then came over to our table. Clearly there wasn't a menu and he spoke no English. He did, however, speak very fast Spanish. Asked what we would like and we sort of looked over at the table with the guys eating soup. He said "Sopa de mariscos." and we said that's what we'd have. In just a few minutes he returned with two big bowls of steaming seafood soup. He brought us a pint jar filled with a bright yellow sauce. Said it was habanero and obviously homemade. Then he asked us what we wanted to drink (at least I assume that's what he asked although I didn't recognize one single word. He listed the various choices. The only word either of us recognized was "Coca" so we each ordered a Coke.

The soup was great. It had lots of pulpo (octopus), camarón (shrimp), calamar (squid), almejas (clams), otiones (oysters), as well as chunks of pescado (fish). We dressed it up with some of the habanero sauce and crumbled a bunch of saltines in it. It was really good. When our bowls were about half empty, he came around and refilled them with more of the broth.

Meanwhile, the two guys at the table that had been eating soup were served a big bowl of boiled peel-and-eat shrimp. Man! I wish we'd been sitting with them. They were also enjoying micheladas. We'll very likely return and when we do, we'll take our time and try to have lots of different things. And we'll definitely have a michelada. Maybe we can get the proprietor to talk a little slower for us.

After lunch, we continued our walk back to the marina. Got back about 3:00 after a trek of just over 7.5 miles.

The plan was to join Dave and Marj for dinner at Restaurante Los 30 again. Dave was wanting some of that molcajete pretty badly. About 6:00 we jumped on the bus and headed out. When we were leaving Los 30 last time, we saw a table where this couple were eating a big platter of boiled shrimp. We decided that was a good way to start. The waiter brought us a big platter of warm boiled peel & eat shrimp. This was a big platter and these were big shrimp, but we tucked in and made short work of them. Then we ordered dinner. Lulu was pretty full so she just ordered the tostada supreme which was covered in different kinds of seafood. Dave and Marj shared a Molcajete Caliente and I ordered Camarones Cucarachas. I had no idea what "Shrimp Cockroaches" would be but I was game to find out. I was delighted to discover that Camarones Cucarachas were big shrimp deep fried until the heads, tails and shells turned a golden brown. They were served with a slightly sweet sauce. I ripped the head off the first one and tried to peel it. No way. So I figured that maybe you were just supposed to eat the whole thing, shell, legs, tail and all. Tried one that way (including the head) and it was great. The shells, legs and tails were very crispy but the meat inside was still tender. It was delicious.

Los 30 is turning into one of our favorite Mazatlán restaurants. The staff last night was first rate. There were three tables of gringos and a couple of them had 6-8 people. The lone waiter ran (literally) around keeping everyone's requests filled. He looked like he was having a really good time. The chef managed to keep up even though each dish required a fair amount of personal attention (you should have seen the beautiful coconut shrimp). A young lady who we figure was the waiter's sister (this seemed like a family operation) helped wherever she was needed. All in all, we had a really pleasant time. We're already trying to decide what we're going to order the next time we go. Between Los 30 and Mariscos El Chabalo, there's no danger that we'll run out of seafood anytime soon.

Sorry, I forgot to take my camera.

1/16/2012 - The race is on

2012-01-16T18:24:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, Lulu and I joined Dave and Marj on Kievit for a little regatta. Turns out there were only four boats competing but, what the hey. Lulu and I have never done any racing except on Kievit, and then, only once, so we're not a hell of a lot of help. But it was just a race for the fun of it so it didn't really matter all that much.

The race started out somewhat dubiously. D & M had attended a skippers' meeting to get the course layout, etc. The diagram we received made the course look like it was just a long straight course. Around the two buoys twice and done. We headed out from the marina a little early to get the sails up and get a little feel for the course before the race started. You can see how seriously we were all taking the race as Lulu checks to see where the heck the wind is coming from and Dave readies the fishing gear.

Finally, all 4 boats were out on the course and it was getting close to starting time. Again, my experience is limited but from what I could gather from Dave, the way these things usually work is that a specific starting time is set. a horn is sounded 5 minutes before the starting time and then sounded again to start the race at the precise time previously announced. During that 5 minutes, the racers are jockeying for position. The idea is to be as close to the starting line as possible, going as fast as possible when the starting horn sounds to get a running start. The race was supposed to start at 1:00 and all communication would be on channel 69. We set the VHF to the right channel and started heading up to the starting line to be in position. Then we hear over the radio that the race would start in 10 minutes (or something like that; it was hard to understand what was being said as most of it was in Spanish). OK, we'll go around again. We pass the committee boat, where the starting official is, and ask "how long?". They come back with "three minutes". Then, a few seconds later, over the radio, we hear that it'll be four minutes. Then we hear it'll be five minutes. It was impossible to keep the starting time straight. Finally, we thought we had it right and started chugging to the starting line. It was getting closer and closer and there was no indication that the start was imminent. We sort of slowed down as best we could and hollered at the committee boat, "When?" We didn't really get an answer until we were pretty sure we were over the starting line. Then the official on the committee boat said, "OK". OK what? OK, it's time to start? Or OK, you're looking good and can continue? We had no idea so we just started racing. Of course, by now, in order to not go over the line too soon, we had slowed down and lost speed. The other three boats headed off in a NW direction and we headed on a SW course to build our speed back up. But, it turned out that Kievit can point so high that we were actually on a really good course for the first mark.

There were some tense moments several times as we neared and rounded the buoys. Our main competition was a brown-hulled Mexican Cal 29. I can't remember the name so I'll just call it "the brown boat". This guy could turn on a dime. We'd go around the mark and he'd be right beside us and between us and the mark. It was pretty cool to watch. Anyway, we all went around the first buoy and then we thought we were supposed to go to the other buoy. But the brown boat's skipper said, no, we had to go back across the starting line and then go to the other mark. Huh? That meant that the course, instead of being in a straight line like it showed on the diagram, was actually L-shaped. Geez! Could this be any more confusing?

Well, we managed to follow the course with help from the other boats. Dave made a couple of very smart calls as far as how to go before tacking and we ultimately crossed the finish line first. Of course, we were the biggest boat and, after all the handicaps were figured in, we came in 3rd on corrected time. Seems like there should also be a correction for whether or not your boat is all loaded up for cruising as Kievit is. But, whatever, we know who crossed the finish line first. If we'd been trying to be the first ones to get our goods to market, the other boats would have gone home hungry.

The weather was beautiful although a little more wind would have been nice. But, it was warm and sunny and the seas were quite calm. Only thing that would have been better would have been if we'd hooked a big ol' dorado.

Obligatory food content:

I decided I'd make dinner tonight. I love to play with my pressure cooker, y'know. I spent the afternoon putting together "BBQ" ribs, oven-roasted potatoes, and fresh steamed green beans. The ribs weren't actually ribs as near as I could tell. Oh, they probably came from somewhere in the vicinity of the rib cage I imagine. I think that, once the really nice slabs were harvested, they handed the leftovers to the bandsaw operator and said "Cut this into as many 1.5" wide strips as you can." It was pretty unrecognizable anatomically-speaking but, after pressure cooking for 13 minutes followed by a nice finish under the broiler, it tasted mighty fine. Next time I'm getting real rib slabs.

Music: Been listening to "The Loft" on the Sirius/XM radio. I'd swear these guys stole my iPod and then just added a few songs of their own. What a great station most of the time. This afternoon we've heard EmmyLou Harris, James MacMurtry, Buffalo SPringfield, Dion, The Delphonics, War, Robert Cray, The Flatlanders, Tift Merrit, Drive-By Truckers and so on. If you wonder what kind of music we like and happen to have access to Sirius/XM, tune into The Loft and find out. BTW, I found out about The Loft when I heard them playing it at The Container, the bar/restaurant that Keith (s/v Chamisa) and I frequented in San Jose Del Cabo on the way down here.

1/14/2012 - CAUTION: food content

2012-01-14T07:32:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure why I persist in thinking of this as a cruising blog. We all know what it's really about, don't we? That's right, it's mostly about FOOD. The saying that every boater gets sick of hearing is "the definition of cruising is doing boat maintenance in exotic ports". Well, for us anyway, that's just a small part of it. We were sitting around the palapa Wednesday afternoon, shooting the breeze, drinking a beer and waiting for the music to start. A fellow cruiser there said that he never stays anywhere for more then a week. He figures that gives him plenty of time to get the boat cleaned up and see everything he needed to in each port. I was aghast! A WEEK??? We've been in Mazatlán for 3 weeks and feel like we've barely scratched the surface. We're still learning our way around. We haven't even begun to take any tours or anything. A WEEK??? If we ate out 3 times a day we wouldn't have time to sample the food offerings here in just one week. A week! Please!

I've heard some people over the years say that they don't really care about food. If they could get everything they needed for survival in a pill, they'd gladly give up eating altogether. Granted, I haven't run in to many of these folks, but a few. I can't imagine what would send someone to this sad state. The food they do eat must be so bland and unappetizing that they just assume that's what food is like. Or maybe they can't taste food due to some taste bud malfunction. That, I do understand.

Lulu had been suffering from a cold for the better part of a week and I had been sailing by unscathed. Thought I was going to get off scot free. Yeah, that's what I thought. What a putz! Just about the time her's wound down, mine kicked in. It didn't start out too bad, though, and I had high hopes for a cold of short duration in which I didn't lose my taste buds. Y'see, pretty much every time I have a cold, there is a period of at least a couple of days in which my nose is so screwed up that I have absolutely no sense of taste, what with the sense of taste and the sense of smell being so intertwined. I dread those periods. But, things seemed to be going pretty good during the first day or two of the cold. Then, on day 3, whammo!

We heard an announcement on the VHF radio that the vegetable guy was at the marina and so was the shrimp guy. The shrimp guy? Hadn't heard about him before. See what we would have missed if we'd only stayed a week? But I digress. Lulu decided we needed some shrimp so off she went to see the guy. She returned with a bag holding half a kilo of beautiful "medium" shrimp. I put medium in quotes because, in the States, these would surely have sold as "large". The large ones he had worthy of skewering and BBQing. Maybe next time. Anyway, she tried to think of what to do with them and ultimately decided that a stir fry over rice was the way to go.

I knew I was in trouble when I couldn't smell her cooking. C'mon, she's stir frying onions, garlic, ginger, peppers and shrimp and I can't smell it? Something's definitely wrong. But, I held out hope anyway. Finally, she brought it to the table.

Still full of hope, I loaded my plate and tucked in. Let me just say that I'm really glad she put some hot peppers in so I could get at least some sensation from the food. Couldn't taste a thing. What a waste!

I truly hate colds and have battled them for many many years. They don't hit me nearly as hard or as often now as they did when I was younger but they still annoy me just the same. Being a big believer in the magic of drugs, I've always sought out a sure-fire remedy. Of course, we all know there isn't one but I tried nevertheless. The best I could do was NyQuil. "The night-time sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, so- you-can-rest medicine." The vile-tasting concoction at least allowed me to get through the night in some degree of comfort. Well, we haven't been able to find Nyquil in Mexico. Wouldn't matter much since even the Nyquil in the States hasn't been the same since they removed the pseudoephedrine and replaced it with some innocuous crap that doesn't work. However, I've always been in inveterate reader of labels. I hate to pay $5.00 for brand name aspirin when a review of the label shows that the store brand has exactly the same formula for $3.00. So, I know what was in the old Nyquil. It had acetaminophen for pain and fever, dextromethorfan for your cough, pseudoephedrine for your runny nose and blocked-up sinuses, alcohol to help you sleep, and some sort of nasty anise-flavoring to keep you from drinking the stuff for pleasure. There was also "wild cherry" flavoring but it was only just slightly better then the original green stuff. Now, with the exception of the nasty flavoring, I have all these ingredients. So, first for Lulu's cold and later for mine, I whipped up a bit of SRYquil to see us through.

I use aspirin in stead of acetaminophen because we don't think that acetaminophen does much and it's been strongly contraindicated when used in conjunction with alcohol. For the dextromerthrorfan, I use Robitussin DM which also gives me that yummy wild cherry flavor. I used up the very last of my stash of real pseudoephedrine on this cld. Difficult to get in the States and, so far, impossible to get down here. Thanks a bunch, meth cookers! I'll have to see if I can find something that works almost as well for future batches.

Lulu had been having really miserable nights with her cold. She was the first recipient of my concoction. She declared it quite palatable and a damn sight better tasting than Nyquil. It also did its job in giving her a good night's rest. A couple of nights of it and she was pretty much over the worst of her cold. Then it was my turn. Sure enough, it didn't taste too bad. Sort of like wild cherry tequila. And, just like her, it got me through the two nights that I had to use it quite comfortably. I'm happy to say that my cold was pretty short-lived and my loss of taste only lasted one day.

Once my buds were back in shape, I was fortunate that we still had some leftover shrimp stir-fry that I actually got to taste. It tasted as good as it looked.

Last night, having eaten on the boat 2 nights in a row, I was feeling guilty about depriving the local restauranteurs of our pesos so, along with our friends Dave and Marj, off we went to spread the wealth around.

The first day we were here, we heard Mike from s/v Tortue, who we knew from our summer in Puerto Escondido, give a review of a seafood place he and Melissa had visited the night before. It was called "Los 30". He gave it a glowing review and Mike is something if a foodie so we believed him. Since it was pretty much right on the bus route, that's where we headed. I suspect the name has something to do with the number of tables since they're all numbered and there were probably about 30 of them.

When we arrived, there were people at one of the tables. While we were there, they left and another couple came in. That was it. But, that sort of bodes well. It means that they must cater mostly to Mexicans, who tend to eat later than we do. There were no other gringos there, but Carlos, our waiter, spoke excellent English.

The menu was entirely seafood with a strong leaning towards shrimp. Dave ordered filet a la Zaragozada (or something like that) which turned out to be a fried fish filet topped with lots of grilled onions and peppers. Marj, being still sort of full from lunch, just had a tostada suprema (again, "or something like that") which was covered in various seafood bits. Lulu had one of her old favorites, camarones en crema con champiñones (shrimp in a cream sauce with mushrooms). And I, I took the road less traveled. I opted for the molcajete caliente. My first experience with a dish called "molcajete" was at a Mexican restaurant in Salem, Oregon. It was a rich seafood stew served in a molcajete (the "pestle" part of a mortar and pestle, usually made of volcanic rock), covered with melted cheese and burning hot. It was so good and that one restaurant in Salem was the only place I ever found it until we got to Mexico.

This molcajete was a little bit different. Yes, it was seafood and vegetables and cheese and broth. And yes, it was served in a hot molcajete. But, instead of eating it with a spoon directly out of the molcajete, you ladled it out onto a plate and ate it that way. The molcajete kept what was left behind piping hot.

You know how the platter is sizzling when you order fajitas? Well, that's what the molcajete was doing when Carlos served it. The broth was still boiling in it and those sticks of cheese were melting down the sides. That orange puddle in the lower left hand corner? That's some broth that boiled over at the table. This stuff was HOT!!! But, man, was it good. Lots of shrimp, cheese, grilled onions and peppers, fresh tomatoes and a toothsome broth. It was delicious and festive. Dave said "That's what I'm getting next time." It was money well spent. And speaking of money, what do you suppose this meal set us back? Let's see, we had two full meals with lots of fresh shrimp and two beers each. The bill came to $259 pesos. That's a whopping $19.00 (USD), folks! For both of us! WITH drinks! And this was not a street stand, but a bonafide restaurant. You got to love it.

After all that food, we probably need to get out and do another walk on the beach.

Oh, and here's another recipe to try. Lulu made this one evening when we didn't really want a full meal and the temperature was cool enough that soup sounded really good. This is not a Lulu original recipe. It came off the net, from where I can't remember, but it was some guy's girlfriend's recipe. Something to do with a Superbowl soup competition.

Creamy Bacon Mushroom Soup

10 bacon strips, cooked crisp and crumbled
1 T olive oil
1 lb. fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 medium white onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 qt. heavy whipping cream (we used evaporated milk since that's what we had on hand)
1 (14.5 oz) can of chicken broth
5 oz shredded Swiss cheese (we used Chihuahua cheese since...)
3 T cornstarch
3 T cold water
1/2 t ground black pepper
1/2 t coarse salt
2 t red pepper flakes (Lulu's own addition to the original recipe)

1. Preparation with a slight variation since the original didn't use the bacon grease:

2. Cook the bacon. Remove the bacon from the pan but keep the grease.

3. If you have less than 1 T of bacon grease, add olive oil to bring the level to 1 T.

4. Sauté together: mushrooms, onion and garlic until mushrooms begin to soften.

5. Stir in heavy whipping cream and chicken broth

6. Stir in cheese in several batches until smooth

7. Combine cornstarch, cold water, salt and pepper together in a small bowl. Stir until smooth.

8. Stir cornstarch mixture into soup

9. Bring to a gentle boil. Simmer 2 minutes until thickened.

10. Serve in individual bowls, garnished with bacon bits.

¡Buen provecho!

1/7.2012 - Where (and when) are we?

2012-01-07T17:07:00.001-08:00

Yesterday started out excellently. There's a produce guy who brings his truck down to the docks every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. He's here pretty early so this is the first time I've made it over before he left.

I'd gotten up early (about 6:30) and TelCel, our internet provider, was screwing up so I didn't have much to do besides drink coffee and read "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo". By 7:30 or so, I figured the vegetable guy was there and I was ready for a little stroll. So I grabbed a shopping bag and wandered over.

His name is Gumen and he has a farm somewhere around here. That's not to say that he grows everything he sells but I assume he grows some of it. I picked out some baby spuds, mushrooms, avocados, brussel sprouts, tomatoes and onions. His wife makes tamales for sale and he had some there. They get rave reviews from the cruisers. I'm not usually much of a tamale fan. I loved them as a kid but the ones we used to get in San Jose (CA) seemed like they had a little bit of cooked masa surrounding a lot of chili or something like it. I remember the insides were red and spicy and good. Most of the tamales I'd had since then tended to be way too much masa with only a token filling of some sort. This includes the ones we bought from Mexican immigrants in Silverton. However, seeing as how everyone around here seems to love them, I thought I ought to at least give them a try. I chose one of each: pollo y res (chicken and beef).

I have no idea what anything cost. Once you're done choosing stuff, Gumen looks in the big bag and apparently counts up the number of smaller bags and tamales you have, then gives you a number. All my stuff came to 180 pesos (about $13.00). Then Gumen threw in 3 oranges, gratis.

Back at the boat, while Lulu was still sleeping, I heated up one of the tamales in the steamer to eat while I listened to the morning VHF net. These things were beautiful to look at, all tied up in their cornhusk wrappers.

Once rewarmed, I was pleasantly surprised when I tucked into it. It had a fairly thin coating of masa surrounding carrots, peppers, potatoes and shredded chicken. It was quite good. I saved the beef one so Lulu could have a taste after she got up.

The plan for the day was to get together with Dave and Marj (s/v Kievit) to head down to Centro and take in the First Friday Artwalk. They have these events all over the place. We even had one in Silverton, although I don't believe we ever attended. But this seemed like a fun thing to do. The Artwalk was supposed to start at 3:00 in the afternoon and it could easily take 30-45 minutes to get from the marina to Centro, depending on traffic and how soon the bus came. So, we figured we ought to head out at about 2:00. However, before that we had something else we needed to do.

Mike on the boat next to us (s/v Narwhal, a sweet little Falmouth Cutter) had told me about a little place right here "on campus" that served a nice lunch for 55 pesos. It was originally started for the guys who worked on the hotel/marina site. But, of course, the cruisers discovered it so the clientele was about 50:50. It's called Yolanda's. Dave and I walked up there about 11:30 just to see what was cooking. Yolanda was cooking "pollo en crema" and it would be ready in about a half an hour.

We wandered back up to Yolanda's at 1:30. There was one table with 4 cruisers and another with 2 Mexicans. We were directed by Yolanda to take a seat. We placed our orders for two lunches (Lulu and Marj decided they weren't hungry enough for lunch. Now I ask you, what's hunger got to do with eating?). The beverages were either Coke, Sprite, or agua fresca. Today's agua fresca was tamarino. Tamarind fruit steeped in water, a little sugar, chilled and there you go. Dave had Coke and I had agua fresca. After a short wait, Yolanda brought us our plates. Each one had a couple of chicken thighs smothered in a lightly seasoned cream sauce. White rice with a few vegetables in it on the side. "¿Frijoles?" she asked. "Sí, por favor." I answered. She brought us each a small bowl of refried beans and a stack of corn tortillas. It was delicious. Apparently every day, lunes a viernes (Mon-Fri), Yolanda cooks something for lunch. The price is fixed at 55 pesos (about 4 bucks). Sometimes she has a choice of 2 entrees and sometimes she also offers sandwiches. Going to have to go back until I've tried everything she knows how to cook.

After lunch, we caught the Sabalo-Centro bus and headed downtown. It was standing room only for awhile but we got on well before that point so we had seats. We got off at Juarez y Constitución and headed down the street.

I love the downtown architecture and the mix of viable living spaces and decay.

The Artwalk led us from one store or studio or café to the next. We saw some very impressive work of all kinds as well as some stuff that makes you wonder what made this person decide to identify themselves as an artist. For Lulu and I, the coolest part was being able to peek behind the walls that run along the street. Some of the interiors were amazing.

Eventually, though, all this art and architecture became very thirsty work. And this is where the title of this blog comes in.

We happened on this little thirst-slaking spot:

Right in the heart of old town Mazatlán, a Polish Pub. We went inside and took 4 stools at the bar. Their imported beer selection was truly awe-inspiring. The vast majority of the beers I had never heard of. The menu had them arranged by country. We took the path of least resistance and ordered a mug of Indio draft. Turns out that a draft is a full liter unless you specifically order una cerveza chica, which we didn't. While we sat at the bar, drinking our beer, we watched the television up on the wall. There were actually two TVs but only one caught my interest. It was showing vintage early 1980's MTV rock videos. Sheena Easton, Prince, Genesis, John Mellenkamp, Pointer Sisters, Tears for Fears, Al Stewart, etc. Guys with very fancy hairdos and suits and women with jackets with big shoulders that made them look like they were from the future. I couldn't tear my eyes away. It was just like being in Lewiston, Idaho back in 1981. "Just one more video and then we'll go." It was very weird to be sitting in a dark European bar watching old American videos in and old town in Mexico. Very weird.

Eventually, though, it was time to go. We wandered back to the central Mercado, stopping only to look at some handicrafts and to buy myself a mellow brim.

When we got back to the marina, we realized we hadn't had dinner so we stopped at La Mona for a pizza. Got back to the boat in time to watch another episode of "Tales of the Gold Monkey" as well as our first episode of "Walking Dead" (we finished "The Wire" yesterday).

So, a nearly perfect day: lots to eat, lots to drink, good friends to share it with, interesting sights to see, TV shows and a new hat. What could be better?

1/5/2012 - The Lost World

2012-01-05T21:38:00.001-08:00

We went on a little dinghy ride with our friends Dave and Marj from s/v Kievit this afternoon. Just a short ride away is a restaurant that is supposed to be first rate. We were going to check it out. But first we made a little detour. Earlier in the day Dave and Marj had done some dinghy exploring and happened a cross this rock sidehill at El Cid Marina that was covered with iguanas. They took us to see.

Be sure to click on the photos to enlarge them.

You have to look pretty close to see the ones in the background but the orange-striped guy in the front really stands out.

These were all taken with a digital zoom so the quality isn't the best but it's the only way to get the shot.

I know I saw these guys or their ancestors in lots of low-budget sci-fi and adventure flicks when I was a kid. Blow them up and have them chase the heroes through the jungle and you've got yourselves some Hollywood dinosaurs.

BTW, the menu at the restaurant looked good but we didn't eat there today. Stand by for the review in a subsequent edition.

1/1/2012 - New Year's Eve

2012-01-01T09:50:00.001-08:00

These crazy Mexicans!

We watched an unprecedented third episode of The Wire last night and, consequently didn't get to bed until after midnight. Not much after but a little bit. During the evening we had been "entertained" occasionally by fairly short blasts of something vaguely resembling music coming from the big hotel across the main road from us. It was quite loud but it usually only went for 10 minutes or so before shutting down for as much as 20 minutes at a time, occasionally a wee bit longer. Little did we know that this was just the tuning-up phase of the evening's entertainment.

Just before midnight, the music started in ernest, and it was LOUD! It was also pretty crappy. Lots of thump-thumpa and not a whole lot else. Sleep did eventually overtake us but it wasn't easy. Throughout the next few hours we were treated to music that was louder by a long ways than anything we'd heard in La Paz. It was interspersed with what were, I guess, toasts and short speeches that were shouted into the microphone. Come to think of it, I suspect this was something that was coming in from a feed elsewhere as the crowd's applause was much louder than it had been during the music.

Long about 4:00 AM the speechifying stopped and we heard some strums on an electric guitar and a few beats on a drum. And then we got to listen to a really quite bad rendition of Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven". But, not to worry. They made up in volume what they lacked in talent. Roll Over Beethoven: we're all so familiar with that song that anything that's off-kilter really grates. In this case, you'd be sitting there waiting for the 7th chord at the turnaround, and the guitarist would play a natural instead. Huh? Sounded so wrong. He'd get started on a guitar solo and just fall way short, seemingly ignoring the more difficult parts. And all the songs he played that I recognized were that way: Miserlou, Johnny B. Goode, Pipeline. It wasn't until he switched to some music that I was completely unfamiliar with that I was able to relax, musically at least. However, they brought a girl vocalist in at one point and I would swear that the song she was singing and the song the band was playing were completely different songs. They weren't even played at the same tempo. The band was hurtling along at 60 mph while the vocalist was singing at about 45. Very disconcerting. And the fact that this was going on between 4:00 and 5:00 AM didn't help things one bit. You cannot believe how loud it was on our boat with all hatches closed. I swear there had to be some permanent hearing damage done to the partygoers last night.

Finally, a little after 5:00, the band mercifully quit. I had just drifted off to sleep when my stupid cell phone started ringing. At five freakin' twenty in the morning. I answered it only to hear Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" blasting out of the earpiece. Then a voice said "Hola" and I said "You must have the wrong number." The voice said "Esteban?" and I said, "Yes, this is Esteban, who is this?" Then I think I heard the voice say "Steve?" just before he must have put the phone up to the speakers for my listening enjoyment. I hung up and turned the phone off. I checked it this morning and it's a Mexican 395 area code. The area code in La Paz is 612 and, as far as I know, the area code in Mazatlán is 669, so I'm not sure who was calling. Guess I could call the number back today to find out but I probably won't.

Anyway, after the phone call, things were blissfully quiet the rest of the morning. So much so that I actually slept in until 8:00 instead of my usual 6:30.

We started the New Year right, though. I cooked us up a batch of spuds and eggs for breakfast. An excellent way to start the day, and the year.

HAPPY 2012 TO YOU ALL. And thanks for being such faithful readers.

12/29/2011 - Random Catch-up

2011-12-30T17:31:00.001-08:00

OK, I know it's been a couple of days. Thought I'd better write something before Raoul starts hassling me again. So, here goes (in no particular order)...

We made a couple of trips to the supermercados to see if we could locate a few items. I needed some Polish sausage or kielbasa so I could make some gumbo. In La Paz I could find it at Chedraui but so far in Mazatlán both Mega and Soriana had struck out. Weird, too, since it's a Mexican brand and they carry other items of the brand. So, we set out to try the other Soriana as well as Ley and Wal-Mart. All of these require us to take the bus to new parts of town so it was something of an adventure. We struck out at the other Soriana on our first outing although we got enough stuff that our packs were chuck-a-block and we had no interest in schlepping them around to the other stores. With full packs, we hopped on the bus back to the marina. Well, the bus was almost as full as our packs. It was standing room only for most of the trip but still they stopped at every bus stop and more people piled on. Fortunately, by the time we reached the marina, the crowd had thinned down. I'm not sure how we would have gotten off earlier, stuck in the middle of the bus with a huge pack to manhandle through the crowd.

Yesterday we took the same bus but got off a wee bit earlier and hiked up to Wal-Mart where I was able to find my Polish sausage (SCORE!). Lulu has been on the prowl for bread flour, however, and has so far struck out. We crossed the thoroughfare and tried Ley's. The also had the sausage but again, no bread flour. At Soriana we had tried buying some bread flour (high gluten) directly from the in-store bakery. They thought we meant we wanted to buy some dough for pizza crust. They would have sold us that but they said they didn't have any bread flour. Well, although they do make bread down here, I guess making bread at home is not a common practice. Oh well, I did bring some down from the States in November but it will run out long before we return. So, the search goes on.

Yesterday, after we finished at Ley's, we got on a bus that we thought would take us back to the main drag along the malecón where we hoped to find a Similare farmacía (best prices). The bus took us downtown to Centro and then headed off towards the old harbor. Not quite what we expected. Suddenly, Lulu spots a Similare and we hopped off the bus. Great, we got a good price on a prescription but now we had no idea what bus to catch to take us home or where to catch the bus even if we did know which one. We studied what passes for a map and finally decided that all we had to do was hike a few blocks to the mercado and catch our regular bus. Partway there I noticed that what seemed like every bus from every different route went right by us on Avenida Juarez. So, rather than continue walking to the mercado we (I) decided to just stop on the corner and wait. And wait we did. I swear that EVERY bus except ours passed that corner. After 20 or 25 fruitless minutes decided to continue walking up to the mercado. As we neared it, sure enough, up ahead, we saw our bus. It really was one of the only ones that didn't come all the way up Juarez like the others. Once we got to the mercado we had to wait probably 20 minutes or so but our bus did eventually come by. Live and learn I guess (or I hope).

When we got back to the boat yesterday, I made some chicken and sausage gumbo.

It was just the thing for a chilly evening. And, I'm happy to say that we still have enough for dinner again tonight.

Speaking of chilly evenings, here's the latest weather report: It's been warmer during the daytime lately. Probably in the mid-70s. Might even reach 80 by Sunday. The evenings are a different matter, however. We routinely see lows in the high 40s or low 50s. However, that is definitely not a bad thing. Makes sleeping nice and cozy. Shorts and sandals during the day, comforters and quilts at night. What could be better?

On Wednesday we celebrated being at the marina for 1 week by going up to the palapa and watching the regular Wednesday night blues jam. Well, our 1 week anniversary wasn't really why we went. Actually it's because it's about the only night life that happens out here on La Isla so pretty much everyone here goes.

It's normally a pretty laid back place with a little jazz in the background, serving coffee and pastries, etc. But on Wednesday night it comes alive. Cruisers and hotel guests fill up all the tables. The kitchen cooks burgers and fries and BBQ ribs and buffalo wings and nachos. A liter of draft beer goes for $25 pesos (~$1.83 for a LITER!). The band is made up of cruisers and is pretty darn good.

The crowd is mostly a bunch of geezers but we still have our twirly girls and twirly girls in training.

The really nice thing about this little hoedown is that it starts about 5:00. Might even be 4:00 but I couldn't say for sure. So, by 8:00, it's all over. Everyone has had enough to drink and eat, listened to lots of music and, if the spirit moved, shook their booty plenty. The standard line is that 9:00 is the cruisers' midnight and that's not far off. For us, it means we can have a full night out and still get back to the boat with plenty of time to watch an episode each of Tales of the Gold Monkey and The Wire. And still get to bed well before 11:00. Life is good.

Today, we took the bus down to the mercado in Centro, the old part of town.

Our goal was to buy some fabric at one of the two fabric stores we'd spotted on an earlier foray. We realized that we were running very short on cloth napkins so Lulu wanted fabric to make some more. From the mercado we decided to walk along the malecón to Carlos and Lucia's where we planned to have Cuban sandwiches for lunch. That turned out to be quite a walk. We had covered 6.5 miles by the time we reached the restaurant. Sitting down and having a brew felt really good.

I've read a lot of detective-type books over the years that were set in the southern US states. Naturally, the ones set in Florida occasionally mention Cuban sandwiches. Always on the prowl for good eats, I've always wanted to try one on for size. I had one in Salem (OR) once but it was just a ham and cheese sandwich on something like pancetta that was then squished flat. Tasted OK but was it authentic? I assumed not. Our sandwiches today were shredded chicken in a mild red sauce, ham, melted cheese, lettuce, onion, tomato, peppers and something that tasted a lot like chilli-pickle.

It was served on the same kind of bread they use for tortas. With fries on the side. It was very good. I didn't take a photo because, it didn't really look all that different from any other big sandwich you'd get at any decent restaurant. Tasted mighty good, though.

In order to make sure we had enough room to eat gumbo later tonight, we walked the rest of the way back to the marina, a total trip of around 8.7 miles. So, all of you who are familiar with Mazatlán, there it is: we walked from Centro to La Isla Marina at Marina Mazatlán. Not too shabby, eh?

Hasta luego.

12/27/2011 - Caldo de Res

2011-12-27T17:23:00.001-08:00

The last couple days have been stay-on-the-boat days. Coming across the Sea, we took on a LOT of water over the sides of the boat and through every possible leaking place whether known to us or not. And, since the bilge pump has a float switch that kept getting fouled by the oil absorbent pads, etc., we had it in the OFF position and just turned it on every now and again to pump out the accumulation. Needless to say, the bilge got kind of full a couple times. This resulted in our having a dirty bilge again in spite of the fact that Lulu just cleaned it a couple weeks ago. So, we've been working on getting it all cleaned up again.
In the process of cleaning the bilge, Lulu spotted a couple of fresh water leaks which I fixed today. We also rerouted the watermaker output line from the fresh water pump feed line to the tank vent line, thus eliminating a possible source of air in the suction line on the foot pump. Tomorrow I'll replace our float switch bilge pump with one that senses water level without using a float switch.

Yesterday, we made a major score. An announcement on the VHF said that a boat on the hard at the Singlar boat yard had a sailing rig for a PortaBote to give away for free. I beat feet over there and snagged it. Not many PortaBotes here in Mazatlán so I probably could have tarried a bit. Anyway, I schlepped the rig back to the boat. New, this thing costs something like $849.00 although it seems you can occasionally get one on Craig's List for $200.00. But this one was free and in great shape. Now I just have to figure out where I'm going to stash the parts.

But none of this has anything to do with Caldo de Res, does it?

Inspired by Tate and Dani's posting about gumbo, I decided to make either gumbo or caldo de res today. A trip to the grocery store nearest to the marina, Santa Fe, made the decision for me. They didn't have any kind of sausage, smoked or otherwise but they did have some beef. So, caldo de res it is. I'll get the gumbo ingredients at one of the bigger stores when we next take the bus to town.

Anyway, here's the recipe for Caldo de Res, an extremely rich Mexican-flavored beef stew.
BTW, I find that I originally posted this recipe back in January of this year. But, you now what? It's just that damn good.

Caldo de Res (Mexican Beef Stew) (pressure cooker recipe)

3 lbs beef cut into 1"cubes (you can use boneless chuck roast, top round, cross rib or any cheap cut of beef you happen to find)
3 cans beef broth or enough bouillon to make 4 cups.
1 can peeled diced tomatoes
1 can pinto beans or black beans
1/3 cup worcestershire sauce
1 package taco seasoning mix
1/2 onion, medium, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
2 carrots, quartered lengthwise and cut into 1/2" lengths
1 teaspoon cayenne or red pepper flakes
1/4 cup cilantro
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 cup red wine
salt and pepper
sour cream
salsa or hot sauce
2 avocados

- Add 1/3 of the beef broth to the pressure cooker (use meat rack). Add beef cubes, 1/3 of the taco seasoning, 2 tablespoons of the worcestershire sauce and salt and pepper to taste.
- Bring to operating pressure and then cook at pressure for 30 minutes. Depressurize and remove meat rack. Add remaining beef broth and worcestershire sauce, tomatoes, wine, onion, garlic, celery, carrots, remaining taco seasoning, cayenne or red pepper flakes, and cilantro.
- Bring back up t pressure and cook 2-3 minutes. Depressurize. Return to stove with lid on but w/o the weight. Simmer over low heat. If steady stream of steam begins to escape, remove lid, stir, and lower heat. Replace lid and continue to simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add beans and simmer an additional 10 minutes.
- Serve topped with sliced avocado, sour cream and salsa/hot sauce. Accompany with warm tortillas.

So good....

12/25/2011 -Feliz Navidad

2011-12-25T21:15:00.001-08:00

We had a really nice Christmas Eve dinner last night at Carlos & Lucia's Restaurant. We got there a little after 6:00. There were already a big group sitting at one long table and a couple of other couples sitting at other tables. We chose ours and ordered drinks. We ordered micheladas made with Clamato and salsa piquante. However, our waitress (and Carlos & Lucia's daughter) Jaquelín told us that they refer to them as Cubanos, since the family is Cuban and all. Whatever you call them, they were delicious.

It's a fairly small restaurant. Very cozy. They even had a guy singing. He had a great voice and had the volume just right so that it was not intrusive on one's conversation.

Early on, Carlos and Martin (at least we think that's his name) brought the pig out to show it off. Vegetarians beware. You might want to skip this next photo. Carnivores, you might want to click on it to blow it up.

It's not a very good photo but it does show that they lay the pig out very flat and cut the skin in strips before cooking. This allows the juices from the skin to douse all the meat equally and also ensures that all the meat is about the same distance from the fire and therefore cooks nice and evenly. The foil is to keep the ears from burning.

The first course was a cream of vegetable soup. It was very, very good and, on this chilly night, it's warmth was well-received. Pardon the photo. I have trouble remembering to snap a photo before I dig in.

We had our choice of roast pork or roast turkey or a bit of each. We, of course, opted for a bit of each. We also had a choice of applesauce or candied yams and we both opted for the yams. This next photo was again taken after we'd already dug in. I tried to get Lulu to put some of her food on my plate just to, you know, sort of fill it out for the photo. I swore I'd return t right after I took the picture but for some reason she didn't seem to want to do that. Go figure.

Starting in the 12:00 position and moving clockwise:

Candied yams: These were not exactly mashed but were definitely chopped up fine after cooking. Then they were mixed with brown sugar and butter (I think). They were really good.
Roast pork: The meat was exceptionally tender and juicy. I made myself take small bites so it wouldn't be gone too fast.
Roast turkey: Again, very tender and juicy. There was a mix of white and dark meat and much of it was shredded like pulled pork and just as tender and succulent.
Rice and beans: Jaquelín had a special name for this Cuban version but I don't remember what it was.
Dressing: This was a really good dressing that was heavy on the bread cubes and celery. It turns out it was Lucia's recipe and she was very proud of it. It tasted great.
Steamed vegetables: Carrots and zucchini. The dish was very tasty in that there was liberal use of garlic. Yum!
Cranberry sauce: Just your standard canned sauce. Still good, though. It's the cranberry sauce we all grew up on.
Fried(?) Plantain: Okay, I'll admit, I don't really care if I ever eat another plantain. A bit too dry and winter-squashy bland for my taste, but I mixed mine with a little cranberry sauce and it tasted just fine.

Once the main course was over, we had a choice of a pumpkin cake that was made off-site or their own homemade flan. We chose the flan. There's not that much to say about flan. It was custardy and sweet and delicious.

The staff is primarily made up of family. Carlos and Lucia are the mom and dad, Jaquelín is their daughter and Roberto, their son, tended bar. Not sure how Martin fits in but he seems to fit in just fine so I suspect he's family as well. Sorry about this blurry photo. Sometimes digital cameras are just not to be trusted.

Left to right: a guest, Carlos, Jaquelín, Roberto, Lucia, Martin. And, although I didn't get their names, here's a shot of two of the behind the scenes heroes:

There was one more lady back in the kitchen but they were too busy to be able to get together and pose for a shot.

All in all, we had a really great time. The family made us feel so welcome and they were so appreciative that we chose their restaurant as the place to have our holiday meal. We will definitely be going back. For one thing, these folks are Cuban and they serve a Cuban sandwich. I've read about Cuban sandwiches for years in various books and now is my chance to have a genuine authentic version.

Today we slept in late, had a leisurely breakfast, Skyped the kids and our parents, and then went on about a 5 mile walk to check out some grocery stores. A fine Christmas as far as we're concerned. Hope yours was too.

Oops

2011-12-24T17:03:00.000-08:00

Those of you who receive this blog via e-mail, the Christmas Eve one
had the photos out of order. Please dump the e-mail copy you got and
get the latest, greatest at:

http://www.yodersafloat.blogspot.com/2011/12/12242011-christmas-eve-day-before.html

Thanks.

12/24/2011 - Christmas Eve & the day before

2011-12-24T15:51:00.001-08:00

First, let me give you a little feel for what the marina we're in looks like. This isn't the marina itself, but the hotel grounds that are associated with the marina:

Yesterday, we finally left the marina and headed out for a walk. The marinas are way the hell and gone on the north end of town but we decided to see what, if anything, we could walk to. The trip didn't start out too promising as we walked by the fronts of hotels and a golf course. But, eventually, we started getting down toward the beach where there were still a lot of hotels but there were also restaurants and stores. Mostly it looked like lots of this:

We had walked about 3.8 miles when we decided to turn back. For those familiar with this end of Mazatlán, we walked almost to MacDonald's. We decided that we really deserved a bite to eat on the return trip and we'd noticed a couple of places advertising $10 peso tacos and 2 for 1 cervezas so we picked on of them to stop at.

Carlos & Lucia's turned out to be a great stop. We started with 3 tacos each (carne asada, pollo, pescado). Those went down so good that we decided to have a few more. Lulu had 2 pescado and 1 marlin and I had 2 marlin and 1 pescado. Hey, at $10 pesos each, we could afford to be pigs. And, truth be told, you don't really get all that much meat on a $10 peso taco on the tourist strip. But they were tasty. Carlos was a really affable guy. Came out and talked to us about the fish they use, etc. His daughter was equally friendly and they both spoke excellent English. While we were chillin', I noticed a sign

for a Christmas Eve dinner. They were serving your choice of turkey, piglet or both along with all the sides and homemade flan for dessert for $200 pesos ($14.65 US) each. That's not a huge steal but it's not bad. Having no other plans, we decided to partake. So we made reservations for 6:00-ish tonight. I'll let you know tomorrow how it was. BTW, we logged just under 8 miles walking yesterday.

Today, Christmas Eve, we decided to ride the bus down to the old section of town and just have ourselves a preliminary look. I suspect we'll spend a lot of time down there during our stay in Mazatlán.

We disembarked at the central market. Like the mercados in La Paz, this is a large roofed area containing booths selling produce, meats, cheeses, souvenirs, clothes, jewelry, etc. But this mercado is much larger than the two in La Paz.There are 2 different buses at work here. The "green" bus is air-conditioned and a little "nicer" and costs $9.50 pesos per person per trip (about 70¢). The other bus is not air-conditioned, is smaller, and is a bit more ragged but, at $6.50 (49¢), who's complaining? As luck would have it, the first bus to stop was a green bus. We climbed aboard and headed downtown.

This shot doesn't really do justice to how crowded it really was. You could spend hours in there just gawking at stuff if the crowds didn't bother you. Upstairs is the "food court" and, although we didn't try any of the offerings today, we will be back. Probably many times.

When we'd finally had enough of the market for now, we decided to just wander around town for awhile. The scenery was great.

Unfortunately, my camera's battery went dead before I was finished seeing stuff to take pictures of. Oh well, like I said, I suspect we'll spend a lot of time wandering around down in Viejo Mazatlán.

Now we're just cooling our jets while we wait to head back down to the hotel district for Christmas Eve dinner with Carlos and Lucia and who knows who all else?

Hope y'all have a very Merry Christmas.

12/22/2011 - Chillin' in the gringo end of town

2011-12-22T18:01:00.001-08:00

Normally, we prefer to anchor out rather than tie up to the dock in a marina. It's cheaper and much more private. Plus, we're reasonably adept at anchoring so there's little stress, unlike when docking in a crowded marina. However, once in awhile, for one reason or another, you just have to bite the bullet and take the slip. We got so salt-encrusted on our way over from La Paz that the boat really needed a fresh water bath. We were sorely in need of showers ourselves.

We called our friend Mike (s/v Tortue) to see if there were any slips open where he was at, La Isla Mazatlán Marina. Turns out that by the next day there would probably be an opening and, sure enough, there was.

So, Tuesday night was our last night with this kind of sunset:

By 1100 Wednesday morning, we got confirmation that slip was available so we upped anchor and headed out. We rounded La Isla Crestón which guards the port side (going in) of the canal to the old harbor.

The lighthouse on top is El Faro, reported to be the second highest manned lighthouse in the world at 477'. There's a trail to the top and I guess you know we'll be hiking it.

Continuing on, we could have passed between these two rocks, Hermano del Norte and Hermano del Sur. There's maybe 1/4 mile between them which should be more than ample.

But I'm very cautious when it comes to tearing out the bottom of my boat so, even though the charts showed no obstructions, I opted to swing around them. Added maybe 15 minutes to the trip which, it turned out, mattered not one whit. Besides, they look a lot closer together from this angle:

Scenery like this stretched all along the way from the anchorage to the marina.

And, what the heck is that thing between those two Moorish-looking structures?

Must be M for Mazatlán.

Only one scary thing happened during the trip. There had been a tour boat sort of paralleling us along the beach for awhile. All of a sudden, he changes course and is headed directly for us. I'm watching, thinking, "this ain't right", but his relative bearing is not changing which means a collision is pretty much guaranteed. According to my reading of the rules of the road, he had the right-of-way since we were both motoring and he was approaching my starboard (green light) side. I slowed down but it didn't seem to matter. He was still headed right for us. I had nowhere to go to starboard as it got really shallow fast in that direction. I can't believe this. He's still headed right for us. I pulled out the air horn and let out a long loud blast, scaring the crap out of Lulu in the process. No matter, still he came but at least now I KNEW he knew we were there. And then, he turns to pass across our stern. The tourists waved and took pictures. I guess that's all he wanted but it would have been nice to maybe give me a heads-up on the radio before scaring the crap out of me. Then again, maybe that was part of the plan, too. Anyway, I was so shook I didn't even get a photo.

When we were almost ready to enter the channel that leads to the marinas, we got a call on the VHF from Patrick on s/v Deep Playa. He'd left the anchorage before us and I asked him to let me know if anything came up that we needed to know. He called to report that the dredge was working in the channel and it would be at least an hour before we'd be able to enter. We both chose to drop anchor in the lee of Isla Pájaros and wait. Another boat, s/v Serenity, chose to just mill around under power slowly while waiting.

While we were stopped, we had a parasailor fly over a couple of times. On this one, we could hear one of the passengers yelling, "MMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!" Must have been having the time of her life.

Finally we got the word on the VHF that the channel would be open for a few minutes, long enough for the waiting boats to get in. We hoisted the anchor and headed in behind Deep Playa and Serenity. The rest is just details. The channel is narrow and narrower still when half of it is taken up by a dredge. Our slip was sort of hard to find but, with some marina employees giving us directions from the dock, we managed to find it. And, even better, we got docked without much, if any stress.

Wednesday night turns out to be Jam night at the little palapa at the top of the stairs. After showers, we headed over to listen to some blues, drink a few brews and eat some wings.

So, here's why we're in a marina:
1.) wash the boat and ourselves
2.) have a good safe place to leave the boat while we explore Mazatlán and possibly the surrounding area.

The plan is to spend 2 months in the marina, exploring the area, and then to move to the old harbor anchorage and spend a month or so exploring Old Mazatlán. By then it'll be getting nigh on to time to head back to La Paz.

Oh, and the thing about the "gringo end of town". Mazatlán is divided into 3 zones: Viejo (Old) Mazatlán, Zona Dorada (Golden Zone), and Nueva (New) Mazatlán. The Zona Dorada is where the marinas are located and caters to tourists, although obviously not all tourists are gringos. The anchorage, where we'll spend our third month, is located in Viejo Mazatlán.

Today we washed the boat and the engine room and started getting a beginning lay of the land.

Oh yeah, I must mention that no one commented on my reference to "palapas went screaming by" in my blog entry a day or so ago. Lulu caught it. Obviously I meant "pangas went sceaming by".

12/20/2011 - Our new BFF

2011-12-20T13:51:00.001-08:00

I just have to tell you how happy we are with our new best friend. That would be our Cape Horn Varuna windvane. We bought this thing a long time ago when the Westsail Owners' Association managed to get a great rate on a group buy. Then, it sat in the box for close to a year before we were in a position to actually install it. I mounted the unit when we were in the yard in Newport back in 2009. The very few times I attempted to use it, I had problems. The steering oar is set up to break away if it hits an obstruction. Normally, when not in use, the oar rides upright out of the water as it's been on Siempre Sabado almost since day one. The problem was that when I'd try to lower the oar while we were tooling along at 4 or 5 knots, I'd always lose control and it would just drop down into the water. Well, going from a dead stop to hitting the water at 4-5 knots is apparently a lot like hitting an obstruction. The paddle would come loose and trail behind the boat by its safety line. The unit is mounted so low and is out away from the stern far enough that putting it back on while underway was way too difficult. I'd just fish it back on board and tie it to the upright mounting tube. When we'd get somewhere and stop, I'd reattach it only to have the same thing happen again the next time. Got to use it for a very short time once just out of Ensenada but I didn't know what I was doing and I had shortened the control lines too much. And then, the paddle came off.

Determined to get some use out of this expensive piece of equipment, I tightened the shock cords set-up that holds the oar to the mechanism. Then I re-read the installation instructions, bought some new line and re-rigged it correctly. This time out, I was determined to use it.

Our first full day underway between La Paz and Mazatlán, I got my chance to try it out. The weather was pretty calm with winds of about 5-7 knots and gently rolling seas. I slowed the boat down and then carefully lowered the oar into the water with a boat hook. Oops. First try was a bust since I had lowered it the wrong direction, causing the control lines to wrap around the horizontal tube. I carefully raised the oar again and lowered it on the correct side. So far, so good. I then aimed the vane so that it was dead into the wind, hooked the control lines to the tiller and disengaged the autopilot. Hey! It's actually steering the boat! It was yawing either side of the rhumb line a little more than I cared for so I tightened up the line that restricts the yaw a bit. Doesn't track quite as straight as the autopilot but it tracks pretty darn straight and doesn't use any electricity doing it.

That night and the next day, we found out just what a great piece of machinery it is. The seas were in a nasty mood. Not the kind of conditions that my Simrad TP-32 autopilot had signed up to work under. I've seen it before in these conditions: it gets really hard to keep on course and the pilot is always one step behind and finally just gives an alarm and essentially throws in the towel. Then it's hand-steering for us. Not so with the windvane. It just kept on steering no matter what was thrown at it. Light winds: no sweat; moderate wind: nothing to it; flat seas: easy-peasy; rough seas: so what? We didn't get to test it in heavy winds and really big seas (thank goodness) but I have no worries that it'll handle them just fine.

I didn't really appreciate what a tough job it had until I relieved it of duty as we approached our anchorage. I took over the helm and found that it was really hard to keep the boat on course. It took a lot of force to work that tiller against the prevailing conditions. The windvane had been making it look easy. Now I really wish I'd have gotten it together enough to have it to rely on when we were coming down the US coast. That first night out of Newport, when we had to hand-steer, would have been SO much easier.

Anyway, here's to our newest bestest friend.

note: In the photo, the control lines are still way too long. I wasn't about to cut them until I knew for sure how long to leave them. I did cut them and whip the ends during the trip over, however.

12/20/2011 - Taking it easy in Mazatlán

2011-12-20T13:21:00.001-08:00

Man, was it nice to sleep through the night last night! I think we hit the rack about 10 PM. I slept until 6:30 this morning and Lulu made it to about 8:45. Completely missed the morning net. I could have listened but I was so engrossed in catching up on blogs that the 8:00 hour came and went without me even realizing it.

We are currently anchored at the Isla de Piedra anchorage. There's a beach to the north of us that is apparently primarily a tourist area. Lots of palapas screaming by pulling those big floating bananas with a bunch of screaming riders. A sightseeing helicopter just flew over. Lots of Sea-doos, too. But, we like it anyway. It's sunny and warm-ish although no warmer than La Paz was during the day.

We haven't even assembled the dinghy yet and probably won't unless we're here longer than we expect to be. Right now we're just enjoying sitting still and taking it easy. Our friend Mike from s/v Tortue is keeping an eye out for an open slip for us at Marina Mazatlán. One may come up tomorrow if the boat that's in it gets their new canvas in time to take off as scheduled. But, this being Mexico, that's pretty unlikely so we may be here a few more days. Fine with us. We have plenty of food and beer aboard, the composter is (well, was) empty and the watermaker runs just fine although we did fill our water tank before leaving the marina in La Paz. We have a good internet connection, the batteries are topped off, the solar panels are pumping out watts and we have generator gas on board just in case. What else could we need at the moment?

12/20/2011 - Position Reports

2011-12-20T06:14:00.001-08:00

Check out: ShipTrak

This is the original link I gave you and corresponds with my HAM license. The other link I mentioned the other day ties to my Ship Station License. Apparently, when I was on Keith's boat and set his SSB up for Sailmail I used the WDE8358 number, probably because he only had a ship station license so wasn't allowed to use HAM frequencies. I set the program on my computer up using my HAM license since my first attempts at HF e-mail were via Winlink, which is on a HAM frequency.

You an also find us on YotReps.

Anyway, note that one of my reports put us out in the Pacific. Apparently, when typing in 109 degrees, it matters if you screw up and actually type 119 degrees. Picky, picky.

12/19/2011 - We made it!

2011-12-19T17:16:00.001-08:00

We arrived in Mazatlán at 1600. We're not actually IN Mazatlán, rather, we're anchored in the Storm Island Anchorage behind Isla Cardones. It's still Mazatlán, just not inside Mazatlán harbor.

Here are the dry statistics:

Total nautical miles: 253
Total hours underway: 54
Average speed: 4.68 knots
Engine hours: 49.8
Hours spent sailing: 4.2
Hours spent motorsailing: 27.5

Current position: N23°10.93' W106°24.35'

Now for the ugly details:

As I've already written, yesterday started out just fine. Got my new best friend, the Cape Horn windvane working, and even got some pure sailing in for awhile. However, about mid-afternoon, the wind started to pick up a bit. I thought about reefing the main but felt it was still a little premature. I KNOW that you're supposed to reef as soon as you think about it! I KNOW THAT!!! But I didn't and I doubt that I'm the only one guilty of that. Anyway, the wind built a little more and I finally decided to rouse Lulu so we could put a reef in it.

For those not familiar with the terminology, "reefing" is cutting down on the size of the sail so that there's less of it for the wind to act on. It's not incredibly difficult but it does require a number of steps to be followed. The first step, and the most troubling to me is: turn the boat dead into the wind. You reef when the wind gets too strong for the amount of sail you're flying. So, turning into the wind at this point is going to make the apparent wind across the deck really scream. Plus, turning into the wind usually also means turning into the seas. So, now you have the wind screaming at you head on, plus your crashing into head seas with the bow alternately rising way up in the air and then crashing back down into the water. And someone (me) has to be at the front of the mast for the procedure. Add to all this mess, you have to lower the main partway, tie in a reef, and then raise it back up. All while Lulu is trying desperately to keep the boat pointed into the wind. The same wind and seas that try to make the boat turn one way or the other away from the wind. Meanwhile, having neglected to roll up the jib before we tried this, it's flogging itself to death behind me as I face the front of the mast. And then, it gets caught in all the wires and gets backwinded which allows the wind to push us off the "dead into the wind" position. Aye-yi-yi. Meanwhile the wind is screaming through your ears, the boat is alternately climbing to the heavens and then plunging into the abyss, and your mouth is as dry as dust.

Didn't take too long for me to throw in the towel and holler, "Let's just take the damn thing down!" Took even less time for Lulu to agree. So, down came the main. We rolled up the jib, set the engine rpms to 2000 and turned back the way we were going. The downside, besides having to admit defeat, is that we now don't have a steadying sail set. As it turns out, I'm not sure it would have mattered, but still.

The wind didn't turn out to be the worst part. No, the worst part was the sea state. First the swells were only 2-3 feet but they were quite close together and hitting us on the port quarter, making for a very bumpy ride. As the night wore on the seas built to at least 5-6 feet and still too close together. How bumpy and uncomfortable was it? Glad you asked. Imagine you're trying to get dressed and 3 or 4 huge bullies keep shoving you around. You never know which one's going to shove next so you can't really brace for it. And they're merciless. Just because you happen to have your foul weather pants about halfway up and you need both hands to complete the task doesn't mean they'll stop shoving until you're done. No, they just keep shoving you. And it doesn't stop once you're dressed. No, they shove you relentlessly ALL THE FREAKIN' TIME!!! The only thing you can do is plop yourself down on a cushion (they'll shove you mid-plop) and hang on. This at least gives the shoves a little less traction. But the shoves still keep coming. Everything you do is a major chore. And, to top it off, trying to do stuff during the shoving promotes nausea. Are you beginning to see why I said that this part of the trip was no fun?

Lulu, trooper that she is, still managed to heat up food and coffee water, and make sandwiches and generally keep us fed. Mostly she kept me fed as she usually didn't feel good enough to eat anything. And, even though she felt like crap, she still stood all her watches.

And speaking of watches, during last night' watches, one of the bullies' friends joined them and, whenever you least expected it, would throw a bucket of salt water at you.

Yeah, we didn't enjoy the ride starting from about 3 PM yesterday until we stopped at 4 PM today. Oh, this morning when the sun was shining down and the windvane was doing such a good job and I got the staysail flying to steady the boat and add a little speed, then it was almost enjoyable, IF THESE FREAKIN' BULLIES WOULD JUST QUIT IT!!!

So there you have it. May have been our worst passage ever, except for our first day out of Newport, OR. Might have been worse ones, but if there were, we've blocked them. But, we made it. We're in Mazatlán and ready to get started exploring new territory. We may move to a marina for a little while as everything needs to be washed down.

Okay, enough of my whining.

12/19/2011 - This isn't that much fun!

2011-12-19T09:38:00.000-08:00

This is just a quickie to send a position report and to let y'all know we're fine. The seas have been miserable since yesterday afternoon. It was a long, wet night. Details later. It's 10:30 local time and we're about 25 miles from Mazatlan. Current ETA is about 4:30 this afternoon. More when we get there.

Hasta luego.

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12/18/2011 - Day 2 begins1

2011-12-18T09:24:00.001-08:00

It's just a little after 10 AM. We've been on this trip for 24 hours. We've covered approximately 111 miles in that time. Up until about 45 minutes ago, it's been a motor-sailing trip. But we finally got some winds that were blowing enough to move us along at a decent speed. We're on a broad reach with winds of 5-7 knots on our port quarter and averaging a little under 4 knots of boat speed. Probably could do better if I knew how to sail. Ahhhh, details.

Big victory today. I finally got the Cape Horn windvane steering system up and running. Just in time, too, since the conditions are the kind that the autopilot doesn't like very much (wind and swells on the quarter that cause the boat to corkscrew). The windvane is doing a great job. Yaws a bit more than I'm used to with the autopilot, but, overall, we're on course. It does way better than I do when I'm hand-steering.

Swells are 1-2 feet out of the north-northwest and coming about every 5-6 seconds.

After I relieved Lulu on watch at about 0730, she fixed me breakfast and then hit the rack. Between the Stugeron, the rocking motion of the boat and the fact that the only sound is the hissing of the seas gong by the hull, she's hopefully sleeping pretty good.

We're out here in the middle of it now. No land in sight anywhere. We saw a couple of contacts on the AIS screen during the night but no one came near enough to actually see. Well, there was one passenger ferry that passed us but that was pretty early on. A cargo ship crossed in front of us a little while ago but even he was over 7 miles away. Pretty empty out here.

OK, time to upload this and send a position report as well. 132 nautical miles to go.

Later.

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12/17/2011 - On our way

2011-12-18T09:24:00.000-08:00

We got underway from the marina precisely at 10 AM. It's now 7:45 PM. No wind all day but the seas are nice and flat so it seems a fair trade-off. So far we've averaged about 4.5 knots with the mainsail hoisted and the engine running. We've passed Cerralvo Island so there should be no more course changes until we arrive at Mazatlán. Not much to do on watch except read, fill in the log every hour and look around occasionally. We're doing 3-hour watches and I'm taking the first one: 2000-2300. Lulu's been trying Stugeron for seasick prevention. It seems to be keeping any queasiness at bay but she's been sleeping all day because that's one of the side effects. She gets slammed by side effects and I seem to just skate by unscathed. Go figure.

Anyway, we're on our way. I'll post this later but I wanted to write something now since I want to include a position report anyway.

-Steve

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12/16/2011 - Itchin' to go

2011-12-16T20:35:00.001-08:00

After looking at several weather sites this morning, I decided that tomorrow is the day to leave La Paz. It's supposed to start out quite calm tomorrow and that's fine as I don't mind motoring out of the bay if that's what I have to do to get a calm trip through the San Lorenzo Channel. By tomorrow evening the winds should pick up some and then continue to build through Sunday and Monday. But that's okay as that's what will push us down to Mazatlán. And, by starting out when it's calm, we should avoid most of the big seas as they won't have had any time to build up yet. By the time the winds and seas hit their projected peak (Monday night), we should either be there or be damn close.

We don't plan an early morning departure. As long as we're past the northern tip of Cerralvo Island before dark, I'll be happy. Not planning any stops, just a straight push to Mazatlán. If we average 4 knots and leave at 10 AM, we'll arrive at 10 PM on Monday. Rather not do that, as we don't like getting places, especially new places, in the dark. If we average 4.5 knots, we'd arrive at 4 PM Monday. Much better. If we luck out and average 5 knots, we'd make it by 10 AM on Monday. Amazing how much difference 1/2 knot can make. If we really drag tail and only average 3.5 knots, we'd arrive at 7 AM on Tuesday, which is still better than 10 PM the night before. So, wish us luck and a fast passage (4.5 to 5 knots, por favor).

Okay, the next dispatch will probably via SSB radio and Sailmail. I'll update our position along the way. If you want to follow our progress check out ShipTrak.

Adios.

12/15/2011 - Bottom cleaning

2011-12-15T15:46:00.001-08:00

We're still getting ready to head to Mazatlán. Yesterday we pulled the dinghy out of the water so we could clean her up and stow her. You'd never know that Lulu did a major bottom cleaning on the dinghy less than 2 months ago.

The barnacle build-up was epic.

We scraped and scraped and then Lulu attacked what was left with a scrubber. Finally, the bottom was as clean as it was going to get and the dink was folded up for the first time in 8 months.

Now she's all stowed away and ready for the trip across the Sea.

In spite of some pretty darn good anti-fouling bottom paint, Siempre Sabado was also experiencing a pretty good growth of barnacles and sea slime. This time, however, we opted for the easy way out. We called Clark from Paradise Found Dive Services and let him do the dirty work. I tried to do a link to his Facebook page but, as is usually the case when I attempt anything Facebook, I failed. But, if you know how to handle Facebook, he said that he's at Facebook/Clark Waters or, you can email him at paradisefoundservices@gmail.com. Anyway, he spent an hour or better scraping and scrubbing.

He also checked the prop zinc and the Frigoboat keel cooler zincs and declared them all OK. He said that, except for the waterline where the bottom paint has come off, the rest of the bottom paint looks good to go for another year or so. Maybe longer if we'd clean it more often. Since the bottom was so crusty, he had to charge me extra but still it was $38 (US) well spent.

And speaking of cleaning, I would NOT want the job of cleaning this panga:

Anyway, little by little we're getting ready to go. Lulu did a shopping trip today for some odds and ends. We'll make a couple more beer runs and then top off the water tank on either Saturday or Sunday and then head out to anchor and wait for our window.

12/14/2011 - Christmastime in La Paz

2011-12-14T17:58:00.001-08:00

Just looking around, it's pretty hard to believe that Christmas is only 11 days away. I took a walk around town yesterday to get a few photos of what Christmas looks like down here. There are a few minor decorations in some of the store windows and you see an occasional Christmas tree.

We saw some trees for sale at City Club that were from very near our old stomping grounds. Weird to look at a tag on a tree in La Paz and see it's from Sublimity, Oregon. Anyway, Christmas just doesn't seem to be as big a deal here as in the States. Of course, part of why it might seem that way is that we don't have a TV so we don't know if they experience the same bombardment of Christmas commercials here as we did up north.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that Christmas down here is a completely un-commercialized affair. It definitely isn't.

This Coca-Cola tree is a backdrop for an upcoming concert on the malecón which is apparently sponsored by Coke. But that's not the half of it. Starting last week sometime, the vendor booths moved in downtown.

For a good 2-3 weeks, part of the streets downtown are blocked off from vehicle traffic and are lined with plywood and blue tarp booths selling what can only be described as pure junk. Cheap toys and clothes and lots of them. Oh, a few of the booths are just extensions of the stores behind them and they're selling whatever they sell in the store and a few are selling handicrafts. But mostly they're selling Barbie dolls and cheap guitars and stretch pants made to look like really tight jeans. On the plus side, there are more food vendors downtown during this time than there usually are. You can even get corn dogs (be still my heart).

There were some ladies selling fund-raising stuff on the zócalo:

And there was a band:

As you can see, the band is made up of people of all ages so I'm not sure whether it's a club, a class, or what. Can you guess what song they're playing in this photo? Look at their fingering closely. Got it? If you said "Obla-Dee-Obla-Dah", you're right! Good job.

So what are our plans for Christmas? We don't have any and it feels great. If nothing else comes up, we'll probably go out for dinner somewhere. After all, we should be in Mazatlán by then and we'll have a whole new city of eateries to explore.

BTW, you may have noticed that I've made a point of including the written accent in Mazatlán in recent blogs. That's to reinforce to me (and to you too) that it's NOT pronounced MAH-zot-lon but rather mah-zot-LON. I've been pronouncing it wrong for so long that I'm having a tough time adjusting and I need these constant reminders.

12/13/2011 - This one's for Raoul

2011-12-13T07:36:00.001-08:00

Since no one came to my defense after Raoul hassled me about being a little tiny bit behind in blogging, maybe it's time to write something. You've got to remember that, when we aren't going anywhere, life just sort of moves on day by day with very little to write about. Just like your lives at home. But, I'll give it a shot anyway.

It's been cool down here lately. No so cool that I have to wear socks but, when the wind is blowing, long pants and a sweatshirt can feel pretty good. It's probably in the high 60s to low 70s during the day and down to the low 60s with an occasional dip into the 50s at night. Yeah, yeah, I know. You really feel sorry for us. During the day, once you get away from the waterfront where you can't feel the wind, it's still pretty darn warm most of the time.

The social whirl has eased up some since our friends Aimee, Frank, and Rudi flew off to explore the mainland for a couple of weeks. However, our new friend John, an Australian bloke aboard m/v Storm Bay, had a little gathering Friday night. He's getting ready to put the boat in storage and fly home for the winter (well, it'll be summer for him once he gets there) so he had a bunch of folks over to his made-for-entertaining boat. Finger food, beer, margaritas, etc. We had a good time. However, we didn't eat before we went and, unless you really make a pig of yourself, finger food doesn't really fill you up, so we stopped at Bandido's for a couple burgers on the way home. Eating dinner at 10 PM, just like real Mexicans.

Tonight we're going back over to Casa Buena. We're having a pre-Christmas dinner sort of like the pre-Thanksgiving one we had there when Cody & Scott visited. Our friends Zac &
Susi (s/v Wendy Ellen) are hosting. Zac's folks are visiting from the Reno area. We're taking a Chinese tofu salad with spicy peanut dressing. It was supposed to be Chinese chicken salad but Susi's a vegetarian.

You might think that finding tofu in Mexico would be impossible. And it probably would be in Loreto or someplace else smaller than La Paz. But, here we only had to look in 2 stores. Found it in a display of "exotic" stuff (Italian salami, American all-beef weiners, etc.) at the new Mega store. Things that seemed to us to be considerably less exotic than tofu proved almost, almost impossible to find. We haven't seen ricotta cheese in the stores. However, I happened across a recipe online for making your own. Looked pretty easy so Lulu jumped at the chance to try it out. She mainly needed it for some bruschetta she was making for a going away get-together on s/v Island Seeker last week. Anyway, there was a lot of it left and what do you do with ricotta? Well, you make lasagna of course. Okay, off to the store to get lasagna noodles as well as some ingredients for the salad.

We managed to get almost everything we needed either at Mega or Chedraui. However, a few key things were missing: dried basil, lasagna noodles, fresh ginger, and beef base. Oh and we were also looking for a large (1 liter) bottle of Microdyne. In the produce section of most of the stores they sell these little bottles of a bactericide called Microdyne. A few drops in a gallon of water makes a disinfecting solution to wash vegetables with. We also use a little in our water tank when taking on dock water, just in case. It's either iodine or bromine based. Chlorine isn't good for aluminum water tanks. Anyway, we wanted to find a larger bottle than the little bitty ones. We'd been told they sell it at City Club but that's way the hell and gone the other side of town. Oh, we've walked there and probably will again, but, it'd be nice to find it a bit closer.

Anyway, couldn't find lasagna noodles, beef base or basil. They had every other kind of pasta you can imagine, but no lasagna. We got some egg noodles and figured we'd make a lasagna-like casserole. However, once we got back to the boat, we discovered that we still had just enough lasagna noodles left for one batch. But beef base? Forget it. If I wanted chicken base I could have my pick of about a thousand different packages made by about 3 different manufacturers. But beef? No dice. Fortunately, Lulu had just opened our last jar so we're not in dire need yet. Basil, however, we couldn't find. But you want oregano? You can find bags and bags and bags of oregano. Pretty easy to find thyme. Rosemary is a little more elusive. We even found fennel. But basil just wasn't to be found. Lulu found something called "Pesto Seasoning" which was mostly basil so she used that and her meat sauce suffered not one bit as a result.

Yesterday, we were downtown and stopped in at the Aramburo market. This is a much smaller grocery store but is reasonably well-stocked. Guess what we found. That's right, lasagna noodles, fresh ginger root, beef bullion, and big bottles of Microdyne. You just never know. Simple shopping is always an adventure down here. We finally found basil at a little organic shop downtown (El Sabor de Baja).

Finally, here's a shot of my new favorite taco stand:

So far all I've had are the cerdo de chile morita tacos but I've felt no need to branch out. These are tacos filled with pork cooked in a spicy sauce, a lot like chile colorado. Dress them up with a little cilantro and you're good to go. Sunday, I introduced Lulu to these gems. In the little condiment bins there was something that looked like very finely chopped onion mixed with extremely finely chopped carrots or not-quite-ripe tomatoes. Lulu piled some on her taco and I followed suit. As I was adding a second small scoop, the proprietor looked alarmed and told me that was "Habanera!" Ohhhh. Well, not one to back down from a chile challenge, I resisted the urge to scrape any of the habaneras off. They were plenty hot but the only time I was uncomfortable was once when I inhaled through my nose while I had a mouthful of taco. The habanera fumes almost melted my sinuses! But, within a few seconds, the toxic fumes had passed and I was back to enjoying a nice mellow burn. These are excellent tacos with or without the habaneras.

Okay, that's going to have to be it for today. Happy now, Raoul?

12/8/2011 - Getting ready to go

2011-12-08T17:00:00.001-08:00

Our moorage at Marina del Palmar is up on December 18. That means we have up to 10 days left to get our various dockside-type projects done. However, we don't have that many left to do. We finished one of the most important ones today.

When we were sailing across from Isla San Francisco to San Evaristo last spring, we hit a patch where we were taking a fair bit of water over the bow. Didn't think much about it since that's certainly happened many times before. However, that time, when we got ready to crawl into bed for the night, we found the bedding was wet. All we could figure is that the caulking between the caprail and the hull was pretty much worn out and ineffective. Water got in under the caprail, ran down the inside of the hull and, as some of it seeped between the ceiling boards in the v-berth, the bedding just proceeded to wick the moisture on out. So, a priority job has been to remove the old caulking and recaulk. Didn't need to bother during the summer since it was always hot and dry and the seas were never big when we were sailing on them. But, we're likely to get some seas on our upcoming crossing to Mazatlan so it was definitely time to do the job.

Removing the old caulk went pretty fast with a screwdriver drug along the crack. There were a lot of big dry chunks that came out. Behind that, in most places, I could feel that the old caulking was still somewhat pliant. Dug out as much as we could, then Lulu wiped the whole area to be caulked down with acetone to make sure there were no oily residues to screw up the job.

We started with the port side day before yesterday. I squeezed the caulk in and Lulu came behind and smoothed it out and wiped up the excess. One side was plenty for one day. That squeeze handle gets very hard to squeeze after awhile and the boat yoga positions are nothing short of tiring. We finished the starboard side today.

Armed with only a broken popsicle stick and a rag, Lulu managed to make my sometimes considerably less than stellar job look downright neat.

Other jobs include epoxying a couple of unneeded screw holes in the tiller and the caprail, change the engine oil, finish varnishing the bowsprit (another couple of coats should do it), fill the diesel jugs, and clean the bottom of the dinghy prior to stowing it on deck. There are a couple of minor jobs as well but none that would keep us here.

The crossing to Mazatlan is about 240 miles from La Paz. We need to grab a weather window between northers. Once a norther calms down, they say you need to wait another day until the seas calm down unless you like a really bumpy ride. Then it's time to go if another isn't predicted immediately following. The last few northers we've had have lasted a long time and were spaced very close together and there's another coming this weekend. With that in mind, we're trying to get our stuff done so we can split as soon as we get a good window, whether our moorage is up or not.

So, a couple projects to go and we are outa here.

12/7/2011 - Anniversary

2011-12-07T17:32:00.001-08:00

It was one year ago today that Lulu and I arrived in La Paz. Seems like a good time to review the year and see just how long we sat in any one place, how often we were in a marina vs. anchored, etc.

12/7/2010-12/13/2010: Arrived in La Paz and dropped the hook at the "Virtual Marina". This is, in fact, simply anchoring in a area that costs money. In return we received dinghy dock privileges, and access to garbage, showers and bathrooms.

At anchor: 7 days

12/14/2010- 1/13/2011: Tied to the dock at Marina Costa Baja.

Marina: 30 days

1/14/2011 - 2/8/2011: At anchor off the malecón, La Paz. Enduring norther after norther, possibly dragging anchor, and working on my transmission.

At anchor: 26 days

2/9/2011 - 4/8/2011: Tied to the dock at Marina del Palmar, La Paz doing a bunch of maintenance chores.

Marina: 59 days

4/9/2011- 4/19/2011: Anchored off the malecón, La Paz

At anchor: 11 days
In La Paz: 133 days

4/20/2011 - 5/15/2011: Cruising "the islands". During this time we anchored every night. We spent time at Bahía Falsa (2 nights), Bahía San Gabriel (2 nights), Ensenada Grande (5 nights), Isla San Francisco (4 nights), San Evaristo (4 nights), Timbabiche (4 nights), Punta San Telmo (1 night). At this point the exhaust mixing elbow on the engine crapped out and we had to return to La Paz to make repairs and await a new mixing elbow. On the way back we hit: San Evaristo (1 night), and Ensenada Grande (1 night).

At anchor: 26 nights

5/16/2011 - 6/2/2011: Anchored La Paz.

At anchor: 18 days

6/3/2011 - 6/14/2011: Cruising the islands again. Anchorages: Puerta Balandra (1 night), Ensenada Grande (1 night), San Evaristo (5 nights), Puerto Los Gatos (1 night), and Bahía Agua Verde (4 nights)

At anchor: 12 nights

6/15/2011-8/21/2011: Moored at Puerto Escondido. Mooring is slightly different than anchoring in that we use someone else's "anchor" instead of our own. However, since it's completely different than being tied to a dock and no services are available, I'm counting it the same as anchoring. During this period, we returned to Oregon for 3 weeks but we were gone from the boat a total of 4 weeks.

At anchor: 68 days

8/22/2011 - 9/3/2011: Moored in the "Waiting Room" at Puerto Escondido.

At anchor: 13 days

9/4/2011 - 10/5/2011: Anchored at Ensenada Blanca, also known as Bahía Candaleros.

At anchor: 32 days

10/6/2011 - 10/13/2011: Anchored in "The Ellipse", Puerto Escondido

At anchor: 8 days

10/14/2011: Anchored at Ensenada Blanca on our way back to La Paz.

At anchor: 1 day

10/15/2011: Enroute to La Paz, starting with an overnight run.

10/16/2011: Anchored at Ensenada Grande

At anchor: 1 night

10/17/2011: Anchored off the end of Marina del Palmar, La Paz.

At anchor: 1 night

10/18/2011 - 12/6/2011: Tied to the dock at Marina del Palmar, La Paz

Marina: 50 days
La Paz this time: 51 days

Totals:

Tied to a dock: 139 days (38% of the year)
At anchor: 224 days (61% of the year)
Underway: 1 day
And one day is lost somewhere.

Total days in La Paz: 184 days (50% of the year)
Longest period away from a dock: 191 days (52% of the year)

And there you have it.

12/5/2011 - Impromptu get-togethers

2011-12-05T13:57:00.000-08:00

It's impossible to make any kind of firm plans in cruising communities, at least in the communities we've been in.

Thursday afternoon was wearing down and Lulu and I didn't really have any particular plans for the evening. Kind of planned to make a pizza and watch a couple DVDs and then turn in. Just a normal quiet evening. However, it pays to not get too invested in plans.

Somewhere around four or four thirty, Aimee, our Aussie friend, stopped by to get some more pointers from Lulu about crocheting beer can cozies. We sat and had a couple beers and visited. A little while later, the big power boat moored next to us, Dee Jay, came back in from a 2-day dive trip. After she was all tied up, Frank from s/v Island Time, who had been on the trip, stopped by our cockpit for a visit. A few minutes later, Benny (m/v Lucia Celeste) brought over some huge fish filets that were apparently part of Frank's booty from the dive trip. We stashed them in our reefer since Frank didn't think his was working too well.

After watching the sun go down, the breeze continued to be shot. With all the beer that was being consumed, it was pretty clear that we all should probably eat something. No way did we have enough pizza fixings for everyone so I went below and fried up some spuds (with onions, garlic, red pepper flakes and rosemary) and, with Frank's OK, fried up about half of the fish that Benny had brought over. We sat in the cockpit and had fish, spuds and sliced tomatoes to take the edge off the alcohol.

After dinner Benny returned and the visiting continued. But, eventually things began to break up as first Benny, then Frank and then Aimee headed back to their boats. Lulu cleaned things up below, I cleaned up the cockpit and we settled in for an episode of Northern Exposure before retiring for the night.

Not every afternoon and evening goes like that but a lot do and you never know when they will happen. More of them happen since Lulu made lots of new friends while I was helping Keith bring s/v Chamisa down from Long Beach. We always enjoy these unplanned get-togethers.

Saturday was another example. In this case, Aimee, Susi and Maia, along with 14 month old Ronin, came by for a bread-making lesson. Lulu had decided to make cookies for the fund-raising bake sale at Subasta on Sunday so, since the oven was hot anyway, she figured now was a good time to give her baking lesson. At first, Siempre Sabado seems a poor choice for a group cooking lesson. After all, she's small. But, as this photo attests, there's room for all (well, except for me). Sorry for cutting off Lulu's head but taking a photo down through the companionway and trying to get everyone in the shot presents some challenges. Sorry, too, about the glare but it was pretty darn sunny Saturday afternoon.

The lesson was over and the bread was baked by early evening. By that time we had been joined by Frank (s/v Island Seeker) and Zak (s/v Wendy Ellen, husband of Susi and father of Ronin, oh and brother of Maia). The guys were in the cockpit and the girls were down below. Ronin spent equal time in both places. Eventually, once again, alcohol consumption and the time of day dictated that food should be eaten. We still had the smaller half of Frank's fish and Lulu had put together a zucchini souffle earlier. So, although it was probably only enough for 4 hungry people, Lulu stretched it to feed seven by adding sliced tomatoes and feeding us lots of fresh-baked bread. After dinner, Benny (m/v Lucia Celeste) showed up. He has a knack for not being here when food is being served. Poor guy. We all sat and drank and visited for another several hours before people started getting tired and/or cold and decided to call it a night.

It's 2:20 PM right now and I honestly can't say what we will be doing 4 hours from now.

PS: I mentioned Subasta earlier and should probably explain. Every year FANLAP (Fundación por la Ayuda de los Niños de La Paz), an organization that helps the underprivileged kids in La Paz, holds a big auction ("subasta" en español) as a fundraiser. All year long various organizations including Club Cruceros, gather donations. Some stuff just goes directly to the as-is sale table and some is reserved for the auction. Local businesses also donate goods and services for a raffle. It's an all-day affair and is attended by the cruisers as well as tons of locals. There are some really good bargains to be had, especially on the clothing table. We donated some things to Subasta this year to make some room on our boat and, I'm proud to say, we managed to spend the whole day there without buying anything that we couldn't consume. Well, except for that pair of earrings Lulu bought herself, but they're small so it's OK.

12/2/2011 - Ads revisited

2011-12-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

I've had a change of heart about displaying ads on my blog. I've removed them. Let me know if they still show up on your computer because I'm not entirely sure how this stuff works. However, I decided that I couldn't, in good conscience, rant on about runaway consumerism and then turn around and help the very forces of evil that promote this consumerism. Could some ads be helpful to readers? Maybe, if I knew how to manipulate and control the ads better. But the fact is that I can simply embed a link to some product that I particularly like and, if I don't, I know you are all smart enough to use Google to find stuff yourself.

I'd supposedly already made $42.00 from people clicking on my ads (although I'm not sure where that money is) so it's not just a case of sour grapes. I just started feeling very hypocritical. This is not meant to cast aspersions on anyone who does choose to display ads
and thereby tap into the fat cats' purses, I just choose not to.

11/29/2011 - A little help from our friends

2011-12-02T07:23:00.000-08:00

It's not often that Lulu and I hire someone to do any work for us. Matter of fact I can count the times we have without using any fingers at all. But, we decided to bite the bullet this time.

The Cetol on our caprails and the side trim was looking pretty funky. The rest of the wood looked good enough to just scuff it up and re-apply a coat but the caprails, bowsprit and side trim really needed to be stripped. YUCK! After watching a fellow boater have some local guys do his woodwork we decided to take that route as well.

We hired Luis and his helper Pelé to strip and sand these areas. They worked at it more or less steadily for 4 days, just finishing up today. Was it a bargain? Depends on what you compare it to. We ended up paying $3500 pesos (~$254.00 US) for the job. We provided everything except the scrapers: heat gun, extension cords, masking tape, sandpaper, and sander. Considering the hours they worked and the fact that Luis was gone a lot of the time and only Pelé was working, I figure we paid them about $7.81 (US) per hour. Probably a pretty decent wage down here. So, it certainly wasn't a steal but at least it wasn't a rip-off nor as much as we'd have to pay in the States. Was it easy? It was for us, can't speak for Luis and Pelé. Would we do it again. More than likely.

Luis

Pelé

We've decided to take the path of least resistance strategy for teak care this time around. Basically you just leave it alone. Give it an occasional scrubbing and maybe wipe on a little oil from time to time to make ourselves feel better, but that's it. Bare teak can take care of itself very well, being a naturally oily wood. It'll turn gray like our decks (which have never had any finish on them) but, considering the lack of work involved, we can learn to love gray. That's how the boat was when we bought her. We will still have to apply Cetol to the bowsprit since it's Douglas fir and to the rudder cheeks since they're something else which isn't teak. We've also decided to keep the hatches and other inboard wood, be it teak or not, Cetoled. It doesn't get near the wear that the caprails and rubrail get and the finish seems to be holding up very well.

11/28/2011 - Just trying to be courteous

2011-12-01T07:19:00.000-08:00

It's a requirement in Mexico, and probably every other country, for visiting vessels to fly the flag of the host country. This is called a "courtesy flag" and is a sign of respect. You fly your own country's flag as well but the courtesy flag should be higher and at least as large as your own ensign.

Now, it's not much of a sign of respect if the courtesy flag is all tattered and faded and that's something that doesn't take long in this climate. Constant exposure to the UV rays of the sun combined with flapping against shrouds in the wind, and flags get beat up pretty fast. We've already worn out two. And they're fairly expensive. A decent one can run you $15-$20 US or more, depending on size.

We think we've come up with a viable solution. You sort of need a sewing machine to make it work, though.

We were having lunch at The Shack one afternoon when we noticed a piece of fabric flying from the rafters. It was about 5' wide and maybe 6' long and sported 6 Mexican flag prints in that area. All you'd need to do to make flags would be to cut the fabric into flag-size pieces, hem it, add a couple grommets and you'd be good to go.

We managed eventually to find the right fabric store and bought enough fabric for 10 flags. Total cost: $5.00 USD.

Our old flag:

And that was after Lulu had repaired it once.

A couple hours of cutting, ironing, pinning, sewing, and grommeting and this is one of our 10 new flags:

They won't last a real long time, being fairly lightweight, but, at fifty cents each, we can live with that.

11/27/2011 - When Bloggers Collide

2011-11-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

It's always cool when you run into people whose blogs you've been enjoying over the years. It happened to us with Mark & Vickie on s/v Southern Cross while we were still in Oregon. We met Pat, Ali and Ouest on s/v Bumfuzzle when we passed through California on our way to Mexico. Once in Mexico we met Paul and Chris on s/v Jeorgia, Rich, Lori and the kids on s/v Third Day, although, in truth I've only met Rich, and the Conger clan on s/v Don Quixote. There are numerous other blogs we follow, or at least check into once in awhile, written by folks we've met along the way. Once you meet them, it's fun to check out their blogs, if they have one, to see where they've been and find out what becomes of them after they leave.

Our latest blogger collision happened this weekend. We've been following Livia's writing for some time now. Ever since they were up in BC thinking about sailing to warmer climes. Livia is the brains behind the Interview With A Cruiser and the Newly Salted projects. She's a smart and witty writer and we were hoping to meet up with her and Carol when they sailed s/v Estrellita 5.10b down to La Paz. Our chance came Sunday when they wandered by after shopping and we had a little cockpit gam.

Lest the line-up of dead soldiers leads you to believe that Livia & Carol were trying to fulfill some sort of Canadian stereotype, let me just say that at least half of those cans were Lulu's. ¡Ella es una borracha muy grande!

As Livia said in an e-mail follow-up, it's nice when you like the people as much in real life as you do in their blogs. And we do.

¡Salud!

11/24/2011 - Thinksgiving cruiser style

2011-11-29T12:46:00.001-08:00

I know I can't fool you guys into believing that this was written on Thanksgiving. You're too darn smart for that. But I post-dated it anyway so that I can find it better when I go back and look for a Thanksgiving entry at a later date.

Anyway, since we had already done a Thanksgiving feed at Casa Buena the Thursday before Thanksgiving, we had pretty much planned to skip the holiday on its official day. We could have gone to the big Thanksgiving Dinner put on by Club Cruceros but we chose not to. We're not big fans of large dinner type gatherings. Reminds Lulu too much of "company" holiday parties and I generally don't care for the way that some of the people behave ("piggishly" comes to mind as a description) and the food, in my humble opinion, generally leaves a lot to be desired. Some, albeit very few, folks at these potluck things bring really good stuff and lots of it, others bring really good stuff that the first 6 people in line get to eat and then it's gone, some bring stuff that is okay but nothing special, some bring food that it wouldn't matter how much they brought - it'd still be too much, some stop at the store on their way to the party, and then there are the freeloaders who don't bring a damn thing. Do I sound like an old poop? Well, maybe I am but at least I now know enough to just stay away from the big feeds. Our friend Rich and his family on s/v Third Day attended the feed and had this to report. Sounds like we didn't miss anything.

While attending the swap meet the Sunday before T-Day, we were invited to Thanksgiving Dinner at a 3-boat raft-up out on El Magote by John the Rigger. He said they were planning dinner for about 20 people. It was still a potluck of sorts although certain people were assigned certain dishes and everyone was cautioned to bring enough to serve 20. This is a lot more our size and style. We weren't disappointed.

We had been told that dinner was at 3:00 but to come over anytime after noon. Not wanting to be way early like we usually are, we didn't even leave Siempre Sabado until a little after 1:00. Out across the sandbar we headed in the dink. The tide was so low that our prop actually hit bottom once while crossing the sandbar. Be mighty easy to run a boat aground out there. As we approached the raft-up, it was pretty clear from the dearth of dinghies that we were still too early. And, not really knowing anyone on these boats very well, we didn't want to be the first ones there and way too early to boot. So, we continued on and spent a little while visiting with Jay and Judy and Basil on s/v Wind Raven . Once the 2:00 hour was behind us we felt safe in returning to the raft-up. Sure enough, there were 3 or 4 dinghies trailing out behind by their painters. We tied up to s/v Talion and climbed aboard. I neglected to get a photo of the raft-up from the water and once aboard I couldn't hike out far enough to do it justice so this'll have to do:

This photo was taken from Talion's bow looking across Mariah in the center to Avatar on the other side. My understanding is that Mariah (John the Rigger's boat) and Avatar are the same boat, just built in different years. All three boats had center cockpits so it made for easy and comfy visiting.

Naturally, in the true spirit of every Thanksgiving that Lulu and I ever hosted, the appointed eating time came and went with nary a sight of the bird, or in this case, birds since there were two of them cooking. No matter, we were all having fun getting acquainted with each other. We didn't know most of the people there at first and the few we did know, we only sort of knew peripherally.

Eventually, though, it was time to carve the turkeys. Why two birds? Because boat ovens aren't that large. A 12 lb. turkey pretty much fills your average boat's oven. In the photo below you can see Lulu's huge pot of gravy on Talion's stove:

Scarfin' down the food:

That's Patsy, Talion's owner, sitting on the throne in the center of the photo. You can see 10 people gathered in this cockpit and everyone has plenty of elbow room. Reportedly, Patsy can seat 12 around her dining table below and she has enough dishes to feed at least 12 as well. A long way from Siempre Sabado's accommodations. As the evening wore on and the dessert cart went by a couple of times, people spread out to the other two boats to visit although most stayed aboard Talion. Coincidentally, that's where the food was.

Here's a shot of Mariah's cockpit. That's John the Rigger, Mariah's owner on the left and Jody, Avatar's co-owner on the right.

We had a great time with lots and lots of good food. I got so loaded up on turkey, dressing, mashed spuds, gravy, candied yams, green bean casserole, etc. that I never even bothered with dessert. Some might call that un-American, but I yam what I yam.

Eventually it got dark enough to make dinghying back an adventure and we set our course for home. We had two folks from Marina de La Paz to take home as they'd gotten a ride out on another dinghy. I tell you, with 4 full-size (okay, 2 full size plus Lulu and I) adults, that PotraBote was a tad overloaded. Made driving it a bit of an ordeal as we did have a little bit of wind-wave action happening. But we managed to deliver our supercargo back to their dock safely and then headed home.

A fine Thanksgiving.

Wonder how one of these guys would taste if we can't find a turkey sometime:

PS: a note about Mexican hospitality...

Just before we left for the raft-up, we decided to get some ice for the ice chests and an 8-pack of Pacifico to take with us. I headed to our favorite cervezeria, The Mini Super Amo-pola.

Turns out Mañuel doesn't carry bagged ice but he did have an ice chest up front that had a huge block of ice inside and he chipped me off a shopping bag full at no charge. Then, as I reached for my wallet to pay for my beer, I realized that I didn't have my wallet. I had taken it out when I went up to take a shower and forgot to put it back afterwards. Oops. I told Mañuel that had forgotten my money and started to take the beer back to the cold case. He would have none of it. Insisted that it was "No problema." and told me to take the beer and pay next time I was in the store. I'd like to think that a Mexican national, who couldn't speak more than a little English, at a 7-11 in the States, would be treated the same way I was treated here. That's what I'd like to think.

11/24/2011 - Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T07:01:00.001-08:00

Last Thanksgiving, Lulu and I were about 25 miles west of the Pacific coast of Baja, out in the ocean, 4 days out of Ensenada. Our feast that day consisted of crackers, cheese and smoked marlin. Today will be better. We've been invited to dinghy out to a 3-boat raft-up to enjoy turkey, et al, with about 20 other cruisers. Should be a good time and an excellent example of a cruiser's Thanksgiving. I'll report back tomorrow.

In the meantime, maybe you can adapt the following recipe to your turkey leftovers, after you get tired of sandwiches. I picked up the basic concept of this recipe yesterday while standing in line waiting to buy a couple bagels from the Bagel Lady. The ingredients sounded intriguing so I had to try it out last night. Turned out to be really good. Of course, the best part is that I got to use a can of Campbell's Cream of Chile Poblano soup. Try finding that at your local Safeway in the States. However, you're all smart folks (else you wouldn't be here, right?), so I know you can improvise.

Bon Provecho and Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Pollo Poblano

4 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 medium onion, finely chopped
1 seeded chile poblano, finely diced
1 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
2 tablespoons olive oil
2-3 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves, cut into bite-size pieces
Salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons corn starch
2 tablespoons white wine
1 can Campbell's Cream of Chile Poblano soup (substitute Cream of Chicken or Cream of Mushroom if you can't find the Chile Poblano)
3 tablespoons (mas o menos) of half & half (or crema media)
2 cups (uncooked) white rice

Cook the rice by whatever is your chosen method (our method follows)

While the rice is cooking, combine the soy sauce, wine and corn starch.
Soak the chicken in the corn starch mixture making sure all pieces are coated. Set aside.

In a large skillet, heat half of the olive oil.
Add the onions to the oil and cook until clear.
Add the garlic, the red pepper flakes, and the chile poblano and cook, stirring frequently, until chile pieces are limp.
Add the rest of the oil and let it heat.
Remove the chicken from the corn starch mixture with a slotted spoon and add to the vegetable mixture.
Cook, stirring now and then, until chicken is cooked through. About 5-8 mintes depending on how hot the oil is. I put a lid on between stirrings to speed things up a little.
When the chicken is cooked, add the can of soup. Stir in to mix.
Thin the mixture down to a good thick gravy consistency by adding the half and half as needed.
Heat through.
Serve over hot rice.

How we cook white rice:

Rinse rice and put into an appropriately-sized pan with a lid.
Add water until there is 1" of water above the surface of the rice.
Put on the heat, cover and bring to a boil.
When the water is boiling, remove the lid and reduce the heat so the rice is gently boiling.
When the water has been absorbed to the point that the rice looks like bubbling lava, reduce heat to a minimum and cover.
After 10 minutes, turn heat off. Leave rice on the hot burner and leave cover on.
After another 10-15 minutes*, the rice is done. Fluff and serve.

*If you start the rice before you start cooking the Pollo Poblano, you can just leave it sitting on the stove until everything else is done. It won't overcook since the water's all gone.

11/22/2011 - Time to Catch Up

2011-11-22T13:13:00.001-08:00

First off, if you're my age (60) or older, or maybe a little younger, I bet you know where you were on this date in 1963.

Okay, this entry may run a wee bit long. Don't know for sure as I haven't written it yet, not even in my head. I'll be making it up as I go along. But, knowing how wordy I can get when I preface a blog with "Not much to say, but...", you might want to start up another pot of coffee before you get started.

Although I posted some blogs from my trip down the west coast of Baja on s/v Chamisa, I'm going to start this blog back in Long Beach, CA anyway.

After my near-miss flight from La Paz to LA, I settled in to Chamisa. It was quite an eye-opener moving from 28' Siempre Sabado to 42' Chamisa. I mean, this boat has a hallway for criminysakes!

BTW, look at how well Chamisa is shoe-horned into her slip. With a little bit of help from friends at the marina on the dock as well as Keith's (to me, anyway) amazing skill at handling this full-keeled beast, we managed to get out of the slip without any of the other boats having to move and without hitting anyone or anything. I was truly impressed. I couldn't have gotten our 28 footer out of there so prettily. How he did it with a 42 footer is still beyond me.

Keith and I spent part of a day getting Chamisa ready for sea (deflating and stowing the dinghy, rigging the jacklines, etc.) and the rest of the time either getting me acquainted with Chamisa or provisioning. As I was using this trip as a way to get some supplies that I couldn't get in Mexico (or didn't want to pay premium prices for), we also spent a bit of time running around to West Marine, etc. The main item I would have liked to have gotten were a couple of new solar panels to add to my present array of two 80-watt panels. Unfortunately, I've been ruined by looking on E-Bay and other on-line sources so the few places we found that even carried panels seemed way over-priced. We were limited from running all over southern California looking for panels by the fact that we were borrowing cars to do our running around. Ultimately, no new panels, but no biggie. I should really try harder to get the most out of the panels I have before adding more panels. Like maybe finding a better spot to mount them so that neither one is shaded by the ever-present-in-the-summer awning over the cockpit. I did manage to get some hardware to rig my windvane, as well as some sorely-needed outboard motor parts. Also bought a bunch of coloring books, tablets, colored pencils, regular pencils and toothbrushes to give away to the kids in the various fishing villages we visit through the summer months. I bought a whole bunch of AA batteries to trade to the fishermen for fish and, hopefully, lobster next spring up in the islands.

But, the absolute most important things I bought to bring back to Mexico:

That's right. Nathan's hot dogs and Hormel chili. I know that I've raved on about how good the street hot dogs are here in La Paz but, frankly (pun intended), it's mostly because of the condiments they pile on top. Well, that and the bacon that's wrapped around each dog prior to grilling. The grocery stores are chock full of hot dogs in every size package a guy could hope to see and made by a whole bunch of different manufacturers. But they all have one thing in common. They're all made of pavo (turkey). Health-wise, that's probably a very good thing. But taste-wise? Fuggedaboudit. When I want a really good tube steak, I want a juicy, salty, extremely flavorful Nathan's all-beef frank. I'll also eat Hebrew National dogs but we really love our Nathan's. Now, in all fairness, we did see a couple of brands of all beef wieners at the new Mega Foods that just opened up in La Paz. Not Nathan's, but probably serviceable.

And chili? Well, believe it or not, chili con carne, in spite of the Spanish-sounding name, is not a Mexican food. You can find lots of canned beans in the stores. Even some called "chili beans" but you can't find canned chili. Can't we make our own? Certainly, but when I want a quickie bowl of chili, making our own from scratch is not the answer. And, unlike my preference for NATHAN'S hot dogs over other brands, I'll eat just about any brand of canned chili. I like them all. Like they say about sex and pizza, even bad canned chili is still pretty darn good. As far as the history of chili, I haven't bothered to investigate but, we used to make a Mexican dish called Chile Colorado, which the cookbook authors posited might be the original "chili". If you add beans to it, which is how I happen to like my chili, it does make a mighty tasty version of chili con carne. Doesn't taste like the canned stuff or even like your normal homemade chili, but it's still pretty darn good and you can taste how our modern chili may have evolved from this dish.

I've got to hand it to Keith, he's no slouch when it comes to provisioning for the trip. We spent an afternoon in Albertson's and Trader Joes and emerged from both places with bags and bags and bags of goodies. Of course, neither of us really knew what the other liked to eat so we were kind of finding out as we went along. I had pictured a trip sort of like Lulu and I had where we just didn't eat too many full meals, relying in stead on sandwiches and quick-to-prepare stuff. Of course, a lot of that probably had to do with the fact that Lulu didn't feel very good during our transit. So, we bought easy-to prepare stuff (pasta sauce in a jar, etc.), very easy-to-prepare stuff (Cup-O-Noodles), and regular basic ingredients like potatoes, eggs, vegetables, hamburger, hot dogs, etc. as well as some items for dressing up other dishes like canned olives and chiles.

To our credit, I suppose, we ate mostly full meals during the trip. Breakfast consisted of either spuds and eggs, eggs and sausage, oatmeal loaded with goodies, pancakes, breakfast burritos and, on one occasion, last night's leftover green chile casserole. Lunches were usually sandwiches and chips and Keith makes a mean sandwich. The first time he offered to make tuna sandwiches, he asked if I wanted one slice of bread or two. This was sort of a foreign concept to me as I thought sandwiches always had two slices of bread (except club sandwiches which have three), so I said "two". Well, it turns out that what Keith refers to as a one-slice sandwich, I grew up knowing as half a sandwich. And then, seeing how he loaded that sandwich down with tuna, the idea of a one-slice sandwich suddenly made sense. Anyway, like I said, for lunch we'd have a sandwich, some chips and maybe a dill pickle spear. For dinner we had biscuits and gravy, spaghetti, tallerini, hot dogs, burritos, the aforementioned green chili casserole, shepherd's pie, mashed potatoes with chunks of pot roast in gravy, etc. We ate really well. When we came on watch we had fruit (grapes, apples, mandarin oranges), several kinds of trail mix, cup-o-noodles, coffee, tea, etc. I think we managed to eat some of almost everything we bought for the trip except the enchilada sauce and we didn't hit even one of the dozen or so packs of ramen I grabbed at the store.

I'll spare you most of the details of the trip down the coast as I've already written about them in previous posts.

Here's a photo of Chamisa in her first Mexican port-of-call, Ensenada, where she is tied up to the (no kidding) "Mega Yacht Dock".

Way back when, I think Keith and Kay had originally planned to gunkhole their way down Baja's Pacific coast. But, as time grew shorter and winter grew closer, they decided to take the path Lulu and I took a year ago. That is, head out about 25 miles and make the whole jump in one big trip. I had told Keith earlier that one of the reasons we wanted to do it that way was to find out if you really did get into a groove after a few days at sea, and what the heck that groove really was all about. He was equally interested to find out.

I just now got to looking at some of my old blogs to see if I'd written anything about "the groove", but, if I did, it's hidden away somewhere. So here's my take after my second trip of at least 6 days at sea. So, what is "the groove"? More than likely it's different things to different people but for me what it was was the point where I stopped thinking in terms of "when are we getting there?". After three days or so of standing watches, you tend to come to the realization that it really doesn't matter when you're going to get somewhere because you know it's not going to be today. So screw it, just stand your watch, eat your meals, and sail along. The days tend to melt together and when you do finally get where you're going, it's hard to believe so many days have passed. On this trip I hit the groove on about the first day, probably because I'd done it before. Turning the corner at Cabo San Lucas almost came as a surprise. Oh, and it helps that the GPS won't give you an estimated arrival time when your trip is longer than 24 hours.

During the trip, we always wore our PFDs when on deck and, although we limited our trips outside the cockpit to the bare minimum, we always were strapped to the boat if we ever did have to venture out. Here's a photo of Keith rigging a preventer on to the staysail boom.

This is Keith on our first day out, trying to figure out the GPS using the somewhat-lacking Users' Manual. We knew how to use the basic features but wanted to try out some of the other stuff. Either Keith would read the instructions and I'd push buttons or vice-versa. Either way, we'd eventually reach a screen that just didn't match the manual as far as the options available. And yes, we were definitely using the right manual. Garmin just needs to do a wee bit more work on making their manuals match their GPS models.

Okay, I assume you've already read about the trip. If not, see the earlier November entries.

The marina at San Jose del Cabo (Puerto Los Cabos) was interesting. The walkway/roadway had a display that was dedicated to what wikipedia referred to as " a British-born Mexican artist, a surrealist painter and a novelist", Leonara Carrington. I'd never heard of her before. There are copies of her paintings along the walk:

Interspersed with sculptures of some of the characters in her paintings:

As well as occasional photos and biographical sketches:

Once back in La Paz, Lulu and I spent part of a day giving Keith a basic lay of the land before setting him loose on his own. He seems to have adapted quite well. He's already gotten his Telcel banda ancha card and found Allende Books and the ice cream shop. I think he'll do just fine.

Last week, since Cody and Scott were visiting us, we decided to get off the boat and live at Casa Buena for the week. This is one of the nicest little bed & breakfast compound we've ever seen. The rooms are very reasonable and there's a big central gathering spot with a full kitchen available to the guests. We rented the two adjoining Garden Rooms. Like a big dumb dog, I forgot to take any photos while we were there so these photos came from CB's website.

This is one of the Garden Rooms and, as a matter of fact, the one Lulu and I stayed in. Both pictures are of the same room.

Last Thursday, we decided to have Thanksgiving dinner for ourselves, the kids and a couple of other folks. We invited Keith, of course, as well as fellow Westsailor Lee Perry who was passing through town on his way from Guaymas to San Diego, and fellow CB guest Al Foster who's new-to-him boat is on the hard at the Abaroa yard that is connected to Marina del Palmar. We also invited some folks that were awfully nice to Lulu while I was gone, keeping her too busy to get lonely. There was Frank from s/v Island Seeker, Aimee (occasional crew on Island Seeker), Zak, Suzi, Ronin, and Maia who Lulu sort of met through our friends John & Vickie (m/v Doña Elena) who are Zak and Maia's aunt and uncle if I got the story right. Aimee is from Western Australia and Suzi (Zak's wife) is from Eastern Australia. Zak lived in Australia for 10 years. They entertained us by trying to teach us how to speak Australian. Did we get it? Yeh, neh. We were definitely not what you'd call fair dinkum Aussie speakers by the end of the evening.

Lulu cooked, with Cody' help, turkey, dressing, mashed spuds, gravy, candied yams, green beans, sweet potato pie and pecan pie, and peach crisp as well as a crudite tray. I contributed my green chile casserole. Everybody ate until we were hurtin'. Dinner was followed by some card games and football on the big screen TV which has replaced the little TV you can see in this picture.

Having the Casa Buena kitchen at our disposal was a real treat for people who are used to cooking on a boat.

Casa Buena is behind a wall which is all you see when you walk by on the street. But inside is a courtyard, the rooms, a small swimming pool, the central kitchen/meeting room, the owners' house, the small chapel the owners built to host non-denominational Sunday meetings, a pony named Niña, two yellow labs named Cracker and Luna, as well as a jet black cat named Spooky and a little kitten whose name I cannot remember.

The way we heard about Casa Buena was that our friends Mike & Nita (s/v Odessa) were staying there last fall while Odessa was having some work done on her in the yard. They invited us over for drinks and we fell in love with the place. In talking to other people who we met at CB, they all found out about it in just about the same way. So we're happy to have been able to introduce some more potential guests to this little gem of a place. Susu and Milton Sanders, the owners, could not be more gracious. Highly recommended.

The first day out on the town with Scott and Cody, we walked their tender little feet off. Showed those young whippersnappers what we old folks are made of.

Mostly we took the kids around La Paz to do a little shopping and try out some of our favorite eateries. But one day we slipped the dock lines and sailed up to Bahia Falsa for the day. We had just enough wind to make the sailing fun but not stressful. Of course, it wasn't taking us where we wanted to go but at least we got to sail for the pure joy of sailing for awhile. We dropped anchor in the crystal clear waters of Bahia Falsa and dinghied ashore. Scott immediately got into the spirit of the Baja:

Oh, I forgot to mention, the night the kids got here, it rained for the first time since we've been in Baja. Poured all late afternoon, evening and well into the night. They must have brought it with them from Oregon. The rest of their stay was beautiful. We put them on the plane and sent them home to snow this past Saturday. It was really fun to have them visit.

Now life is back to "normal". We had dinner with our friends Mark & Vickie on s/v Southern Cross the other night. We have "cocktails" on Island Seeker several evenings a week. Tonight we're having Frank, Mark & Vickie over for Lulu's pizza. Southern Cross just got hauled out here at the Abaroa yard and Frank's boat is just up the dock from Siempre Sabado. This morning on the VHF cruisers' net we heard s/v Estrellita 5.10b check in as new arrivals. We've ben anxious to hear that as we have been following Livia and Carol's blog for quite a while now. Although we've never actually met in person, we both feel like we know each other already through blogs and e-mails. We plan to meet in person this weekend.

So, what are we doing for Thanksgiving? We decided to skip the big 200+ people feed put on by Club Cruceros. We're just not that big on large crowds of people. We figured we'd already had Thanksgiving so we were prepared to do not much of anything. But, at the cruisers' swap meet Sunday, John the rigger invited us to dinghy over to a 3-boat raft-up out on the magote for Thanksgiving. There'll be about 20 people, some of whom we've met. Should be fun. All we're being asked to bring, besides drinks, is candied yams. But enough candied yams for 20 people. Piece of cake.

Speaking of food, check out this photo:

Four of those precious Nathan's hot dogs cooking away in a pan surrounded by fried spuds/onions/peppers. They're cooking together to save dishwashing time. Yum. It's good to be home.

PS: got a Simrad TP30 Tillerpilot (never used) at the swap meet Sunday to have as a back-up to our TP32. The plug-in is different but, since I only use two of the wires (12VDC + and -) anyway, that's just not a problem. Got if for around $185 (US) which is less than 1/3 of what I paid for my TP32 new.

11/12/2011 - I'm HOME!

2011-11-12T12:53:00.000-08:00

Just a quickie to let everyone know that we arrived safe and sound in
La Paz an hour or so ago. Got everything put away and I'm just about
to eat some of the leftovers from the meals Lulu's been taunting me
with via e-mail while I was gone (chicken divan and zucchini
souffle). Not that we ate bad, mind you, but still, it's better when
Lulu cooks it. So, I'll try to write something ore later but, be
aware that our daughter Cody and her husband Scott will be arriving
for a visit tomorrow so all my time may be taken up showing them la
vida buena en Mexico.

The trip from San Jose del Cabo to La Paz was uneventful. Weather was
fine to beautiful. No sailing winds but we expected that.

Hasta luego

We're outs SJ!

2011-11-11T09:57:00.000-08:00

Just a quickie to let you all know we left San Jose del Cabo about 2 hours ago. Warm, sunny, calm and no wind to speak of. Much different than a couple days ago. If you're following us on Yotreps, I just updated our position. Only doing about 4.5 knots but that's about 3.5 knots better than we were doing when we turned back the other day. Hoping to get to La Paz sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening.

Later.

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11/9/2011- San Jose del Cabo

2011-11-09T10:29:00.001-08:00

11/9/2011 - Wednesday in San Jose del Cabo

(note: the following took me a long time to write and, since I'm writing it in Wordpad - still using my netbook - I don't seem to have a spell checker. And I just don't feel like going back and re-reading what I wrote. So, here it is, warts and all.):

Wow, looks like I've been remiss in keeping the blog up to date. For all you know, we're still out there in the Pacific, wending our way to La Paz. Here's what's really happened since my last post on Sunday.

Sunday night we rounded the tip of Baja California. There's a thing called the Cape Effect that tends to amplify winds and waves in the vicinity of a cape. And if the tip of Baja isn't a cape, nothing is. Sure enough, as we neared land and began rounding the cape, the winds and seas both kicked up to pretty gnarly levels. Well, not so much the wind, but the seas were pretty big. It was kind of funny because Keith was down in the cabin making a phone call to his wife Kay, taking advantage of the first cell signal we've had since leaving Ensenada. He must have been below for 10-15 minutes at least. When his call was over he stuck his head out, looked around, and said, "Wow! hen did it get like this?" as we bounced and swerved our way through the seas. Pretty good tribute both to his iron gut as well as to how used to the motion that we've gotten that he didn't even notice things were extra bouncy until he stuck his head out.

With no need or desire to stop in Cabo San Lucas, we continued on our way. Fully rounding the cape, we bid the Pacific Ocean "adios" and headed up into the Sea of Cortez. They wereredicting northers later in the week so we were glad to be able to hit it when we did on Monday morning. At that point it looked like we could concievably arrive in La Paz as early as mid-day Tuesday. Well, mid-day Tuesday was yesterday and, not only are we NOT in La Paz, but we're no longer in the Sea of Cortez either.

On our way up the Sea, we had the main out while motoring. Keith happened to look up and noticed that the line that connects the sail slugs that hold the main to the cars that ride in the flexible track (Chamisa has an in-boom furler system) had parted. He decided we needed to drop the main before we tore something up. I assume the spanking that the main got when we rounded the cape on Sunday night was the culprit. Anyway, since we were experiencing some north winds he decided that it would be best to try to get out of the wind to lower the sail. Los Frailes was fairly close at hand so we made our way there. Pulled in behind tghe big rock, out of the wind, lowered the main (which went much easier than Keith expected it would) and got back on our way. I'm sure the boats that were already anchored at Los Frailes were wondering what the heck we were up to.

Back out on the Sea and headed north. We weren't very far north of Los Frailes when the engine sound changed pitch. We both got that sinking feeling in the stomach as it changed pitch again. It would run right and then slow down and then come back up again for a few seconds and then slow down again. Keith said "that didn't sound good". and I had to agree. He went below to the engine room hoping to be able to see something obviously amiss. He returned a few minutes later and the engine was purring along as nice as you please. He said there was probably a cup or more of water in the fuel filter/water separator. He drained it off and then, 15 minutes later went down to check it again. He had to drain almost as much off the second time. He kept checking and it looked like we were going to have to check it every 10 minutes or so for as long as water kept showing up, which could be all night for all we knew. Watchkeeping was taking on a new dimension. However, when we went back below so he could show me what where and how he was drining the filter, we noticed that the fuel in the filter had a decidedly cloudy look to it. So, now we had a little bit of a predicament. Both 40 gallon tanks were empty and our only fuel was in the 80 gallon tank and apparently contaminated with water and god knows what else. What to do?

With the wind coming from the north, there was no way we were sailing to La Paz. Keith asked me whether there were any unfriendly lee shores between us and La Paz in case we lost the engine. I told him the route was full of unfriendly shores and very few hidey holes. He decided the thing to do was to shut the engine down and sail back to Cabo San Lucas for fresh fuel in the 40 gallon tanks. After looking through the cruising guides we realized we could fuel up at San Jose Del Cabo, some 15 miles closer than Cabo San Lucas. So, although we were a little wary of using the main in its current condition, we really had no choice, so we hoisted the main and unrolled the jib and headed back the way we came.

The north winds weren't really very strong so we made pretty slow progress. We were unable to continue using the jib as, not having a whisker pole, we were unable to keep it full of air. It would fill and collapse, fill and collapse, fill and collapse, etc. So we rolled up the jib and unrolled the boomed but much smaller staysail. Took us a very very very long time to pass Los Frailes. However, with the wind blowing no more than 5 knots, we were still able to make 2-3 knots which is not bad for big heavy Westsail.

We continued on. Decided to stand our normal watches although keith decided to spend his first off-watch dozing in the cockpit rather than sleeping down below. He must have been REALLY tired because what he was doing wasn't dozing, it was out and out sleeping. I had to wake him a couple times and each time required more than one attempt. We ghosted on through the night, making slow but steady progress. By the time I started my second watch at 0300, we could see the lights of San Jose del Cabo some 10 miles or so in the distance. About an hour or so into my watch, I was able to change course a little which put us on a little bit better point of sail. Then the wind started filling in and we steadily picked up speed. We were scooting along at 6 knots.

When we were within about 2 miles of the entrance to the marina and it was still dark, I decided we were close enough for now. I headed up into the wind to slow the boat down and then tried a couple of different approaches to heaving-to to see if we could just basically sit where we were. I was partially successful, keeping us from getting any closer or much further away. Keith came up about 0700 and we just continued drifting around until it was light enough to be able to confidently enter the marina. Once inside, we took on 96 gallons of diesel (the 40 gallon tanks are apparently actually 48 gallon tanks), disosed of the contaminated diesel from the day tank and headed back out. While we were there, we listened to some the Baja HaHa-ers on the VHF talking about staying in the marina another couple days until the promised norther blew itself out. We weren't too worried about taking a bashing, so out we went.

San Jose del Cabo is on the south side of the tip of Baja. As we rounded the tip and started heading roughly northeast, we started getting pounded. The winds weren't such a big deal but the seas were. Although not all that large, maybe 6' or so, they were really close together, like 4 seconds. This makes for a very bumpy ride. The first casualty was Otto, the autopilot. Otto simply did not sign on to steer in these conditions and chose to shut himself down. I took the helm and could see why Otto wasn't happy. It was really hard to keep on course, or even very close to on course. But we continued on. A little bit later we both happened to be watching our speed on the GPS and realized we were only averaing about 1 knot. We began to second-guess our "push on" decision. If we continued and conditions didn't improve (they were actually supposed to get worse, we would use up all of our fuel a long ways before reaching La Paz. And, we would have to hand-steer through it all. Now we may be ignorant but we're certainly no dummies. Even we could see that pressing on was a bad idea. So, we turned tail and ran back to SJdelC. Our speed shot up to 6 knots as soon as we turned around.

Once back in San Jose del Cabo, we managed to get one of the last 2 slips that was large enough for us. We had showers (THAT felt good), ate at the little restaurant up by the office and then hit the rack early. And I mean EARLY. Keith went to bed at about 6:00 PM and I followed suit a half hour later. We both slept almost 12 hours, getting up this morning around 6-ish.

So, that's where we are. We've signed up to be here tonight and tomorrow night as well since the northers are supposed to peter out on Friday. If so, we'll head out again and try to make a non-stop run to La Paz. arriving sometime Saturday afternoon, depending on when we get started and how fast we can go.

OK, hope this lengthy entry makes up for keeping you all in the dark since Sunday.

11-6-2011 at sea

2011-11-06T14:49:00.000-08:00

11/06/2011, Sunday morning around 1045 ship's time or 0945 local time (DST)

Bouncy night last night. The wind picked up enough for us to use it but the seas followed suit and picked up, too. Wearing foulies that are too big for me and trying to maneuver around the cockpit, I felt like an astronaut. And not one of the sleek new space shuttle astronauts. No, this was like a John Glenn era astronaut with the big puffy soace suits. When I could finally get in a spot to plop myself down on a cushion in the cockpit I was fine but invariably I would have to get up to do something and every movement was awkward. Hoping not to need them tonight.

But, that aside, we had a good night. Had a 4 inch flying fish land in the cockpit.

Whoops! Bloggus interuptus. As I was writing the stuff above I started getting queasy. Weird, since I just installed a new Scop patch this morning. I went topside but that didn't help very much. Eventually I removed the old patch and installed a new one. Lulu and I have had a couple of instances where we used a patch that must have been outdated or faulty because there was no protection from mal de mer noted. In my previous experience along this line, replacing the patch worked great. While I was removing the old "new" patch, I may have found the problem. Seems that I had done a poor job and it was mostly sticking to hair and not my skin. Anyway, a new patch and a nap and I'm all back to normal, such as it is.

We finally got to shut the engine off and sail today. We're doing a respectable 6 knot average with the main and jib. And, come to think of it, the main still has that first reef in it. The seas continued to be bouncy but the sails helped dampen some of it. Right now, we're about 45 miles from our next turn at Cabo Falso. This means we're actually 100 miles or so south of our destination, La Paz. If you bisected a line from Todos Santos to Cabo San Lucas, we'd be due west of the midpoint of that line, about 35 miles out to sea. If all goes well, we plan to round the tip of Baja sometime tonight, probably mid-night-ish, unless Keith's more exact calculations say otherwise.

Been a great trip so far. Would have been nice to have better sailing weather but we're happy anyway. Now, if the northers don't beat us up too bad going up the Sea, we'll be looking good. The GRIB files look like we should be OK if we can stay on our projected schedule.

Oh yeah, this morning, while we were bouncing along through the ocean, we were visited by a bunch of dolphins. They seemed dead set on entertaining us. Some did full-body vertical leaps in the air before flipping their tails skyward and diving back in. Others just surfed the bow wake and one, at least, did some backwards juming out of the water. That is, he came out and landed dorsal fin down. All quite cool.

That's about it for today so far. Hasta la pasta.

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11-5-2011 - Cruising along

2011-11-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

Well, we finally got some sailing winds yesterday afternoon and evening. Ran with the genoa, the main, and the iron jib for most of the afternoon. We were cooking along at 6 knots much of the time. Why the engine? Because the winds weren't THAT good and because we're in "let's get there" mode. We tried to listen to Don Anderson's weather report on the SSB radio but it was a pretty poor copy. We did hear him talk about 35 knot winds on the outside aaaaaalllll the way down to Mag Bay, so before we started our watch rotation we put a reef in the main and swapped the genoa for the staysail. Keith took the first watch (1900-2300) and reported a good 6 knot ride. On my watch (2300-0300) the winds continued and we just cooked along. Matter of fact we passed a cruise ship. It was all lit up like Disneyland. We approached it, were abeam of it, and then left it in our dust. Of course, there's a very good chance that they were stopped so they'd enter port on schedule. But I prefer to think we smoked 'em! Finally, in the wee hours of this morning, the winds dropped down but we still managed a respectable 5 knot average. Don Anderson's 35 knot winds never did materialize. Looking at the GRIB files, we should be getting better winds the next few days. Unfortunately, we won't be here to experience them as they seem to be filling in right behind us.

Last night, about midnight, we were at our furthest point from land, about 75 miles or so. Look at a map of Baja. You see that big spur thing sticking out onto the Pacific about halfway down? Yes? Okay, below that the shoreline makes a big scoop. When we were halfway across the scoop, we were 75-80 miles from land. Now that we've passed Bahia Magdalena (Mag Bay) we should be steadily getting closer to land as we near the tip of the peninsula at Cabo Falso.

Keith fixed chicken salad sandwiches for lunch yesterday. I heated up some heat & serve roast beef with gravy and we had that over instant mashed spuds for dinner. Then, this morning I made scrambled eggs w/diced ham and home-fries for breakfast. Keith, on a whim, made some brownies from scratch yesterday afternoon.

That's about it. We're still motor-sailing with the reefed main and staysail. The seas aren't too bad although they're far from smooth. But it's fairly warm outside (at least until the sun sets) and the sky is nice and blue today.

That's it for here for now. Hasta luego.

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11-4-2011, A little more substance

2011-11-04T12:57:00.000-07:00

I had the morning watch (0300-0700) today and, when it got light enough to see, happened to glance down at the cockpit sole. There was something gross on the teak grate. Only the front and back pieces were intact as they were down in the holes formed by the grate. The middle portion had obviously been stepped by one of us or maybe both of us and was now just this slimy mashed substance. Looked like it might have been a small squid at one time. I cleaned it up and tossed it over the side. Later on, I was sitting on the starboard side and happened to look at the side deck. There were at least 6 small squid lying dead on deck. Flying squid? Who knew? Later, when Keith was forward raising the main, he said he threw at least 10 of them over the side.

The seas today have been pretty rolly. Pretty much like our trip down was. TGFS (Thank goodness for scopolamine). We've had the main up all along to steady the roll but, if it's working I'd hate to see what it would be like without. Last night on my 1900-2300 watch, the wind started piping up a bit. Too dark and too late to consider sailing. However I was watching the main and watching the winds build and thought that reefing the main might be something we should do. You know what they say, "The time to put in a reef is when you first think of it". I hated to wake Keith up but that's how it had to be. He was grateful that I had. We rolled up to the equivalent of the first reef which calmed the ride down a bit. By the time we were done it was nearly time for Keith to come on watch. I had NO trouble dropping off to sleep.

Today, we're getting a little bit of a breeze. Certainly not enough to sail in if we want to reach La Paz by the 13th, but hopefully enough to help the engine out. The engine was heating up again and by the time we had the RPMs down enough so the temperature would drop, we weren't going very fast. Once the temp was down, Keith started experimenting with raising the RPMs a little at a time. So far so good. However, we also decided to unreef the main and unfurl the jib as the wind is putting us on a reach. We've picked up maybe a knot. Won't know for sure until we do the cipherin' a little later. Hard to rely on the GPS speed calculation because it swings all over the place (sort of like the GPS antenna is doing).

Keith made chicken salad sandwiches for lunch along with a couple apple wedges on the side. Just finished chowing down.

The seas right now are grey as can be and so is the sky. Pretty warm, though (the air, not the seas).

Tried to listen to the Southbound net last night but I didn't get the SSB tuned in time and I have my doubts whether or not we'd be able to hear him anyway. We listened for the Chubasco net this morning and the Baja California Net a little later but didn't get anything readable from either one. We'll try Southbound again tonight at 6:00 PM. Tomorrow morning we'll try for Amigo and Sonrisa nets.

This boat is really nice and has lots of storage, room to move around, etc. But the thing that I like the absolute most is that I can sit at the settee writing e-mails and still be able to look out the window and see something besides the inside of the bulwark. Chamisa's radar is kind of fun but I'm not convinced that we need radar yet. Especially since we already have AIS. In short, nice as Chamisa is, I am not lusting after a larger boat.

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11-4-2011 Day 3 or is it 4?

2011-11-04T09:19:00.001-07:00

Things are still going smoothly out here off the coast of Baja California Sur. Pretty sure that we're either halfway done or very close to it. The autopilot continues to work great until it suddenly decides it doesn't want to anymore (parents of young kids will recognize the syndrome). So, we just give it a time-out for 10-15 minutes and so far it has always decided to behave properly when we release it from time-out.

The engine has heated up a bit occasionally. So far we've been able to restore it to it's proper operating temperature by slowing down a bit. Since we don't have a tachometer right now, we have to guess at engine speed. We think the bungee that's supposed to hold the throttle lever in place is causing it to increase our speed at such a slow rate that we don't register the change in pitch.

Last night and so far today have been quite rolly-swelly. Makes us feel like a couple of lumbering idiots as we try to gracefully move around, only to be sent one way or the other by the force of the swells on the boat. Last night was the first night that we've had winds that might have been strong enough for sailing. But, it was too dark to start rigging sails then and, besides, it died off after awhile.

Not really much to report. Very little wildlife spotted since my last report. Can't see land as we're too far away and, besides, it's very hazy over there. We stand our watch rotation, eat lots of food, get some reading in, record our position, speed, course, etc. every hour, send out a SPOT signal every 4 hours, check and send e-mail and position reports and that's about it.

At about noon today we will have completed 3 days.

Hasta later.

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11/2/2011 - Day 1 & 2, Ensenada to La Paz

2011-11-02T18:56:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, November 2nd @ 1:50 PM

We're currently about 30 miles off the Pacific coast of Baja enroute from Ensenada to La Paz aboard Chamisa, a Westsail 42 owned by our friends Keith and Kay. As I have probably already written, Kay injured her shoulder recently. This was putting a crimp in their plans to sail Chamisa south from Long Beach California to La Paz, Mexico. So I volunteered to crew for them. And that's why I'm currently 30 miles off the Baja coast instead of in La Paz drinking a cold brew and trying not to let the heat bother me.

We left Long Beach at 10:30 AM on Sunday. Almost exactly 24 hours later we entered the port of Ensenada where we got cleared in to the country, had a restaurant meal and then spent the night. We left Ensenada on Monday at about 11:00 AM. Well, it was later than that after we got fueled up but let's say we left around 12:30 PM.

So far, the trip has been pleasantly uneventful. We did have to put up pwith a lot of fog during the night on the trip from Long Beach to Ensenada. Fortunately we've had no fog since. We've had basically NO sailing wind so far (what else is new?). The GRIB files I downloaded earlier today show the wind filling in later this week. However, by the time they do we'll be well south of where the wind's going to be blowing. Fortunately, Chamisa's engine is running fine. About the only issue we've had has been with the autopilot. For some inexplicable reason, it decides to follow its own path every so often. So far the fix has been pretty easy: shut the power to it down at the breaker, let it rest for 15 minutes to a half hour and then start it back up. It's worked every time so far. Oh yesh, and we lost the tachometer on the engine control panel so now we're just running by the sound of the engine and the speed we expect to attain at 2000 RPMs.

Yesterday, after leaving Ensenada, we were sitting in the cockpit hoping to see a whale. And then we did. A mother and calf not too far off our starboard beam surfced long enough to take a breath. They swam just a little ways away and then sounded, giving us a beautiful two-fluke show. Unfortunately, no cameras were handy. We saw a bunch of whales after that, I'd guess maybe 2 dozen in all. I got to see one jump out of the water. Looked just like the logo from that insurance company (can't recall the name). Because of their acrobatics, I'm pretty sure these were humpbacks. Oh, and there was also the little hump on their backs that gave me a clue. They seem to be headed north.

Last night was pretty boring. We had a few boats to watch for awhile but through most of the night it was just us. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. A boring passage is a safe passage.

Well, I'm going to send this out on Sailmail later this evening so you'll get this blog through the miracles of HF radios and the internet. What a wonderful world.

PS: if you were following Siempre Sabado's movement on Yotreps (back when we moved occasionally), you can follow Chamisa's progress on Yotrps by clicking the link to Siempre Sabado. We're using my account until Keith's Sailmail account is activated.

PPS: I'm unable to receive blog comments until we're back in internet land so don'y think I'm just snubbing you.

-SRY

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Day 1: Long Beach to Ensenada

2011-11-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

The trip from Long Beach was uneventful. Could have done it in my dinghy, although it might have taken a wee bit longer. After fueling up, we left my former USN home port at about 10:30 AM. Seas were almost flat if not totally flat. It was sunny and warm. Well, not warm like I've gotten used to but warm enough. We motored along at 5-6 knots with the main flying for stability, although we didn't really need it.

Chamisa has a SPOT personal satellite locator onboard so we sent a signal as soon as we cleared the harbor so that Lulu, Keith's wife, Kay, and my mom among others could track where we were. We plan to send at least two SPOT messages daily during the trip.

Keith made ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch.

The autopilot, which had been giving Keith trouble before, seems to be working fine (no leaking fluid), with one minor problem: every 8 hours or so, it decides to follow its own path. The fix has been easy: turn it off and back on again. The first time it happened was just as we were leaving Long Beach. Next time it was just before I came on watch at 11:00 PM. Then it happened again a few minutes before we got in position to enter Ensenada harbor. We always caught it within a minute of it "glitching". If this is the worst thing that happens, we'll be doing just fine.

Later in the afternoon, we got a little more wind. It was enough to justify a headsail in addition to the main. Wasn't enough to just sail but, with the added push of the sails we could slow the engine down (saving fuel) and still maintain 6 knots. However. later in the afternoon we rolled the staysail back up as we lost what little wind we had and didn't really want to get caught having to take it down if it started blowing hard during the night.

For dinner we ate the last of the green chile casserole I made the day before. Got some serious mileage out of that: 2 dinners and a breakfast. We started a 4-on, 4-off watch schedule at 7:00 PM with Keith taking the first watch. The deal is, when you're on watch, you wake your relief up 30 minutes before his watch. This gives the off-watch guy a chance to wake up, maybe make some coffee or something, grab a few snacks to stuff into his pockets and still make it on deck in time to take the watch.

Can't speak for Keith's watch but mine was totally uneventful. Well, it was way foggy the whole time and that was a strain. However, Chamisa has radar so that helped some. It was also pretty chilly. Had long johns, sweatshirt and foul weather gear on. I mean, it wasn't COLD but it certainly wasn't warm. Four hours doesn't seem very long but when Keith came on watch at 3:00 AM, my rack looked mighty inviting.

The next morning (Oct. 31), Keith came to wake me for my watch but, since it was 6:30 and he had no intention of going back to bed, he said I could sleep longer if I wanted, which I did, although only maybe another half hour or so. We were scheduled to arrive in Ensenada about 11:00 AM at the rate we'd been going.

The sun started warming things up and helped to burn the fog off and we were able to shed a few layers of clothes. By the time we had dropped the main and were getting into position to enter the harbor, it was sunny and mostly clear. And fairly warm. We decided to go to Cruiseport Village Marina, having gotten glowing reports about it from fellow cruisers. Finding the entrance was a little tricky but we did it. Tied up temporarily to what is called the "Megayacht Dock" and went up to get a slip assignment.

The office was technically closed but there was a guy working there (probably an IT guy - they always have to work during the rest of the office's lunch hour) who told us that the people we needed to see would be back at 12:30 PM. Oh, that reminds me: did I mention that we arrived at the mouth of Ensenada harbor at 10:30 AM? Almost exactly 24 hours after we left Long Beach. The trip was about 140 miles so we averaged 6 knots. Not bad. We had calculated, for planning purposes, to arrive in the late afternoon averaging 5 knots.

But I digress. Back to the marina office:

Jonathan, the young and very competent manager, finally returned at about 1:30 or so. he had been taking some other cruisers through the clearing in procedures with immigration, port captain and customs. When he finished with them he turned his attention to us. We told him that, since the Port Captain closes at 2:30 we'd probably wait and check in tomorrow. He said, "No, let's go do it today. I think we can probably make it." Wow, what an optimist. He got busy with the paperwork and then we jumped in his car and headed down to the offices. It was now after 2:00. The beauty of having a local who knows the ropes with you is that he also knows the language and the people behind the counter. he got stuff done that there was no way we could have gotten done in the same amount of time. What a treat.

By 4:00 or so, we were all checked in, including getting fishing licenses, and were on our way back to the boat (Jonathan had to leave to clear up some minor crisis at the marina) and in search of food. We ate at a seafood place that Lulu and I ate at a year ago when we were here. Good food.

Finally back at the boat we had showers, did a little internetting and hit the rack about 9:00.

Today, having gotten our paperwork done yesterday, we plan to head out whenever the fog lifts. If it's like yesterday, that'll happen somewhere around 10:00AM or so and we should have a window of a few hours before it closes back in again. First stop will be the fuel dock at Coral Marina and then out to sea we go.

I'll try to keep these blogs updated on a daily basis using the HF radio but no promises. Many things can go wrong with communication that have absolutely NOTHING to do with boat or crew safety so don't fret if I don't check in for awhile. The weather predictions right now look like it's going to be a calm, motoring trip the whole way to Cabo.

Meanwhile, back on Siempre Sabado, Lulu reports that she's using her time well. She's cleaned the entire outside (from the decks up) and has now cleaned every nook and cranny inside as well as oiling every stick of interior wood except the overhead, which is varnished. Now she's looking forward to getting some sewing projects done. No barnacles growing on that girl. And NO, you can't have her and she doesn't hire out so don't ask.

Until next time...

10/27/2011 - Rookie mistakes

2011-10-27T19:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the day I was scheduled to fly to LAX to meet up with Keith on s/v Chamisa, the Westsail 42 that I'm going to crew on between Long Beach and La Paz. The night before, I'd gone on-line and printed out my boarding pass and yesterday morning I packed. So, as usual, I was ready to go a long time before I needed to be.

The day before, I had called out on the morning Cruisers' Net on the VHF radio asking for a ride to the airport. Rumor had it that the cab ride was around $40 one way and there are no shuttles. Fortunately, a fellow named Mike called back and said that he had to take a friend to the airport on Wednesday afternoon and I was welcome to go along. he said his friend's flight to Tijuana was leaving at 2:00 PM and, since mine didn't leave until 2:33, it should work out. I met him in person later and he said he'd pick me up at 1:15 which seemed a little late to me but he seemed confident and, since beggars can't be choosers, I said OK.

Well, by noon on Wednesday I was ready to go. Before noon actually. But I tried to be calm and cool my jets by reading until it was time to go. Finally, at 12:50 I couldn't stand it any longer and decided to head up to the marina gate and wait. Lulu came up to wait with me. Things were going along okay although I was still feeling a little hinky about how close it was between the time he was going to pick me up and the time my flight departed.

Finally, 1:15 rolled around. And then 1:20. We watched the clock nervously as Mike hadn't shown up yet. I told Lulu that if he wasn't here by 1:25 I was going to hoof it down to the taxi stand and get a cab. Sure enough, 1:25 came and went and still no Mike. I started hoofing it.

When I got to the stand, following protocol I asked how much to the airport. The ancient driver said "200 pesos." Huh? Only $16.00? I said, "Let's go." He started down the street driving kind of slowly. He asked if I wanted to go slow and I said, NO! I need to go rapido! And rapido he went. He was zooming along wherever possible, weaving his big ol' Dodge van in and out of traffic, hell-bent on getting me to the airport in the minimum possible time. My kind of hombre!

We got to the airport at about 12:35. I gladly paid him the 200 pesos and then threw in a 40 peso propina (tip) for "manejando rapidamente". He gave me a big ol' grin and congratulated himself on his fine driving.

I hoofed it in to the departure area. There was a line at the Alaska Airlines desk which I at first joined. Then I figured that, since I already have my boarding pass and I'm not checking any bags, why do I need to wait in line? I'll just proceed directly to the gate like I would in the States. Showed my pass to the first guy and he waved me through. Got to security and went through the standard procedure of emptying my pockets, removing my belt, etc. They didn't make me remove my shoes, however. Got through security with no problems and walked over to gate 3. Plenty of time to spare. This was going to be no problem after all.

Finally, it was time to board. I got in line with everyone else. Had my passport, my FM3 visa, and my boarding pass all ready. I got up to the lady that was checking passes and IDs and showed her mine. She looked at my papers and said,

"You didn't go through the main desk, did you?"

"No."

"Well you should have. They would have given you an immigration form to fill out. You need to go back to the desk, get the form and fill it out and then take it to Immigration."

"Will I be able to make the flight?"

"I hope so." (geez, me too!)

So, I hotfoot it back through Security and back down to the main desk. No one there, of course, but the guy at the Volaris desk next door listened to my plight and gave me a form. I quickly filled it out and started speed-walking to the Arrivals area where the Immigration office was supposed to be. I got there and didn't see any Immigration office. I was standing there like a dummy, just about to ask the Rent-A-Car lady if she knew where the office was when an unmarked door opened and a young lady in an airport uniform came out and motioned me over. The lady at the Alaska gate must have been in radio contact with this lady because she seemed to know all about what was going on with me. She grabbed my paperwork and ushered me into the Immigration office while telling me that I was late and I should have been at the airpoirt 3 hours before my flight was scheduled to leave. She said that I'd probably miss my flight.

Apparently this step in the process has something to do with the FM3 visa. If I just had a tourist card (FMM) I think I'd just turn it in with my boarding pass but the FM3 evidently requires something else. She rattled of some instructions to the young Immigration officer who looked none to happy about having to rush the job, but he did it anyway, such was her commanding demeanor. I explained that this was the first time I'd flown out of Mexico with an FM3 and didn't know what the rules were. I don't know if they believed me but I think they did as I'm sure I looked every bit as shaken as I felt. Meanwhile, my guide (the young female airport employee) is on the radio with the lady at the gate (I guess) and I hear my name mentioned several times. The Immigration guy stamps my paperwork and keeps his half. He gives me the other half and tells me to take care of it as I'd need it to get back into the country. Then, the young lady employee says to me, "Now, we run." and she proceeds to start running through the airport.

I'm in hot pursuit but I'm hindered a bit because my big pack is only on with one shoulder strap making running an awkward affair. But I did my best and soon, we were back at Security. As I'm emptying my pockets and taking my belt off again, my guide tells me, "Your passport is expired." WHAT????? I just got it when we were in Newport. Then, as I was filling my pockets back up and stuffing my belt into my pack, she said that she'd mistaken the issue date for the expiration date. My passport was actually good until 2020. Yikes! Don't scare me like that.

Then, finally I'm running down the tarmac to the plane. Why did they park it so far away? A young man grabs my big pack to put it in the hold and I board the plan with my small day pack. I'm just sure I've held things up and everyone would be glaring at me. But, although I was the last to board, no one seemed more than curious. It was another 20 minutes before the plane took off. Man! Was I glad to be aboard!

The flight was uneventful and going through Customs and Immigration in LA was too, although it was still stressful since I was never really quite sure what was going on. It would really be nice if they had a big poster explaining what the process was and what one could expect. Same thing would be nice at the other end. I mean, if I knew why I have to clear out of Immigration with an FM3 but (maybe) not with an FMM, I probably wouldn't have made my rookie error. As it is, I just go along and do what I'm told and have absolutely no idea why.

What the heck is a visa anyway?

Anyway, I'm safe and sound on Chamisa. If all goes well we're looking at shoving off for Mexico this Sunday.

PS: Lulu met up with Mike just after I left to go get a cab. He told her that he said he'd be there to pick me up at a quarter to one, not a quarter after one. Yeah, whatever.

10/25/2011 - Clean fuel

2011-10-25T17:13:00.001-07:00

The beauty of diesels is that they don't ask for much. Plenty of air and nice clean fuel is about it. The problem is that they are quite picky about their fuel being CLEAN!

The following is definitely NOT an original idea on my part. I blatantly stole it from my friend (that I've never met) Wojtek, who sails the Westsail 28 "Namaste". I recently did a blog where I was complaining about my over-the-top fuel filtration system and said I was going to get rid of the Racor 215R filter unit that I had been using as a secondary filter. Wojtek responded with the following comment:

Steve, if I can suggest, stick with this old Racor. You never know when you might need it but there is a better thing you can do with it.
I have reused my old Racor after installing dual primaries. It is sitting on the port side of the lazarette, coupled with a small electric fuel pump. Every drop of fuel that goes into Namaste's tank is squeezed thru the 2 micron filter. Have I mentioned that I haven't had to even flick to the second primary since the setup?

Cheers,
Wojtek

He then included a link to some pictures of the set-up he made for Namaste. Well, I know a good idea when I see one. So, instead of dumping the $110 filter unit and the $30/each filter canisters, I made a copy of Namaste's filtration set-up for Siempre Sabado.

Can't remember what I paid for the nylon cutting board that it's all mounted on but the fuel pump cost about $25.00, the hose was less than $3.00, the toggle switch and various fittings were in my ~~junk~~ "good stuff" bins.

I transferred about 20 gallons of diesel to the main tank today using the filtration system. It takes awhile as the pump only pulls the fuel through the filter at about a liter per minute. But there was absolutely NO mess and I know that the fuel I put into the tank today is so clean that my 30 micron primary filters will pretty much have nothing to do.

Our usual practice is to take our jerry jugs to a fuel dock in the dinghy and then fill our main tank from the jugs. We haven't pulled up to a fuel dock since we were in Santa Barbara a year ago. The main tank is 39 gallons so, even if she was bone dry, it would only take 2 trips to the pumps to fill her back up. Well, then one more to fill the jerry jugs for reserve. Doesn't really matter how slow the filter/pump empties the jugs since we're not tying up a fuel dock while we're doing it.

So, thanks, Wojtek for the idea and for the advice.

10/23/2011 - Reading books on an eReader

2011-10-23T21:45:00.001-07:00

I resisted eReaders like the Kindle and Nook for quite awhile. It was partly because I felt I was one of those people who just wouldn't be happy without a "real" book in my hands. But it was also because I'm kind of cheap. I couldn't see paying a couple of hundred dollars for a reader and then still have to buy the eBooks. Not when every cruiser lounge on the planet has an exchange library.

However, by last fall the prices had dropped to a point that seemed reasonable to me and I began to see the wisdom of having our reading material on an eReader that didn't get any heavier no matter how many books it had on it. So, for Christmas last year we bought ourselves Kindles. Trying to keep things simple (and cheap) we opted for the wifi version rather than the 3G version. If I have 3G access, I can always download books to my computer and then transfer them to the Kindle.

At first, I went through the Amazon.com library to pick out all the books that, due to being in the public domain because they're so old, were free. I downloaded about 120 books including "Dracula", "Around the World in Eighty Days", "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea", "King Soloman's Mines", "Tarzan", and the whole L. Frank Baum "Oz" series. It's been great fun reading some of these old books. They just have a certain feel about them that more modern books don't have.

Then, a young friend of ours gave me a whole file folder full of books including a lot of recent stuff. Some may see this as piracy but I see it as he gave us access to a library. There's no way we'd buy any of these books but we'd certainly check them out of the library to read. Once read, we dump the file.

Now, this is one of the places where reading on an eReader differs greatly from reading a physical book. If you're downloading stuff from Amazon (or Barnes and Noble, Sony, etc.), this may not apply. But in our case, we have about 1000 books on our Kindles. When I choose a book to read, assuming it's not one I've heard of, I'm going in cold. I have NO idea what the book is about until I start reading. Also, since they don't use page numbers, just percentages, I have no idea how big the book is before I start to read. This is pure random reading. I'm going in stone cold. And you know what? So far it's worked out great. Some of the recent books I've read were "The Art of Racing In The Rain", "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter", "About a Boy", "All The Pretty Horses", and "The Lovely Bones". I'm currently 67% of the way through "Cutting For Stone". I really had no idea what any of these books was about (with the possible exception of "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter") until I started reading them. They're all completely different from one another and I've thoroughly enjoyed every one. In most cases, these are probably not books that I would likely pick up or even find in a cruisers' exchange library. So just for the variety and novelty of what I'm reading these days I love my Kindle as well as my eBook benefactor.

The other thing is, and I have no explanation for this, I seem to be reading books a LOT faster than I did before the Kindle. I have no idea why that would be but it sure seems to be.

But one of the coolest features is how quickly you can get a book. The other day I was reading about a book, "The Moneyless Man" on Boat Bits. It sounded interesting so I went to Amazon, looked it up, and then ordered it and downloaded it to our computer from which I transferred it to our Kindles. Just like that. Did the same thing when we were visiting my brother back in July. He had an intriguing book called "Pot On The Fire: Further Confessions of A Renegade Cook". Sounded interesting, Amazon had it in eBook format, I ordered it and downloaded it. Literally, less than a minute after I decided I wanted the book, I owned it and actually had it in hand. That's just too cool. Sometimes the prices aren't all that great, but I've gotten so many free books I think it evens out.

But, the main reason to have an eReader on a boat is the same reason our music is all mp3 files on either an iPod or a mini external hard drive (both, actually), and our mvies are on mini hard drives: because, who needs the weight of books, CDs, DVDs, etc.? We off-loaded 5 grocery bags of books when we were in Puerto Escondido. We still have the reference books aboard but all the general reading stuff is now just a bunch of zeros and ones. God help us if we have an EMP attack!

10/20/2011 - Another shitty day in paradise

2011-10-20T16:46:00.001-07:00

And, I mean that quite literally...

You know that big ol' derelict bird poop covered ketch tied up next to us? Well, it should have been a clue. There I was, sitting in the cockpit yesterday afternoon, minding my own business, when all of a sudden it sounded like someone was throwing gravel on top of the shade cover. And then something wet hit my shoulder and my swim trunks. Eeeeeewwww! I just got pooped on! The shade cover took the majority of it but I got hit some too. I quickly cleaned it up before it set.

The problem is that this big old abandoned boat sits here all the time with no one aboard to discourage the birds from roosting in the spreaders.

It's not always a problem for us. Only if the wind is blowing and blowing from the right direction as it was yesterday. Our shade cover helped a lot but we needed more. I pulled out another tarp that came with the boat along with the side cover that Lulu made for shade for the summer.

May look funky but at least now we can sit in the cockpit without worrying about being shat upon.

In other news:

1.) Lulu finally got to clean up the dinghy. When we were using the dink a lot and landing on sandy beaches, it was impossible not to drag sand in on your feet and on the anchor. The sand just sat in the bottom of the boat, resisting all attempts to remove it. Drove Lulu freakin' CRAZY! Today, we pulled the dink up on the dock and Lulu removed the seats, anchor, mooring lines, etc. We flipped it over and she de-barnacled and scrubbed the bottom. Then, back upright so she could clean the interior good and proper. I wish I'd gotten a "before" photo so you could see the difference. Believe me, there's a HUGE difference.

2.) If thy filter offends thee, pluck it out. And so I did. Anybody want a great deal on a used Racor fuel filter?

3.) I'm kind of embarrassed about this one. It's sort of Diesel Mechanics 101. As long as I was in the engine room today, I figured it would be a good time to check/change the pencil zinc in the heat exchanger. Sure enough, it was gone. On a whim I decided to take the end off the heat exchanger to see what kind of gunk was inside. Well, clearly this is something I need to do EVERY time I change zincs, or raw water pump impellers for that matter.

The thing at the top of the picture is a new pencil zinc. The brass piece on the left is one that the zinc has rotted off of. All the rest of the stuff is crap that was just sitting in the inlet end of the heat exchanger. Old pieces of zincs, broken off pieces of the impeller, and one zinc that looks like it rotted off its holder before it even had a chance to rot away gracefully. Left alone this stuff could plug off the heat exchanger and cause the engine to overheat. Fortunately, we never reached that point but I stand warned.

And that's how it is here today in La Paz.

10/19/2011 - Back where we started

2011-10-19T12:26:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we got up and headed to town with a whole list of chores. First up was to check back in at Marina Del Palmar and Marina Don Jose to see if they really don't have space. Our first stop was Palmar. We were hoping that one of the young ladies that was there when we were last here would be working. Sure enough, the one that I assume is the office manager was in the office. We asked if they had space available for a sailboat of about 30 feet until the end of November. She looked at the chart on the wall, the same one that the owner had looked at yesterday, and said, yes, they had a space. But it was way down at the end next to the huge derelict Novia Mia. We said that would be just fine. We asked the cost and she said $360 USD for a month. That's great and less than we paid last time we were here. It's amazing that they charge by the foot since the slip we're in could easily handle a 50' boat. But that's okay with us. Since we want to be here until the end of November, there are 12 days to account for beyond the month. However, the daily charge is $25 USD, so those 12 days would cost us another $300. Instead, we opted for another month at $360. We paid for one month now with the option to renew for another month on November 18 if we want (we will). When we were here yesterday and talked to one of the owners who told us nothing was available, he was probably really saying, "It's late in the day and I don't really want to do the paperwork." or "I don't have a clue how to check a boat in but I don't want to tell you that." or "If I rent out a space I'll probably screw it up and when the office manager gets here tomorrow she'll be pissed off at me." Instead, it was easier and saved face to just say nothing was available. I guess it pays to skip the owner and just talk to the office manager (who, in this case, I think is the owner's wife).

Anyway, we scurried back to the dinghy, putted out to the boat and got underway. Docking was a piece of cake but I can't get too proud since the slip is big enough, both in length and width, to accommodate a 50 footer.

Once settled, we had to deal with the shore power issue. The slip we were in only had 50 amp outlets. Since we have a 30 amp shore power cord, we were going to need an adapter. I called Lopez Marine on the VHF and asked if they had such a beast. After a little searching, Hamish called back and said, yes, they did have one in stock. We closed up the boat, donned our packs and headed to Lopez.

Once we got there, I was a bit taken aback to find that the adapter cost $168 USD! I mean, I knew it was going to be expensive but geez! Oh well, I've got to have it if I want shore power (I do!) so I parted with the dough. Along with a couple other items we bought, my pack was now full and heavy so we headed back to the boat to unload. I figured we might as well hook up to shore power to start charging the batteries while we were running the rest of our errands. Not wanting to find my new $168 adapter gone when we returned, I figured I'd at least make it a little less attractive by putting the boat's name on it with a Sharpie. Then I went to plug it in. No matter how I tried, I could NOT get that adapter into the outlet. I was about ready to modify it with my Dremel tool when I saw this on the box:

"Notice: There are two types of 50 amp outlets. One is for 50A-125V and the other is for 50A-125/250V. The two types are not interchangeable. Be sure to check which type you have before purchasing this product."

Huh? Two types? Well, judging from the drawings on the box, we bought the former type but needed the latter. Oh crap! The obvious thing to do was to take the adapter back to Lopez for a refund. BUT, I had defaced it by putting our boat name on it. DOUBLE CRAP! Lulu tried unsuccessfully to remove the name but no joy. I called Lopez to see if they had the other type. He said they did but it went from one 50A to two 30A outlets. More than we need but... I asked how much that was. "$272.00 and some change." Ye gods! There was no way I'd pay that. Hamish did say that we could bring the other one back since it didn't fit.

We loaded the adapter back in the pack and started walking to Lopez Marine. Along the way we stopped at the other marine stores to see if they had the adapters. None did although they had the separate components. We continued on to Lopez. All the way I'm wondering what kind of soaking I'm going to get for writing on the adapter.

We reached Lopez and walked into the welcome air-conditioning. Did I mention that it was really freakin' HOT out? As I pulled the adapter out of my pack I told Hamish what I had done. He didn't even miss a beat when he said, "Oh, we can probably get that off." Wow! He then refunded the full price. We went on about our business but ultimately returned to Lopez once more to buy the components to make up our own adapter. BTW, I checked the prices of the pieces at the other stores and, even though the cruisers around here often bad-mouth Hamish for being too high-priced, his prices were considerably lower than anyone else's for the component pieces.

We went downtown to the Modatela to buy some fabric for making a new cover for our bed since the previous one was ripping. On the way, we bought a blanket that I've wanted for a long time.

Also had a couple of shrimp tacos to give us strength. Then, on to the Aramburro store for more Topo Chico (seltzer) and Sangria (really good grape soda).

It was a long hot walk back to the boat and the pack was heavy. So, we needed occasional breaks. The first one was when we reached the ice cream store. A little frozen yogurt and we were good to go again. It felt really good to get back to the boat and know we didn't need to go anywhere else.

Lulu made pizza for dinner and then we both had showers which felt REALLY good.

The big boat next to us that you can see in the photo above is all wood. Poor thing would sink if they have a power failure. The bilge pump runs about 45 seconds out of every 90. And the stream is pretty good:

Just guessing, I'd estimate that it must pump about 10 gpm. That means that it pumps 7.5 gals every 45 seconds. So the boat is taking on water at 7.5 gallons every minute and a half. That's 7200 gallons per day. That's over 60,000 lbs. Wouldn't take long to sink a boat even this large with that kind of leakage. If we have a power failure and she starts to go down, I believe we'll untie our lines as I'm pretty sure she'd take the dock down with her.

Ah, marina life. It's definitely a mixed bag.

Oh yeah, I also renewed my Banda Ancha card yesterday so we now have cell phone internet access for the next 30 days. Ah, civilization!

10/17/2011 - EnRoute to La Paz

2011-10-19T06:46:00.001-07:00

Man, we're good! We woke up at 0730 and were underway at 0745. Last night we decided that we could do all of our normal morning things, like breakfast, while underway. So we just got up, started warming up the engine and then, when it was warmed up, raised the anchor and headed out.

It didn't take long for me to get my chance to remove the offending secondary fuel filter that I wrote about yesterday. We'd been steaming along for about 4 hours when the engine slowed down and then quit. I restarted it once but it did the same thing. The main was already up so we unrolled the jib and, with almost no wind, started moving away from our chosen path at about 0.8 knots.

This time I knew exactly what I was going to do. I climbed down in the engine compartment and cut the fuel lines leading into and out of the secondary filter. One I left dangling and the other I coupled to the outlet line from the primary filter manifold. Restarted the engine. It took 2 tries to get it to get the air all purged but then she settled right in and we were back on our way. Total down time: 15 minutes. Could be my imagination but it seems like the engine is running smoother now. And, although this makes no sense since 2200 RPMs is 2200 RPMs, it seems like we're scooting along faster now too. Couldn't have been the tidal current as we were fighting it and would continue to fight it all the way into La Paz. Like I say, it pretty much had to be my imagination but it's been a long time since we've sen 4.7 knots.

We decided to anchor down by the end of Marina del Palmar where we hope to find a berth. We anchored in 15' of water and when the anchor bit in, it REALLY bit in! No question as to whether or not it's well set.

We dinghied ashore to see if we could get a berth in either Marina del Palmar, Marina Don Jose or Marina de La Paz. No joy anywhere. We'll check back with the first two but, if we can't find a spot in either of them, we'll shoot for either Palmira or Costa Baja. We'd prefer Costa Baja and it's also the most likely marina to have an opening since it's way the hell and gone out of town. But it's secure, has water, internet and power at the dock. And it does have a shuttle service to make it's distance from town a little more palatable

We celebrated being back in the city of good, easily available food by going to one of our favorite spots: El Taqueria Super Burro. We both had papas rellenas: mashed potatoes topped with butter, carne asada, mushrooms, cheese and corn and then served with the standard array of sides: salsa mexicana (pico de gallo), a salsa made of fire roasted chiles and tomatoes, an avocado-based salsa, pickled onions, cucumbers, limons, roasted chiles, and shredded cabbage. It was SO good! Saw our old buddy Mañuel from our beer store. He was glad to see us as we were to see him.

Good to be back in La Paz for awhile.

10/16/2011 - Ensenada Blanca to.... ?

2011-10-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

With my flight to SoCal set for 10 days from now, we decided to get back to La Paz faster than we normally would. Our normal trip would be Ensenada Blanca to Agua Verde, then Agua Verde to Timbabiche, then Timbabiche to San Evaristo, then San Evaristo to Ensenada Grande, and finally Ensenada Grande to La Paz. But, we thought it'd be good to speed that up a bit. It would take us about 15 hours to sail the 60 miles from Ensenada Grande to San Evaristo. So we figured that since the moon is just a couple days past full and the weather forecast is pretty benign, why not leave Ensenada Grande on Saturday evening, sail overnight and then spend Sunday and Sunday night in San Evaristo? That would cut out 2 overnight stays.

So, after bidding adieu to John & Patricia (s/v Trick), Ed & Lori (s/v Eileen May), Anna & Phil (s/v Seawind II) as well as Roberto and David at El Santuario, we weighed anchor and set off.

We departed Ensenada Blanca right on schedule at 1800. We had sun with us long enough to get around the corner and start heading southeast. The motor was running good and all seemed right with the world. Sunset was going to happen around 7:20 or so and the moon wouldn't be rising for another 2 hours after that so we'd have a couple hours to try to identify various constellations. We're not really all that far south but it sure seems like some of the constellations that have always been very easy to locate are harder to find down here.

The moon rose right on schedule. Looked like a big lopsided jack-o-lantern when it first came up. I was happy to see it because there was this one channel that we had to go through just after Agua Verde that had me kind of nervous. There's an off-shore reef that extends quite a ways under water. You have to go between it and the shore in a channel that's only about a mile or so wide. I know, a mile sounds like a pretty big passageway but, in the dark, with hazards underwater where they can't be seen, a mile is not quite as wide as it used to be. Fortunately, we passed through unscathed. The only casualty was our speed. Seems the tide was coming in and all that water had to go through the channel too. And, besides being narrow, the bottom rises from several hundred feet to about 50 to 60 feet so all that water had to be squeezed down. In doing so, it increased its speed against us and dropped our already slow 4 knots to 2.5 knots until we cleared the channel.

The rest of the night proceeded uneventfully. Lulu and I took turns sleeping for a few hours at a time. Listened to NPR for awhile and read a lot. It was a very peaceful night with no wind and gentle swells.

The sun came up at about 7:30 and we still had 2 hours to go until we reached San Evaristo. It was a beautiful morning and we were thankful to be passing through San Jose Channel in the daylight. As we neared San Evaristo, I got to thinking. And I think you probably know just how dangerous that can be. I had heard that we might get some heavier weather on Monday. We've been through some fairly uncomfortable seas in the San Jose Channel and weren't really looking forward to doing it again. Plus, if it did get ugly, we might get stuck in San Evaristo for a couple days. Normally we wouldn't care but this time we're sort of on a schedule. Can you see where this is going?

I talked to Lulu and we decided, what the heck, let's just push on to Ensenada Grande on Isla Partida. We should be able to get there by about 4:00 this afternoon. And so, that's exactly what we did. Bypassed San Evaristo altogether and continued on down the channel.

What little wind we had was on the nose as were these large but gentle swells. Lulu made us some breakfast and then laid down to get a little more shut-eye. I continued to read or listen to the radio. About 11:30, we switched and I went below to take a nap.

Sometime during my nap is when it happened. The engine quit.

There was a time when this would have just freaked me out. But this time, because it had been running so well for so long, I was pretty sure it was just a dirty fuel filter. Cool as a cucumber, I opened the engine compartment door and switched the two valves that gave me a nice clean primary filter. Close things up, start the engine and then listen to it die. Repeat. Repeat once more just to be sure. Yep, just as I thought. It's not the primary filter. Crappage!

Having no desire to climb into the nice hot engine room to change the other filters, we opted to sail. Raise the main, unroll the jib, point as close to the wind as we can and set the autopilot. Everything was going great except that the wind speed was pretty low and it was coming from where we wanted to go. Now, Siempre Sabado is a sweet little boat, but, loaded down like she is, she doesn't point worth a damn, especially when the wind speed will only allow us to go about 2 knots. So, we found ourselves sailing almost perpendicular to our rhumb line. Oh well, better than not moving at all I guess.

After a half hour or so of this, I figured the engine had cooled some. So I gathered up the spare filters, some tools and dove in. The little bitty filter on the engine is the easiest to replace so I tackled it first. It's located inside a little can and, when I removed the can, it was only about 1/4 full of fuel. That means that the supply was likely getting restricted upstream. But no matter. A guy can dream, can't he? I changed the little filter and fired up the engine. It died. Tried again. It died. Tried again, it didn't die. Whoa!! You mean that I might not have to change the other, harder-to-get-at filter? Cooooool.

Put the tools away, closed up the engine compartment, rolled up the jib, sheeted the main amidships for roll abatement, and started on our way. And then the engine died. Tried another couple of starts without much hope and got just exactly what I expected: no joy.

Okay, unroll the jib again, trim the sails, set the autopilot and prepare to jump back into the engine compartment as we slowly sailed away from where we wanted to go. Get the spare filter, climb back down and start removing the secondary filter. This filter is not really that hard to change, it's just kind of messy and difficult to reach. But, it is the one that I had to change so many times when we came down the Washington coast after we bought our boat in Anacortes and moved her to Newport, Oregon, so I was pretty used to the drill. With a minimum of problems I got the filter changed. We've had a small diesel leak in the engine room for a little while and now I know that this filter is the culprit. I think I got the leak slowed down while I was in there.

Anyway, climb back up, put stuff away, close up the engine compartment and try again.

Engine starts...engine dies.
Engine starts...engine dies.
Engine starts...engine dies.
Engine starts...engine dies.

Now wait just a darn minute! Okay, maybe it just needs more time to self-bleed the system. Let's try again.

Engine starts...engine dies.
Engine starts...engine dies.
Engine starts...engine dies.
Engine starts...engine dies.
Engine starts...engine dies.
Engine starts...engine dies.
Engine starts...engine doesn't die! Oh, pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease...
It keeps running. I put it in gear and it's still running. Get back on course and it's still running. Roll up the jib and, you guessed it, it's STILL running!

We cautiously start towards Ensenada Grande and the engine continues to run beautifully. Four hours later, we're there. We anchored in 24' of very clear water on 125' of chain. Lulu went snorkeling and said that the snorkeling here rivals anything we saw at Ensenada Blanca. We both had saltwater baths followed by a fresh water rinse.

Tomorrow, weather (and engine) permitting, we'll finish the trip to La Paz.

Also, once we're in La Paz, I'm going to eliminate the secondary fuel filter. That's how we ran the whole trip down from Newport: just the primaries and the little filter on the engine. I'm going to start changing a primary filter with each oil change and change the engine filter on every other oil change. That ought to head off any problems and make life much simpler to boot. And getting rid of the leaker filter will just be a bonus. Besides, the filter canisters for it are EXPENSIVE!

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10/14/2011 - Adios, Puerto Escondido

2011-10-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

We arrived at Puerto Escondido almost exactly 4 months ago; June 15th. We had only intended to stay a week or so but that's how the cruising life can go. We departed today, leaving many new friends behind but we're pretty sure we'll run into them again in one harbor or another sometime. We're headed back to La Paz but we made our first day's run an easy one: 2 hours to Ensenada Blanca where we anchored at 12:30 PM. We have a nice gentle ripple running through the anchorage and a light cooling breeze. There are 5 other boats here at the moment: Kashmir, Seawind II, Manta, Eileen May, and Sea Venture. We're anchored directly out from the palapa at El Santuario in about 24' of water with a 5:1 scope.

We had originally planned to take a leisurely trip back down to La Paz, arriving somewhere around November 1st. We need to be in La Paz in November as that's when Cody & Scott are coming to visit for a week. Well, things change. In the last couple of days I recieved and accepted an opportunity to help a friends bring their Westsail 42 down the Baja coast from Southern California. Kay & Keith, who we met a little over a year ago at the Northern California Westsail Owners' Rendezvous, have been trying to get Chamisa down to La Paz. Last year they were foiled by an injury that Kay had and, although they had made it to Long Beach so far, it looked like this year might be a repeat. But, things happen and Kay decided to take care of her shoulder Stateside while Keith and I bring Chamisa down the coast to La Paz. Then Kay can fly in after she recovers. So, we're heading to La Paz at a slightly quicker pace than originally planned.

We'll spend tonight and most of the day tomorrow here at Ensenada Blanca. Then we plan to pull out about 1800 tomorrow and do a night sail the 60 miles to San Evaristo. With the moon just past full and Lulu's new stargazing book, we're really looking forward to that leg. We should be in La Paz about Tuesday evening. We'll try to find a space in a marina for all of November. That way, I know Lulu and the boat are nice and secure while I'm gone, Lulu can have access to unlimited dock water for washing 4 months' accumulated grime off the boat, it'll be convenient when Scott & Cody are here and I can finally top off and equalize the batteries.

No photos the next few posting as they'll mostly be done through Sailmail.

10/11/2011 - Ads

2011-10-11T10:41:00.001-07:00

As some of you have noticed, there are a couple of ads on the side and bottom of the blog now. The concept is that they would relate somehow to something I've written in the blog. The most obvious would be if I actually mentioned a product by name. Let's try it: we took about 5 shopping bags full of books off the boat yesterday because all we ever read now are our Kindles. Okay, let's see if an ad for Kindles shows up.

Anyway, the idea is that, if I happen to mention something and it piques a reader's curiosity, an appropriate ad might show up on the side that could take the reader directly to a place where he/she could learn more. And, if they get there by clicking on the ad on my blog, I get a couple of pennies.

I've resisted doing this for a long time mainly because it goes against my 60s sensibilities. Smacks of "selling out". But I've lightened up a bit on that line of reasoning because a.) nobody really cares, b.) even Bob Dylan shilled for Victoria's Secret, and c.) a little extra taco and beer money couldn't hurt. I don't think the ads are particularly intrusive or annoying. Besides, if it's good enough for one of my favorite blogs, Boat Bits, it's good enough for me.

10/9/2011 - To market, to market

2011-10-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

The Sunday market in Loreto is one of those things that it's easier to experience if you have a car here. Again, it's way too far from Puerto Escondido to walk. You could anchor the boat off Loreto and row in but, since the "anchorage" at Loreto isn't protected from any direction except maybe the west, and since strong northerlies are predicted this week and weekend, that option is out for all but the extremely brave or extremely foolhardy at least part of the time.

So, that pretty much means catching a ride from a cruiser with a car who also happens to have extra room and whom you haven't pissed off about something yet. Our chance came today when Richard from s/v Trinity offered us a lift. So right after the morning VHF net we met up and headed to town.

The market is a combination flea market and farmer's market.

Like any good flea market, you never know what you might find. Richard was looking for some soup bowls and found some although he could only get three instead of the four he wanted. There was a cool little GE travel iron like the one I had in the Navy. It was all Lulu could do to walk away from it even though she already has a good travel iron. It was just so cute.

The real reason to go, though, is for the food. Mostly the produce, although I'm told the meat is good as well.

We bought a kilo (2.2 lbs) of rock scallops and a half kilo (1.1 lbs) of huge shrimp for 220 pesos (about $16 USD) and so, what with all the salami and pepperoni we bought for pizzas the other day in La Paz, there just wasn't enough room in the fridge for any more meat.

We did, however, have room on the boat for produce.

We bought a pineapple, mangoes, potatoes, limons, zucchinis, and a cauliflower.

And, I got to get a couple of excellent carnitas tacos for "breakfast". I have a tendency to always order fish since we're in fish country. But I do miss my carnitas and carne asada tacos now and then.

Following the market, we stopped at the local ISSTE supermarket for a few more items and then back to the boat to put it all away. If we had a car down here, the Sunday market could easily become a weekly ritual.

Now it's time to fire up the mesquite charcoal briquets and put those shrimp on the barby.

10/8/2011 - Restaurant of the drunk

2011-10-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

Restaurante del Borracho. It's a misleading name, at least at 2:00 on a Saturday afternoon. Del Borracho's is kind of an institution around Loreto. The story I heard is that it's owned by an ex-biker gringo. It's highly regarded among both the gringo and Mexican communities for its atmosphere and service but especially for it's hamburgers and fries. The only problem with the place is that they've been closed the entire time we've been in the Loreto area. Seems they close down in the summer months and don't open again until early October. The other problem is its location. It's almost to Loreto which is way too far to walk from Puerto Escondido, and it's far enough out of Loreto that walking from there isn't too feasible either. Guess we could hitchhike with Del Borracho our specific destination.

But, we didn't need to. Instead, Dale, one of the Puerto Escondido regulars offered us a ride yesterday. We jumped at the chance.

Besides looking like something from out of the old west, when we arrived there was a metal sign swinging in the breeze that had just the right amount of rusty creakiness to it to give the place that little extra something.

The interior is wide open, wood, and very comfortable feeling. There are lots of interesting things hanging on the walls and from the ceiling.

The staff was extremely friendly.

Naturally, we ordered cheeseburgers and fries. The burgers were very good. They were probably 1/3 lb. burgers well-dressed with plenty of tomatoes, pickles lettuce and just a couple rings of onions. All too often we get a burger with a huge slice of onion, one tiny little slice of tomato and one pickle chip. Not here. There was enough tomato and pickle that you got some in every bite and just enough onion for flavor without being overwhelming. The buns were grilled, too, which shows that the cook cares.

The fries were nice and crispy on the outside and soft in the middle, just like they're supposed to be.

All that said, they weren't the best burgers we've had in Baja. That award still goes to Buffalito Grill in La Paz. At least so far. But it was one of the cooler places we've eaten. If we get another chance to go to Del Borracho's, and I hope we do, I think I might try the grilled Ceasar salad with chicken. Lulu's thinking about the beef stir-fry if we get there on the right day (it's a special one day of the week and I'm not sure they make it on the other days).

So, at least now, if we leave Puerto Escondido sooner rather than later, we'll at least have eaten at The Restaurant of the Drunk.

10/7/2011 - Seasons are changing

2011-10-08T10:19:00.001-07:00

Hard to believe that winter will ever hit Baja but last night and today we're beginning to get a hint that it really will happen. Right now, I'm sitting in the cockpit at 6:30 PM and the temperature is a cool 84°F although the breeze makes it feel more like 78°. May not seem cool to you but once you've spent months on end with temperatures in the high 90s and low 100s, 84 is pretty darn cool. Matter of fact, I think we're going to watch our shows down below tonight lest we catch a chill.

Yesterday we were at Ensenada Blanca. However, the weather reports were calling for fairly strong northers this weekend with small craft warnings on Monday. Ensenada Blanca is wide open to the north so it wouldn't be a great place to be during a strong norther. We've heard these predictions before and blew them off. Why did we pay attention this time? Well, Wednesday night we had very strong winds blowing through the anchorage from the west. No worries as we had protection from that direction and, even if we drug anchor, we'd blow more or less out to sea rather than up on the beach. However, the winds were something of an eye-opener. If this is what it was like with winds from our protected side, did we really want to weather high winds from our unprotected side? And, being from the north, the winds made the shore a dreaded lee shore. In other words, if we broke loose, we'd get pushed right up on the beach. Not a good thing.

So, about noon yesterday, after the winds and waves had laid down some, we set sail for Puerto Escondido which offers better protection from the north. Richard on the trimaran "Trinity" and Phil and Anna on the ketch "Sea Wind II" preceded us. Jay and Judy on "Wind Raven" and Jack on "Miss Maude" planned to leave later in the afternoon with Puerto Ballandra on Isla Carmen their destination. That leaves only Mick on "Kashmir". Not sure what his plans were.

We had a very mellow trip back up to P.E. The mooring we had been using in the Waiting Room was taken so we headed out to a mooring in the main harbor, even though they are pretty overpriced since the price increase earlier this summer. However, later in the afternoon while having a beer outside Pedro's teinda and discussing life with other cruisers, we were convinced to move into the Ellipse, an anchorage run by API. Since API only charges 11 pesos a day (about 1/10 what Fonatur wants for their mooring balls), we weren't hard to convince. The Ellipse would not ordinarily be my first choice of anchorages. It's small and the boats are close together. But, we were assured that the depth was mini al and short scope would do the trick. We anchored in 12' of water with about 50' of rode.

We're pretty much the furthest boat out, with the green awning.

Although the strongest winds are supposed to be Monday, we are already feeling their effect. These winds are coming from the north where Fall is definitely in the air. Right now (it's now 7:25 PM - no, I'm not that slow a writer; we had dinner in the interim) I'm sitting at the table writing this, with shorts and a t-shirt and without the fan running. Even yesterday this would have been unheard of. Going to be excellent sleeping temperature tonight. Supposed to get down into the low 70s.

So, where to from here? Well, in a week or so, when the norther is just a memory, we'll start working our way back south. Give ourselves a couple weeks to get to La Paz where we'll spend November. We'll spend a few days in Agua Verde, a few days in San Evaristo, a few more in Isla San Francisco, a couple more days in Ensenada Grande and finally a day or two in Bahia Falsa before settling back into the routine in La Paz. Looking forward to it all. We can now say we've spent a summer (minus 3 weeks) in the Sea of Cortez.

10/1/2011 - Small world

2011-10-01T10:39:00.001-07:00

A year ago today we left the marina at Benicia, California and arrived at the marina in San Leandro for the Northern California Westsail owners' rendezvous.

Small world department:

We were sitting at El Santuario palapa bar the other day, enjoying a couple of cold brews when a bunch of guys from the hotel (Villa del Palmar) wandered in. A couple of them had t-shirts on that advertised things like the Portland, OR fire department and some place in Tigard, OR. We struck up a conversation and it turns out that they had sailed past Siempre Sabado on the Wild Loreto Tours catamaran and noticed the Silverton, OR hailing port. Yes, we told them, we are from Silverton, and yes, they told us, they're all from Portland.

As it happens, this was the groom's entourage for the first wedding to be held at Villa Del Palmar - Loreto. Matter of fact, the wedding was scheduled for later that same evening. The groom, Dave, said that, as the wedding was to be held barefoot on the beach, it'd only take him about 5 minutes to get ready so they had time to enjoy happy hour. They all loved the whole laid-back funkiness of El Santuario. We had a great time shooting the breeze. Of course, we always love it when we run into people who think what we're doing is cool. Those, of course, are the best people and the ones who are obviously the most fun to talk with. These guys fit that category.

Eventually we parted company, Lulu and I back to the boat and Dave and friends/family to the wedding. We were actually able to watch the wedding from the boat but it was far away enough so it was hard to tell much of what was going on. However, later, when wedding photos were taken, we realized that Siempre Sabado would be in the background along with a couple of other boats.

Yesterday, Dave, his beautiful bride Heather, and other members of their entourage joined us at El Santuario for Happy Hour again. Heather showed us the DVD full of wedding photos (600 of them!) that the hotel had provided for them. The cover of the DVD box had a photo on it of the bride and groom and, sure enough, there's Siempre Sabado at anchor in the background. How cool is that?

As we were shooting the breeze, somewhere along the line the name Roger Clyne came up.

"Roger Clyne? You mean Roger Clyne and The Peacemakers?"
"You're familiar with Roger Clyne?"
"Hell yes! And the Refreshments, too."
"What are the odds? Here we are at a little palapa near a hotel in a pretty remote site near Loreto Mexico, and we run into someone who is not only from Sil;verton, but knows Roger Clyne and The Peacemakers?"

For those not aware, The Refreshments morphed into Roger Clyne and The Peacemakers for various reasons. The band holds a yearly 3-day music fest (Circus Mexicus) at Puerto Peñasco, a town on the Mexican mainland on the way northern coast of the Sea of Cortez. Lulu and I have been thinking it would be pretty cool to go sometime. Dave and Heather have been thinking it would be pretty cool to go sometime. So, our plan for next year is:

Dec/Jan/Feb: Mexican mainland, probably mostly Mazatlan
Mar: La Paz?
Apr/May: start cruising up the Sea
Jun: Puerto Peñasco for Circus Mexicus.
If the Fonatur marina in Puerto Peñasco seems pretty secure, we may just hang out through July and leave the boat there when we go back to Cody & Scott's house for a couple of months
Aug/Sep: Cody & Scott's in Oregon
Oct: Cruise the Sea southbound
Nov: La Paz

rinse and repeat with slight variations.

Of course, these plans, like every other plan we make is completely open to amendment at any time.

See ya in Puerto Peñasco, Mr. and Mrs Gleen.

9/28/2011 - Paradise enhanced

2011-09-28T10:04:00.001-07:00

I've talked about El Santuario before. It's the little palapa bar where we had the Talk Like A Pirate Party and where we are now spending most afternoons. They've made Happy Hour two hours long so the beer is now cruiser-priced (rather than fancy hotel-priced) for a couple hours every afternoon and the least we can do is show our gratitude by pounding down a few.

I wish there were a string of Santuarios up and down the Baja coast. It's the kind of place that you expect to find everywhere when you're fantasizing about cruising but are actually fairly rare. There's a nice beach palapa bar/restaurant at Bahia Falsa way down almost to La Paz but it's not nearly as laid back at Santuario. There's also a palapa bar/restaurant in San Evaristo but it's so laid back that it never seems to really be open and, if it is, it's up in the air whether they'll have cold beer or not.

So what makes El Sauntario so special?

Well, the "No shoes, no shirt, no problem" attitude certainly doesn't hurt.

The overall funky coolness of the buildings are certainly an asset.

The beautiful surroundings, obviously.

And the fact that a roadrunner may go darting by is a definite plus.

All that stuff contributes to the overall appeal of Santuario. But what really makes the difference is the staff.

These guys (L-R: Alan, Roberto, David) make the place a true santuario. There is nothing they won't do for us to make us feel welcome. And everything they do, no matter how extracurricular it seems to us, is brushed off with a smile and a "Please, it is nothing."

Let's take yesterday for example.

The plan was developed on Sunday when Jack from s/v Miss Maude brought over some dorado to grill. Alan cooked up some vegetables to go with the fish, someone provided some tortillas, and then David went diving and brought back some clams to put on the grill (since we didn't have enough limons for ceviche). Everybody there shared an impromptu lunch. David, we're told, is quite a cook. He said that if we brought over some fish, tomatoes, onions, limons, etc, on Tuesday morning, he'd cook up some magic and we could all have a mini-feast when Happy Hour started at 2:00.

That sounded pretty good. Jay and Judy (s/v Wind Raven) went to the store for tomatoes and limons, Lulu and I went to the store for tortillas, onions, charcoal and charcoal starter, Mick (s/v Kashmir) contributed onions, tomatoes and tortillas, Lulu made a batch of cookies and I made a pot of beans. Jay and Jack spent Sunday evening, all day Monday, and most of the day on Tuesday fishing. Unfortunately, in spite of all their efforts, they came back fish-less.

Two o'clock rolled around and there we were with all the ingredients except fish. The BBQ grill had been put away and it was beginning to look like it was going to be a food-less afternoon. But David, undaunted, took one of the hotel guests, Michelle, and headed out into the bay on a kayak. They returned maybe 15 minutes later with a huge bounty of fresh chocolate clams (so-named for the color of their shell, not for the Hershey-ness of their flavor, thank goodness). He then got to work preparing them.

First he served up a platter of raw clams on the half shell. Squeeze a little limon on them, a dash of Maggi (sort of like soy sauce), and another dash of hot sauce. Absolutely delicious. I was too busy eating to even get a picture.

Next, he got busy making clam ceviche.

Everyone got their fill and it was excellent.

Four o'clock and the official end of Happy Hour was drawing near. However, Luis (aka "The Boss") had dropped by and, hearing it was Lulu's birthday, extended Happy Hour until 5:00. Outstanding!

That's the kind of thing that goes on here. We cruisers, being naturally ~~cheap~~ frugal, have made this our regular afternoon hangout and now feel pretty much like family. But the occasional hotel guests who wander this far down the beach also seem to love the friendly funkiness of Santuario. It's not long until the staff and the cruisers have made them feel like they're home as well. I don't know if Santuario will still be the same place it is a year from now or whether success will ruin it. I hope that it remains the same but, if not, maybe for once I'll be in the right place at the right time to be able to say, "You think it's good now? You should have seen it back in 2011."

9/25/2011 - Trouble in Paradise

2011-09-25T12:51:00.001-07:00

Long after we had gone back to the boat from the Talk Like A Pirate Party the other day, a few die-hard pirates stayed on, dancing and drinking into the night. Apparently, there was a bit of an altercation during those wee hours.

It seems that one of the pirates (cruisers) got fresh with Irena, Alan's wife. In case you don't remember, Alan is the employee of Wild Loreto that reminded me of my cousin Larry.

Alan and Irena

The story I'm told is that Alan tried diplomacy several times to get the cruiser to quit disrespecting his wife but to no avail. Finally they decided to go down to the beach to settle things. Only Alan came back. The cruiser was taking a "nap". Everyone present, I'm told, agreed that the cruiser certainly had it coming. I've also been told that even the cruiser now agrees with that.

However, Alan's boss got wind of it and Alan received a 2-day unpaid suspension as a result. Now we're hearing that his boss is thinking seriously about firing Alan. This is a guy who is a great asset to the organization. He's incredibly personable and helpful. Further, if we hadn't been having a party there, Alan and Irena would have been home instead of spending the night at the palapa for NO extra pay helping a bunch of gringo yachties have a good time. If he does get fired, he, his wife and his twin 2-year-old boys will likely have to move in order to find another job. A damn shame!

We cruisers, and tourists in general, need to remember how our actions may affect the local folks. The cruiser in question may feel remorse but that won't get Alan's job back. We're really hoping that management will do the right thing, maybe suspend Alan for a few more days or something, but not fire him. If he is fired, Judy from s/v Wind Raven suggested that the least this cruising community could do would be to pass the hat to help with moving expenses. I hope it doesn't come to that but, if it does, I really hope the community steps up.

9/25/2011 - Up the creek...

2011-09-25T12:34:00.001-07:00

...with a broken paddle.

We were rowing back from shore the other afternoon, having returned the Terminator to John on Trick as they were headed back to Puerto Escondido. I'm merrily rowing along when *SNAP* the port oar just broke in two, Right at the oarlock where, of course, the greatest stress is. Lulu took the broken piece and used it as a paddle. I would row with one oar and then Lulu would correct our course with the paddle. Slow, but we got there. About a week ago, Mick from s/v Kashmir lost an oar sometime during the night. Now he had just one oar which wasn't doing him much good. We borrowed his remaining oar but the mismatch made rowing pretty difficult.

Nothing left to do but repair our own oars.

The repair was nothing Earth-shattering but it worked out well. We happened to have a couple of pieces of closet rod stock on the boat. It was bigger around than the interior diameter of the broken oar shaft so I had to plane it down to size.

Once it was small enough to just slip into the shaft, I put one end in and pinned it in place with some screws.

Then I slipped the other end over the protruding plug and screwed in in place.

And voila! we once again had a matched set.

The repair went so well that today, I cut the other oar apart at the stress point and inserted a wooden plug in it, too. Figured I'd head trouble off at the pass for once.

9/20/2011 - Arrrrrrr ya scurvy dog!

2011-09-20T13:23:00.001-07:00

That's right folks, Monday, September 19 was International Talk Like Pirate Day. And like the scurvy bunch of sea dogs that we are, the cruisers anchored at Ensenada Blanca used it as an excuse for a party. Members of the local fleet were in attendance as were some folks who drove down from Puerto Escondido and some who wandered up the beach from the hotel.

Our hosts were the crew from Wild Loreto who run El Santuario palapa bar as well as kayak trips, diving and snorkeling trips, etc. Alan, Roberto and David went out of their way to keep us all lubricated and happy.

David (L) and Alan (R). BTW, Alan reminds me SO much of my cousin Larry. Sam facial expressions, same mannerisms, says things the same way, etc. And, like Larry, Alan is a helluva nice guy.

Roberto with his novia, Lynne.

Roberto (R) and his boss, Luis, without whose cooperation the party could not have happened at El Santuario.

It was your basic cruiser beach party. Plenty of food donated by nearly everyone, lots to drink with special pricing, courtesy of Luis and Wild Loreto, and, of course, lots of pirates and dancing:

There was even a sand castle contest:

Dean from was elected the Queen of the Pirates:

And Ray was elected King:

PIRATES! Can't take them anywhere!

And I need to give a special mention to Diana who thought this thing up and took care of the negotiations with Wild Loreto and the Hotel to make it happen. Hopefully it'll become a yearly event and they'll use it as a model to throw more parties at El Santuario.

Thanks, Diane....

9/18/2011 - what have we been doing?

2011-09-18T11:08:00.001-07:00

Looks like my last blog was the one where we went scuba diving for the first time. Since then, Lulu has had 2 more successful dives, the first down to 76' and the last one down to 90'. I started out on the second dive but had problems with my mask and flippers and decided I really need new stuff before I dive again. My mask kept filling with water. This was sort of ironic since Terry had just showed us how to clear the water from our masks while underwater. The process worked fine but I found myself doing it almost continuously. The flippers we got with our snorkeling packages are short and fat and don't give a heck of a lot of drive. Then, to top it off, the strap on one of mine came completely off while I was 20-30 feet down and I had to just sort of clench my toes to keep the whole flipper from sliding off my foot. Our friend John managed to find the strap so I can at least use the flipper even though it's not really a very good one. Anyway, we definitely need to visit a dive shop in Loreto next time we have the opportunity.

On Lulu's second dive, she and John and Terry gathered some seafood for a feast on Terry's boat later that evening. On yesterday's dive, Terry took some video of her. If I can figure out how to snip a short piece out I'll see if I can attach it to a blog. Later.

We spent the better part of 2 days cleaning the topsides of the boat which had gotten decidedly grungy. Oh yeah, and I've been doing a lot of rowing lately since I haven't been able to find a new impeller for my outboard yet. I have 4 of them on order from the States and hopefully one of them will come down with a fellow cruiser sometime soon. In the meanwhile, John from "Trick" loaned me his spare outboard. It's an old 2 hp Suzuki that John's wife, Patricia has dubbed "The Terminator". Looks like hell but it works and sure beats rowing. I don't mind the rowing too much but sometimes it takes an awfully long time to get places.

Tomorrow is "International Talk Like A Pirate Day" and a party has been planned for the palapa bar here at Ensenada Blanca. BTW, the official name of the palapa bar is El Santuario (The Sanctuary). There's going to be a potluck, costume contest, pirate queen and king vote, volleyball, tug-o-war, etc, etc, etc. Should be fun and I should get a few good blog photos. The only fly in the ointment is that we're supposed to get north winds tomorrow and, what with Ensenada Blanca being wide open to the north, it could become a pretty bouncy anchorage. Not a huge deal if you're staying aboard or staying ashore, but running back and forth could be a little dicey. This is the main reason I'm borrowing The Terminator.

It's beginning to cool down, sort of. Let's see, today's Sunday so I guess it was Wednesday and Thursday nights, we actually had nice cool breezes. Where it usually only cools down to the high 80s at night, on those two nights it probably dropped to the low 80s. Lulu had to actually cover up with a sheet and I got up and put on a t-shirt on halfway through the night. However, the last 2 nights have been as warm as ever or at least close. But, there does seem to be just the slightest hint of cooler air occasionally these days. Just enough to give one hope. Lulu and I were commenting that this is probably the first time we've ever looked forward to winter. Sixty-five to seventy degree days followed by fifty-five degree nights sounds pretty good right about now. Hard to imagine getting up in the morning and putting on anything other than a swim suit but long pants and long-sleeve t-shirts actually appear to be in our future.

That's about it for what we're doing. Looking at e-mails from home, I see that Autumn is beginning to set in in the Pacific Northwest. We've always loved Autumn but it's always been sort of tainted but the knowledge that winter won't be far behind. And winter up there didn't mean just long pants and long-sleeve t-shirts. All in all, hot or not, I think we prefer it down here.

Hey, here are a few more photos of the beautiful Villa del Palmar Hotel that has been treating us so nicely.

View from the bar:

View of the bar:

The hotel and pool area:

9/11/2011 - Move over, Mike Nelson

2011-09-11T19:04:00.001-07:00

Today certainly didn't turn out like we thought it would. Our plan was to go to the tienda for a few things, maybe enjoy happy hour at the palapa and call it good. However, that was before Terry called.

Terry is a cruiser (s/v Manta) who has been down here since the early 80s. He's an avid diver and frequently takes people out on diving excursion as well as doing some instructing. He's been sharing the Ensenada Blanca anchorage with us for the last week or so. He called us on the VHF radio this morning about 9:30 and wanted to know if we'd like to go out on a dive. I told him that our experience so far consisted solely of snorkeling. He said that wouldn't be a problem. We were just to bring our masks, flippers and snorkels and we'd head out about 10:30. We jumped at the chance. We were both a little bit nervous about it but Terry said we'd start off in about 3' of water, then move to 5' when we were comfortable and so on. We decided that you just have to jump when chances like this come along lest they never come along again. We told him we'd be there.

Once we got Terry's dinghy loaded up we headed out to Isla Las Tijeras, a mile or so north of our anchorage.

Once we got there, Terry told us how easy scuba diving was. I said that was good because less than a week ago I was still using a life vest when I snorkeled. This gave him pause but he pointed to the shore and asked, "Can you swim well enough to reach the shore?" I assured him that I could and he said "No problem." Terry gave us a quick lesson in how the regulators worked. Then we donned our masks and flippers and went over the side. He handed us down our scuba tanks and we schlepped them to shallower water where he could help us put them on. There was a considerable surge that made standing in one place very difficult but we eventually got our gear on and adjusted.

The next step was just to get under the water and breathe to get used to the fact that we would actually be able to breathe underwater. Except for Lulu having trouble getting her mask to fit without leaking, this step went pretty well. It was pretty amazing to be able to actually breathe underwater. It wasn't completely new since we'd been able to breathe underwater (to a point) with snorkels. But the scuba gear sounded different, particularly when exhaling, and that took a couple of seconds to get used to.

Comfortable with that step, we moved into deeper water, maybe five feet or so. Terry said to just go down to the bottom and grab a rock to help hold us down and just get used to breathing and being underwater. This was a lot harder than it sounded. It was all I could do to get down and almost impossible to stay down. My gear included a buoyancy compensator that still had some air in it which wasn't helping at all. Terry released the air and then found some rocks to put in the pocket of my vest. Lulu was still having mask problems but she kept doggedly readjusting and trying again.

We then moved into a little deeper water, maybe 8' or so. Terry motioned to us to take a spot on a rock and watch. He then opened a scallop and laid it on the rocks to attract the fish. And attract fish it did! First little small colorful ones and eventually some larger ones: two different kinds of parrot fish, some trigger fish, and numerous others who's names I have no idea of.

We moved to deeper water (14') and saw a small moray eel which Terry fed with some pieces of scallop. As we proceeded along, I spotted a much larger moray sticking his head out from beneath a rock. I made no attempt to feed him, being somewhat protective of my fingers.

Gliding through the water was incredible. It was almost like flying. The weight Terry added to my vest made me almost neutral on the buoyancy scale. If I stopped and let some air out of my lungs, I could slowly sink. But by inflating my lungs a little more, I could rise up and swim along at whatever level I needed to. It was just like Sea Hunt except not in black and white. It really was awesome.

We continued on following Terry into gradually deeper water. We saw some more morays and, at one point,Terry revealed a scorpion fish to me. That was one well-camouflaged fish! He pointed him out and I didn't see anything but rock until Terry nudged it a little with his dive knife at which point the "rock" exploded into movement and swam away at high speed. They're very venomous and even a very small prick can cause real problems. Too bad they're so darn hard to spot.

Our ultimate depth was 39'. At this point we stopped going deeper because we'd reached the thermocline where the water started getting noticeably cooler. Terry would be alright as he had a wetsuit on but Lulu and I just had swimming suits. She had a long sleeve Lycra dive skin on top but I just had a wet t-shirt. It wasn't uncomfortably cold but it would have been if we'd stayed at that depth too long.

As we started meandering our way back towards shallower water, Lulu and I both got the opportunity to feed a small moray. Good thing we had gloves on as I felt him hit my finger a little when he took the proffered scallop. Eventually we found ourselves back in 4'-5' water alongside the dinghy. We still had enough air in our tanks to keep diving but we were both pretty pooped. We'd been down for 47 minutes.

Terry complimented us on how little air we used. Said we were cheap dates. He also especially complimented Lulu on her tenacity. In spite of her ill-fitting mask and all the trouble it caused, she just kept returning to the surface to make adjustments as needed and then rejoining us down below. He figured she would have given up long ago. He doesn't know Lulu very well. As for myself, I took to scuba diving WAY better than I ever thought I would. It's amazing how knowing that you can breathe underwater can change your whole view.

Will we buy scuba gear? I doubt it. Takes up a lot of room which we just don't have. Will we jump at the next opportunity to go scuba diving. Yer damn right we will!

Next trip to Loreto: new mask for Lulu and better fins for both of us.

Our Christmas present to ourselves this Christmas: an underwater camera.

9/10/2011 - Wipe-out!

2011-09-10T09:10:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was a little more eventful than most of our days which revolve around snorkeling and reading. Yesterday the wind piped up from the NE and with it, the seas. The anchorage was fairly uncomfortable most of the day what with all the rolling and pitching going on. Good day to stay home and read, which I mostly did. Lulu, on the other hand, had a headache and then the constant rolling tended to upset her stomach enough that the only thing she wanted to do was lie in bed. Which was fine since we weren't doing anything anyway. Mike and Melissa on S/V Tortue finally threw in the towel and headed back to Puerto Escondido but the rest of the fleet stuck it out.

A little after 1:00 PM, Lulu emerged and decided that maybe if she just got in the water and lazed around she'd feel a little better so over the side she went. It did seem to help a little and about 1:30 she had an idea: she'd leisurely swim to shore and I'd take the dinghy over and we'd enjoy happy hour at the palapa.

Sounded like a plan to me although the seas were a wee bit rough, but, what the heck. She set out and I loaded up a backpack with various things we might need, launched the dinghy and followed her. I reached the shore a little bit before here and, what was usually a flat calm beach was now a surf landing. Oh, a minor surf landing as those things go, but a surf landing nevertheless. The problem is that the water is SO shallow that you have to cut your motor well before landing. This wasn't all that bad as each successive wave pushed the dink just a little further on shore. I got out and pulled it up out of the surf line, sunk a bucket in the sand for an anchor and called it good. Wasn't sure what time the tides were but the wide expanse of wet sand that the surf was no longer reaching told me that the tide was probably going out. That'd mean it would be harder to drag the dinghy back out but at least the breaking waves wouldn't fill it with water. At least that's what I thought.

The palapa seems to be sort of a well-kept secret and, sure enough, it was just us and Roberto, the guy who runs it.

We put out a radio call to the Ensenada Blanca fleet to get off their rolly boats and come enjoy happy hour with us but we got no responses. After awhile we saw Jay and Judy's dinghy on its way over but it turned out they were just parking there and walking to the tienda. We had a very pleasant afternoon shooting the breeze with Roberto, finding out what kind of music he likes (I'm making him a bunch of CDs today) and about his girlfriend who, as luck would have it, we got to meet a little later when she stopped by with some customers from the hotel.

On their way back from the store, Jay and Judy stopped in and we continued our visit. Another staff member, David, came by and had a big cabrilla in a bag. Next thing we knew, he was making us up a batch of ceviche from it. So we sat around eating fresh ceviche and shooting the breeze. No payment was asked for or expected for the ceviche. David was just sharing.

The palapa closes at 5:00 because the employees from all of the various parts of the hotel catch a bus that takes them all home and the bus comes by at 5:30. If they miss it, they're just out of luck until the end of the next shift change. So, a little before 5:00, we paid up and headed out.

Turns out that my surf-reading skills are somewhat lacking. The tide wasn't going out, it was coming in! And that meant the the waves had been splashing on my transom and filling the dinghy with water. Must have been at least 5 or 6 gallons of water in it. No matter, we turned her around and started walking her through the surf out to where it was deep enough to start the motor. In retrospect, we should have just walked all the way out beyond the surf line. After all, it was only a foot or two deep. But we didn't. Instead, as soon as we were deep enough to lower the motor, I did and then I jumped in. Lulu gave one more shove and the she jumped in. The rest is somewhat of a blur. I don't know whether or not I actually started the motor. What I do remember is that Lulu was in her regular spot on the starboard side to balance my weight on the port side. Then, I guess a wave must have hit us from the side or something because all I remember is Lulu was suddenly on the port side and our combined weight along with the wave action tipped the dinghy over on its side, filling it with water in the process. We jumped out, righted the dink and then tried to push her back ashore so we could bail her out and start again. But the dinghy was quite full and the surf wasn't helping things any. We managed to get the boat on the beach but not high enough to bail effectively. Every time I'd get 3 or 4 bucketfuls out, the next wave would deposit 5 or 6 new bucketfuls.

Jay and Judy had managed to get launched okay but they also swamped their boat, although not as bad as we did. They came back ashore to empty it, I guess, and then came over and helped us out. Together we managed to turn the dinghy on its side and empty most of the water, at least enough so we had a fighting chance. We relaunched, only this time I had the oars all set and ready to go. We rowed through the surf line until we were past the breakers and then were able to start the motor and head back out. Jay and Judy also had a successful re-launching and got back to Wind Raven just fine.

The wind continued to blow like crazy all night but, fortunately, it changed directions 180 degrees so that there were absolutely no seas associated with it. The wind was coming from onshore and the bottom is so shallow for such a long way that there just wasn't much water to build up and waves. The wind howling outside and blowing down through our open forward hatch made for a very comfortable night's sleep with no need for fans.

9/7/2011 - Snorkeling

2011-09-07T09:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we joined the crews of sailing vessels Trick, Merilon, Trinity, and Kashmir on a little snorkeling trip. We dinghied over to an off-lying rock that looked promising. Once geared up, it was over the side to start exploring among the rocks at the base of the big rock. It was pretty cool. The water temperature was warm enough so that getting chilled wasn't even a remote possibility. We saw lots of Damsel Fish, some Parrot Fish, and lots of smaller fish that we couldn't identify. John & Patricia from s/v Trick knew the names of lots of them and told us but, of course, I promptly forgot most of what we were told. Mick from Kashmir saw a barracuda shortly after entering the water. We probably hung around this site for a couple of hours.

After awhile we decided to move on. As we were crossing the channel between the rock and the mainland we all spotted something floating in the water and decided to check it out. As we got closer, it became obvious that it was a sea turtle. Our experience with turtles thus far is that they dive as soon as you get very near them. But this one was behaving differently. He/she (let's just call her "she" from now on) let us approach right alongside. It was hard to tell whether or not she was alive. What little movement we saw could have been attributed to wave action. But still, there seemed to be the occasional flipper movement that made us think that maybe she was alive after all. Finally, John reached over and lifted the front of her shell to get her head out of the water in case she was unable to get a good breath under her own steam. At this point it was evident that she was definitely alive but very weak. Richard from Trinity hopped in the water and got some close-up photos. Finally, she seemed to be a little stronger and John released her. She swam off under her own power, if somewhat weakly.

Richard, Mick and Mike proceeded back to their boats and John, Patricia, Lulu and I went on to snorkel on another reef. Lots more fish here. It was very cool to be surrounded by a school of Sargeant Majors who were definitely more curious than cautious. Lulu even spotted two small octopuses. We probably hung around here for about an hour. I surfaced near the dinghy at one point and saw Richard returning in his dinghy. "Where's John?" he yelled. I pointed him out and Richard yelled "We have to go back to the turtle!". Seems he'd downloaded his photos back a the boat and, upon inspection saw a hunk of fishing net wrapped around one of the turtle's rear flippers. None of us could see the net when we were alongside her but it showed up clearly in Richard's photos. Richard headed off in search of the turtle and we all got back aboard the dinghy and, after shedding our gear, followed him.

Amazingly, Richard actually found her again. By the time we got there he had cut the netting loose. She still wasn't looking too chipper though. John repeated his "hold her head out of the water" routine and eventually she again seemed a little stronger. He released her and again she swam off under her own steam, if somewhat weakly. We wished her well although I don't think any of us have an awful lot of hope that she'll survive very long as she seemed very weak.

Richard headed back to Trinity and we headed to a little indent in the shoreline to have some chips and something to drink and visit for awhile. Eventually it was time to head back to our boats which we did with plans to get together for another snorkel tomorrow.

It was a picture-perfect day. Sorry there aren't any pictures to prove it.

9/5/2011 - We actually moved!

2011-09-07T09:25:00.000-07:00

Note: This blog was originally written on 9/6/11 and included photos. But, the wifi connection we can access from our anchorage without the external antenna which we lost in the chubasco, blocks any URL that includes the word "blog". This includes "blogspot", "blogger", etc. So, until my new antenna arrives from the States or I remember to take the computer ashore to the hotel or over to Wind Raven to use their wifi antenna, you'll just have to live w/o pictures. Sorry. But, on with the show. Here's the original blog from 9/5/2011:

9/5/2011 - We actually moved

Yesterday we went to the Sunday market in Loreto with friends Ed and Cindy on s/v Tequila Mockingbird. We'd heard a lot about the market and had been wanting to go but, unless you score a ride pretty early in the day, you're pretty much out of luck. We ran into Ed and Cindy the day before and were swapping stories. We first ran into them in Timbabiche a few months ago. We told them we were planning on leaving Puerto Escondido today (Saturday). They said that was too bad as they were planning on heading in to the market on Sunday and we were welcome to come along. This is when it's really nice to be retired. I said, "Well, there's no reason we actually have to leave on Saturday." So, we decided to postpone our departure so we could check out the market.

The market is sort of a farmers' market and flea market rolled into one. It's held every Sunday morning in what is usually a huge empty lot. There are numerous stands selling fresh produce, a meat market, a couple of places selling tamales, and a bunch of places selling what-have-you. I took my camera along but, as is my wont, forgot to actually take any pictures.

We bought a bunch of produce: potatoes, carrots, avocados, mangos, cabbage, peppers, limons, tomatoes, grapefruit, etc. The prices were great. We came back with a bunch of bulging bags and spent maybe 200 pesos (~$16.00 US). After the market, we had breakfast at Cafe Ole and then hit El Pescador supermarket for anything else we needed. Ed and Cindy drove us right up to the dinghy dock to unload our booty.

Back onboard before noon, Lulu started cleaning and stowing the groceries and I fired up the engine. Once the engine was warmed up, we dropped the mooring and motored out of the waiting room at Puerto Escondido.

Things have been getting sort of uncomfortable at PE the last couple of weeks. There's a new manager and he seems to be trying to prove that he's the boss or something. First was the stupidly high price increase. That's what ultimately forced us off the mooring ball and out into the Waiting Room. Then, it seemed like every day there was some new rule. One of the standard afternoon pastimes was to buy a beer at Pedro's Tienda and then sit outside Ray & Jaime's office and shoot the breeze. Thursday afternoon, we were informed by one of the workers (not by management itself, of course) that we could no longer drink beer in front to the office. By the next afternoon, the tables and chairs had been removed so we couldn't even sit there. It just seemed that the new manager was bound and determined to force the cruising gringos out of Puerto Escondido. Never mind that we're the bulk of the income. You have to give him credit, though. If forcing us all out is his goal, he's well on his way to succeeding. Anyway, even though we're paid up until the end of September in the Waiting Room, we decided to split.

We'd been hearing stories about Ensenada Blanca (Bahia Candaleros). There is a fancy new hotel there that is trying to sell timeshares. Well, if it's completely vacant, it's hard to look attractive to the potential buyers that they bus in from Loreto. Consequently, they're being very friendly to cruisers right now.

Having a few picturesque sailboats in the harbor in front of the hotel can't hurt, right? Besides that, they come out in a kayak every morning and bring us complimentary coffee and pastries. Further, if you go in and register your boat, they give you a wrist band that allows you, for the price of a drink or two, to use the swimming pools (one of which is chilled) and just generally hang around the hotel. So, let's see... Puerto Escondido where they are trying to drive us out, or Ensenada Blanca where they seem to actually want our patronage. Hmmmmm.... Tough choice.

We dropped the anchor at Ensenada Blanca Sunday afternoon about 2:30. Our friends Jay and Judy on s/v Wind Raven were already here. Jay had caught a nice Rooster Fish and gave us a couple of big chunks of it for dinner.

I cooked some spuds on the BBQ grill and then grilled the fish. Served it all with some sliced tomatoes from the Sunday market. A fine repast. We never did get ashore on Sunday.

Today (Monday), I rode to shore with Jay to check out the little tienda and get a few supplies that we didn't get in Loreto yesterday. Later, we joined the crews of most of the other boats anchored here (all of whom we had met in Puerto Escondido) along with Ray and Diana who drove down from PE. We all met ashore at a little palapa bar on the beach.

Diana is trying to set up a party for cruisers to celebrate International Talk Like A Pirate Day on September 19th. We spent the afternoon in the palapa drinking beer and swapping lies.

The palapa closes at 5:00 so we all dinghied back to our respective homes (well, Lulu swam back). Lulu had made some chilorio/creamcheese dip so we had chips and dip and a salad consisting of avocados and tomatoes with basalmic vinegar, salt and pepper.

So, here we are. Tomorrow we're going out to an adjacent rock and doing some snorkeling with John and Patricia from s/v Trick and probably some others as well. One of these days we'll have to go in and use the hotel pool just to find out how good a chilled pool can feel.

9/1/2011 - Another trip to town

2011-09-01T15:59:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we decided to go into Loreto in the afternoon. We chose Wednesday afternoon specifically so we could have some of the excellent baked chocolate clams served at Augie's during happy hour. We also needed to get some cash and a few supplies. We had kind of decided to take a cab in and back until we found out what the current fares were: somewhere between 600 and 700 pesos round trip. That's $48 - $56 (USD). Crazy! The cabbies, like many other Mexican businessmen have this very unfamiliar (to norteamericanos) approach to business. That is, when business is down, you make up for it by raising your prices. The idea, I guess, is to make more money off fewer customers. So, since this is not tourist season, there are fewer people needing taxis so the fares go up. Brilliant, eh? We decided to hitchhike in and ride the evening bus back.

We shouldered our packs and got started on the 25 minute walk out to the highway. We hadn't gone 50 yards when Debby, a fellow cruiser who has a place in nearby Juncalito, stopped and gave us a ride as she's done many times before. After a quick stop at Fernando's tienda to get a couple of bottles of water, she dropped us off at the highway. Right after we got out, a semi came whizzing by from the south. We didn't even bother sticking our thumbs out for him, knowing that it was very unlikely that he'd stop anyway. So we patiently waited. After 15 minutes, that semi was still the ONLY vehicle we had seen coming from the south. We knew there was some construction going on down the road and figured that soon the northbound traffic would be let loose and we'd get plenty of chances for a ride. We waited another 5 or 10 minutes without seeing a single vehicle headed north. We were just about ready to throw in the towel and skip the trip for today when a water tanker truck came lumbering out from behind the electricity substation across the highway. The driver made a wide turn that put him partway on the northbound shoulder and motioned to us asking if we wanted a ride. DAMN STRAIGHT WE WANT A RIDE! We crowded into the cab and he started grinding gears and heading to Loreto.

Twenty minutes later or so, the driver dropped us off in front of a grocery store that we wanted to check out. We thanked him and headed inside to see what they carried. Ultimately, we didn't buy anything there but we were in a good spot as we needed to walk by the bus depot to check what time the southbound buses ran. After determining that our best best for a bus was at 6:55 PM (if we missed that one, the next one wouldn't be until 11:00 PM), we tried to hit a couple of ferreterias (hardware stores) in search of string for the string shopping bag that Lulu is crocheting. Unfortunately, it was siesta time and the ferreterias wouldn't re-open until 4:00 PM.

Next stop was the Banamex bank to get some cash. We had been having difficulties with Lulu's ATM card so we decided to try it first. It was a new card that had been activated but had yet to be used successfully. We inserted her card and entered the PIN. Punched in what we wanted to do and how much cash we wanted. The machine thought a minute and then told us that her account did not exist. This is what happened before. Looks like we need to call Wells Fargo. No matter, I plugged my card in and punched all the appropriate buttons. The machine mulled it over for a few seconds and then informed me that my account didn't exist either. WTF? OK, no big deal, we'll just try a different bank. Had a problem once in La Paz and just going to a different bank did the trick.

On our way to the other bank, we passed the modatela (fabric store) where we tried again to get string. After finally figuring out the word for string (mecate), we determined that, while they did have string, they didn't have any of the size Lulu wanted. Oh well, next stop, the bank. But first, let's stop at El Pescador, the largest supermarket in Loreto. We got some cheese, Gatorade powder, and a few canned goods. OK, now to the bank. But wait! We forgot to get the fabric Lulu wanted for making a new bedsheet. OK, back to the modatela and another exercise in dealing with the language barrier. We finally did get the fabric although it wasn't really what she wanted. But, when choices are limited, you get as close as you can. We also scored a scrap of thin red nylon that we can use to repair the frazzled outside edge of our Mexican courtesy flag.

OK, now to the bank.

We got down to the Bancomer and, when it was out turn, went in to the ATM booth. Plug in the card, punch in the PIN, describe the transaction and wait. This time the machine told us that it couldn't complete the transaction and we'd have to contact our bank. WHAT? Maybe if I try for a smaller amount. Same results. Oh, this is definitely NOT good. We need to call Wells Fargo and soon. We walked over to a public phone to try to figure out how to make a call to the States. First we'd have to buy a phone card. I really didn't want to get cut off mid-way through a conversation with the bank and so, was very wary about using a pay phone with instructions that I couldn't really understand. And then it came to me: AUGIE'S! Augie's Bar has a computer set up with a MagicJack and allows customers to make phone calls to the States since it costs almost nothing. OK, we're off to Augie's.

We walked into Augie's air conditioned bar and basked for a few minutes in the refrigerated air. Ahhhhhhh......... Then we ordered a couple of micheladas and asked to use the phone. "Sí, claro." MagicJack is pretty cool as you use an actual phone so it's not quite like using Skype. I dialed Wells Fargo's number from the back of the card and went through all the automated menu crap until I finally got to the point where I could talk to a human. When he answered I explained that we were in Mexico and our debit cards had been turned down at 2 different ATMs.

"Were you trying to get a cash advance from your credit card?"

No, I was trying to take cash from my checking account with my debit card.

"Are you sure you didn't maybe mix the cards up?"

No, I'm sure I got the right card.

"Because it shows here that 30 minutes ago someone tried to get a cash advance of $XXX.XX dollars from your credit card."

Huh? Oh, WAIT A MINUTE! Geez! I DID try to use the wrong card! Look, this other one says right on it "Debit Card". What a dummy!

"That's OK, I'll just remove the restriction that your previous attempts put on your credit card so it's still useable. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

No, thanks, you've been very helpful.

WHEW! That's all the problem was. This explains Lulu's problem as well as the credit card is the only one she had in her pocket so it's the only one she's tried. We left Augie's, went back to Bancomer, had a successful ATM transaction, finished our shopping and hoofed it back to Augie's for happy hour.

At Augie's we saw pretty much the same people that we always see there at happy hour. Marv was still fretting and stewing about his Mexican cell phone, just like he was when we were there 3 weeks ago. The clams and micheladas were excellent and we got into a conversation with a guy sitting next to us at the bar drinking cranberry juice. Jim is from Washington and has a home here in Loreto (well, Nópolo, actually). He comes down every few months to check on things. We talked a lot about Puerto Escondido which, as a businessman, drives him absolutely crazy. Here sits this veritable gold mine and, not only won't the Mexicans develop it, but they make it next to impossible for anyone else to develop it either. Anyway, ultimately, Jim offered to give us a lift back to the marina which we gladly accepted.

We were back on the boat by 7:00 or so. Would have been there sooner except that the outboard ran out of gas shortly after leaving the dinghy dock (could have sworn there was plenty of gas), and I had to row the rest of the way. After a dinner of chips and salsa followed by chips and a dip made of chilorio, crema and mayonnaise, we settled into our regular evening routine.