We woke up early, about 6 am, had breakfast and did our devotions. Then read for a bit. We decided to do some kayaking this morning, and went across to the little lagoon. We walked a bit on the rocks, and Renee’ took the GO Pro to get some pictures out on the point. I was not watching the kayak and when she came back we found out that the tide was coming in, and our kayak was leaving without us. I went out and got it, and then we kayaked over to the new boat in the port. They are a couple from Canada, he is a transplant from Australia, they are friends of Lucy and John . There are now four boats here, two ketches, one trimaran and us. The first ketch is Christina and Michel, the se second ketch is Lucy and John, and the trimaran is Janice and Colin. We all have plans on going to Puerto Peñasco.
Eventually we got back to our boat, and read some more and had lunch. Another quiet day.
We do have room for guests, if anyone is interested in visiting and spending a week or so with us, drop us a line and we will coordinate. What you have to do/have is you need a sport and will need to be able to get to where we are when you are going to be down. When we know what time frame you are thinking about we can let you know where we expect to be so that you can make your travel arrangements.
If you want to know where we are, click this link:
We woke up at 6 am, very calm very still. Had breakfast and got underway with the anchor up at 7:10. We crossed Bahia Los Angeles and as we were heading out, we could see into Puerto Don Juan, we saw our friends were still there, S/V Inia. Christina and Michel. So, we decided to head in for a day. We Listened to a sermon from Northeast on our way this morning as way of doing our devotions.
We arrived and had the anchor down by 8:15 or so, and started planning our day here. We are going for a kayak ride across to the beach and then a hike. We expect to be back for lunch.
I ran the GO Pro on the way over and all the way into the anchorage, I plan to do some editing of that video to see if I can get it small enough to upload to Vimeo next week or the week after when we are in Santa Rosalia.
Well, that is a lot of work to figure out what to do with the video and pictures from the GO Pro! I have a couple of hours worth of video, and about 740 still pictures. That was about 3 hours of GO Pro action. Way more than I can use for the blog, and I am limited to 500 MB per week to upload to Vimeo for video. My first attempt at speeding up the crossing from Bahia Las Angeles to Puerto Don Juan wound up at 3.54 GB. Slightly more than I can upload to Vimeo. Second version still 1 GB. I may have to pay for a plan to allow bigger files to be uploaded. 500 MB video files are pretty small.
After dinner, we played a game of Baja Rummy. Renee’ won! In the middle of the game, I asked for a Gin and Tonic, we are out of the Gin we brought with us, and this was going to be the first drink from the bottle we found on the boat when we got it. We found it in the engine room, and figured “what can go wrong with liquor?” Well, it was not Gin, not even bad Gin, it was gasoline. Yuck! Oh well, when we get to Santa Rosalia, we will get to a liquor store and get some gin.
We have decided to go to Santa Rosalia and check into the marina. This will mean two weeks of quarantine. We don’t know exactly what that will look like, but the guy at the marina said, that yes we could use the bathrooms, get propane and use the laundry facilities.The downsides are we will have to stay until the port is reopened, and we will have 120 miles to go north from there, just to get back here. Upsides, include cell service, shore power, groceries, propane, (we are down to one tank), laundry etc. One of the bigger drawbacks to where we are right now, is no internet, which means no FaceTime with the kids/grandkids, no phone, other than satellite, and while we have 150 minutes per month, I am pretty confident that we have used most of that already, and it is only 1/2 way through the month. The minutes do not carry over, (even though we did not use more than 10 minutes per month for the first 4 months) I think it is about $1.50 per minute after the included minutes.
We are planning on leaving Sunday and going to Puerto San Francisquito (45ish miles) then leaving early Monday morning and going straight to Santa Rosalia (70ish miles)
We do have room for guests, if anyone is interested in visiting and spending a week or so with us, drop us a line and we will coordinate. What you have to do/have is you need a sport and will need to be able to get to where we are when you are going to be down. When we know what time frame you are thinking about we can let you know where we expect to be so that you can make your travel arrangements.
If you want to know where we are, click this link:
We woke up a little before 8 am, and got up to a very calm day. No wind, no waves, that is a great start! We had breakfast and did our devotions. Renee’ wants to clean the windows before we go ashore.
We talked a bit more about where to go from here. We have to wait until after 9 am to call the marinas, at least if we want to talk to anyone. In anywise, we are still considering Santa Rosalia (120 miles south) and this morning we thought about San Fellipe (150 miles north). The advantage of going north is it puts us one day away from Puerto Peñasco. Some disadvantages, it is 5 miles inland to the town from the marina. In any case we will be making some calls today. Then going ashore for WiFi and lunch.
Well, we had a good breeze from behind to push us to the beach. That was good. We spent two hours (maybe a bit more) with lunch in the restaurant on the WiFi, made some calls and it looks like if we go to Santa Rosalia, and go to the marina, we will be stuck there for there for the duration. If we anchor we can leave if we choose. There may be other issues though, in any case, we are going south tomorrow (I think). We will see. I was able to upload pictures via the thumb drive and hub on my iPad to the blog, but not videos to Vimeo, I tried from the website, the Vimeo App, and also from the Files app that can access the files on the thumb drive, it even said that it had an option for uploading video to Vimeo. Perhaps, it was a limit of the internet provider. Limiting uploads. I have seen that before. Well, if we are in Santa Rosalia in a couple of days, I can upload the video’s there via cell service.
On the way back to the boat, the wind was stronger than what we had on the way in (bad) we even had some decent swells to go over on the way back. We got the kayak put away, and took a nap.
We do have room for guests, if anyone is interested in visiting and spending a week or so with us, drop us a line and we will coordinate. What you have to do/have is you need a sport and will need to be able to get to where we are when you are going to be down. When we know what time frame you are thinking about we can let you know where we expect to be so that you can make your travel arrangements.
If you want to know where we are, click this link:
We woke up at about 6:30, got it together and ran ashore for breakfast and internet. That was 2-3 hours of internet and moderately good breakfast, at least there were no crowds to fight with. We were the only ones in the restaurant besides the cook and waiter. We headed back to the boat about 10:30 or 11, and got underway by 11 am.
We had checked the weather, and it was supposed to be very calm. Wind speeds 5 – 10 knots. This is kind of important, as we have to go north west through a channel between the mainland and an island. These tend to funnel the wind, making it higher than what is felt outside the channel. While out, we of course ran the water maker, and even though the planned anchorage was only about 7 or 8 miles away from the town, we had to go around a bunch of small islands, as there are rocks in-between them. While out in the channel, we discovered that rather than the expected low wind, we had 25 to 30 knots with gusts to 40+, which always kicks up the waves, so it was a rough 4 hours or so, going north around the island/volcano. The view was awesome! The ride was not much fun. We had taken the long way around to run the water maker, and when we came back to where the anchorage(s) were, we had a chance to say “No, we are going back where we were last night”. Since it was only an hour more to go back where we started.
While looking at this (with disgust) I checked the iridium for text messages and email. There was one email, and it was from Salvador the guy who runs Puerto Peñasco boat yard, where we are planning to get hauled out. He let us know that the port is closed, and that he was able to get one boat in based on the “humanity card” as they are close and lost their engine. This means that we are not going to Puerto Peñasco right away. We had planned on being there in about a week, maybe less and to sit out whatever quarantine they had. Well, back to plan “B” of course, we don’t have it written out yet, but a soft sort of idea is starting to form.
We think we will check out Santa Rosalia, it is about 120 miles south, had a fair marina with low rates, good internet/cell service on the boat, a supermarket within walking distance, propane (we need that) also within walking distance, and low rates for the slips (that is a good thing as well). Of course it is too late to get a hold of anyone there today (5 pm) So, we will call first thing in the morning. Assuming we are heading there, there is one place to stop on the way south, San Francisquito about 45 miles south of here, then a bit more than 70 miles to get to Santa Rosalia, so two travel days to get there. The problem is not going south, it will be coming back here, as the prevailing wind is from the north. While it will be two days to get there, and fairly pleasant (if long) days, it will be two days of bashing north into the waves and wind to come back. Not something I am looking forward too. Last time we crossed from Santa Rosalia to Guaymas, then went north to Isla Tiburon (Shark Island) then crossed back to the west side to San Francisquito. Guaymas is an option to sit this virus out, but not a first choice.
In anywise, we are back in the harbor at Bahia Los Angeles, wind speed was still in the high 20’s as we dropped anchor, but the harbor is fairly protected, at least for waves. Tomorrow we will probably go ashore for lunch and internet again. We will see. At least Renee’ will go ashore at some point, as the books she had downloaded onto her phone disappeared (again). This has been an ongoing problem, she checks the books out from the library, and should have them for about 3 weeks, somewhere along the line, either the program gets closed, or an update happens or she holds her nose wrong, or the wind blows and poof! The books are gone again. She made sure to download the books yesterday and today they were gone. So, back to the Internet cafe to get the books back again.
We do have room for guests, if anyone is interested in visiting and spending a week or so with us, drop us a line and we will coordinate. What you have to do/have is you need a sport and will need to be able to get to where we are when you are going to be down. When we know what time frame you are thinking about we can let you know where we expect to be so that you can make your travel arrangements.
If you want to know where we are, click this link:
We woke up at about 6:30, the wind was blowing. We did not expect t this, but it seems to have died off as quickly as it showed up. We will see. The sailboat that came in is pretty small maybe less than 30 feet.
This is the day that is on my calendar to do some maintenance before getting underway. Things like cleaning Engine, generator, water maker, shower strainer, and putting the speed probe back in the water. So, that was the first thing I did.
Those the of you who are reading all of my posts will remember the debacle associated with the plankton strainer for the water maker. Well, there is more to the story. In this system, there is a strainer between the ocean and the first pump, it is very similar in construction to the plankton strainer, but much smaller. It also has a clear bowl, so I can see how dirty that strainer is. It appears to be clean, so I have not been cleaning it. Today, I pulled it out and cleaned it, and in fact it is fairly clean and probably did not need to be cleaned. BUT, when I pulled the plankton strainer out, it was covered in green slime and was very dirty. The first time I cleaned it was probably 4 months (way too long) today was about 4 weeks, still too long. I have decided to move this cleaning up to weekly. We will see if we have to clean it more often that that. I have talked to some other people with water makers, and asked about how often they change/clean filters. One person said that they clean their filters every time they run their water maker. Note, these filters are media filters, 25 micron and 5 micron. My experience with cleaning those types of filters is that as you clean them you put holes in them and they are no longer the filters you want. On the other hand, he had run his water maker using the city water where we were. He then cleaned his filters and said that they were black from just one run of about 4 hours at 15 gallons per hour. (Part of why we don’t trust the water in the marinas here in Mexico). The water going out of their water maker was about 7 ppm TDS (this compares to our normal of about 70 ppm, or US safe water standards of <500 ppm. In any case, my schedule calls for changing the water filters next week. This is a compromise, between cost, filter efficiency and water quality. Obviously, If I changed the filters more often, the water quality should stay higher, but the filters cost about $7 each, so that cost is not insignificant to change frequently.
The trip from Puerto Don Juan to Bahia Los Angeles was a rough, wet, windy trip. In Puerto Don Juan, there were no waves and no wind to speak of crossing the Bahia to Los Angeles is about 7 or 8 miles. The wind speed in the middle was a solid 35 knots, with gusts to 40+. Swells were moderate at about 3 feet or so. When we got to the town of Bahia Los Angeles, the wind was down to about 6 knots, with virtually no swells. Kind of strange. We got organized and got the dinghy down, had lunch and went ashore.
We found a restaurant/bar that had WiFi, and asked about propane (we have one empty tank, and one that we are using. Well, it turns out that the propane guy only comes once a month and he was here last week. Oh well, that is not happening. We spent a couple of hours on the internet and then Renee’ walked to the store and I went back to check on the dinghy. With the light swells, there are small waves and with the tide swings here (6+ feet) the dinghy was floating and had about 2” of water in it from the waves bouncing at the back. So, I bailed it out, a couple of times while waiting for Renee’ to get back with the groceries. The wagon we bought sure comes in handy!
We do have room for guests, if anyone is interested in visiting and spending a week or so with us, drop us a line and we will coordinate. What you have to do/have is you need a sport and will need to be able to get to where we are when you are going to be down. When we know what time frame you are thinking about we can let you know where we expect to be so that you can make your travel arrangements.
If you want to know where we are, click this link:
