Category: Uncategorized

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Bahía Tenacatita is about twenty-five miles past Chamela, a motor sail easily done in one day. It’s a bigger, very well protected bay that had about 30 boats anchored in it when we arrived. The north end, where most of the boats anchor, has a palapa (palm roofed) restaurant by the estuary mouth and a hotel/resort a short walk to the east along a beautiful sandy beach. The nearest town is La Manzanilla on the south end of the bay. At Tenacatita there is an active morning radio net, afternoon activities including some very competitive bocce ball on the beach or walking on the beach. Occasionally a couple of games of Mexican Train would get played. After the activities, everyone would meet up at the palapa and then head back to their boats. Friday evenings featured the mayor’s raft up for happy hour.

There are boats that spend months at Tenacatita. The water is warm and clear, great swimming and snorkeling can be had, and a trip up the estuary is fun, either for a dinghy trip to see the mangroves or to head out to the raicilla distillery at the point. The bay is also perfect for a day sail and we saw a mother and baby whale while we were out one afternoon.

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After about a week in Tenacatita, Bill realized the batteries weren’t fully charging. We have three 80 watt solar panels, and even with running the engine for an hour a day, the charge wouldn’t get above 90 percent. Time for some equalizing. This meant we needed to find a marina and plug into shore power. Equalizing charges at a higher voltage than normal to try to convert the lead sulfate back into lead. The nearest marina is Barra de Navidad, another day sail south.

After a couple of days in the marina, we headed out to the Barra anchorage. Caught a panga into Barra and a combi, a local bus, to Melaque to find an ATM and some groceries. All local transactions are cash, so topping up the funds when you can is important, as not all towns have an ATM. Melaque is larger than Barra and has some decent abarrotes, or small mini markets, and a big grocery store. Most mini markets have a small selection of fresh food, but it’s nice to branch out occasionally from roma tomatoes, poblano peppers, cucumbers, and onions.

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Back we went to Tenacatita. Some of the same boats were there, but new boats as well, coming and going from Barra or Zihuatanejo, farther south.

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Since there are basically no services near the anchorage, a trip into town is necessary. We walked up to the hotel with Marshall from Tenacity to catch a taxi, about a 45 minute ride. The beach landing at La Manzanilla can be wild so we opted for the calmer, longer road trip version and saw a couple of coatis while heading up the cobble stone road from the hotel. The paved road portion of the trip is under construction. In town, the farmer’s market was on and we recognized many of the same vendors as the market in Barra. Bought a couple of small, colorful tablecloths for the boat, and some groceries.

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We all wanted to see the crocodile refuge so off we went.

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La Cruz de Huanacaxtle is a small town at the north end of the Bahía de Banderas, or Banderas Bay. It has a good anchorage and a marina. We dropped anchor on December 18 and rowed in to check out the marina and town. The dinghy dock here is expensive – 80 pesos a day, but on occasion you can tie up without paying if the security guys are otherwise engaged. The town has a very nice fish market, a tortilleria where you can get warm fresh tortillas for 9 pesos per half kilo, and some small grocery stores where you can buy basics. A half kilo of medium large shrimp can be bought at the fish market for 100 pesos (figure about 18 pesos per dollar).

La Cruz has restaurants, condos to rent, whale watching excursions, an amazing Sunday market, and gringos everywhere. But there is no ATM or bank in La Cruz. For that you have to go to the next town, Bucerias, or into Puerto Vallarta on the south end of the bay. A combi ride to Bucerias is 12 pesos each and takes maybe 20 minutes. For 24 pesos each you can ride the bus into Puerto Vallarta and depending on where you go, that can take 45 minutes to over an hour. We did discover early on that all stops, or paradas, are not equal. You can’t assume that just because you got off at one place that the return stop would be just across the street.

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One of our early adventures was the afternoon the dinghy decided to escape. It was not tied as securely as it should have been and Bill looked up to see it drifting out the bay. Luckily a panga was going nearby, so Nina frantically waved her arms, discovered she still has a decent taxi whistle and got their attention. Dinghy rescued! Hooray for the panga fishermen!

We have coined the phrase “wild google chase” – just because google says it’s there doesn’t mean it is. So far it’s been true for banks, bookstores, and outboard motor shops and we strongly suspect more. Bill researched the locations of about six places he thought we could look at outboard motors. It was time. We do like to row, but rowing half an hour in the heat to get in to a dock is a very different experience than rowing half an hour in the Pacific Northwest. It was time to track down a 2 horsepower engine, about as much as our dinghy could handle. We’d talked about an electric motor, but they are twice as expensive, they have to be charged, and no one down here sells them. Zaragosa, PV’s version of West Marine had a 3.3 Mercury, but nothing smaller. The Suziki dealer turned out to sell cars and pointed roughly in the direction of where the outboard store was but was not more specific. The marine store by Marina Vallarta sold outboard parts but not motors. We caught another combi and headed over to Las Glorias to the Yamaha dealer. It didn’t look like much – a small storefront filled with boxes of outboard oil, a foot high concrete sill to step over and a small customer window that was closed. It popped open. Enough English was spoken that, yes, they did sell outboards, and yes, they did have a 2 horse in stock, would we like to look at it? Should we buy it? We decided, yes, which turned out to be a good thing. It would take a couple of days for the transaction to clear and they would then deliver the motor to La Cruz. One last stop, Star Marine. No longer there, which was when we coined the phrase wild google chase. We now have an outboard, and we are quite enjoying it.

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Why La Cruz? There’s always something going on. The marina has a full calendar of activities from yoga to Spanish classes to weekly free movies, to guest speakers, to kids activities and so on. We have been happy to participate. The Christmas Eve potluck was fun and we got to meet some new folks. We’ve done a movie night, heard Jeanne Socrates speak about her circumnavigations twice (she holds the record for a solo, unassisted, non-stop circumavigation and she was 77 when she did it). We got to hear Jamie and Behan Gifford from Totem speak several times. They have spent the last ten years circumnavigating with their three children. As one fellow cruiser said, when you hear them at a boat show, most of the audience is wannabees, here we’ve all actually set off in one way or another. We are also a 30-45 minute bus ride from Puerto Vallarta, so there are lots of options.

Outside of PV is the Jardín Botánico de Vallarta. We were invited to go by Tom and Annie from Tappan Zee, who we had met in La Paz, and we were joined by Marshall from Tenacity. We caught an early bus into PV and had the ride of our lives. Bus drivers are paid by the passenger rather than an hourly rate, so the more runs per day the better. Apparently the driver decided that it was a competitive driving day. He managed to keep it just this side of a bus demolition derby. There were locals with their phones on video recording the very close calls with other buses. We were all grateful to arrive in one piece. Annie was studying her Spanish during the ride and missed most of the drama. It took us two more buses to get to the garden and thankfully both rides were both mellow. The garden – think Buchart Gardens gone tropical with orchids, hummingbirds (at least three kinds), a river to swim in, and all kinds of butterflies everywhere. It’s gorgeous. On the way back, Nina got to check off a travel bucket list item – riding on a chicken bus. The bus from the garden was a nice tour bus, but she kept hearing bird chirps somewhere in the bus. Maybe birds had flown into the bus and were roosting in the luggage rack. Finally, looking across the aisle, a row back she spotted a bag that was moving. It had several chicks in it peeping away. It was a pretty deluxe chicken bus, but a chicken bus nonetheless.

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Sunday market. French Bakery. Vegan ice cream shop. Whales in the bay. New friends. Meeting friends of friends. And then we were off again. After nearly four weeks in La Cruz, we headed south to Bahía Chamela. We rounded Cabo Corrientes, the point where Mexico starts to swing east, during the night. The wind picked up more than the predicted but other than being rolly, it wasn’t a bad ride.

Chamela is a beautiful bay. We spent a couple of days in the bay just off the town of Pérula and then a couple of days in the islands. Bill got in some snorkeling and saw some colorful fish and sea stars. His other snorkeling was to begin scraping off the barnacles on the bottom of the boat. We’d had the bottom cleaned by a diver while we were in La Cruz but it was starting grow already. And things do grow quickly here. The first night off of Isla Pajarera we were treated to a fantastic lightning show over the mainland mountains that lasted two hours.

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Next stop, Bahía Tenacatita.

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On to San Blas…

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Several folks we talked to told us that when you are in San Blas, take the jungle tour. We anchored in Ensenada de Mantanchén, the bay near San Blas, rowed the dinghy in and headed in to town to find out about the tour and visit the port captain. Mantanchén was our first major encounter with little biting bugs. Jejenes are everywhere and they are about the size of a flea. They are nasty little critters. Not too many boats anchored here because of it. Bug spray or lotion is a must and we still came out looking like a new measles outbreak.

We did the jungle tour with Tom and Katie from Absolute, and had an amazing panga ride through the mangroves up to a crocodile refuge. Katie speaks Spanish and translated as we went along so that was really helpful. How else would we have found out that crocodiles have no tongues? Lots of birds, turtles, and crocodiles along the way.

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After the crocs, Chacala was the next stop. It’s a resort/rental town with a beautiful long arc of a beach. Along the beach are palapas, or palm thatched restaurants. We had a nice lunch at one of them. We had a good view of the breaking surf on the crowded beach. The waves were good for swimming but not so good for dinghy landing. Luckily, there was a nice little cove near the Capitania de Puerto that was an easy landing. What was interesting about the Port Captain in Chacala was that he spoke English and completed our entry and exit form on his computer. We need to check in at every town we stop at and take in our boat papers. In Mazatlan, we had to check in and out separately, two trips to the office. The same form was used for both, and each had to be officially stamped. On the exit papers, Bill had finished filling it out when the staff person realized that the port captain was on vacation and we couldn’t use the form with his name at the bottom, so he got another form with the correct temporary name, and Bill redid the form. At each port we have to show our boat documentation, the form from the last port, sometimes our TIP (temporary import permit), proof of boat insurance, and passports. In San Blas, they asked for our boater cards, a first. It’s not a consistent set of documents, so Bill walks in with an accordion folder full of boat documentation so we can have what ever they need on hand. They make copies and hand everything back. Paper is alive and well in Mexico. When we go into marinas, the marina office takes care of the port captain’s duties, so we don’t have a potentially long walk to find the oficina.

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We had a couple of minor sailing adventures while in Chacala. The guide book recommends a stern anchor as the anchorage is pretty rolly, which is how they get those nice waves on the beach. Our stern anchor came unset in the middle of the night, so the next morning we had to row it out in the dinghy and reset it. We had drifted close to a neighboring boat, but thankfully didn’t hit anyone as our primary anchor held. Our second adventure was when were were trying to hoist the dinghy to store it on deck. As we started to hoist, the pin holding the upper block to the snap shackle exploded and left the halyard up the mast. Luckily the dinghy was not too far out of the water so it didn’t drop more that a couple of inches. We got out the bosun’s chair and Nina went aloft to retrieve the rope. Tied everything together with a soft shackle and got everything hoisted and stowed. Off we headed for La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, a big cruiser hangout.

This is the post of a newbie birder. Lots of birds are involved, and hopefully all of them are correctly labeled.

We spent about four days in Mazatlán. Next stop, Isla Isabela, a tiny island considered the Galapagos of Mexico. The island is maybe half a mile by a mile and a half. It has an old research station that is now used by ecotours who come to the island for diving and snorkeling. Isabela is also the home to thousands of Magnificent Frigate Birds, boobies (Blue Footed and Brown), and Red-billed Tropicbirds, iguanas and a snake species that we didn’t see.

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Also flying among the magnificent frigate birds were four red-billed tropicbirds. They were smaller and louder than both the frigates and the boobies, and they were easy to pick out overhead because they were frantically flapping their wings most of the time they were in flight. They must have flown circles around the boat for a at least twenty minutes.

While Nina watched birds, Bill went snorkeling.

La Paz is a lovely town with a large ex-pat community. It has an active cruiser net every morning that is the best source of who’s in town, who’s leaving, where to get services or who has stuff to trade. We spent our two weeks in La Paz at Marina Costa Baja which is on the very south end of town. It has good shuttle service to town, which was good as it’s too far to walk.

One of our goals in La Paz was to get a Mexican sim card for our phone so we could have a local number and cheaper internet than the phone plan we have from the States. We also needed to get more coconut fiber for the composting toilet. We ended up walking from the Cathedral to Home Depot, a much longer trip than we anticipated, only to find they didn’t have any coconut fiber. Peat moss would have to do. We found a Telcel nearby that sold us a phone chip, but they had no way of loading it with minutes, we’d have to find an Oxxo for that. Luckily they are all over. We bought our minutes but they didn’t seem to load. We found another Telcel store, but really they are a phone and accessory vendor, not a plan seller. And their English was as beginner as our Spanish. The younger salesman grabbed his phone and opened up google translate. The challenge then was to minimize key strokes and still communicate. Ultimately he was able to walk us through the general process, it worked pretty well, and reminded a couple of old folks of a useful tool. It was a good thing to learn while waiting for our minutes to load. We’ve used it a couple of times since then.

Shopping in La Paz is fun. There are department stores where you can buy a motorcycle, a refrigerator or other major appliance, and clothes, all within feet of each other. Fabric stores are all over but don’t sell patterns. Cotton yarn is impossible to get (or any kind of wool). The Bravo Mercado is a big, traditional market but you want to get there early to get the best produce. There is a small farmer’s market twice a week that has fresh food and crafts.

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Our original plan was to be in La Paz for about a week and then head up to Espirtu Santo, an island north of La Paz that is a national park. The weather didn’t cooperate so we ended up staying in La Paz and made it to the HaHa party. We headed up to the island just as the weather was about to go awful again so we anchored one night at El Mezteño and headed back to Costa Baja. It started to rain hard again. The wind picked up.

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Back at the marina, Bill changed filters on the watermaker only to find a leak after putting it back together. One of the filter O-rings got crunched and stretched when he was tightening it back up. Water everywhere. Checked out the La Paz cruisers resource webpage and Bill connected with the watermaker guy, who has been in La Paz for fourteen years, and got a new ring and a couple of spares.

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We left La Paz on Dec 3 and headed for Playa Bonanza. It has a nice sandy beach that’s about a mile and a half long, with light surf for landing a dinghy. There’s supposed to be a trail to the other side, but with all the rain, it was underwater.

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Next stop, Mazatlan, a two night passage to the mainland. We had an uneventful ride other than a brown booby deciding that it wanted a ride on the top of our mast, and a pin popping out of a mainsheet block in the middle of the night. We fixed the block with a soft shackle and thwacked the halyards on the mast to scare the booby away. We anchored in Mazatlan in the harbor near Club Nautico. The Club and the harbor have seen better days, but the access to town was easy and we felt safe there. It is however, next to the town’s treatment plant, and the harbor had all kinds of trash floating in it. Needless to say, we did not go swimming in the harbor. The walk to the old town, however, is pleasant and we found good places to eat, bought some fused glass glasses, and a new traditional shirt for each of us.

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Finally, HaHa launch. Bill went to the captain’s meeting while Nina hit the laundromat for a final load. Kick off party in the afternoon. Boat parade the next morning. The boat next to us had a bagpiper who played What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor as we motored out. Not much wind once we got out into the ocean, so we motorsailed.

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Once we were out in the ocean, it was time to try some more fishing. Nina let out the hand line with a cedar plug. The first one got away but the second one we landed. It was a tuna of some kind. In describing it to others, we decided it was a skipjack. Not the tastiest of tuna, but we ate it anyway. One of the surprises was how messy cleaning a fish on the back of a bouncing sailboat can be, even after bleeding it (but probably not enough). Needless to say, we’ll save you that photo.

By the finish of leg 1 to Turtle Bay, Gypsy was at the back of the fleet. We are one of the smaller boats and so we are slower than the boats with longer water lines. We made it in time for the baseball game. We also discovered that something on the boat is eating power and the batteries are not getting fully charged.

Leg 2 to Bahia Santa Maria. We had enough wind to sail the whole way! Nina also caught a yellow fin. Flying along under spinnaker is probably not the best time to do that. Much better tasting than the skipjack. This one was caught on an All Eye black and red lure that Carl gave us. Bill tried running the engine to charge the batteries. Alternator is running really hot and not really charging. Good thing there’s wind. And the wind kept building. The fleet hit a squall in the middle of the night. Felt like sailing down the Oregon coast! We came through fine, but a couple of other boats had mishaps, one of which was Raven. Raven had both their spinnaker and their genoa in the water and wrapped around their prop. We arrived midday at Bahia Santa Maria, the fourth from the last boat to arrive. We swapped out the alternator for the old rebuilt one we had along as a spare. Headed over to Talion for a Portland potluck: Aarinaar, Raven, Gypsy, Dharma Girl. Good company and food.

Lent our 130 genoa to Raven as they have no foresail. It fit enough for them to use for a bit. Bucket laundry before the party on the bluff. Got back to Gypsy only to discover that a pair of jeans had blown away. Just before sunset, there was a single cloud with a sheet lightning storm flashing away for at least half an hour. In a separate cloud off to the side, the full moon was rising. Pretty amazing.

Next morning, the fleet set off for Man-o-War Cove, Bahia Magdalena. Weather report for Cabo San Lucas, the HaHa destination, is not sounding too good, depending on which weather model you follow. The European model has a tropical depression slamming into Cabo with 40 knot winds. The NOAA model has the storm blowing out to sea. Some boats bailed for Cabo to try to beat the storm. Some decided to stay in Mag Bay. We decided to wait until morning and set out at around 0400 (4 am). This way, we’d get to Cabo during daylight and we could assess things then. Winds were light, but we sailed most of the first day. This saved us fuel, but we had to motorsail the rest of the run to Cabo as the wind dropped to a calm. As we got closer, the weather reports were looking like Cabo would get hit. We hadn’t set up for a slip, or signed up with an agent there to check into Mexico, so we decided to keep going to La Paz. After our Richardson Bay experience, we didn’t want to be in an exposed anchorage in a major blow. Approaching Cabo, we were at the back of the fleet again, but as we continued to La Paz, we became the front, with three other boats following us in. Saturday, November 16 we tied up at the fuel dock in the Marina Costa Baja. We’d beat the storm and had a calm trip up. We later met a crew from another HaHa boat who had stopped at Cabo to drop off crew and their last 30 miles into La Paz was rough.

Sunday, the tropical storm Raymond hit La Paz as rain. For a place that may have years with less than an inch of rain, it was a mess. We’d ventured downtown and all the streets were awash. We were drenched, even with rain coats. It was a crazy day to try to get our bearings.

Upon arriving in San Diego, the first thing we needed to do on our project list was to head to Tijuana to get our TIP, the form that says we can have our boat in Mexico legally. The crews from Raven and Gypsy went together to Otay Mesa to hit the banjercito, the Mexican military bank that issues TIPs. We took Uber, a bus, a train and another bus to get there. A day pass for the transit system is $6 so it ended up being a great deal as each leg otherwise costs $2.50. We got a cab in Tijuana that charged us $8 for a six block trip. The driver did not get tipped! Walking back to the border, Kevin spied a taco shop. Great food and it introduced us to tamarind water, which was very refreshing in the heat.

We stopped at Trader Joe’s on the way back to the marina and on the bus were a couple wearing Pellucidar polos. Their boat had been moored a row ahead of us in Avalon and was flying a HaHa flag. Turns out they were another PNW boat, from Seattle. They knew one of the boats across from us at the Police Dock. It’s a small world. We’d met another HaHa boat, Blue Sugar at Two Harbors on Catalina Island. We were starting to converge.

Next on the agenda was to get to Costco and get Nina a new pair of glasses. We were there via transit so we didn’t buy much and there’s a mile and a half walk from the marina to the bus stop. We stopped by the local library to use their internet. We went back to Costco via car the next day with Raven to provision.

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We decided to have a play day and go to the San Diego Zoo. Bill had been there when he was in college on a family trip. The animals were nice to look at but the landscaping is amazing.

One of the nice things about doing the HaHa is the chance to meet people. Gina, from Raven, put together a happy hour for the HaHa boats at Shelter Island and about ten boats got together and ate and chatted. Women Who Sail had a meet up at the Silver Gate Yacht club one evening, so six of us from the Police Dock HaHa group headed on over. We didn’t realize that we were supposed to RSVP, but they were gracious and let us stay. Beside the HaHa group, there were local cruisers, folks just back from the South Pacific, and racers. All levels of sailing experience. Nina met a few more women doing the HaHa, some who had been cruising the South Pacific (one had met Velic in Savu Savu), women new to sailing, and the woman whose boat had rolled off the Oregon Coast 150 miles short of completing their circumnavigation.

Back to Costco again – glasses are ready. We hit the library again to use the internet. We needed to print some things out and scan some documents. They don’t have guest passes! One of the staff offered to let us use her card as a work around but another mentioned that we could just get a card. Fortunately, we had signed up for a San Diego mail pick up, we could use that address to get a card, otherwise the cost would be $36. Nina now has a SDPL card and can check out two items until she brings in proof of address. Their checkout limit is 40 items, 3 weeks for books, 1 week for movies and they have no fines (unless you don’t return it and then they will bill you for it). Meanwhile, we got on their computers, Bill got our Mexican fishing licenses and got things scanned. He also called the bank to let them know the money we were spending was not fraudulent. We had to buy a print card for a not intuitive printing/scanning system. Everything got done in the end. We headed over to Costco for a cheap lunch and this guy in line says “didn’t I see you at Kaiser yesterday?” We’d gone in to get part 2 of our hepatitis shot and he’d been there. Nina asked if he was doing the HaHa as he’d been talking about boats to the woman with whom he’d been conversing. Turns out he is the Poobah of the HaHa. We had a nice chat and mentioned that we’d volunteered to help flip burgers for the big kick off party.

Back to the search for boat stuff. Next to Costco is a Lowes. Our search for coconut fiber for the composting toilet was unsuccessful. Back on the train and bus so it was just as well. Coconut fiber is bulky and there’s that walk back to the marina. Stopped on the way at West Marine to look at more fishing gear. Nina had tried fishing on the way down, but was unsuccessful. Pam and Carl sent us off with a lovely kit, but practice was not making better. In talking to other fishermen, it seems you can never have too many lures, so we added a cedar plug and a bird to our collection.

Our time in San Diego was coming to an end. We got the dinghy restowed. Raised the sails to try out the 3^rd reef on the main; see how the staysail set. All the boats in the marina were in high project mode. Crews were starting to arrive. We finally got insurance for Mexican waters. Bill found a marina to stow the boat during the hot hurricane season in Mexico. Time to cast off!

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We have been trying to sail as much as possible rather than just motoring or motor sailing. Bill has been figuring out our whisker pole and got the genoa poled out (so it won’t flop back and forth) and we had a good run overnight. Caught a mooring buoy in Morro Bay around noon.

There were familiar boats in the harbor and we finally got to meet some of their people. Raven was at the Morro Bay Yacht Club, Charelle, the boat that was moored next to them in Monterey was on a mooring ball next to us. We met Andy from Spruce. Both Charelle and Spruce have been out for about 10 years, Charelle from Australia and Spruce from the UK.

Next stop, Channel Islands. We do have pictures for this part of the trip, we just haven’t had time to load them.

We landed in Cuyler Bay on San Miguel Island and anchored down from Spruce. The folks from the other sailboat, Aikane, stopped by to say hi and asked if our dinghy was a chameleon. He had one with his previous boat but sold it with the boat. He now has a really nice nesting peapod that he built. Nina had serious oar envy, as they were spoons. They let us know about a hike the next morning from the ranger station.

The hike started at 9:00. The ranger station was over a mile from the beach and up a steep narrow path. We had to row over, clamber over a bunch of rocks because Bill decided to haul up the dinghy next to Aikane’s dinghy, get to the trail head on the beach and then hike up the trail. Somehow we made it in time. There were eight of us on the hike lead by Inga, a volunteer who has been coming to the island for twenty years. All the sailboat crews were there plus Brian, who was camping on the island, and Mike, a photographer. It was a nice hike out to Cardwell Point. The island at one time was used by the Navy as a bombing range so you have to stay on the trails. There is still unexploded ordinance on the island. It was also a sheep ranch for a while, with up to 6,000 sheep on the island. They pretty much destroyed the island’s native plant population, but the park service has been working to get it back.

Spruce gave us a ride back to our dinghy, and Nina mistimed her steps out and landed on her bottom in the water. If there’s a way for her to get dunked, it happens. We rowed back to Gypsy into a 20 kt wind with the resident gray whale surfacing nearby.

Another gusty night. Stowed the dinghy and headed for Santa Rosa Island. We got to Johnson’s Lee on the south side of the island and found Spruce anchored there. They were planning on leaving around midnight. The wind was still gusty, around 20 knots. The bay looked calm and sheltered. And festooned with lobster floats. We enjoyed a couple of days in Johnson’s and then the wind picked up around 10:30 pm. Seas were building and out of the east creating really rolly conditions. Not really conducive to sleep. Around 2:30 am we decided it was time to move. The anchor was holding but it was really uncomfortable. Bill tried to start the engine and the starter motor was stuck. Tried fiddling with it but nothing worked. In the morning, Bill worked on it some more. We emptied out the starboard locker in the cockpit and Nina climbed inside to take the panel off the back of the engine instruments. Still bouncing around. Bill finally got the engine going, but where to go? East to Santa Cruz Island was out of the question as the wind would be 20 knots on our nose. We decided to kill time by motoring up the west side of Santa Rosa and then back down again until the winds would drop in the afternoon. Hugged the shore as we headed east to Santa Cruz Island. We dropped anchor in Forney Cove in the afternoon. Everything on deck was covered with salt. Time for a rinse.

We had a quiet night and woke up to water on the floor in the galley. We discovered our foot pump was leaking so found the back up and installed it. The intake and outtakes were reversed so it wasn’t going to work. These were corrected and in the taking it off and realized that the pump was not quite sitting on the floor. It was up just enough that each pump flexed the housing until it finally began to leak. The replacement is now shimmed up.

Oxnard was next. It was not at all what Nina thought it would look like. Coming in from the ocean, the channel had houses and palm trees along both sides. It was quite pretty. Spent a couple of nights there, caught up on groceries, washing and filling water tanks. We decided to try to get a reciprocal moorage in Marina del Rey and ended up at the Del Rey Yacht Club for a couple of nights. Raven was also there. We were invited to their Monday Night Football event and assured that we really didn’t need to be football fans to enjoy. We were made to feel very welcome and had a fun evening. Hit the town the next day and walked up to Venice Beach. Woke up the next morning to find Tracy Edwards’ boat Maiden tied up next to us.

Off to Catalina Island. Two Harbors. It’s slower at Catalina than in the summer, but the harbors are full of mooring balls, really closely spaced. The harbor patrol walked us through how to get ourselves properly moored, fore and aft, and we were in. Met the crew from Blue Sugar, also on their way to the Haha. A couple of familiar boats are also here – Sundance and Gargoyle. We motored over to Avalon and found out what a mooring field really looks like and were really glad the it wasn’t the middle of the summer and a weekend. And that we missed the Santa Anas, which are strong NE winds. The highlight of Avalon was walking up through the Wrigley Botanical Gardens.

We left Avalon for Palisades, an anchorage around the island on the south side. Spent a day catching up on boat chores. Left mid-afternoon for an overnight motor sail to San Diego. We made it through the hundreds of lobster pots just outside the channel without any mishaps and arrived at the Police Dock on Shelter Island. We tied up next to Raven.

Richardson’s Bay is where Sausalito is. Anchorage is free, so Bill found us a nice spot at least a 30 minute row from the dinghy dock. Free is a very good price, and many of the boats anchored there looked like they had been taking advantage of this for quite a while. It also means that you don’t know how well anchored they really are, thus the distance and the spot on the edge of the pack.

While setting the dinghy up, Nina got stung by a bee that was resting in the dinghy hoisting rope. She survived and we rowed into town. Sausalito is a pretty town, very touristy on the main thoroughfare, but easy to explore on foot. We found the library, a grocery store and had lunch at Sausalito Taco. We also found a hardware store that had a spare French press carafe and promptly bought it.

We headed into San Francisco the next day. The plan was to take the ferry in and catch the bus back. We wandered through the very nice bookstore at the ferry dock in SF and then walked over to Chinatown. Rather than going up Grant, the more touristy street, we wandered down Stockton, where the locals shop. It was chockablock with small groceries full of foods that will never be seen in your average grocery chain. Everyone was out shopping. It was like being in a new world and it would be a fun place to get to know better. We ate our lunch sitting on the steps of the Chinese Hospital and listened to the noon siren and message go off in English and Chinese.

Next stop was to find Nina’s great-uncle Emory’s place on Russian Hill. The hill was as steep as she remembered and we got a great view of the city from the top. Down we went to the Maritime Museum. Had a beer at Ghiradelli Square and headed off to Van Ness to catch the bus back. We had time to kill so we walked down Union and found the Golden Gate Valley Branch Library. It had a really friendly vibe and was well used by adults and the after school crowd. We walked back to the bus stop, waited in the sun, and had the bad word of a bus driver drive right past us. The next bus was at least an hour’s wait so we decided to head for the ferry. We got to traverse Russian Hill crossways to how we’d hiked it earlier. Caught the ferry and wandered back to the dinghy dock in Sausalito by way of the boardwalk. Found a new bookstore that had opened the previous week.

One of the reasons we were in Sausalito was to connect with friends of a friend. We’d all had to reschedule for various reasons and we were finally going to meet up. We were starting to get a little nervous about the weather forecast, though. We were awakened in the middle of the night by strong gusts of wind, 30 knots and up. We seemed to be ok, anchor holding, so we went back to sleep. At about 7:00 am our anchor alarm went off. It was truly blowing like stink, and our anchor was dragging. Fortunately we hadn’t hit anyone. Nina went forward to work on retreiving the anchor and in the process had her glasses blown away. We got the anchor reset. One of the big catamarans next to us had also dragged and was on the other side of the bay. A couple of other boats had dragged, one on the rocks and the other dismasted by Angel Island. We were ok. When the wind dropped, we got the dinghy stowed on deck. And the wind started up again. We cancelled the meet up and decided to leave the next morning.

Back over the San Francisco bar again, smooth trip. Very few commercial boats coming or going. We did get a glimpse of Excaliber, a fishing boat that we’d seen a number of times on our AIS at night while coming down the coast.

We had a nice run to Monterey. Got back from showers to find Raven’s card taped to Gypsy. They are another Rose City boat heading for the HaHa and were just down the row from us.

Bill connected with the brother of a friend and we were going to meet up with them the next day. We had a fantastic day with Tad and Norma. Breakfast, a hike around Point Lobos, a drive to Pebble Beach and we had cocktails at he Mission Ranch (no Clint sightings, tho), and the finals of the San Francisco Comedy Competition at Folktale Winery. It was a full and wonderful day. Thank you!

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Next day was on to the Monterey Aquarium. One of the coolest facts we learned is that pelicans are descended from velociraptors. We were chatting with one of the volunteers at one of the hands on stations and she asked where we were from, where we were going, etc. Turns out she’d done the HaHa twenty years ago. She heads up to Seattle every year but makes a stop in Portland on the way. Did we know the Bollywood Theater? Another lovely day.

Another laundry day. Bill discovered that we can get additional clothesline if we hook the boom preventer to the flag cleats on the shrouds. The preventer is a line that goes from the end of the boom through a block at the front of the boat and then to the back of the boat. By tying the boom off when we are sailing in light winds or winds that are coming from too far behind us, the preventer keeps the boom from slamming over to the other side of the boat and back again.

Time to move again. Next stop, Morro Bay.