Jenna's Adventures

 Jenna's Adventures in the Great Beyond
a chronicle of international wanderings
for our collection of photos on flickr, click here

Saturday, May 14th—

       Hey! Have you noticed I've been not updating anything? Probably. It started when I accidentally deleted a few journal entries in Costa Rica and then I just fell off the wagon. At some point, I'll fill in the blanks, but for now I'm just going to start from recently.

       We arrived in Tahiti exactly a month ago...wow! It doesn't feel like that long. Kate, Grace, JT and Mandy left from here and Koelby and Jessica surprised us by asking if we had room for them to come back! So we're back down to four again. We met a guy named Greg and a girl named Margot that were both on another boat that we were anchored next to, and they're both going to be joining us probably in Bora Bora or Rarotonga. During the week before Koelby and Jessica flew in, JT, Mandy, Tom and I took the boat over to Moorea to see what there was to see. We took a tour that included a wonderful buffet lunch and we got to swim with giant stingrays and black-tipped reef sharks!

Stingrays!

       After Koelby and Jessica got here, we were planning on leaving last Tuesday. Unfortunately, Tom discovered that our windlass motor needed a bolt to be welded again. So Tom and I walked for about an hour toward the airport and found an auto shop that said they could fix it and have it for us the next day. Much confusion and frequent checking-in phone calls later, we finally got the motor back on Thursday. We all stayed in a hotel in Papeete these past two nights, so we'll see if it works today when we get back to the boat. If it does, we'll leave either today or tomorrow for Moorea again so Koelby and Jessica can see it, then up to Huahine/Raiatea/Bora Bora. from Bora Bora we're off to Rarotonga, a little over 500 miles. It seems like nothing compared to our over 4,000-mile crossing from Costa Rica to the Marquesas!

Sunday, February 9th—

I know, I'm terrible. It's been over a month since I've written anything! In my defense, we didn't do all that much when we first got to El Salvador, and since we left for Guatemala, we've been pretty busy all the time. So let me try to catch up.

Before we left Mexico, Koelby, Tom and I went on a tour with these two guys named Tony and Miguel, who both spoke very good English. They took us to Izapa to see some ruins and right next to one of the sights, there was a family that made and sold a few different chocolate drink mixes, and they had starfruit trees on their property. We bought some of their chocolate and they let us pick and take a whole bag of starfruit with us for free! The day after the tour, the marina officials took us around to get our final paperwork stamped before we headed out. That morning, I noticed a cute little praying mantis hanging out on the side of our boat. Later, before we were getting the boat ready to leave, I picked it up to take it up to the grass on shore so it wouldn't be stranded in the middle of the ocean and as I was trying to set it on a bench, it took off flying. I was glad to see it turn away from the docks, just in time for a flycatcher to notice it and swoop down to neatly snatch it out of the air! So much for helping the little guy out! I also saw a whole herd of rays that day—maybe 15-20 all swimming together. They went down too fast for me to get a picture, but it was a spectacular sight to see!

After a Mexico-El Salvador crossing that was unexpectedly similar to our Tehuantepec crossing, complete with heavy wind and waves, we finally arrived in El Salvador a couple days late and were able to get an escort over the bar into Bahía del Sol the next morning. El Salvador gets the award for Most Boater-Friendly Immigration Services, because they stamp all your boat and personal paperwork (including passports) in an office right at the marina! How convenient is that? After staying in the marina for a night or two, we put the boat at anchor and got a ride into La Libertad with Jean, an ex-pat and organizer of the El Salvador Rally, a cruiser event that doesn't start until March, or we'd have signed up for it. There, we were picked up by Kelli, a friend of Carol's who has her own tour company. She showed us around the center of San Salvador, which included a church built by an artist that is spectacularly beautiful inside with its rainbow stained glass walls, and afterward took us to see a Lucha Libre fight. Lucha Libre is a very fun staged fight event where the fighters dress up in elaborate colorful spandex and sometimes masks. For the next week, we stayed with Carol and didn't do much except plan our next adventure and go to the US Embassy for Tom to submit paperwork to get a new passport (his expires in July).

Koelby, Jessica, Tom and I left for Guatemala on Sunday the 19th. We took a TICA bus from San Salvador to Guatemala City and stayed there overnight. We stayed in a little hotel in Zone 1, which was pretty sketchy but clean. Because the neighborhood was not the greatest and we had to wake up at 4am for our bus the next morning to Cobán, we decided to order pizza for dinner. The hotel also had something we hadn't seen before: electric shower heads. This is an interesting piece of equipment that goes on like a regular, very big and bulky shower head, except it also wires into the wall. So in order to have hot water, you need to also be in very close proximity to an electrical source. Which is fine as long as you don't stick your finger into it while trying to adjust the temperature. Koelby, of course, stuck his finger in it and was rewarded with a full-body shock from the shower.

The next morning, our taxi was just early enough to get us to the bus station just in time for us to make the 4am bus, an hour earlier than we were planning! The driver was very nice and made sure to come back and let us know when it was time for us to get off to catch the smaller bus to Lanquín, which is where the hostel is that we were staying at to get to Semuc Champey.

We got to the hostel, El Retiro, around 11:00-11:30 and as we were checking in, one of the managers asked us if we would like to go to Semuc Champey. When we said yes, he asked if we wanted to go with him and his girlfriend (the other manager) because they were making a trip that day with just them and her brother-in-law, who was visiting with his wife/her sister. Normally the tours leave at 8:30, so this was a great opportunity for us to see Semuc Champey and be able to leave the next morning without having to stay another night. We accepted and after grabbing a bite to eat, climbed into the back of a truck with them. There were about seven of us in the back, much better than the normal 25 or so that compromise the daily tour groups from the hostel.

After a 45-minute roller coaster ride along rocky dirt roads, we reached the drop-off spot near the river. We walked upstream for about three minutes to get to the entry of the caves. The Lanquín caves are a series of caves half-filled with water and you can go in with a tour guide, who gives you a candle to hold as you move through the pitch black. Here again we were glad for a small group. The cave tour was about an hour and a half to two hours and it was awesome! Sometimes we had to swim and you can't see the bottom at all because the water is so opaque. A few times you have to walk up rickety ladders and once you climb up a knotted rope through a waterfall to get further. The rope climbing was an adrenaline rush because you are trying to find places to put your feet by feel—because it's dark and you're reaching through a rush of water—and grope for the next knot in the rope all while being dumped on by the cool waterfall. Very exciting, though!

The next morning, Tom and I got on a small bus to Flores, while Koelby and Jessica left for Antigua. Our bus ride out of the valley was beautiful and sunny, a perfect contrast to the fog and drizzle of our arrival the day before. At one point on the drive I saw a toucan in a tree! It happened so fast I didn't have time to tell Tom to look, but it was so cool! I'd never seen one in the wild before. The bus ride was about 8 hours long and included a lot of beautiful countryside and one short raft/ferry ride across a river. When we got dropped off, we stopped by a travel agency and paid for a sunrise tour of Tikal the next day (it left at 3am from our hostel!) and an overnight bus to Antigua for that night. While we were checking into our hostel, Los Amigos, we met a couple that is traveling the world and already has more than ten times the number of stamps in their passports than I do! We had dinner with them at the hostel's delicious, vegetarian-friendly restaurant and they even let us borrow their combo locks so we could lock our stuff up the next day, since we weren't staying the night after Tikal.

We got up at about 2:30am to get ready for our bus to Tikal at 3am. The ride was about an hour and a half, and when we got there, we walked all the way to Temple 4, the highest and furthest away. We climbed probably 375147352 steps and at the top, we sat and waited with another group of people for sunrise. It wasn't a spectacular, brightly colored one because of all the clouds, but it was very cool to hear all the birds waking up! After the sun was up, we descended the temple and walked around the ruins with a guide, Donald. He told us all about the ruins and some interesting things about the people, as well. I spotted the first Spider monkey and when we heard the Howler monkeys (they're LOUD!), Donald helped us find them by howling at them to see if they would howl back move enough for us to see them. They're a lot smaller than I thought, and they were so high up in the trees it's hard to get a glimpse of them, but just as we were about to leave, we saw one jump from one tree to another. I also saw a bunch of birds! Some sort of Motmot, a bunch of big, bright green parrots, toucans, a woodpecker, a large black turkey-sized bird, and a small red bird. I would look them all up and tell you what they were, but my bird book is at the boat and I don't have time before we have to leave. We also saw a White-nosed Coatimundi that acts sort of like a raccoon that's used to people, hanging around the garbage cans and begging for food, and two beautiful Ocellated Turkeys, that act like ducks and follow people around at a distance waiting to see if they have bread crumbs. Not very dignified for such beautiful creatures, but definitely resourceful.

We hung out at the hostel that afternoon until 8pm when we went to get on the double decker bus that we'd payed too much for. It sucked, as do red-eyes of any sort, but we made it the next morning at 6am to...Guatemala city. We almost didn't get off the bus before it backed out of the loading area because we'd been told the bus went all the way to Antigua. Even better, when we went to get on the shuttle to Antigua, our names weren't on the drivers' list, so we ended up having to pay a man with another small bus-taxi to take us to Antigua. Luckily, we were one of three couples stuck in the same boat, so we all went in the taxi together.

When Tom and I got off (the other couples were going further), we saw a small hotel with the door open because some people were leaving. We walked in and the very friendly woman, Irma, who I think was the owner greeted us quietly (it was about 7:15am by that time so she naturally didn't want to disturb her other guests) and took us to a room. We didn't have cash and needed to go to an ATM, but she said we could pay her later. We went to sleep for a few hours and then got up to walk around the city. We got lunch and did a little walking, and saw four church ruins and a jade museum that day. The next morning, Irma cooked us pancakes for breakfast. They were amazing; I think she puts crack in them or something. Then we walked all around Antigua and saw about 20 more church ruins and another jade museum. It was a lot of walking, but it was worth it. All the church ruins are beautiful. The next morning, I woke up feeling absolutely terrible. I was sick all day and sore & aching everywhere as a consequence for the entire bus ride back to San Salvador. I think maybe it was something I ate the night before, but Tom ate everything I did, so we may never know....

We arrived back in San Salvador on Saturday the 25th and left for a 3-day tour with Kelli around some places in El Salvador. Luckily, I woke up on Sunday feeling fine with no ill effects (no pun intended) from being so sick the day before. Kelli picked us up at 8:30 from Carol's house and the first day we went to a food festival in Juayúa and then out to a small town where they drove us out a little ways to a hot river. Yeah, it's kind of like a hot spring but it's an entire river. Koelby and Keaton jumped off the big waterfall and the rest of us jumped off a lower spot. I, of course, slipped as I was trying to jump off (in my defense, it was extremely slippery) and ended up elegantly landing in the water on my face. It was pretty impressive...and painful, but not too bad. Then we drove upriver a little ways and hung out in the spot where the hot river and the cool river meet. It was lovely like being in a hot tub with occasional cool currents swirling around you. If you swim too far up the hot side, they say it gets so hot you can't even touch it without getting burned.

The next day, we hiked for about 5 hours to see some very pretty scenery and waterfalls, and we got to climb down the face of one of the falls while holding onto a rope that the guides set up for us tourists—they jumped around the falls like it was nothing. It was a lot of hiking and we were definitely sore the next few days but it was a lot of fun! The last day, we are breakfast at a nursery and toured a coffee processing plant and got to see all the steps to processing the coffee cherries and beans and roasting. It's very labor-intensive and involves a lot of waiting! Then we stopped by a small ruin site that was very cool because everything had been buried in ash and a lot of it was really well preserved!

After we got back to Carol's house, Tom and I and the boys got to hang out for about a week before coming back to the boat. We got the windlass motor fixed by a connection of Tony's and I tried chocobananas for the first time! It's great—a frozen banana on a stick dipped in chocolate and then rolled in a topping of your choice! Brilliant! I think I ate four of them in five days. And did I mention they were only $0.60?

Tom and I came back to the boat on Thursday. We installed the windlass motor (quite a feat, let me tell you) that day and over the next couple days, we got a couple of the winches taken apart and greased, and stitched up part of our genoa with a borrowed sewing machine. We were supposed to leave this morning, but the port captain wasn't around at the right time, so we have to wait until tomorrow morning's high tide. Tomorrow morning we shall be on our way southeast!

Saturday, January 4th—(more pictures will be added when I get a chance) 
       After our decent Tehuantepec crossing, we pulled into Chiapas yesterday afternoon to an anchorage, intending to go ashore and find wifi so that Jessica and Wendy could figure out their bus situation. They are taking a bus to El Salvador to make sure that Wendy gets there in time to make her flight back, because without motoring, we can't guarantee that she would get there in time. As we were taking the dinghy to shore, we stopped to talk to our neighbor about the area. He was a very nice man who's boat was registered in Vancouver, BC and he had a dog with him. The dog's name was Pitú and she was very sweet and very pregnant. He said she was going to have her puppies in about ten days. I saw a group of birds flying above us that he told me were Roseate Spoonbills! I'd never seen them before. Anyway, he told us that none of the restaurants around there have wifi, but that the marina does and that they will help us with our check-out procedure, so we pulled into the marina instead. The adjoining restaurant has pretty good food, and wifi with no password—nifty!

       This morning, I saw a snake while walking up to the bathrooms. It was about eighteen inches long, gray, and moved like one of the garter snakes across the top of the water like the ones in the pond at the ranch. Later, as Tom and I were walking up to hang out at the restaurant, we saw a small brown ray! It was just lazily swimming around with some small fish. It was so cool! Today, the plan is to go to immigration to check out and hopefully be on our way south soon!

Thursday, January 2nd—

Huatulco was a very nice stop. We arrived Saturday mid afternoon and said goodbye to Linda. Koelby, Jessica and Wendy went out to dinner while Tom and I stayed back and made food on the boat. On Sunday, Wendy and the boys hung out in town and around the boat in the morning while Koelby, Jessica, Tom and I took a taxi to go see the Copalita ruins. They were no elaborate huge temples, but they were interesting nonetheless, and I spotted much more clearly a bird that I couldn't identify after seeing it for a minute through a lot of leaves in Chacahua. It's a White-Throated Magpie Jay. Very pretty with a long dark tail and a quail-esque spray of feathers on its head. That afternoon, the boys and Jessica and Wendy went to go snorkeling while Tom and Koelby fixed the engine (it had spontaneously died right as we were pulling into our slip the day before).
       Monday morning, Koelby, Jessica and Wendy took off in search of a hotel with a pool and bar that they'd heard about from our marina neighbors and Tom, Ian, Keaton and I went snorkeling. We went to the small beach they'd been to the day before in search if the spotted ray they'd seen, but no luck. We did see a guy swimming toward the beach who walked up on shore with about four octopus and a lobster which was awesome to see, though we didn't talk to him and he walked right by us to climb the hill above the beach. From there, we took the dinghy over to a beach near the cruise ship docks and snorkeled around there for a while. There were a bunch of puffer fish, I saw an eel of some sort, and we also saw something that was very odd to me: Dorado carcasses on the bottom. They were ghostly white and looked very out of place so close to the beach.
       That evening, the four of us walked to a restaurant/sports bar to watch the bowl game that the ducks were playing, but they didn't have the right channel, so while the boys watched it on Ian's laptop that he'd run back to get from the boat, I got to watch the Olympia Grand Prix in London. Show jumping at a sports bar? Dreams do come true! 
       Tuesday, New Year's Eve, we'd decided to leave and sail to Salina Cruz so we could be in a good position to take advantage of the weather window in the dreaded Gulf of Tehuantepec that was supposed to start on Wednesday. The wind picked up Tuesday night and sometime before morning, we lost our American flag amidst all of the jolts and drops from the rollers. I didn't sleep much between our night watch and our morning watch, due to the crazy roller-coaster ride, coupled with the chattering of the hanks from the staysail and the drops of water coming into our room alongside the hatch. All Wednesday morning until sometime after noon, we crashed our way through formidable rollers, taking many waves over the bow while being pulled through it all by 20-30 knot winds. It definitely wasn't something I'd consider comfortable or recommend to my friends, but it could have been a lot worse. The water and the wind calmed down significantly that afternoon which allowed us to make much better time until this morning when the wind started dropping off. We're still making headway, albeit much more slowly, and hopefully we'll be southeast enough by tonight to feel more of the wind and less of the waves that are supposed to show themselves starting this afternoon. And now we have a fish for lunch! 

Friday, December 27th—
       We figured wrong. It turns out, Chacahua (the small town 180 miles from Acapulco) does have quite a few restaurants and plenty of cabañas, but nothing remotely approaching an internet cafe. That would require that they have internet. So the morning after we arrived, on Christmas Eve, Keaton, Koelby, Jessica and Wendy took a truck, a boat and two taxis to the nearest city in search of internet. Ian, Tom and I stayed in town and hung out. I got to

pandita!

play with a kitten named Pandita that belonged to Tim, a man originally from South Africa who now divides his time between two surfing towns, Chacahua and a small town in Texas. We took the dinghy across the channel into the lagoon and, after getting somewhat lost, managed to hike up to the lighthouse overlooking the town and the lagoons. Tom and I even saw a very long light brown snake, probably 4'-5' long with a pointy head. It was very cute. When everyone else got back and reported their half-success (none of the fax places could fax to the number Keaton had been given by the bank), we decided to leave the next day for Puerto Escondido to see if he'd have better luck there, or at least if he could find a post office and mail it from there. After taking a few Christmas pictures and getting the boat ready, we set off and made it to Puerto Escondido that night. We had to motor for a lot of it, which we don't usually like doing, but we had a deadline to make for Keaton. Along the way, we saw something for the first time that, until that day, we'd only heard stories about. We saw breaching rays!!! I did some research and I think they were mobula rays, which are known to leap out of the water like these ones were doing. I also saw something in the water that I swear was a snake, and was later backed up by Keaton and Koelby because they saw more. I looked them up and discovered that they were yellow-bellied sea snakes. I consider the rays and snakes as nature's Christmas present to us, along with the beautiful sunset that night.
       Puerto Escondido was a very nice little town that we would have liked to stay at longer, but we needed to keep going to get Wendy to El Salvador. Tom and I took advantage of a chance to stay in a nice-for-Mexico hotel that had air conditioning and hot water and was very comfortable. That night, we went over to the hotel Koelby and Jessica were staying at for dinner, which for Tom was their open-faced turkey sandwich special and for me was the best hamburger I've had in Mexico. The man who owns the hotel is ex-US Navy, and many of the guests are Canadian, American, or British retirees who met vacationing various years and who all come back now for 3-4 months out of the year to Puerto Escondido.
      One of the women we met at the hotel, Nancy, took Tom and I to the market the next morning because everyone else had stayed out too late the night before and wasn't awake at 9:30. Another one of the women, named Linda, accepted Koelby's offer of a sailboat ride to Huatulco—she was on her way there anyway to meet up with her daughter and her alternative was a bus ride. The boys are staying in Escondido tonight and we should meet up with them sometime tomorrow at the marina.

Monday, December 23rd—
       One of the evenings on our way to Acapulco shortly before sunset, we noticed some dolphins. They were small, pretty dark, and they had no beaks! After scouring my marine mammal field guide, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that they were Pygmy killer whales. They were so cute! I didn't have a camera with me but Keaton got a video of them on his phone that I think he's going to put on the blog. So far, I think they're my favorite ones that we've seen on this trip.
       On the night of the 18th, Tom and I were having a pretty speedy watch, averaging 6-7 knots for the last hour and a half or so. I had also been watching a Brown Boobie that was circling our boat and occasionally attempting to land on top of the mast, pulling away at the last minute a few times before finally being able to land. The poor thing was probably really tired to be so determined to land. Not even a full minute later, the autopilot locked up full left again, which it's done a few times now. Tom ran downstairs to flip the switch that needed to be flipped to kill the autopilot while I waited with my hands on the wheel until I knew I had control of the rudder and could turn us back to the right. Koelby had come running when he heard the autopilot lock from their bedroom, and mentioned something like "oh, that's broken again" or something like that, I don't remember exactly. It took me a second to realize he meant the block for the boom, not just the autopilot. Right after he said that, it popped off the track completely and, without the second pulley keeping the boom in place, it swung way out over the water with the pulley swinging around. I immediately grabbed the line that was attached to the boom and, ducking in case it same swinging back before I could get it in, started hauling it in as fast as I could. When I got it in, I held onto it instead of just cleating it off so that if it needed to swing because of the motion of the boat, I could let it out a little so the boat wouldn't swing around with it. I turned the motor on so that we could turn the boat into the wind to lessen the pull on the boom in either direction and, after a couple missed tries, Keaton got the topping lift onto the top end of the boom with a carabiner so that we could tie it off from the bottom and take down the main sail. Once that was in place, Tom had to go under our bed to get out an extra block set to temporarily replace the one that had come unthreaded. Shortly after we were back under way toward Acapulco, the Boobie reappeared and landed on the top spreader, just hanging out with us. Tom and I went to bed around 1:30am and I'm told the bird stayed at least through Koelby and Jessica's watch, which ended at 4am, and must have flown away sometime before 7am when Tom and I were back up for watch again.
       We finally made it to Acapulco on the 19th at around 4pm, and tied up to an anchor buoy. Then we took the dinghy over to the marina and asked about leaving it there tied up, but they wouldn't let us, so after a short adventure, we found another marina that would, for a small charge. Then Koelby and Jessica took off to go find Wendy's hotel and bring her back with them, while Keaton and Steele wandered around and Tom and I did the same. We found a large market area where one of the local stray dogs decided to adopt me. He literally followed me for about 20 minutes, and when Tom and I sat down at a small outdoor restaurant in the market area, the waiter even asked if he was my dog. Now I know he was probably just looking for food, but it surprised me that the waiter, who's probably used to the stray dogs around the market, thought that this one was mine. He was very sweet (the waiter was nice, too, but I mean the dog) and got all wiggly-puppy like excited when I payed attention to him or scratched his ears. I'm sure he's not the cleanest canine specimen, but I couldn't say no—he was just too endearing.
       We met up with everyone else shortly after 7pm and had dinner at a German restaurant, then a man named Rogelio who was hanging around the market trying to get tourists to come to some club, walked us to the area where the Cliff Divers perform. We watched their 9:30 show and then Tom and I stayed until their 10:30 show, which was really only about a half hour wait since the show takes about that long, but it was worth it because we got a much better view the second time around and we got to see them dive with torches. It was pretty impressive and exciting and you would have to pay me a lot of money to climb the cliff like they do almost straight up with no harness and then leap into surging tides.
       The next day, Tom, Ian, Keaton and I moved the boat over closer to Wendy's hotel (Koelby and Jessica had stayed with her that night) and took the dinghy in to go meet them at the hotel so that we could take showers. After we were all clean, we went to the water park near Wendy's hotel and hung out there for the afternoon. They had a dolphin show that we went to that was sometimes cool, but also sad because I'm pretty sure their performance tank is the same tank that they live in. By that day, I was down to my last couple shirts and my last pair of shorts. It was time to do laundry!
       The next morning, we all went to shore with all of our laundry while Koelby stayed on the boat to tinker with the generator and the engine. We took a taxi to a lavandería and dropped off our clothes, sheets and towels. Tom's and mine ended up costing us about $20, which I think was worth it to not have to stand in a hot laundromat all day and feed quarters to machines. Besides, we all had boat and personal business to attend to. From the lavandería, we walked to a Starbucks to get on the internet and look up marine stores. We needed a specific size finger zinc for the generator that we hadn't been able to find that would enable us to run the refrigerator without having to motor. After Tom figured out where we were going, we set off. We took a taxi to the Home Depot to pick up some other stuff for the boat and then started walking to a Sears to find sealing strips for the freezer. We never found the Sears, but we did find a tiny little shop selling different tires and rubber strips and various car things, where we got lucky and found something that would work for the freezer just fine. From there we set off in search of the marine store. After a long walk, we finally found it. It turned out that they were closed and didn't have what we needed, anyway, but they pointed us in the right direction. We took a bus up to the north side of the bay near where we'd been anchored the first day, and started walking around looking for the yacht club. It seemed hopeless, until I happened to glance to my right as we were crossing a street and saw what I thought might be yacht club flags painted on the side of a small building. I hollered at Tom who was ahead of me and told him I saw what I thought might be a marine store, so we walked over to it and were pleasantly surprised to see that yes, it was a marine supply store. It gets better...they had the zincs we needed! Hallelujah victory dance!!! It was a little challenging communicating with the one guy working there because he spoke no English, and my marine-genre Spanish leaves a lot to be desired, but we managed and he was very nice. Success! We thought about getting a couple extras for when it needed to be changed again, but we still weren't sure if it was the exact right size (it was, we discovered when we got back to the boat), so we only got one to start with. So after a lot of walking and the bus ride there and another two bus rides, we made it back to the lavandería right at 7pm, when they told us they'd be done with it. They even folded it and bagged it for us.
       We were met with some not-so-great news. Keaton was now dealing with some bank issues out of his control, so he wanted to stay in Acapulco for a few days to get the paperwork they were emailing him and get it faxed back. Jessica and Wendy found a small town about 180 miles down the coast and figured out that it had restaurants and an internet cafe, so we figured that would be a good compromise, since he wasn't even going to get the email for another couple days.
       The morning after we left, at the beginning of Tom's and my watch, we saw a few spotted dolphins riding our bow, and I noticed multitudes of vivid ultramarine-blue, almost luminous flecks in the water. I'm still not sure what they were, but I would guess some sort of plankton. A little while later, we saw a whole pod of spinner dolphins, and these ones were spinning! They leapt up out of the water and spun like dancers before splashing back in. It was spectacular, but short-lived. I hope we see more of them!

Wednesday, December 18th—
       We were supposed to be in Acapulco this morning. Oops. We didn't end up leaving La Cruz until Wednesday, because Alejandro's family invited us to have dinner at their house. They made chicken enchiladas that were amazing and we stayed to hang out and talk for a while. His mother got home around 9:45 and we got to put a face to the voice we'd heard on the phone for the past few days—when we'd had a particularly challenging time with the language barrier, he'd called her to translate, and she spoke near-perfect English. It turns out she'd lived in California from the time she was 3 until the end of middle school, when she'd come home to Mexico. She was married at 16 to Alejandro's father, and they're still happily together.
       Koelby had offered Alejandro a trip to Yelapa with us, and he said yes! He left with us on Wednesday and we pulled up to Yelapa just before sunset. The view of the town and the surrounding forest was beautiful! A local fisherman helped us grab the tie-line on one of the many anchor buoys and everyone got in the dinghy to go see if there was any possibility that we could still hike to one of Yelapa's waterfalls that day. I stayed at the boat because I wasn't feeling well with a pretty tenacious cold, and to watch the boat and make sure we didn't pull the buoy too far. After everyone else figured out that the hikes were too far, Tom came and got me in the dinghy and we went to a restaurant for dinner. The next morning, we sailed for Manzanillo. We figured out that it would be easier for Alejandro to get a bus from there than from Yelapa, because there are no roads and no cars allowed in Yelapa. On the way to Manzanillo, we caught a mackerel and Alejandro cooked it for us and it was delicious! He cut it into small chunks and added a lot of lime juice, like a simple ceviche. We saw something else on he way to Manzanillo that was very interesting. Tom and I were laying down in bed with the fan on us to stay (relatively) cool and I heard Koelby yell down to me that I had to come see these dolphins because one of them had fish attached to it. I was very confused but wanted to figure out what it was he was talking about, so I came up to the deck and went out to the bow with him. Sure enough, there were two Bottlenose dolphins riding the bow, and one of them had two very strange-looking parasitic fish attached to it. When the dolphin would get too close to the surface for their comfort, they would let themselves slide down the sides of its body and then they'd move back up when they had the chance. It was so weird watching them slide around on its skin, and they weren't small, either. The bigger one was probably 14-16" and a pale grey, and the smaller one was about 12" and a ghostly, blueish white. I've never seen anything like it before!
       We pulled into Manzanillo on the13th and took the dinghy to shore to get dinner, and after while we were walking around, we found a small roller coaster and rode it. I was and still am very skeptical of it; it definitely did not feel very sturdy, but we all came off of it alive, so what can I really say? The next morning, we got up and made breakfast and then took the dinghy over to the other side of the bay that was closer to the bus station. While we were hauling it ashore, there was an old white guy watching us from inside the fence of a vacation rental house. We talked to him for a little while and he said we could leave the dinghy by the fence and anyone walking by would assume it belonged to the house and not mess with it. He was very nice and even offered to let us use the house's phone. Then we walked toward town and on the way, Tom, Ian, Keaton and I said goodbye to Alejandro and stayed at a little coffee shop to do some research on Acapulco while Koelby and Jessica went with him in a taxi to the bus station. On the way back to the dinghy, we stopped at a small fruit stand/grocery store and picked up some fruits & vegetables. We left for Acapulco that afternoon, wishing for wind because to get there in time for Koelby and Jessica's friend Wendy to fly in, we would need to make pretty good time. Instead, we've had a couple days with little to no wind so Wendy made reservations at a hotel on the beach. Hopefully we get there soon so we don't have to make her wait too long!

Tuesday, December 10th—

Wow, a lot has happened in the past week. I was planning on writing when we left the area, and we are planning on leaving today, but it's been longer than we'd planned. So I'll start with Thursday.

We woke up and went to the harbormaster's office to check into the marina—apparently you have to do that in every marina. Then we went over to the boatyard area to meet two guys—one who was going to work on our broken refrigeration unit and the other who was going to give us a quote on how much to sand down, treat, and paint over our rust spots. Only the refrigeration guy showed up and we had no way of contacting the other guy, so we went back to the boat with David, the refrigeration guy. David tinkered around under the bench seat with the unit while Jessica and I came up to the VIP lounge in the marina office building. A while later, Koelby and Tom came up to tell us what happened. The refrigeration unit was beyond repair, at one point having fried itself, so they had him tear out the unit and we should be getting him here with the new one today. All was not lost on the rust front, however. Koelby managed, after much confusion, to locate a man named José, who worked on boats. They talked about what he would do to the boat and how much he would charge us, and he and his crew of four guys started working on Friday. They found a couple things that day that slowed their work down a little (specifically a hole they accidentally uncovered in the bow from a rust bubble—not their fault, and our very rusty anchor chain due to a chain locker with no drain), but didn't overcharge us for them and were very nice about the whole thing.

Thursday night, we went to dinner at a restaurant called Ana Banana, where there was a live band there for a man's birthday party. There was a guy there who Tom and I had seen earlier in the day and whose bike Tom had complimented. He came over to our table after recognizing us and he and Tom hit it off talking about bikes. It turns out that he'd seen our boat before, over two months ago in the Berkeley marina where he was a few slips away from us! He remembered us from our broken boom that we'd had laying out on the dock for decoration. Small world! His name is Gail and he's from Quebec, but he does boat deliveries and has is own boat that he sails between San Francisco and Mexico when he was time.

Also on Friday, Tom, Jessica, Keaton and I went to Puerto Vallarta, specifically Marina Vallarta, by bus, looking for adventure and a marine store that hopefully had the parts we needed for the generator. No luck on the parts, but we did find a Walmart (oh, joy) and a very good, very reasonably priced sushi restaurant. Oh, and a couple iguanas in the trees behind the shopping center.

On Saturday, we mostly stayed at the marina, with the exception of lunch and dinner. I uploaded a bunch of photos and Koelby & Jessica laid by the pool. At 9, we met Pancho, one of the guys working on our boat, and his friend, Alejandro. They took five of us to a small town called Sayulita which was very fun! We went to a bar and then to another one with DJs and a dance floor, and finally got home and into bed around 3am.

Sunday, we went with Alejandro to a beach about a five-minute drive and three-minute walk away. It was somewhat secluded because you have to walk from the road to get there, but there were a few more people there with us. Then we are dinner at a very good, inexpensive place that Koelby and Ian had been introduced to on Friday.

Yesterday, Tom and I went on a grand adventure! By which I mean we rode horses at a place about 15 minutes from Puerto Vallarta called Rancho El Charro. We took a bus into Marina Vallarta and Pamela, the woman who owns the ranch, came and picked us up there. When we got to the ranch, we signed a release form and met our guide, Tomas. We got on and left, following him through the nearby small town before getting to a gravel road, where he asked me, "¿quieres galopar?" After checking with Tom and getting his agreement, I jumped at the chance. "¡Sí!" And so we did. It was a blast! It wasn't super fast, more of a fast canter, really, but it was very fun! I was on a gelding, maybe 12 years old, named Commander, and Tom was riding a 17yo mare named Luna. Our guide, Tomas, was on a cute, blue-eyed chestnut sabino paint mare named Confetti who was 10. We rode up through the trees, up, up, and more up! It was so high! Very pretty, and there were so many butterflies along the way! My favorites were some with brown wings that looked like they had a bunch of transparent spots at first, which I found out upon closer inspection were lime green spots! After we got to the top, which had a beautiful view of Puerto Vallarta and the surrounding mountains, we began our descent. There were a couple ascending stretches, but mostly it was downhill. After a while, it got a little nerve-wracking, even for me. We were descending very steep, rocky stretches, to the point where Commander, with his no-nonsense attitude, would just barrel down without really picking his way very well. I wasn't scared exactly, just worried that he would trip and hurt himself. Granted, he's done this many times, but it was still very unfamiliar to me. It was fun, though! Definitely exciting. There were times when I had to squeeze my legs in or up to avoid scraping against trees and rocks and sometimes the ground (the trail, especially on those steep stretches, was essentially a deep ditch so that our feet were about level with the ground on either side). When we finally got to the bottom, we rode through a wide, shallow river and let the horses drink. We took a short detour up from the river to a place where we got off the horses and just left them in a group with their reins over their saddle horns (another very unfamiliar thing, but again, they do it all the time). From there, we hiked a couple minutes to a small waterfall in a very tranquil location shaded all around by the large trees. We didn't stay long, but it was a very nice little jaunt. The we went back to the river and walked along it for a while before coming to a long, wide strip of concrete road that we found out, when I asked Tomas, led to a place where a restaurant was being built. We turned off that road after a while and then when we got to another dirt/gravel road, Tomas asked if we wanted to gallop again. Uhhhhhh, of course! After this run, which was temporarily interrupted when we turned the corner and found about six people walking dogs, we turned off the gravel road and walked back through the small town and back to the ranch. All three of the restaurants they usually take tourists do during the ride were closed, so Pamela fed us lunch when we got back. Commander, the gelding I rode, had the longest winter coat and, because of that, was very sweaty by the time we got back, so they let me spray him off after we un-tacked them. I think they were mildly amused by my desire to do so, but I couldn't leave him all sweaty like that. After lunch, Pamela's son, Sebastian, drove us back to Puerto Vallarta so we could take the bus back to La Cruz.

When we got back to the marina, Tom and I walked back along the dock to the boat. At a certain point, we both looked at each other at the same time with the same slightly confused expression. We'd walked too far. It didn't take quite that long to get to the boat. When we turned around and went back to our slip, our confusion was confirmed. There was no boat there. We walked back to the VIP lounge and I asked a couple middle-aged guys if they possibly knew where our boat had moved to. My justification for asking them was that in every other marina we'd been in, a lot of people took notice of our boat and knew it when we told them which one was ours. They said no, and Tom thought it was weird that I'd asked two strangers. In his defense, it was weird, I admit, but I thought maybe there was a chance. We walked out of the building and around toward the parking lot side, from where you can see the bay and the nearby anchorage. Bingo! We saw our boat floating out in the bay. Not knowing what to think, we returned to our slip to wait for their return. While we were waiting, guess who came up to talk to us? Yep, you probably didn't guess it—one of the strangers I'd asked about our boat! Turns out that after thinking about it, he did remember our boat, and was able to tell us that they'd gone out to the bay so that the crew of guys working on our boat could spray paint, because the marina wouldn't let them do it on the docks. I did a small victory dance! It's not often that my weird questions to strangers result in answers other than "I'm sorry, I don't know," so I had reason to celebrate. Plus, everyone knows the satisfaction of being right. 

Today, we're planning on leaving for Yelapa, a small town that doesn't allow cars but that has some gorgeous hikes and scenery and apparently, more horses than people, so I'm excited! I'll write again from there and post it if I have wifi.

Wednesday, December 4th—

Yesterday at about 10am, with the wind severely lacking and our water tanks pretty low, we started motoring so that we could get to Las Islas Marietas faster and also make water. On the way in, we passed a strange brown object in the water, so we turned the boat toward it to investigate. On the first pass of it, our best guess was that it was a large fish carcass. On the second pass of our circle, we discovered it was not a fish. It was a dolphin, rotting on the surface of the water. The beak and blow-hole gave it away, and you could see a section of its bones from the back half of its body. Circle of life, I know, but it was sad. It's not every day you see something so beautiful transformed into something so...dead.

You can tell who tans easier...

       We also saw some Humpbacks, but they didn't get very close. We followed them for a while but to no avail. Finally, around 1:00, we came around the side of one of the two islands and saw a small archway through which you could see a small slice of beach. We had found it! Or what we thought was a smaller version of it, it being the beach-sunk-inside-an-island that you can find pictures of if you search for Islas Marietas. We dropped our anchor and grabbed our snorkel gear and swam over. It was interesting swimming through the cavelike arch to get to the beach inside because the currents were so strong, but it was worth it once we got inside. It was a lot smaller than we were expecting, but it was beautiful nonetheless. Jessica even found a bright ultramarine blue fish that I got some pictures of in one of the caves off to the side. And on the way back to the boat, Koelby discovered a bunch of tiny bumblebee-sized, yellow and black striped fish that clustered in and around the plant life that was growing from the bottom of each of the small buoys holding up the swimming-zone line. It was fantastic!
       After we left that first island, we moved the boat to the second one, which we assumed was the one with the much bigger beach-cave. After taking the dinghy around, and walking a little over the top of the island, we couldn't find it. So, either a) it's not there and the one we went to just looked bigger in pictures, or b) we haven't found it yet. We're going to do some more research in town to find out. Some highlights of the second island include: Tom scraping his knee on the rocks/sand and Koelby hopping on one foot while his other was stuck in one of the dinghy harness ropes, both while they were trying to jump out to haul the dinghy ashore; the hundreds of hermit crabs we saw, a few with shells as small as my pinky nail (so cute!); the few interesting red crabs we saw further inland (one species looked like little bull-dog crabs the way their bodies were shaped as if they were all muscle); and me getting totally soaked while we were putting the dinghy back in the water to leave the island.
       While taking the dinghy around in further search of this elusive beach-cave, we came upon a man in a kayak and stopped to talk to him. He ended up telling us that we couldn't actually anchor where we were and that we were supposed to use the anchoring buoys set there by some government agency. He very nicely explained to us how to pull up and grab the rope on the buoy to attach to our boat. While he was talking to us, the dinghy got a little too close to the buoy and the barnacles scraped my knee, so now Tom and I have matching knees.
       Everything seemed great after we relocated to the buoy until about 12:30am, when I was woken up by a seemingly endless barrage of loud bangs. It was our boat repeatedly slamming up against the metal buoy, right at the bow where Tom and I sleep. Tom and Keaton went up and essentially shortened the rope that attached us so that it would be tighter and we'd be less likely to hit it. It worked fairly well. About 5am, we started hearing a different species of loud banging. This time it was the rope making our anchor repeatedly lift off the deck and then crash back down, right above mine and Tom's heads. This time, Tom woke Koelby up and, after noticing that we'd drug the anchor buoy at least a hundred yards (oops!), we decided to move the boat to a different anchorage near Nuevo Vallarta, which is where we are now. Tom and Ian are trying to fix the generator and sometime today the plan is to take the dinghy to shore to find wifi so we can figure out where we're staying when we get to Puerto Vallarta. Hopefully we'll be able to do some things in Puerto Vallarta other than boat repairs! 
       Updated 4:30pm—We decided to stay at the marina here for at least one night and tomorrow morning we're having a couple guys come to the boat to see if they can help us with some of our issues.  

Tuesday, December 3rd—

An interesting morning, but the sunrise was beautiful!

Saturday morning was much the same as any other morning, until about 6am when there was an allegedly very loud, metallic banging sound near the back of the boat (I didn't actually hear it, I think I woke up a second later). Anyway, Tom stuck his head out of the hatch and, seeming very alarmed, hurried to get dressed and run up topside. Curious, I stuck my head out, too. We were almost right next to the rock cliffs along the bay! I threw on some clothes and joined Tom up on deck with Koelby and Jessica. It turned out that we had drifted .3 miles from where we'd dropped the anchor. We suspect there was some sort of shelf and that we drifted enough that the anchor fell off of the shelf and then didn't have enough chain to get a grip on (or even touch?) the deeper bottom. The funny part was that the previous night, the boat was still in the same spot we'd left it when we came back from dinner. I checked the inReach and our drifting happened between midnight and 5am. We picked up the anchor and moved back closer to the beach to sleep for a few more hours before we got up, cleaned the boat and headed for Puerto Vallarta.
       Unfortunately, that first day were met with rather pathetic winds. We mostly did a lot of drifting and managed to cover 28 miles in 24 hours. Fortunately, on the morning of the second day, the winds picked up and we covered 133 miles in 24 hours, which for us is a new high. We've averaged pretty good speed since then, but right now the wind is barely holding on at about 4 knots, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that it will at least hold, if not pick up, so we can still get to Las Islas Marietas today. We're only 18 miles away!

Poor, unfortunate souls

       Yesterday, Tom and I discovered a most peculiar thing. It was about 7:30am and Tom had gone forward to re-route the staysail line outside of the rigging so I could pull it tight, and he was sitting facing out toward the water and I hear him exclaim, "there's a squid on deck!" I jumped up from my book and hurried over and sure enough, there was a tiny squid on the deck in front if him, no more than five inches long. As I went to get the camera, I spotted another one almost underneath one of the fenders near the back. I don't know what kind they are, but they were very cute and I felt bad that they had to end their lives drying out on the deck of a sailboat. However, we made the most of it and used them as bait for our handline. We didn't hook a fish but we know something ate the squid because when we pulled the handline up to check on it, there was about a third of the body left and definite slash marks.
       Last, and possibly my favorite, are the dolphins. Yesterday, we saw three different species of dolphins! I'm not a dolphin expert, but my guesses, with the help of my marine mammal field guide, are 1) Eastern Spinner Dolphins, 2) Bottlenose Dolphins (the darker, offshore variety), and 3) Pantropical Spotted Dolphins. The latter came in a group of about ten, give or take a couple, and they rode our bow and stayed near the boat for close to ten minutes! I stood on the bow and watched them up close and it was so cool! They would lag a little behind the bow and then all of a sudden, a group of maybe seven of them would come charging up so gracefully and come even with or in front of us again. They didn't leap very far out of the water and didn't do any acrobatics, but I love watching them slice through the water like it's nothing. They're so graceful!

Friday, November 29th—

Turkey Day, Cabo Style!

       On Wednesday, we moved the boat to the marina so we could charge the battery and go grocery shopping, as we were intending to leave Cabo on Thursday. Wednesday night, Koelby  Jessica, Tom and I went to dinner at a brewery called Rámuri that had very good food. We decided that night that we would stay for Thanksgiving dinner (we'd seen flyers for a couple different restaurants doing a special menu for Thanksgiving), but we would leave the marina and anchor back in the bay and just take the dinghy in. Ian and Keaton walked to the Baja Brewing Company on Thursday morning and made us reservations for 6:45. I'm not one to get excited over your traditional Thanksgiving fare, but that food was good. They served, quoted from the menu, "Oven Roasted Whole Turkeys, Barley Mashed Potatoes w/ Giblet Gravy, Apple and Walnut Focaccia Stuffing, Southern Comfort Glazed Baby Carrots, Fresh Cranberry/Blueberry Compote, Chipotle Cheddar Cornbread, and either Charlie Brown Pumpkin Pie or Cinnamon Apple Pie." It was enough to make me wish we had Thanksgiving every Thursday. While we were at the restaurant, Koelby started talking to the guy at the next table over. His name was Troy and he was visiting Cabo with his parents and his wife, Kusi (I think that's how it's spelled—it's pronounced like Lucy). They were very nice and we invited them to come with us the next day to Chileno Bay to go snorkeling. This delayed our leaving Cabo by another day, but it's okay because we don't have a schedule to keep to other than the one we make ourselves. It turned out to be a lot of fun! Koelby and Ian went to fetch them from the beach in the dingy at around 10am, and then we sailed over to Chileno Bay, which took about two hours. When we got there, Tom was reeling in the handline we had been towing on the way over and, would you believe it, a very small tuna hooked itself with about ten feet of line left in the water!

I'm not sure exactly what kind of fish, but it was definitely shaped like a tuna

Then we made sandwiches with things Troy & Kusi brought with them—they're flying out tomorrow, so they brought us all their extra food and drinks—and jumped in the water. There were a few very large schools of fish and, over near the rocks, a bunch of smaller groups or singles of different, sometimes more colorful species. Tom took a bunch of pictures of them. After we snorkel end and swam for a while, we also decided to break out the subwing (look up subwing on YouTube—it's worth it) for the first time. Tom, Koelby, Troy, Keaton and Ian all tried it out. The salt was bothering my skin too much to get back in the water but I watched them and I can't wait to try it myself! They all said it was a lot of fun! Next time I hope we can figure out how to attach the GoPro. It seems to be missing a small piece of the mounting hardware. After we put the dinghy back on the boat, we motored back to the main Cabo bay and our new friends let us shower in their hotel room! It was fantastic to have consistent-temperature hot water for the first time in a while. We had a great time with them and I'm glad we stayed the extra day! Tomorrow we should be leaving for Puerto Vallarta.

Our new friends!

Tuesday, November 26th—
       We made fairly good time and arrived in Cabo San Lucas on Sunday night and anchored at around 7pm. It was quite a party at the beach, with one restaurant playing very loud music, and they even set off fireworks at one point! (We would learn very soon that every night in Cabo is a party.) We decided that since we didn't know where to take the dinghy or even if it was okay to leave it on the beach, we would wait til morning when we could see where we were going. The next morning, we came in via water taxi and walked toward the mall and marina district where we got brunch at a restaurant called Los Ajos. From there, we split up and Koelby, Jessica, Tom and I went over to find the marina office to reserve a slip for the night before we plan to leave here while Ian and Keaton wandered around the mall area. The four of us found a bar with 2/$5 margaritas and hung out around the marina boardwalk for a while. Then we all went back to the boat to hang out and swim before returning to shore for dinner and to watch a basketball game. After looking unsuccessfully in at least four places for this game, Koelby was able to find a guy who worked at the last bar who let him use his phone to watch a live gamecast of it.
       Today, Ian, Keaton, Tom and I swam to shore in the morning for breakfast and ended up staying through lunch, when Ian and Keaton stayed at the bar to hang out and Koelby, Jessica and the two of us took the dinghy back to the boat to get our snorkel gear and headed over to one of the small beaches near the rock arch to go swimming and snorkeling. It was pretty cool; I'd never been snorkeling before. The salt water didn't taste very good (does it ever?) but we had enough fun that it was just a minor discomfort. Tom and I took a bunch of pictures on the Pentax, over- and underwater. When it was time to leave, we narrowly escaped in a rather fortuitous window of time just long enough for us to get the dinghy far enough offshore that we weren't being battered by breaking waves. After we got back from that adventure, we dropped Koelby and Jessica off at the beach with Ian and Keaton and took the dinghy over to the dinghy dock at the marina so we could take showers (washed my hair with BS & ACV again, feels great after, if a bit dry. I'll be moisturizing it with small amounts of argan oil and, in the future, spraying with leave-in conditioner before I swim in salt water) at the marina facilities and then grab dinner before meeting back up with everyone. We even met a couple new friends right before we met up with our old ones! My apologies for the not-so-ideal picture/text alignment; it won't let me control the picture position with much accuracy and it's infuriating. How hard is it for them to add a text-wrap-options feature so that you could fine tune the size and position of pictures? Too hard, apparently.

Yay! Birds!!

Saturday, November 23rd—
       Today we leave for Cabo. Yesterday we went and explored the beach and then Tom and Koelby cleaned out the freezer. Right now, I think it has only alcohol in it.
       The beach was fantastic! Jessica and I kayaked over while the boys swam. Koelby was the first one to ask to be towed, so we gave him a ride and then went to offer Ian a taxi to the beach. When we got there, everyone pretty much started going inland while Keaton and I walked along the water for a little while looking for cool things. We found a few cool shells and some flounder fish right in the shallows that skittered away from us when we got too close. My favorites were the two blue crabs we found in the water. The first one Keaton got a video of running away from him and trying to be ferocious underwater. The second one he managed to pick up and take a few pictures of with his GoPro. The pictures came out very well. After the second crab, we turned away from the water and walked in a little where we found a whole lot of purple urchin skeletons. So pretty! Then we saw tom coming toward us with something in his hand, which turned out to be a bunch of cool white and brown spiky shells. He took us inland and showed us the weird shell beds where they'd come from, and we eventually made our way across the spit of land to the opposite beach, along the way stumbling upon a huge sand dollar graveyard. This other beach was in some ways even better than the first one! Keaton found two pelican skulls with the tops of their beaks fully intact, which I carried back so as to take a picture of them. Tom found a giant shell that he's very proud of, and we also found sea turtle skulls! Keaton and I each brought one back to the boat; his even has the bottom jaw still attached!

       When the three of us got back to the original beach, we noticed that the boat looked a lot closer. It was. Ian and Koelby and Jessica had come back and noticed it was much farther away than when we originally anchored. They kayaked back and discovered that it had drifted .3 miles and was parked very near one of the channel marking buoys, so they moved it in and sent Ian back to wait for us with the dinghy. We moved the boat yet again and anchored and that's when Tom and Koelby started on the freezer. Today, we wanted to leave by seven o'clock but it's seven now and Ian, Tom and I are the only ones up. If we leaves soon and make good time, we should be in Cabo by early tomorrow afternoon.

Friday, November 22nd—
       I've decided to try and move my journal to the iPad because it takes less time to write, therefore hopefully I'll be able to write more because I won't get bored of writing. I'll copy in the earlier posts later, but here's today's.
       Two nights ago, right as Tom and I were getting up to go on watch at 10:00, we started the engine to motor into Bahía Magdalena. We anchored inside the bay overnight with the plan of waking up in the morning and motoring over to the small town of San Carlos. Since Ian, Keaton, Tom and I were all up before 8:00, we had to wait for Koelby and Jessica to get up before we could go anywhere, so Ian and Keaton blew up the kayak and took it over to shore for a couple hours (and brought back some awesome shells that I am jealous of, including an urchin skeleton Keaton found). Tom and I braved the as yet unopened bag of "frozen" hash browns. The thing about the freezer is that it works great when we're plugged into shore power, but that's about it...otherwise it's more of a cooler. We discovered two things about the hash browns: 1) that they were most probably the source of one of the ingredients of the freezer-smell-cocktail (the smell, when we opened them, could possibly have knocked out a small child), and 2) that they were fine to eat once we'd cooked them enough. We ate them with plenty of ketchup and sriracha just in case, though.
       A little after ten, after Koelby and Jessica had gotten up and Ian and Keaton had gotten back and they'd all eaten, we motored over to San Carlos. There's not much there, but last night we took the dinghy to shore in search of a restaurant, a grocery store, showers, or any combination thereof. A few hundred feet from the boat, the bottom of the bay jumped up to about three feet under the dinghy, and kept rising gradually until we first had to half-cock the motor so the screw wasn't hitting the sand, and then finally had to get out and walk through the water because it was so shallow. We left the dinghy high and dry to chill on the sand and wait for us to return. Once we made our way to the buildings we were aiming for—promising bright orange structures that looked resort-like—we met the man whom we assume owns both the restaurant and the tiny resort. Success on the dinner and shower fronts! He said there was a grocery store but it was some distance away. We ate dinner a his restaurant, called Restaurante Mar y Arena (Sea and Sand). Tom ordered breaded shrimp which were pretty good. I ordered scallops cooked in orange liqueur, optimistic that they might be like the scallops Tom and I had eaten in Moss Landing, CA at Phil's; they were not.
       The so-so scallops, however, were all but forgotten in the wake of discovering, thanks to Koelby's asking the owner, that we could all take showers in one of the rooms of the resort...and not have to pay for the whole room; he charged us 50 pesos per person, or about $4. After ten days without a shower because we've had to conserve water on the boat, it was heavenly. I washed my hair with the BS solution and conditioned it with the ACV rinse, and *yay hooray* when it dried it felt like I'd just shampooed it! I was expecting it to feel greasy for the first few washes at least, but I was also not planning on waiting ten days to wash it after clarifying it—more like 3-5 days. But it worked out! Hopefully it will continue to be like this and it won't get greasy as quickly.
       Today we moved the boat over to a pretty beach with some dunes and we'll probably leave later today or tomorrow morning for Cabo. I hope this afternoon/evening!

Tuesday, November 19—
       Yesterday, we experienced our first small Mexican town. After Koelby and Jessica got up, we took the dinghy into Bahía Tortugas, motoring by and through a huge number of pelicans diving to get their breakfast—straight into the net of a couple local fishermen. It had to have sucked for them, but at the same time, they're probably used to it. When we got to the dock, a man named Pedro, who was missing most of his right arm, helped us get rid of the garbage we'd brought with us from the boat and promptly proclaimed himself our tour guide, in very broken English. Koelby mentioned that we needed water, so Pedro took us to the nearest market and showed us the multi-gallon jugs they had. What we really needed was somewhere to fill up our water tanks, and we hoped we'd find a place at the diesel fuel dock that had potable water. We did not. Instead, we found no less than four small grocery stores with different variations of the same multi-gallon jugs, thanks to Pedro, who didn't understand us well enough to know that that's not what we actually wanted, and I'd forgotten to figure out how to say 'potable water' before we got into town. It's agua potable, in case you're wondering. After quite a long adventure through town, and being separated from half of the group, we finally found them back at the beach. But Pedro was not done. No, he led all of us somewhere in pursuit of langosta (lobster) which we thought meant a restaurant that had lobster. I'm not sure what the building was that he led us to, but it was definitely not a restaurant and there was not a lobster in sight. After this, we finally managed to lose Pedro because Koelby gave him some money—which, in retrospect, probably would have gotten him to leave us alone much sooner, but none of us thought of it. We left Turtle Bay with nothing to show except our new dinghy lifting and storage system (lifted using one of the lines from the top of the mast and stored topside above Tom's and my hatch).

Thursday, November 14—
       We arrived in Ensenada on the 11th. The day before, we saw a couple hundred dolphins all jumping and leaping out of the water—it was amazing! I took about 500 pictures and I still have to go through them all on the computer.






       When we pulled into Ensenada Bay, we tried to radio the Ensenada Cruiseport Village marina, but they didn't respond. We ended up just pulling into it anyway, because the other marina in town didn't have room for our boat. We got a slip and got all checked in with a man named Enrique who had the most beautiful blue-green eyes. The next morning, he drove us all to the immigration office and we got our Mexican tourist visas and I got my passport stamped for the first time EVER!! Back at the boat, we did some computer updating and left that evening. The next day, we arrived at Isla San Martin, but there's not much here, so we're going to go over to the mainland and see what there is to see there.

Saturday, November 9—
       Well, I guess I'll jump on the journal bandwagon. Since I didn't start at the beginning of the trip, I told myself I'd start once we got into Mexico, and as of a few hours ago, we're in Mexican waters. We left San Diego yesterday and we're on our way now to Ensenada, the first port of entry along the Pacific coast. We're not making much progress now and are mostly drifting, so I hope we get some wind soon. This entry isn't very long because, as you can see, not a lot has happened yet. More to come!