I know this is late and it has taken us a long time to get any information out after our passage but we were tired after the passage and hence laziness ruled over productivity. Now you may get bombarded with blogs(I doubt it but that is our intention as of right now) with the creative and original thought that you would expect of people who have spent three weeks in the most uncomfortable surroundings your little city dweller minds could think of(have you figured out this trip has given me a bit of a superiority complex, some people my say 'enhanced' my superiority complex but I would say listen to me not them as I am obviously better).
Our passage started in La Paz around the 9th of May. Between the 9th and 18th of May we busied ourselves in La Paz getting the boat ready for passage. We did take 2 days off and go and visit josh and Christine in Pescadero.
Christene and Josh's little abode
but I still count that as working for the passage. We managed to finally come to a suitable arrangement for doing work. We had quite a big list of chores to do and decided to divide these up from the start and let everyone do their share when the wanted. This seemed to work very nicely and everything was done by the time we were ready to leave(the list of chores will be posted in separate blog under the name 'LIST OF CHORES').
Now a little about La Paz. Ever since we had bought the boat we have heard about La Paz. It is revered in the sailing community the way the the Emerald city is reviled by the inhabitants of Oz. It is the Promised Land. We met so many people on our travels that only wanted to get to La Paz and then all would be well. It ended up being pretty funny as we just kept running into people with this mentality. So naturally being the cynical group that we are we spent a good 2 months just ripping on La Paz. Small knowing smiles would appear whenever we met someone else who 'just wanted to get to La Paz' and inevitably that conversation would provide a good days worth of humor for the boat. It got so bad that I developed this uncontrollable need to go to la Paz and see what this place really is about(when I started this trip I had no desire to go to La Paz and when we passed it with out going there on our way through Mexico I never once thought it was a shame we didn't go). And so after much thought and deliberation we changed our plans due to refrigeration issues and forsake our chance at Guatemala, El salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, The Galapagos and Easter Island and instead ended up in La Paz(yes refrigeration was that big a deal to us and it was probably the best decision of the trip so far). and this is what we found
Wouldn't you know it La Paz is the Promise Land. This was by far my favorite city in Mexico. It is super safe and very friendly. It has everything you need, a downtown with a good dose of charm and a Mexican downtown that provided just the right amount of intimidation and discomfort that a non spanish speaking white person would want. And then there is the sailing community which is naturally huge and obviously brings in large amounts of money to the town. It covers every form of boater in every financial bracket. This makes for endless interesting meetings and conversations as well as a certain recklessness in the boating attitude culminating in the numerous boats that manage to become 'involved' in accidents and are in need of repair. I always thought we were in the 'very good chance of damaging the boat' bracket, but after La Paz I wouldn't even put us in the 'average chance of damaging the boat bracket'. Then you have the sunsets which are like the picture below every night we were there. There are numerous places you can sit and have a drink or something to eat to watch these and they are fantastic.
So that is La Paz. And we were lucky to be able to provision here and get the boat ready. It made our lives easy and a lot more enjoyable than what it could have been at a lot of the other places. After a fun filled month hanging around La Paz and the bottom of the Sea of Cortez we had our refrigeration fixed(and it is great) the boat chores done and the boat stocked with food and parts and we were ready to go. Our original plan had been to leave La Paz on the 14th, stop in Cabo on the 16th and be on our way to the Marquesas. The reality was a little different.
A lot of what I am about to talk of next was censored when it first happened. The reason for this was that we didn't really want anyone to worry and we have a few members of our family's that are following us quite closely that would worry. Its funny when the roles are reversed and you started sheltering your parents from things you don't think they can handle. Maybe it is just preparing us for when we have our own kids. Now that it is all said and done I can give you a few more details. We left La Paz on the 18th of May(4 days late because we couldn't get our shit sorted)) about half way through our trip to Cabo, Don informed me that he had noticed the starboard water tank was leaking. He had known about it for a while and chose to censor it from the rest of the crew to see how it would play out. I only found out because I was in the habit of checking it too. When I probed some more it became apparent we were going to lose half our water supply about 3 hours after leaving Cabo. This was a concern. So we stopped at a the closest marina which ended up being 14 miles short of Cabo. Here we set about dealing to the minor problem which had presented itself on our trip from La Paz to Cabo(which takes about a day and a half). We commenced these positions for the next 2 days.
Two days later we had managed to fix our tank and in the process fix the third water tank we had originally left as we didn't need it. So we went from having half our water supply in a tank we knew would be good to having all our supply plus half as much again in 1 tank we new would be good, one tank we were pretty positive would be good and one tank we had no idea about. So for a few days it was a little sketchy as to what would be reliable and what wouldn't(you can never really trust a fix on the boat till about a month later, from what we have found and then it is just as likely to fail as anything else on a boat which is pretty much everything on our boat).
We got to Cabo the afternoon of the 21st and pulled into the fuel dock to fill up on fuel and water(we didn't do this at the marina we stayed in because we found out the fuel was unreliable and the water undrinkable). Upon completing this process we found our water line from our tanks to the sinks were leaking rather bad and our main water filter had finally clogged up enough that it would no longer let any water through. So now we have lots of water(supposedly) but no way of getting it to the taps. The next two hours saw Carl running back and forth between the boat and marine stores trying to find a filter and fittings to fix our leak. Don losing any kind of hand to eye coordination he might have possessed in the past and cutting his hands three times in the space of three minutes(one was a real bleeder too) which then relegated him to expressing his opinion about what to do while I did it. While this is going on the girls are dealing with the guy on the fuel dock is getting more and more pissed because we have been sitting at his dock for 3 hours not really doing anything(if only he knew, we tried to tell him but it was Cabo so he didn't care , he just wanted us to leave so his fuel dock could look a little more attractive to people with some real money, can't really blame him there). We eventually eliminated the filter as we could find no replacement, plugged the leak and put everything back together.
So off we went with 275 gallons(yes we know this is a lot) of crapy tasting water spread across one good water tank and two suspect water tanks. A suspect water line. Two lame looking tiny water filters and a ridiculous amount of plumbing parts that we are not even sure will fix a problem if we have one.
And so starts part 2. The crossing.
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