La Paz anchorage has a reversing current (like SF bay, part of the day the tide is coming in, part of the day it is going out). This does weird stuff to boats at anchor, leaving them beam or stern-to the wind, and sometimes when everything comes together in just the right combination of wind and current, it creates the 'La Paz Waltz' where boats will literally start sailing at a knot or two while still at anchor. The other night I was able to sit in the cockpit, stern-to 15 knots or so of wind, and actually steer the boat back and forth using the tiller against the incoming current. It's very strange, and the first time it happened we really thought we were dragging our anchor...which as it turns out would not have been all that surprising when we finally did raise our anchor (to shift to a more Pesky friendly spot) and found that a week of spinning in strange circles around our anchor had caused the chain to foul the anchor at about the 40' mark.

Aside from all the anchorage fun, we've been running around La Paz on massive provisioning runs, hitting every hardware store in town for a variety of supplies, eating great food, using the internet to frantically catch up with 'real life' in all it's forms, and generally having a whirlwind of a time. Here's some highlights:

Rancho Viejo: The arachera tacos here are the best tacos we have ever had...when we left San Francisco we thought nothing would be able to dull the pain of leaving Papalote behind, we were wrong. Arachera tacos for $18 pesos make Papalote a distant memory...and, we have recently been informed you can actually go with a group and just buy the arachera by the kilo, with tortillas and condiments on the side and have a massive group feed.

Bandidos: Burgers cooked on a grill retrofit into the engine compartment of a pickup truck. Open air dining 5PM-Midnight every night, and if it's cold they give you blankets. I highly recommend the 'Outlaw' which is a 1/2 lb burger with BBQ sauce, bacon, onion, and american cheese (for about 40 pesos).

La Fuente: Corn ice cream. Need we say more? Okay, fine: Tequila ice cream. Look for the polka dot tree on the Malecon.

5 Peso Tacos: Yes that's right, 5 peso tacos from street vendors. And today, 3x10! That's 3 carne asada tacos for a total of about 70 cents. While options abound I personally recomend the blue tarp stand, recognizable by the blue tarp strung from an aging van, near the mercado.

Cheap Tequila: You can buy a decent bottle of tequila for 45 pesos ($3 US). I would bet that for lots of expats here this is a primary draw in itself.

Baja Paperwork: Based on the recomendation of some friends, we went to Baja Paperwork to get our Temporary Import Permit completed. We were a little unsure of how well it would turn out if we tried to do it ourselves (click here for background), and we really didn't want to make an entire day of going out to Pichilingue to the Aduana office. We went in on Friday, and Yolanda got us our TIP on Monday. You pay a bit for this service, but we thought it was worth it. Also, handy tip, if you are not yet in Mexico, you can actually just get your TIP online at: http://www.banjercito.com.mx

We are going to spend another day or two here using the internet (and eating more food) and then head out to start exploring again. Miss you all!

While en route out to the anchorage a few days ago we heard a noise that we both dreaded...a cracking noise from the tiller region. Upon close inspection our tiller had delaminated, meaning that we have to fix our current tiller or buy, beg or steal another tiller before we can leave La Paz on Pisces. A plea out on the morning radio cruisers net for a tiller source was unsuccessful, so we laid out our options:
1. Buy wood in La Paz and make a new tiller.
2. Order a tiller from the States and wait for it to be made and shipped to La Paz.
3. Fix our broken tiller to get us through until we put the boat on the hard for hurricane season for the summer, and come back home and figure out what we want our ideal tiller to be for next season.

We decided to go with option 3, and we are on day 4 of the (re) creation of FRANKENTILLER.

Installation of our e-tiller while we fix our regular tiller

Day One: Sanding the tiller, drilling out the holes for the new bolts

Day One cont: First round of epoxy.

Day Three: Dry fitting the tiller to see if our repair job will be sturdy enough

Day Three: Tao crew comes over to check out the sturdiness of the epoxy job
Day 4: First round of varnish with the tiller suspended on the foredeck so we can varnish it all at once.

Last month the company that I have a credit card with put a hold on my card due to "suspicious activity" in Mexico. While I really appreciated their concern it did cause me to sweat for a moment at the fuel dock while I figured out how to pay the guy for the 70 gallons of diesel he'd just put into our tank. I emailed customer service and tried to convince them that it was my suspicious activity on the card, no worries, and please re-activate it. They were not convinced and said I had to call in person to authenticate myself (although how they feel reassured by my voice rather than my email is a mystery to me since they don't have voice recognition).

We don't have a cell phone in Mexico, and I was hesitant to call the 1800 number via our satellite phone, so I just kind of figured I'd mooch off of Jacob's credit card for a couple of months until we got back into the States and I could call. I guess I've become more Americanized than I thought, because the idea of not being able to use my credit card made me a little uncomfortable, so I decided to try calling the 1800 number via our free internet phone connection, Skype. Much to my surprise the call went through and my credit card has now been happily reinstated, with a little note on the account record that must say something like "card holder is mooching around in Mexico. Don't approve any exorbitant charges that she won't be able to repay, but let her buy a couple of cervezas and tacos every now and then." To me this ability to sort out my financial situation from another country using the wonders of free internet telephone is amazingly wonderfuly mindblowing. At the very least, blogworthy.

In other news we are now at anchor in La Paz, having said our sad farewells to Jacob's parents and goodbye to the marina lifestyle. We've been having a lot of fun here, enjoying the town, the people, the great cheap food etc. We did manage to do a monster supply run to re-stock our almost empty lockers, and have spent some time happily wandering about the city and poking our noses into stores.

Monster food trip

Wandering through back streets in La Paz

24 09' N, 110 20' W

We are back from an amazing week buddy-boating around Isla Partida and Isla Espiritu Santo with Tao, and are currently in a marina (!) in La Paz, hanging out with my parents who flew down for the week.

'When winds are light people motor rather than go slow, when there are heavy winds they motor because it's 'easier' than sailing.'

As we worked our way down the outside of the Baja a cruiser who was headed North told us the above. At the time we wrote it off as just a bit of idle complaining from an 'experienced cruiser.' It didn't completely fit with our experience of the Pacific side of the Baja, where long stretches between safe anchorages, and a lack of services, made sailing a necessity rather than a luxury. However, as we passed Cabo San Lucas and moved into the Sea of Cortez, things have changed a bit. With anchorages more closely spaced, and more opportunities to re-fuel, we have definitely seen boats under sail entering into the minority.

We've talked quite a bit about this phenomenon, and we've looked closely at our own decisions over the past few passages and tried to analyze for ourselves what was driving our decision in those instances when we fired up the engine rather than sail.

In a sense what the engine provides that sailing doesn't is an element of predictability. You know what speed your boat goes under power, and you can more or less assume you will be able to make something close to that directly towards your destination. This becomes more and more appealing when you are talking about a series of anchorages spaced 60 miles apart (just on the line of what most boats can comfortably do during daylight hours if pushed at a good clip). If you motor all or a good part of the trip you can leave one anchorage in the early morning and be at the next anchorage before dark. If you sail...all bets are off.

For us, we've seen the 'predictability' element cause us to motor in two different types of circumstances. When headed into Los Frailes we were getting slammed by a nasty headwind and chop, and the choice we faced was to motorsail a decent portion of the afternoon, continue sailing and arrive in the anchorage after dark (possibly risky and definitely nerve-wracking), or continue sailing and spend the night out in the weather. We chose to motorsail and be assured of a comfortable and quiet night at anchor.

The other circumstance was from Los Frailes to Muertos. The weather pattern we had observed was calm winds during the night, light or calm winds all morning, and building winds from the NW in the afternoon. We had 60 miles to cover to windward, so we left the anchorage at midnight and motored until the morning, at which point we were only 20 something miles out from Muertos. We then sailed on the light winds into the anchorage, comfortable that if the winds died or picked up to an uncomfortable degree we would be within close striking distance of the anchorage.

In retrospect, both of these decisions were totally reasonable and served us well, the only problem with them is that they left us motoring significant portions of our passages rather than sailing. This was brought into sharp relief by our recent buddy-boating with Tao, who essentially haven't used their engine at all (anchoring included) since somewhere around Cedros Island (about a third of the way down the Pacific side of Baja). Julia and I are both totally impressed by this piece of seamanship, and we would be lying if we said it didn't make us feel a little sheepish at our reliance on our engine.

Digging a little deeper into why having a 'predictable' passage has equated in our minds to a 'good' passage, we realized that we just haven't gotten completely comfortable yet being on the boat underway. When on passage we both carry a good deal of tension about what might happen next, we lose sleep, and our bodies are tired from the physicality of it. This has unconsciously led to us treating the passages as something to be minimized, treated as a necessary evil. As we look back on this it is very disappointing, as one of the reasons we decided to take this trip was our love of sailing. In the whirlwind of new experiences and being stretched far past our comfort zone we had lost sight of that.

Our self-imposed challenge now is to push ourselves to not become complacent with the scurry from anchorage to anchorage approach to cruising, continuing instead to build the experience and confidence necessary to enjoy the passages as part of the whole experience. In support of this we are trying hard to identify how to make the boat easier to sail, continuing to learn what sail combinations are best for Pisces under different wind conditions, tweaking our watch schedule to find what works best for us, and generally pushing ourselves to continue sailing when the temptation to motor arises.

We are happy to report that we had the ideal start to this new approach on our passage from Muertos to Isla Partida. We left the anchorage an hour or so before Tao and Kaalelewa (sorry about the spelling!), and had a beautiful sail. We flew downwind all afternoon with the poled out jib and staysail, had a couple of monster fish bites and broke a fishing line, spent a night drifting in a calm West of Isla Espiritu Santo, and then a fresh breeze in the morning leaded to a fun upwind sail to Isla Partida trading tacks with Tao.

We are now anchored at Ensenada Grande at the northern edge of Isla Partida, an amazingly beautiful uninhabited nature preserve. Tao and Pisces have had the anchorage more or less to themselves, and we have been exploring partially submerged lava caves , hiking across the island to view the rugged Eastern coast, and enjoying the sort of silence that you don't even realize you haven't been having until you come to a place as deserted as this.

24 33' N, 110 23' W

Yesterday we spent a lovely afternoon poking around tidepools and then hiked up to the top of the hill that forms the Northern end of the anchorage. From there we had a great view of our next sailing leg around to Isla Espiritu Santo.
Lunch break between tidepools and hiking

After deciding not to leave today, we headed to the beach and Shawn and Chris showed us how to do yoga.

After yoga and a dip in the ocean we went up to the fancy resort at the Southern end of the anchorage, they had issued an open invite to all boaters to come to the restaurant and pool. Some of our other friends joined us there to enjoy the beer, pool and totally awesome waterslide!

The anchorage has new boats in it every day who are coming up and across from the mainland, Mazatlan and PV mostly. From here people are going all sorts of places; heading up to La Paz and into the Sea for the summer, heading back to California for the end of the season, or doing final prep for crossing across to the Marquesas...

We are at Ensenada de los Muertos (an attempt is underway to rename this area Bahia de los Suenos as the name 'Muertos' has been deemed counterproductive by the local land developers).

We had a nice trip up here, leaving Los Frailes at midnight for an overnight motor and sail the 40 odd miles here. Not much wind for most of the trip, but we caught a nice light Southeast wind that blew us directly into the anchorage the next day. This was about as expected, as the local wind pattern has been afternoon NW winds building up, and accelerating around the little capes along the coast, then dying in the later evening. We left during the night time calm so that we could make good some miles to our destination and be within striking distance the next day for a more leisurely sail in.

Muertos is a nice anchorage, white sand beach, clear water, and the cruiser friendly restaurant 'El Cardon' with free wi-fi and internet phone. We sat out an impressive Northerly here a few days ago that brought wind in the mid-40 knot range. Pisces was plastered with sand from the dunes, but we held tight, a good confidence builder.

Actually, we did have one minor incident on the morning of the (well-forecast) Norther. A boat that had come in late in the night decided that morning to reanchor closer in to shore. When they dropped their hook they came to rest about 2.5 boatlengths upwind and only slightly off to starboard of us. In a crowded anchorage this would have been acceptable, but in such an empty and wide open anchorage with the forecast winds, it just seemed unneccessary and unwise. I think they realized that, because they called us on the VHF and offered to move if we were uncomfortable (a classy move). Unfortunately, when we said 'thanks, we would actually like you to move' they then declined (not so classy a move). After a brief discussion, Julia and I decided that the only course of action left was for us to reanchor. At that point it was blowing about 25kts, so the process was relatively easy. A few hours later when the wind was really howling we were glad that we had taken the steps to reanchor and preserve 'defensive' space around Pisces. Ultimately if we had choosen to not do anything and something had happened, it would have been both our problem and our fault for not proactively protecting our boat.

This anchorage is also the first place that we have really been introduced to the social side of cruising. As you progress along the common cruising routes you start seeing the same boats, overlapping here and there at anchorages, leapfrogging each other, etc. Eventually you start to get to know the people on the boats, and very quickly you can have more invitations to activities and dinners than you have time for. As you might imagine it's a diverse group of people, a wide variety of backgrounds and experience levels, but all with the same dream in common (and more than that everyone here is someone who managed to make good on their dream which is something worth respecting in itself). We've been very impressed at the sacrifices and leaps of faith people have made to be out here, it's truly humbling.

By and large the socializing has been a welcome change, but at the same time it's a bit of a challenge to not get completely sucked into the scene. Everyone communicates via VHF, so it's essentially a party line where almost everything you say is going to be listened to by everyone in the anchorage. It makes it a bit awkward to turn down an invitation, or to invite only a few people over instead of the entire anchorage. We're trying to work on finding a happy medium that still leaves us time to enjoy the solitude part of cruising while not 'brushing people off.' (We've also found the utility of using VHF codes to communicate with our good friends on Tao when we want to avoid public knowledge of our conversation:).

At this point pretty much everyone in the anchorage is out of all fresh food and provisions, so there is a pretty strong pull to make the 60 mile trip to La Paz. We need to be in La Paz in about a week and a half to see my parents who are visiting, but that's our only true time constraint, and there are some nice places between here and there. Julia, Shawn, and Chris are currently off on a hitchhiking adventure to the nearest mini mercado (about 5 miles down a dirt road) to try and get an onion or two, and if we're really really lucky, some queso! I somehow was able to avoid this task..erh..mission and have been hanging out at the restaurant and taking advantage of the fast internet.






23 59' N, 109 50' W