Tuesday 03-18-08 Back Down to Man-O-War Cove

Up, net, coffee (such creatures of habit).

The guys tried to scout out the channel in the dinghy, but again, TOO MUCH WIND!
So, do we sit here for two more days or head back down the channel?
Voted, head down the channel.

So we pulled anchor and just as we were getting to the main channel, here comes "Oscar I" up the channel - it is our chance to follow them up!
But what if we can't find a good place to anchor up by Puerto Lopez Mateos and the wind continues??
Forget it - let's go find some warmth!
Bye Bye "Oscar I"...

We followed our GPS track back down the channel.Past a whale and the largest stream of migrating birds we had ever seen! There were thousands and thousands of birds flying in a line up the channel. It was amazing!We went to where the dunes between Magdalena Bay and Santa Maria Bay were narrow and anchored outside of the channel. We dinghied in to the beach and hiked across to Santa Maria Bay.
Again, beautiful untouched, windswept dunes!

Lots of sand dollars and cool finds on the beach at Santa Maria Bay! Beautiful groups of waves coming in and beautiful huge sand dollars everywhere!Spent some time looking for clams, exploring the beach and playing with the stuff on the beach.

Then back across the dunes, where Jim found a cool old beer bottle! He did an internet search, and found information on this bottle. It was manufactured between 1881 and 1905!

We also found scallops, clams and pin-shells. We tried a raw one of each.
Sandy and salty...
Would be better if they were cleaned properly!

Back to "Meerkat" for tri tip tostadas.
The wind had really picked up, so we headed further down the channel and back to Man-O-War Cove. We had the "National Geographic Sea Lion" behind us, so we had our first conversation on vhf with them, "warning" them Maggie Pedersen and Bob would soon be aboard!

Time for some Austrailan red wine, courtesy of Kim - Thanks Kim!
Cajun chicken and red beans & rice for dinner, then bed around 9 pm (a late one!).

Monday 03-17-08 - St. Pat's Day in Mag Bay! Still in the Small Mangrove Off-shoot

Up early (since we all went to bed at the crack of sunset) to sprinkles on the deck! There were small clouds coming through and actually raining on us!

We listened to weather and it was still blowing on the outside, so here we will sit another day.

But is was Saint Patrick's Day! In Mag Bay!Anyone who knows me, knows I always have the perfect holiday decorations! These decorations were mainly people decorations... Pam had brought some too!

So we decorated ourselves and had a shot (I poured mine out and Stan had to eat cookies to get rid of the "shot in the stomach feeling"...)
Had "Irish Oatmeal" and leftover bread for breakfast.








Tim & I got out the kayaks and explored the canals, beaches and mangroves.

I stayed in costume...I walked around on a couple of "low tide beaches" until I was losing my shoes in the muck...




Jim and Stan fished from the dinghy, but didn't catch any keepers.

Back to the boat to read the other half of my book.
Pam made tuna tostadas for lunch.
We all killed bees.
We watched an osprey catch a fish.
Then watched a coyote walk the length of the canal on a small "low-tide" beach.He never saw us until he was at the far end of the beach and we howled at him.
Tim moo'd at it, as if it would be afraid of a cow...

Jim took a nap.
I couldn't do a "Light & Easy" Sudoku, so I tore it up (Stan scribbles them out, I tear them up...)

The lazy day was almost over.
Time for some bagpipe & Irish music!
Probably the first time this little canal had heard that...

BBQ'd tri tip and pretended it was corned beef. Steamed some cabbage and carrots for an excellent dinner! Pam also made her tomato salad.

At this point, I told the guys that if Pam wasn't here, they would be eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner every other night!

Watched the moon rise.





Watched the late afternoon slide away over the dunes. And enjoyed our dessert of "Black Irish" (dark chocolate) brownies!

Sunday 03-16-08 - Mangroves - First Day We Didn't Travel!

Weather still said there was a full gale on the outside, all the way from The Channel Islands all the way down. So where we were sitting was good!

Pam made excellent french toast from our Bimbo bread and fruit salad.

Opened our books, Sudoku books and did a few projects.

The guys fixed things, filled fluids, ran the generator most of the day, made water, gooey'ed up a thru-hull and cleaned the bottom.

I made bread and did laundry.The laundry dried in no time in the wind.

We watched one of the National Geographic boats head up the channel.
We watched the wind go down the channel.We watched the top of "Oscar I" go through the Devil's Elbow.
We listened to music, ate nuts and chips and salsa.
We looked down the small channel at the sand dunes we had explored the day before.The guys had beer after cleaning the bottom.
Pam & I had a margarita then pulled the laundry in.
Read some more...
Then watched the sunset.I made meatball stroganoff.
Jim off to bed at 7 pm.
Tim too...
Pam, Stan & I (quite the party animals) stayed up reading until the late hour of 8 pm!

Saturday 03-15-08 - Up to the Small Estuary

Up to overcast skies once again, but it burned off early.
Listened to Don on "Summer Passage" warn us of the full gale expected on the outside, so we wanted to get up to a more protected place.

Tim and Jim went out "scouting" for the channel in the dinghy.

We had a whale surface RIGHT and I mean RIGHT next to the boat a couple of times. I was able to grab the camera and get a couple of shots WITHOUT telephoto!I was hoping he would stick around for a bit, but he had a destination down the channel and kept going.

The guys came back with a perfect small estuary in mind for hiding out in. So up anchor and up the canal once again. We had one shoal to go over with only 7' of water. Always a little creepy when the depthsounder reads single digits...

The side canal we were in was pretty narrow, with small beaches that would show up at low tide. Perfect to hide from the wind!

Here's a few shots of the boat at anchor in this small area.




Jim & I dinghied further up the small canal to see where it went - up to more smaller canals!

Then we all piled into the dinghy & went across the main channel to the beach and incredible sand dunes! The spot we landed in was really mucky - kind of sucked our feet down into 4" muck. Pam lost her shoes, but Tim rescued them for her. The dunes were beautiful! Wind swept with zebra patterns, untouched, blowing and awesome!












This one shows the side channel with our boat.





Tim skied down this dune.














We took a zillion pictures, found some animal tracks and goofed off for awhile.

Pam & I made played hopscotch for some exercise...Probably something you will never see again...

Found a less mucky spot to launch the dinghy, but one of the dinghy tires was flat. Back to "Meerkat" to fix the flat. That took awhile. We figured if we were Mexicans we would have had it fixed in 1/10th of the time it took us...

We enjoyed a bottle of Cabernet - courtesy of Delaina & Stav - thank you!
Pork tenderloin, carrots and mashed potatoes for dinner.
Chatted in the cockpit for awhile, then off to bed!

Friday 03-14-08 - Up the Mag Bay Panhandle

Up to a foggy, overcast morning.
Hmmmmm.... how are we going to see the shoals?
We send the "scouts" out in the dinghy with the dinghy depth sounder to find the channel! There are a few large boats that go up this channel on a regular basis, however there are no channel markings and we have no idea where the channel is. There are shoals all around, and some of them turn to beaches on low tide.
The large boats know where the channel is, know when to hug the right or left side of the canal and know which side of the many small islands to go on. And on top of this, we need to find places that are sheltered from the wind and enough outside of the channel to anchor.
We have no idea about any of it! We would have liked to follow one of the boats up, but our timing was never right and we really wanted to do it on OUR OWN!
So, Jim and one of the guys headed up the channel to explore these unknown places...

The rest of us ran the generator, made some water, did some laundry & hung it out to dry.




It is amazing how fast the clothes dry here - faster than using the dryer setting on my washer / dryer!



The "depth sounders" came back, so we crossed the shoal back out into the main channel. Then saw this coming down the channel! It is the "National Geographic Sea Lion"!So we know there is deep water somewhere!
The National Geographic has two boats that do trips out of La Paz - the "Sea Lion" and the "Sea Bird". We waved at each other like crazy and they seemed happy to see us up in this wilderness. This waving like crazy from this boat was explained several days later via two vhf conversations. In one of these conversations, I had hailed them to let them know Stan's sister, Maggie and her husband would be on their boat for a week-long trip in a few days. We actually crossed paths in the night with Maggie & Bob, but didn't know it until the next day. Anyway in the first conversation, we talked for a bit and gave them Maggie's name. In the second conversation, several more days later, the captain told us we were the ONLY private boat they had seen past the marked channel that year! No wonder they would wave like crazy - they don't see sailboats or boats other than fishing boats up where we were! The other thing that was cool, is they remembered our name and called us on vhf to let Maggie talk to Stan! And the captain, Mark has his sailboat at Marina de La Paz and told us he would share the charts for Mag Bay with us, when we get together after his spring trips.

So, back to this particular day cruising up the panhandle...

Our charts didn't quite match where we were and would often show us "on an island"...






There are usually mangroves on one or both sides of the canals, and often the sand comes right down to the water on the ocean side. It looks like the Sahara desert meets the sea.We cruised up only a few miles to a small (not so clean) mud beach to anchor for the night. But these not so clean beaches usually have a purpose ~ trash burning!The guys took our bags in and did their fire dance. It was great to get rid of our trash! This is how the Mexicans do it in remote places and they have old metal bins for this purpose. So this was ok to do.

Back to the boat for beers, books, talking, Sudoku, watching whales and frigate birds.












The channel in this area is not very wide, so the whales were pretty close!

Then we watched the seiner, "Oscar I" go down the channel. They also waved like crazy, honked and said on vhf, "Nice boat. Bye bye." After finding out several days later we were the only crazies in the panhandle, this all made sense too!We listened to Don on "Summer Passage" give weather. A full gale was expected on the outside of Baja, so tomorrow we wanted to find a spot to anchor that is more protected and more outside of the channel.

Pam made her "goulash" for dinner & I made cornbread to go with it.
Dominos, books and to bed!

Thursday 03-13-08 - 1st Stop in Mangrove Canal!

Something was swimming around the boat splashing at 1:00 am - did the big squid come back to say thanks?

I scrambled the leftover shisk-k-bobs with eggs for breakfast as we waited for the fog to lift.

New water bottles for all - decorated by Pam!




We got the boat ready and motored out to the channel markers. The channel markers only mark the channel up to San Carlos - we were going up the other channel... Jim drove, two people stood on the bows looking for shoals and I would stand behind Jim and read the depths on each depth sounder (one in each hull). We went across one shoal where I only read 5' of water... Good thing we only draw 3'!

If you have Google Earth, this might be a good place to look up!

Stan on shoal watch:














We found a big "U" shaped area to anchor in. The head of the "U" was sand dunes flanked by mangroves on each side.

Stan, Jim & I dinghied in to explore the dunes and mudflats.No footprints anywhere, except our own (which in the sand flats would sink 4 to 6 inches)!

It was a good thing we did not sink 6 inches in the wet flats...

I took a bunch of pictures (what's new...) and ended up with my camera covered in sand.
Stan tried a clam, but spit it out.
Then for some strange reason he tasted the sand to see how salty it was. Not very salty - it has a long way to blow from the ocean!

Back to the boat for jumping in the water, showers, hora feliz and fishing.











All the fish were lucky and got to swim away for another day!

Pam made chicken and onion fajitas which we enjoyed with our fresh tortillas.

Jim read in bed and the rest of us continued our domino game.