Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
Sunday, May 08, 2011
We finally escaped from La Paz! Don’t get me wrong, La Paz is a wonderful place and as such many a cruiser has made it there and never left. It is beautiful, inexpensive, and has lots of services for working on boats. La Paz doesn’t have the feel of a tourist town. In fact, other than the occasional cruiser or fisherman, I didn’t see any tourists. The streets, the shops and restaurants are all filled with locals.
We had a wonderful break from working on the boats, when our friends Wanda, Pinkie, Steve and David came to visit. We drank way too many maitai’s, hung out at the pool, went swimming in the Sea of Cortez, and ate at great local places. We had a really great time. Now isn’t that what cruising is all about?
Reality set in a few moments after they left….with the steering system
still not repaired, provisioning still to be done, and hurricane
season rapidly approaching.
Another highlight of our visit to La Paz has been reconnecting with our
friends Jim, Emma, Phoebe and Drake on the boat Blue Sky. They left
Redondo about 6 years ago to sail around the world and are on their
final leg home. They have provided us with a wealth of information
and we are excited that they will be taking over our former slip in
Port Royal Marina. We are however still trying to talk them into
taking another lap around with us.
The steering finally got fixed this past Tuesday. It was a lengthy and
painstaking process of elimination to determine exactly what the
problem was. It ended up being a combination of a lock valve in the
helm pump that had been installed backwards when I had it rebuilt in
late 2009 and a worn seal in the hydraulic ram. In order to figure
that out we had to disassemble the entire hydraulic system,
autopilot and piping. We are thrilled with the results and it works
better than it ever has.
As I mentioned earlier we are going to Cabo to do our international
clearance from Mexico instead of doing it in La Paz as originally
planned.
Obviously there is a story here but we need to leave
Mexico before
we can tell it.
Cabo is roughly 150 miles from
La Paz and in order
to time our
arrival in Cabo for Monday
morning (when the government offices
open) we went about a third
of the way and dropped the anchor in Ensenada de Los Muertos.
Muertos is one of my favorite anchorages. The last time I was here
was about 10 years ago and it has certainly changed. For starters,
it’s no longer called Ensenada de Los Muertos which means cove of
the dead. A luxury resort has developed the property and renamed
it Ensenada de Los Suenos which means Bay of Dreams. They also
have a nice restaurant in the eastern part of the cove that has
showers, wireless, and a dingy dock. The old fishing village is gone,
but the beautiful white sand beach, the clear green water, and the
flat calm anchorage is still the same.
We pulled anchor and got underway at 4pm which should put us
in Cabo around 6am. We will update you again when we are
leaving Cabo……