Darlene is the kind of true friend we all wish to have. Tom on s/v Kia Ora lucked out tremendously when Darlene, a good friend to Tom and Tom's wife, offered to take the time to help him sail Kia Ora from San Carlos, Sonora, to La Paz, Baja California Sur. Darlene valued the friendship…
Marina San Carlos is one of the best-run and all-business marinas there is. We experienced a bit of a delay in leaving Marina Seca but otherwise the splash, the short trip to our assigned slip, and the marina paperwork went like the usual clockwork. Once tied up in slip B-23 for 12 days, we got…
March 28, 2016: The holiday rush was over at Marina San Carlos. From what the marina staff told us, the marina had been crazy-busy the whole week. But now, it was a post-holiday Monday and we got lucky with an early slip assignment and a haulout date for April 6, nine days hence. The usual…
March 25, 2016: The morning was calm in Bahía San Carlos but due to the Semana Santa activity we decided to spend several days at one of the nice anchorages a short distance to the north. Bahía San Pedro is a pleasant stop and a mere 16 miles from Bahía San Carlos, so off we…
March 23-March 25, 2016.We're just doing basic provisioning in San Carlos, so why take pictures of the laundromat or the grocery store? Remember that forecast we got? Yeah, it was accurate. Hit us in San Carlos at about 1100. Almost exactly 48 hours after we'd left Bahía Concepción. Too bad laundry onshore took until 1200…
Criminy. The most time we've spent at anchor in any one place lately, ended up being in the anchorage at San Carlos, where we intended to (eventually) to get hauled. We left Bahía Algodones at a leisurely 0840 on March 22, 2016, after we had a chance to gape at all the buildings large and…
March 21, 2016: We really do try to hang out in places for a while. We'd planned to slack around Bahía Concepción for several days with all our new-found friends. However, both the USB forecast on the AmigoNet at 0730 and the LSB forecast on the Sonrisa Net at 0745 called for good weather for…
March 20, 2016: There we were, minding our own cruiser business. The morning had been the typical lazy cruiser day of dinghying to a restaurant for a nice meal, chatting amiably with fellow cruisers, and returning to The Fox in the afternoon when the typical offshore breezes began to pick up. I heard screams, and…
Saturday, March 19, 2016: Raised anchor at Bahía Santo Domingo and putted an uneventful 9 miles into Santispac, a favorite spot of ours near the entrance to Bahía Concepción. As we arrived, we saw just one power boat and two other sailboats at anchor here; but the beach had lots of new (to us) structures,…
March 17, 2016, was intended to be a leisurely passage of a big ol' 14 miles so we didn't raise anchor until almost lunch time. The forecasts on the two different cruisers' single-sideband frequencies were completely incompatible with each other ("SE to SW" versus "NE"). As it happened our actual weather conditions were completely incompatible…