On Tuesday morning (August 9), we left Puerto Escondido at 0830 to go to Loreto to get our park pass and do some more grocery shopping. We went to the park office first, arriving right before it was supposed to open at 0900. It was a good thing we hadn’t started the process yesterday; what we thought would take five-minutes took 1.5 hours to complete.

As part of the process, we had to go to the bank in the historic town center to pay for the pass. As we mentioned in the last post, Loreto was the first Spaniard settlement in the Californias, and was the capital until 1777. This is the Capital building.  

Here is a shot of the town center plaza

Some of the streets surrounding the plaza have tree canopies

We should probably back up and explain a few gaps in the story. Before going to Isla Carmen, we had tried to buy park passes online. Eric filled out all the information for all three of us and uploaded our 3 photos successfully, but the system failed when he tried to pay. He’d saved proof that we had attempted to buy the passes in case we were stopped by a park ranger. And as we briefly mentioned in a previous post, we did get stopped by a park ranger onshore in Isla Coronados. The ranger was nice and said he was aware that the online system was having problems. He didn’t kick us out, but told us to go to Loreto and buy the passes in person before going back into the park. 

We were frustrated that it took so long, but the silver lining is that the online system had charged us for Keith, despite the system being aware that he was a child (but remember, the payment had failed). When we paid in person, the lady said that kids are free, so the in-person trip saved us $90!

The car was due back in Puerto Escondido by noon, so we didn’t have much time left to grocery shop. As we’ve already seen first-hand, each store in Loreto has limited offerings, so getting all the desired supplies means stopping at several stores. Due to the limited time, we were only able to hit two stores before we had to head back. 

In the late afternoon, Liz, Dan and Drake came over again. The males headed for the pool right away. Sprezzatura Eric had brought us a solar oven from the US, and Christi already had a crustless quiche cooking in the new oven when they’d arrived. 

Liz and Christi said they’d join the males once the quiche was done. After waiting a couple of hours, the ladies gave up and joined the men at the pool. With no quiche to eat, we all had dinner at the marina. 

Wednesday morning, there was another windstorm at 2:00 am. Eric and Keith got up for it. This one only lasted about 45 minutes, but the winds got up to 35 knots. The waves were breaking over the far dock again, and a piece of dock near us broke off. There was a light mist, but no significant rain. 

Eric went back to work on the dive compressor first thing in the morning. He took off the final pressure regulator. Air was coming out of the main chamber without the regulator on, so he figured the regulator was the issue. He had the rebuild kit and got to work. Lots of little o-ring and pieces. In order to complete the job, he had to fabricate a tool that he didn’t have. He modified a deck plate opener.  

He rebuilt the whole pressure regulator.

At first it appeared that the issue was fixed. But, as soon as he turned up the pressure setting on the final regulator, the airflow stopped. It appears the problem is actually upstream, in the compressor — that the final high pressure stage is not working. We’re going to have to take the dive compressor out of the boat and have it professionally serviced. It was hard for Eric to give up on this project since he had invested so much time and (literally) sweat into it. 

The air we have onboard has to be saved for emergencies and bottom cleaning, so sadly, we won’t be scuba diving until the dive compressor is fixed. 

Christi tried the quiche in the solar oven again, hoping that it would cook better this time since there were less clouds and she’d put the oven out early in the day. This time it did cook, but she took it out a bit too early and it wasn’t cooked through. It’ll take practice to get the baking right.