When Eric woke up, on Sunday (September 11), a few of his toes were bruised and it was a bit hard for him to walk. Not a fun way to start the day. He is glad he did not fall farther on the stairs.

The almost full moon was visible — and magical looking — long after sunrise.

A few boats had left the Bay of LA on Saturday, but most had stayed for the party. Today, people began to part ways. One by one, people announced on the radio that they were leaving and where they were going. Even though we’d only known most of these people for ten days (some more, some less), after so much fun socializing and going through the hurricane together, we felt bonded with them. It was sad to see them go.

We weren’t going very far, just to the northern tip of Bahia de Los Angeles. Before we left, we had some of the boat kids over to play D&D for a couple of hours. 

We pulled up anchor at 1315 and headed for La Gringa, about a 1.75 hour ride from La Mona. We knew we were in the right place when we saw a giant sign on a hill that said “Welcome to La Gringa.”

There wasn’t much there by way of infrastructure, just a couple of structures on the northwest side of the bay. The northern part of the bay is a sand bar with more water between the sand bar and the hills behind them (much like “the window” in Don Juan). There were a couple of all-wheel drive vehicles parked on the sand bar that appeared to be camping. We were the only boat there.

The reason we’d gone to La Gringa was for “the ride.” Behind the sand bar, a river flows down and lets out into the bay here at La Gringa. You can apparently park your dinghy on the sand bar near the outlet, walk a floaty over the bar, plop it into the river, and ride it back to your dinghy on the other side. We were told that the ride only works on an outgoing high tide when the moon is either full or new.

We dropped anchor, got Kosmos situated, got the dinghy down, blew up our floating dock, and headed out at 1645, towing the dock behind the dinghy. The outlet was hard to see and farther away than we’d expected; we were practically on top of it before we saw it. Here is the sand bar (its actually small rocks) and bay.

Bay on the left, river on the right

We walked up the sand bar a ways before we plopped the floating dock in so that we could get the maximum ride. The river only had a few inches of water. Now we understood why it only worked at the new and full moons when the tide was especially high; this river was probably dry most of the month. We hopped on the dock. It moved slowly. The first video is looking upriver, the second video is facing downriver

Keith immediately started complaining that he was bored, and walked for a bit. 

As we neared the rocky mountain wall, the river began to pick up some speed. At the mountain, the river made a U. The river continued to pick up speed as we rounded the U, and was moving at a fairly fast between the U and the outlet.

Keith didn’t want to go again, so we headed back to Kosmos. Keith took a shower right away. When he got out of the shower, the water pump didn’t stop pumping. Eric ran around the boat and checked all the faucets; none were on. This meant that the water pump had a problem. The high pressure shut off was not working.

This has been a hard week for Eric. We discovered the freshwater leak on Tuesday, dealt with it on Wednesday, had a hurricane on Thursday, he hurt his feet on Saturday, and on Sunday, the freshwater pump died.

Eric was not happy about having to change the water pump right then. It had been a long, busy day and he was tired. His feet hurt, and they hurt even more cramped into the weird boat yoga positions required to change the pump. He was also frustrated that the water pump had worn out faster than normal; our guess is that the leak was causing it to pump more water than usual. Eric accidentally installed the quick connect connectors backwards, so it took longer to change the pump than it should have. He redid them, and finally the pump did get changed, and the new pump worked great. In retrospect, it is a blessing that the pump went out in a calm anchorage and not out at sea.

The almost full moon was amazingly bright.