Blog Q: Do you worry about boat thieves?
A: It is difficult to steal a larger boat, like ours. We’d report it to the authorities and it’d be found pretty quickly.
That said, dinghy theft is a little more of a concern. Dinghies that are fast with big motors have appeal to thieves, but even that kind of theft is rare. We have a slow dinghy with an electric motor, so no one wants our dinghy/motor.
The biggest concern is people stealing things off of the boats. As far as we know, all the places that we’ve stopped are safe. It was explained that because this part of Baja is off the trafficking routes, there is nothing to attract criminals. There are reports of theft being an issue in some other areas, such as Guayamas, but we don’t plan to go to those places.
On Wednesday morning (September 21), it was a bit rolly when we woke up. Eric put out the paravanes, which helped. While Eric was working on the paravanes, the family, on s/v Auryn, called on the radio and invited us to go for a hike onshore with them. Here was the view from the shore.
We walked up the ravine on the east side of the mesa.
We finally scaled up the loose rocks/dirt to the top of the mesa. That wasn’t easy in flip-flops. The mesa had beautiful views.
The mesa was loaded with caterpillars, so we had to walk carefully to avoid stepping on them.
Check out the interesting cactus with a bush wrapped around it.
The trek down the other ravine wasn’t easy – Christi and Keith both lost footing and slid down to the bottom.
After lunch, they invited us to go snorkeling with them at a rocky point just east of their boat. We told them that we needed to get ready and we’d meet them out there. Here are a couple of shots of the scenery we passed along the way. The snorkel point was around the back side of the large rock in the second photo.
When we finally arrived, we saw that they’d anchored their dinghy off-shore, but they had swam into shore and were playing in the water of the rocky shoreline. They said the snorkeling wasn’t very good and they were done snorkeling. Here is a picture of the above rock from the other side. It has a face!
There was also a little island across the way.
We pulled our dinghy up onshore and hung out with them. Keith and their younger son played in the water, the older son was hunting for shells, rocks and interesting creatures, and the adults sat in the water and talked.
Much to our horror, when we decided it was time to go, we saw that the dinghy was loaded with bugs that looked similar to cockroaches. The family assured us that they were harmless. The bugs were squirrely and we couldn’t get them out. We decided to take the dinghy back to Kosmos and deal with the de-bugging there. On the way back, whenever a bug popped out from its hiding place, we’d try to smack them with our shoes. We got quite a few of them en-route.
Back at Kosmos, we emptied everything out of the dinghy, shaking each thing off well to make sure there were no stowaway bugs on it, and Eric did a combo of squishing and throwing them overboard until they were all gone.
It was still roasting hot and humid, and we still couldn’t open the windows because of the bugs, so we ran the generator and a/c for most of the evening. Here are a couple of sunset photos.
