(*Sorry for the delay in posting. Life got busy once we got back to San Diego)

On Sunday, March 5, we awoke at 0300 to do the last minute things to get Kosmos ready to go to sea. We untied at 0400. It was about 60-nautical miles from Marina Coral to the mouth of the San Diego Bay. Here was the sunrise

The day was mostly overcast and grey. Had we not done the previous difficult passages to Bahia Tortuga and Ensenada, we would have said that the conditions were rough, but compared to those two, sea conditions weren’t all that bad. We were hobby horsing a lot, but the swells weren’t giant nor the intervals rapid enough to make it a miserable ride. We were all functioning normally (for the most part). Here is a “sail” boat passing us… in 5 knots of head winds.

From what we could tell, Ensenada has grown a lot over the last 17 years. Hotel Coral used to be on the northern outskirts of town, but suburbia had spread so far north that Coral was now more like the middle of town. Likewise, the entire coastline between Tijuana and Ensenada had a lot more development than it had 17 years ago.

When we approached the mouth of San Diego bay, we used the US Customs and Border Patrol app, called CBP Roam, on the phone to notify them that we wanted permission to enter the country. We’d registered on this app before we’d left the country, so the app already had all the pertinent information for our boat and our family (ie registration numbers, passport numbers, etc.) The request has a bunch of questions, such as how many people are onboard, was there anyone onboard who hadn’t already been pre-registered, do you have anything to declare, etc. About 10 minutes later, the app notified that we were clear to enter without having to stop for an inspection. That was nice. After our circumnavigation, customs had done an inspection. A female agent questioned Christi while a male agent questioned Eric in a separate room, then they went through the boat with a little hand held gizmo that detected explosives. And that was the “limited inspection” for “low risk” vessels.

Once in the bay, the seas quickly calmed down. Ahhh. One of the wonderful things about San Diego Bay is that it was usually calm. We enjoyed the familiar sights as we headed to our new slip in a marina that we’d never been to before. All went smoothly with entering the marina and docking.

On Sunday night, the three of us went to dinner at a restaurant close to the marina to celebrate our successful cruising adventure. On Monday, we started getting back into the groove of our normal land life routine. At first it was hard to get used to the busy pace of land life, but it didn’t take long to readjust.

We are frustrated to report that a couple of days after we returned to San Diego, our fridge/freezer combo unit in the companionway (hallway between living room and pilot house) died. Eric determined that the compressor wasn’t running. That was the same issue that the dual drawer refrigerator that we’d installed at the same time as we’d installed this combo (autumn of 2018) unit was having, too. Since both units were Vitifrigo and they both had similar issues at similar times, clearly, it is a Vitifrigo issue.

Getting the refrigerator out of the galley (kitchen) to repair it was going to be a big hassle. Getting the unit in the hallway out of its mounting up off the ground was going to a giant hassle. Ugh.

That said, we were thankful that it waited to die until our trip was over. We would have been really inconvenienced with no refrigeration onboard, especially when we were in remote anchorages. We were also glad that we hadn’t gotten the other unit fixed yet since it would be easier to fix them both at once.