Sunrise on Sunday, January 15
We are sad to report that it was no calmer on the north end of the anchorage than it had been on the south end. The rolling wasn’t terrible, but it certainly wasn’t calm.
At 1000, we met Moin and Erin Skye on the beach and went on a hike inland with them. There were several hikes at Bonanza, and we chose the one closest to where we landed the dinghies. Looking south from the trail head.
The sunrise on Tuesday December 6, 2022. The sky looked like it was engulfed in flames.
In the mid-morning, Oceananigans let us know they were going to do the hike. Eric and Christi weren’t quite ready to go, but Keith went went with them. When Eric and Christi were ready, they went to shore and waited for the group near the beach. A few minutes later, the group emerged. Christi and the kids went up the ridge between the the two beaches and walked inland along the jagged and rocky top of the ridge for quite a ways.
This was their highest point before they headed back down.
Continue readingSunrise on Thursday, December 1. Sometimes the clouds made the sunrises and sunsets extra dramatic; sometimes the clouds just blocked the light.
Check out the fish around our boat.
Eric had done some online searching, and found the family that we’d missed in La Paz. They happened to to be nearby, so they came to our anchorage to meet us. Eric and Keith went to shore to meet the family. Since Christi was still not feeling good and didn’t want to pass on her germs, she stayed aboard and rested.
Continue readingSunrise on Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Eric did not sleep well from all the rolling in the anchorage. First thing in the morning, he deployed a flopper stopper. It helped some, but it was still uncomfortable. The water was too shallow to put out the paravane, so later in the day, he fixed the broken flopper stopper. The flopper stopper had metal clips and it was the clips that had broken. He just tied knots in the line and deployed it. Much to his pleasure, it worked! Having the second flopper stopper helped even more, but there was still a lot of movement.
Our friends on Oceananigans arrived in late morning. With all the rocking, we were desperate to get to day land. Shortly after they arrived, we went to shore with them to do the hike up the ravine.
This was the view from the top of the peak seen in the above photo.
On Wednesday morning, Eric was woken up at 0400 by some noise. He went up to check to see if all was okay, and found that we were in the middle of a quite a bit of wind and the boat had moved a lot. There was also an occasional bolt of lightning, but no thunder. In the summer, it is not uncommon for windstorms to hit the Sea of Cortez between 0300 and 0500.
On the wind gauge you can see the wind picked up speed from almost zero knots to over 20 knots in 45 minutes. Christi and Keith awoke not long after Eric did. On VHF radio Eric heard a call out to boats in the anchorage saying that it looked like one of the sailboats was dragging. Eric responded, but the sailboat that was possibly dragging did not. Eric blew a portable air horn 5 times towards the sailboats, but the other sailboat boat nearby said the wind was too loud and could not hear it. Eric turned on the radar and monitored not only our boat, but all the boats in the anchorage for dragging. Fortunately after the initial movement from the wind, no one dragged. This picture is blurry, but it shows how much and how fast we moved when the wind kicked in. Usually it is small movements around a spot after we anchor, this was a big continuous move as the wind really picked up.
The winds calmed down at dawn, but the swell caused by the winds persisted for most of the day. The swells were exacerbated by the pangas (little fishing boats) speeding past us with the tourists. We met the person on the boat who Eric talked to. He was glad we were able to monitor the boats with our radar. His name was Nick, and we decided the next day we would go do the hike up the volcano together.
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