When we were on Isla Coronados, we’d noticed that someone had put a bucket of water on the shore. Tons of bees swarmed the bucket, but there were no bees anywhere else. One of the things we’d liked about Isla Coronados was the lack of bees bothering us onboard.
On Friday morning, we tried an experiment. We left a couple of small containers of water onshore to see if the bees would stay onshore if they had water. We also went for a walk to check out the little cave that was visible from the shore.
Sunday was oppressively hot again. Eric got a very early start on the dive compressor. He reassembled the third stage. Sadly, the compressor still didn’t work. He took off the final pressure safety valve and cleaned it. It looks like this may be the part that is broken, but he doesn’t have a spare. He gave up on the project and put the compressor back into its mount, along with all the gear stored in around it. He was frustrated that he again put so much effort into the repair for nothing. There was another boat with the same compressor that left a couple day ago, and he is hoping to perhaps find them and try swapping in the part to verify it is the problem.
We wound up spending the day holed up on the boat, enjoying the A/C. Brett came over and the boys played. Christi and Eric did a few chores. In the evening, Eric went to the pool for social hour while the kids and Christi stayed at Kosmos.
On Wednesday (August 17), all three of us were still feeling off-kilter from the night passage on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Brett from Avalon came over and the boys played games all day. Eric played with them some in between doing chores. Christi did some cooking and some chores.
In the evening, we all went to the pool for social hour. Christi and the boys didn’t stay long; instead, they went for a walk to get aqua frescas in town. Agua frescas are a broad category of light, refreshing drinks that include include diluted, lightly sweetened fruits juices and teas made of local flowers. We haven’t mentioned them before, but limonada (basically a light lemonade, but made with lime) jamaica (tea made from hibiscus flowers), and pina (diluted pineapple juice) have become staples for us when we go out to eat. This time Christi tried one called Fruita that was mixed fruit with a touch of cream. It was phenomenal.
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
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.
