Second Trip to Marina Costa Baja, Day 12 — La Paz and Black/Grey Water Tanks

On Friday (February 10), Christi had an appointment for another haircut, so we took the 0900 shuttle into town. From the cathedral (where we were dropped off), we walked a few blocks south to a bank to use the ATM.

ATM’s are not nearly as common in Mexico as they are in the US. Most of the towns we’ve visited, including Bahia de Los Angeles, don’t have any. We’ve only found them in the bigger cities that we visited: Santa Rosalia, Loreto and La Paz. We want to take a moment to rant about the bank called BBVA, which charges $9 (US) in ATM fees and gives a terrible exchange rate. Plus your own bank charges fees, too. We’ll only go to BBVA when there is nothing else available, but sadly, today the other bank’s machines were down so we were stuck using BBVA.

From the bank, we walked northeast about 1.5 miles. The farther inland we went, the less gentrified the neighborhood became. Even though we’d driven through this area before, it was interesting to get a closer look on foot.

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Second Trip tp Marina Costa Baja Days 9 – 11

Sunrise on Tuesday, February 7

The weather was back to cold and windy again. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, we mostly laid low in the marina. Eric finally completed a project that he’d started in San Diego: creating a system to better secure the anchor. Back in San Diego, Eric had bought a piece of 3/4″ starboard and had cut some slots in it to hold the anchor in place so it wouldn’t rattle around when the boat was in motion. He secured the board in place with some dyeema line that has an anti-chaffing sleeve cover over it and a clip. He strapped the line to the cleat on the deck.

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Playa Pichilingue to Playa La Bonanza on Isla Espiritu Santo

Ferry heading into the terminal at sunrise on Monday, November 28

This morning, we got Kosmos ready for sea and lifted anchor at 1000. It was a two hour ride to Playa La Bonanza, located on the east side of Isla Espiritu Santo.

The anchorage was a stunning perfect crescent with sparkling white sand against a backdrop of hills. Looking towards the north end of the anchorage.

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Bahia Falsa to La Paz

On Thursday afternoon, we’d attempted to go to La Paz via the road. Unfortunately, the logistics hadn’t worked out.  

Here are a couple sunrise photos from Friday:

Still wanting to go to La Paz, we started Friday morning off by planning the logistics to take Kosmos. Once we realized that conditions would be more favorable to travel in the early afternoon, we went back to the shallow nook and frolicked in the water some more. Oddly enough, there were less fish and birds than yesterday.

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February 2019 Update on Us

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Our big news is that we have moved back to San Diego! The San Francisco Bay Area was nice, and we did enjoy the boating up there, but we are deeply rooted in San Diego. Eric has returned to work at DivX, and he is excited by the new opportunities there. Keith is back at his former French language immersion school. We have mostly fallen back into our old routine. That includes helping our two remaining parents, who are both in their late 80s, very frail, and need a lot of help.

We returned in early January, when weather windows along the coast are few and far between. We lucked out and got an amazing weather window from San Francisco to San Diego in between two big weather systems. The window lasted three days, and we managed to get back into San Diego in (relatively) blazing fast 70 hours. Here is a photo of sea conditions:

Last year, we did a lot of work to Kosmos. We changed out both refrigerators and the washer/dryer, resealed the main engine keel cooler, installed a new wind sensor and display, installed a new inverter, got new bottom paint, and put Prop Speed on the keel coolers.

We’re hoping that life slows down for us soon so that we can find time to fix the technical issues with the blog site, as well as write posts about the work we’ve done to Kosmos and the places we’ve explored, both via boat and via land travel. Meanwhile, here is a pic from Angel Island, a small island park in the middle of the Bay: