While this isn’t the best picture of the moon itself, it shows how much light the full moon was emanating on Thursday, December 8, before the sun rose. It was so bright it was almost like daylight.
Here was the sun rising to the east while the moon was setting in the west.
On the morning La Paz radio net, Eric announced that we’d just arrived and were looking for kid boats. After the net was done, someone called us on the radio and said there were two boats in Bahia Falsa with kids close in age to Keith.
Our new friends left first thing in the morning to go back to La Paz. We were sad to see them go. Not long after they left, a park ranger boat came into the anchorage and inspected each of the boat’s park passes. The park ranger asked if we had a dog.
We went to shore after we finished our chores. It was around 1300 (1:00 pm) and the tide was at its lowest point. As we got closer to shore, we could see that that there were indeed two sandbars, separated by a channel. The closer sandbar was quite narrow, was actually more rocks than sand, and was attached to Espiritu Santo. It had one house on it. The farther sandbar looked to be much wider and mostly sand. It was attached to Isla Partida and had quite a few structures on it.
We got as close to the channel as we could until the dinghy was nearly grounded. We dropped the anchor. The Espiritu Santo sandbar was behind Eric.
On Sunday morning (November 27), we made one more run to the grocery store in La Paz. The tide was not as high as it had been yesterday, but it was still high.
After we were done shopping, we had a little time to kill before the car was due back, so we went to Playa Tecolote, a popular beach at the northern tip of the peninsula. Like the rest of the peninsula, the scenery from the dive was mostly vacant land, mostly hilly desert with glimpses of the shoreline, including several estuaries.
Sunrise on Saturday, November 26. Very demur compared to some of the dramatic sunrises we’ve seen here in Baja.
We were shocked to find that today the tide was significantly higher than it had been yesterday. Yesterday, we’d tied up in front of the big restaurant. That wasn’t an option today since the big restaurant was flooded.
Sunrise on Friday (November 25). It was still super windy and the port captain for Bahia de La Paz was still not allowing boats to leave. In this photo, you can actually see the swell. Since this anchorage was protected from the wind, this was “wrap around” swell. Needless to say, it was an uncomfortable morning aboard Kosmos.
One of the things that Eric had bought at the boat store on Wednesday was bigger swivels for the paravanes. Eric had realized that the working load on the flopper stoppers swivels weren’t high enough and needed to be upgraded. Before deploying the flopper stoppers, Eric removed the swivels from the paravanes and put them on the flopper stoppers (the swivels that were on the paravanes were significantly larger than the ones that had been on the flopper stoppers). He’ll put the newly purchased swivels on the paravanes another day.
When we went to shore today, the tide was even higher than it had been on Wednesday.
On our way into town, we stopped by Marina Costa Baja’s marina office. The marina office, fuel dock and boat yard were disconnected from the rest of the marina/hotel complex. It had a separate entrance about a mile north of the entrance to the marina/hotel. To get from the fuel dock to the hotel/marina, one had to walk on the a dirt road that paralleled the highway or take a dinghy.
