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.
On Friday (January 13), we awoke up to no wind and super clear water. We knew the calm wasn’t going to last for long. The forecast was that the winds were shifting direction and would pick up from the southwest, so we needed to move to a more protected location. We decided to go to an anchorage called Ensenada la Gallina, which was only 3.5 nautical miles south. The west side of Espiritu Santo has many fingers, and this anchorage had a particularly long finger on the south side that offered a little more protection than the rest of the fingers. Moin and Erin Sky decided to come with us.
We pulled up anchor at about 0820, and the other two boats were right behind us. We arrived at around 0900, with the other two boats filing in shortly after we did. We chose a spot in the southwest end of the cove because everything closer inland was too shallow to anchor in. As you can see, it would be a long dinghy ride to shore.
We tried to anchor three times. The first time the anchor didn’t hold. The bottom was kind of rocky, so we guessed the anchor must have hit a rock. The second time the anchor held, but we settled too close to the rocks along the shore. We moved farther away from the rocks and dropped the anchor again. The anchor didn’t hold.
Continue readingMonday, January 9, continued... When we went inside, we noticed that the refrigerator/freezer was off. Eric realized that the inverter had shut down. He started the generator and realized there appeared to be something seriously wrong.
The inverter reported that there was 1.6 volts in the battery connection; but the battery said it had 13 volts. Eric measured the voltage at the inverter and the 1.6 volt reading was correct. He measured the voltage on the other side of main fuse and it registered at 13 volts. It appeared the main fuse was blown.
Eric tried the inverter by-pass switch so we could power the inverter circuit with the generator, but it didn’t work. This created a new set of questions: was the by-pass switch defective or wired wrong? Or was there a bigger problem with the inverter?
Continue readingSunrise and moonset on Sunday December 11, 2022
It was a mellow day. As usual, we spent the morning doing chores. While Christi and Keith were washing Kosmos, a marina employee came by in a small boat and asked if that was our dinghy. When they looked over, they saw our dinghy was floating away! Eric hopped into his boat and they retrieved the dinghy. We are so grateful to him. Had he not seen it and alerted us, the dinghy would have likely smashed up on the rocks.
Continue readingWhile 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.
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