La PAZ!

We LOVE La Paz and it's quite easy to see how everyone gets stuck here with the beauty of the Sea of Cortez at your fingertips. With a couple of days under our belt at Marina Palmera we decided to go anchor near Marina de La Paz as to save our wallets from getting lighter. It's curious to watch the boats do the "La Paz Waltz" where the tide and winds affect most everyone differently. Watch out for your neighbors here!

Frailes and Muertos

We spent a couple of days in Los Frailes and Los Muertos with a couple of people we met sailing down the coast. When you're on a boat and you meet someone new, typically you invite them over for drinks/dinner. It's comparable to walking up to someone in a parking lot, saying "nice car, want to come to my house for  BBQ and drinks?".  

 There's endless beauty to be had on the ocean!

More fish!

Mag Bay

After many restless nights and long pushes, we made it to Magdelena Bay. The weather has been fantastic up until now and there's rumor of some winds coming through in the next couple of days so we'll hunker down here for a bit.

Absolutely Beautiful!

Our trip out of Ensenada was uneventful and we had a gorgeous push down to Bahai Tortuga

A whale stopped for a visit

Always plenty of dolphins!

Dawn checking out the hammock swing

Catching some bait but darn excited! First fish in Mexico.

We had heard GRAND stories of Turtle Bay and were quite excited to pull in after a couple of days out at sea. Sadly, it wasn't anything like we had imagined. We picked up some fuel at the fuel dock which meant backing the boat in to their floating dock. Reading through Charlie's Charts, I saw that there the depth got quite shallow coming in but we didn't have any problems.

Anchor Recovery

After talking to a couple of locals on the process and finances of retrieving the anchor, we opted to rent a wet suit (since my dry suit wasn't working) and to try to get it ourselves.

I had marked on the GPS where the anchor was lost and with a little luck, we anchored again right on top of it. Visibility was about 5-7 feet, all the way down at 82'. Once on the bottom I located the anchor in about 2 minutes, the whole dive took about 15 minutes.

Here I am using the now fixed windlass to bring up the lost anchor.

Safely back home.

Fried Electronics

After a short amount of digging, it's been determined that the switch shorted out which caused the windlass to go crazy. Both solenoids are fried but the windlass is still operational.

I've talked with some local boat/business owners about going out and attempting to retrieve the $1,000 of metal that was dumped. Tomorrow should bring about some more answers and we'll find out if it's a good idea to go diving out there or try to drag a grappling anchor around to see if we can snag it.

Hopefully everything can be retrieved and we can save another trip to San Diego and a whole LOT of money.

"If it's not something, it's something else" rings true!

We're back in Ensenada. I'm not happy about it either.

This is what happened.

Upon setting up the jacklines on the boat, I un-secured the anchor on the bow of the boat and forgot to re-secure it. With wind out of the NW at 15 with gusts up to 25, we made out way out of Coral Marina, going along quite well until... "What's that sound?" which is something that's commonly said on a boat. It took about 2 minutes to pinpoint the source of the noise which ended up being the windlass.

Paying out turn after turn of line into the sea.

Apparently something had shorted the switch out so there was little I could do to control the windlass. I quickly reached under the windlass and began unscrewing the wires that supplied power. With the beast dead and the boat securely anchored, I began assessing the situation. 110' of chain, 170' of line, all attached to a 55lb anchor in 70' of water and we were stopped.

Dawn got the engine going again and powered the boat forward to take the strain off the windlass as I crawled back into the anchor locker to fiddle with the wires to the windlass. I figured out I could make contact with the wires and get the windlass in gear!

My thrill was short lived as the anchor line wrapped itself around the windlass, jamming the windlass. By this time, the anchor line was short enough that it wasn't allowing the bow of the boat to fully rise, effectively burying the bow and me with each passing wave.

Not to be out done, I had Dawn motor up as much as she could so I could run the like back to the cockpit and try to bring up all 250 lbs of line, chain and anchor with a winch back there. With 30 more feet up, waves sweeping over the bow and already exhausted from what had happened I came to the realization that even with the help of the winch in the cockpit, I wouldn't be able to manually pull 110' of 3/8" chain and the anchor up once it got to that point.

The logical move was to cut the anchor line, sending everything to the bottom and freeing the boat. Of course I didn't have the forethought at the time to put a buoy or fender on the remaining line which would have resulted in an EASY retrieval the following day.

I'm still kicking myself for this one. Not securing the anchor back to the boat, not putting a buoy on the anchor line, etc.

 Luckily, the spot is well marked on my chart plotter so with any luck, I can grab a local and their boat and head out there with some dive gear.

Sure there's always the positive side of things. We're glad this didn't happen further south where it would have been more difficult to find parts, we still have all 10 fingers and toes and I certainly learned a whole lot.