We will be leaving La Paz today and heading to Puerto Ballandra to see the famous mushroom rock, "El Hongo". The last 24 hrs have been crazy busy as we have been getting the boat ready for our next trip. In just 24 hours Lee has managed to Install a new depth sounder, change the water impeller, and change the oil. We have bought and stowed all of our food and all that is left on the list is to refill our propane tanks and do some laundry, then we should be ready to leave.
We have been in la Paz for a week now and we are having a great time. We start Spanish lessons today and then we are planning to head up to isla espiritu santos and isla partida on Tuesday of next week where we will explore the islands for a few weeks before heading to Mazatalan on the main land.
We some updates from our trip to la Paz to still add which we will post in the next couple of days before heading north.
On Mon 27th Feb we caught our first fish and we havnt stopped since. We caught a pacific bonito between Bahia ASuncion and Man O War cove in Bahia MAgdalena. This trip was about 250 miles.
We all wanted to have our photo taken with the fish so Lee held it up for us but we didn't realize that he was about to start flipping around and spraying blood all over us and the cockpit. You can see he made quite a mess of the boat! Next time i think we'll avoid the fishy photo shoot. We grabbed a plastic bag to stick him in but he munched his way out of the bottom. This was a very hard fish to kill but we managed it eventually and here you can see the huge fillets that we got.
We have just arrived in Ensenada de los Muertos after a nice short 50 mile trip. It has been a nice calm day and we caught ourselves another Pacific Bonito. There's a restaurant on the beach which we will go to tonight. We have just come from Bahia los Frailes which is next to a marine sanctuary where we spent two days.
On our first night in Los Frailes we heard something that sounded like fireworks, when we stepped outside the boat we were amazed to see that we were surrounded by manta rays jumping out of the water, hundreds of them. When we shined the torch in the water we could also see hundreds of tiny little red eyes looking at us followed by views of many different fish.
Solent off the beach
Serena and Lee on beach lookout
We took a walk to Playa Serenita with the silver lining crew and spent the day on the beach snorkeling and enjoying the sun.
Lee looking for a clear path out of the desert
The walk to the beach was very long and hot so we were happy when a truck came by and offered us a lift. The walk back was interesting; we decided to take a shortcut as we didn't fancy the 3 mile hike back to our anchorage so we peeled back some barbed wire and headed off through the desert instead of taking the road. We had to scramble through sand covered with spiky cactus and brush with thorns which we had to pull out of our shoes every now and then. We made it back to our beach just before dark and thankfully our dinghies were still there. We got some great footage of the fish with our underwater camera. Los Frailes really captured the spirit of the Sea of Cortez for us so decided to stay for another day and the following night (last night) we decided to make a bonfire on the beach with Elan, Ashley and Apollo from Silver Lining. We arrived at the beach and started gathering stones, and wood for the fire. Lee dashed off over the hill to the lagoon and 15 minutes later he came back with a whole tree! Lee made two fires, one for our food and another one to sit around.
Getting ready for the BBQ
Before Los Frailes we spend two nights at the Puerto Los Cabos marina. We got a slip for half price as it had no power but who needs power when we are generating 550 watts at 40 amps per hour with our solar panels! Lee even turned on the AC electric water heater at one point! This had a lovely marina with a nice little restaurant called The Container. We went into town and were able to do our laundry which we haven't done for almost a month! We found an organic market out of town and visited a local cactus garden which carries hundreds of cactus species.
At the organic festival.
