Puerto Escondido & Loreto

Wednesday 12th August 2020
Being enclosed in a natural lagoon, the water here is very hot, and in general the days are scorching and the nights unbearable. We both are sleeping either on the foredeck or in the cockpit. Often there is no wind at all and that’s when you really feel the heat.
The marina has a lounge called ‘the Captains Lounge’ which has a kitchen , TV WiFi and most importantly Air conditioning. We spend a lot of time there, but also have been swimming in the bay.
The plan is to leave here on Tuesday 19th and make a long roundabout route back to La Paz taking in various remote island anchorages.

I managed to upload the video below, it’s not great, and we will make much better ones, once we work out how to collect and edit the existing footage we have.

Espiritu Santo & Agua Verde

Thursday 13th
I pop over to Mikes boat Ikigai, to help him rewire some appliances he has fitted, mostly 12v fans and LED lighting. He has been stuck/based here since the start of the Covid thing and has really gone native, he knows everyone and all the best spots around. He tells us about a great beach getaway hidden within the lagoon behind the mangroves which we visit later for a cooling swim, he points out another similar spot he recommends for beach barbeques.
Later Mike drives us into Loreto to the supermarket so we can restock. We actually ate all the bananas just in time.

Friday 14th
Back to the marina to do some laundry get a shower and for Arturo to collect his correspondence maths course. Later in the afternoon I head over to Mikes boat to help him fit a fuse on his new super hi tech fan. come 6pm we have dinner at the marina with Mike and our two new friends Kyle & Jamie who are also stuck here with the Covid restrictions. They have done a lot of sailing and Jamie has sailed around france as well and speaks a few languages so she and Arturo hit it off.

Saturday:
We visit the marina for some good internet and so I can order a few bits and bobs from Amazon for Kathy to bring out. I manage to buy a 3 pack of 32gb memory sticks for under £10, I also order a couple of 2 Terabyte external hard disks for around £50 each. All useful for the mass of video footage we are accumulating. Arturo has now realised that he does not need to film in 4K at 120fps, We are having to remove his video clips from the GoPro to the laptop one or two at a time, review, delete or transfer to an external drive as I only have a few gb free, and he has maybe one hundred clips weighing in at > 2gb each. This will take some time.

Sunday 16th
A fairly early start for me, we leave the boat around 9:30 and head into the marina to meet up with Mike who is going to drive us into the Sierra de la Giganta mountains. It’s a dramatic drive through 10 miles of winding steep mountain roads. We snake back and forth eventually reaching the small village of San Javier where the first (ish) mission in California (at a time when Upper California was united with this Lower California). Spanish Jesuit priests came here at the end of the 18th Century in order to bring god to the indigenous people, it’s only an accident that they brought troops with them and set up armed trading posts along the whole of the Californian coast, and later claimed the land as belonging to the Spanish king. The mission failed due to a lack of drinking water in the mountains, but was restarted a few years into the 19th century just a couple of miles down the road near a natural spring. From this mission a network of roads stretch out over the peninsula leading to the other missions which followed, and I think they stretched as far as Monterrey in the northern part of California.
We follow the irrigation channels back into the fields behind the church and find some locals selling wine, I had hoped to get some locally made olive oil, the place is full of olive trees, and has one over 300 years old, which seems to contradict the official dates. They say the mission here planted the first grape vines in the whole of California, and produced the first Californian wines. The locals are disappointed to find we are all non drinkers, so I buy a bottle for Kathy to enjoy at a later date and Mike enquires about bringing his tent up here to camp. We are surrounded by quite stunning mountains and Arturo has never seen a Mexico like it before. The way he describes his home town has me thinking ‘Birkenhead in the 70s’, i.e. a bit industrial and boring.
I buy some pineapple Empanadas (Pasties) from a local for a few pesos and we settle into a small cafe for some lunch.
Tomorrow we stock up on food and on Tuesday we head out back into the sea. There is a potential hurricane heading our way, but then there has been most days these last few weeks. Most fizzle out, or hang a left into the pacific heading for Hawaii. We also have some strong southerly winds forecast, but there are many safe islands out here which provide good protection.
It’s likely we will spend another week in the area before heading back to La Paz.

Monday 17th
Heading ashore to have a farewell dinner with Mike, I’m hoping we will catch up with him again in October when I sail back this way with Kathy. I will also post this blog from the restaurant. Earlier today I spent an hour trying to work out the earthing on Mike’s boat. He got a shore power shock from his propellor on the hard a few days ago. I don’t figure much out, other than the fact that his earth from the shore is not grounded to the boats 12V DC common earth, It doesn’t look like the manufacturer planned it to be, but as usual on Mike’s boat I can’t find the cables that run to the switchboard from the power inlet. It’s going to need some more attention. Mike runs me into town and he drops me off at a barber, I didn’t ask him too, but I quietly take the hint. The barber tells me I can’t catch Covid in his shop, which makes me smile. Later we head for the super, but there’s a big queue outside so we drive on to a big store of the pile em high variety. I get most everything. We are leaving in the morning (Tuesday) and will sail around the islands, others out there are sailing here for fear of the hurricane, but I think they are being a bit to cautious. Genevieve is heading our way and currently is strengthening with winds of 85 knots, and is meant to become a major hurricane by Wednesday. Hopefully it will stay out in the pacific and just bring refreshing wind and rain for us. Wherever I go I will only be a half days motoring from Escondido and safety.

A fish
The safe anchorage at Puerto Escondido
Lunch at the Mission
Mike and Arturo in front of the Mission at San Javier
A Banana Tree
The cheese from these guys was lovely
A lot of fishing line collected by the prop.
Arturo says we look like Narcos in this pic.
It was that big
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Arturo

I tried to upload the pics and place them in the text, but I had annoying WordPress problems, In the end I did it but have had to dump them all together.
Hopefully see you after the next hurricane 😉

Paul Collister