December, 2006 to January, 2007

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After waiting out a cold Norther in Santa Rosalia for a week, we headed south, outside San Marcos Island, down to Los Pilares on the Concepcion Peninsula where we were greeted by a curious sea lion but passed an uncomfortable night. The next day we saw lots of dolphin on our way south to Punta Pulpito.
John broached the dinghy in the surf taking the dog ashore at Punta Pulpito, landed on a big rock and bruised his back so badly he still couldn't walk right 7 months later. Dog was fine, thought it was fun.

We passed another uncomfortable night at Punta Pulpito and then made our way down to San Juanico, where we anchored in the company of Shadowfax, and waited out another week's worth of Northers.

San Juanico hosts a population of Grebes, little sea ducks that swim about, dive, and resurface all together like a synchronized bird team.

We observed the Winter Solstice at San Juanico, then went down to Puerto Escondido on Boxing Day, where we stayed for another week, celebrating our wedding anniversary, resting, resupplying, and waiting out some heavy weather from the west. The wind blew almost 40 one night, pushing us over our mooring, fouling the rode behind the wing on our keel. Fortunately we had tied a safety line to the mooring ball, and were able to cast off the mooring rode, clear the ball, and re-moor to it, all in the middle of the night, in a high wind, twice.

We think Puerto Escondido is one of the prettiest places on the Baja, the mountains are spectacular, the mooring basins are well protected, and the people are lovely. Too bad about the management, Singlar's best efforts are being confounded by some mysterious local force which makes money and service disappear.

We saw our first mangroves at Escondido, a sign that we're in warmer waters.
We departed Puerto Escondido January 1st and hopped down to Aqua Verde, where we spent another uncomfortable night, then we moved on down to Evaristo, again in company with Shadowfax.

At Evaristo we had our first comfortable night on the anchor, we were back in familiar waters after 10 years; we had visited Evaristo in 1996 on a (choke) Moorings charter out of La Paz.

The next morning we moved on to Caleta Partida, where we lingered a couple of days, finally making it into La Paz January 5th.
It was a long month coming down, and we started to learn about waves, anchorages and windy weather, but we found our way safely and arrived happy.