Leg 3—Cabo San Lucas to Bahia Magdalena

April 5-April 8

Back on the boat in Cabo San Lucas, we cleaned up a bit and then, for old time's sake, walked up the wharf to the lot where we built the dinghy. On our way, we ran into another friend, one of the cigar sellers on the wharf (If you're reading this...Hola, Andrez!). We stopped by the de-sal shop to say a quick hello to the workers there and then walked up the road to Pollo de Oro, home of cheap chicken and ice cold ChocoMilk.

With that important duty off our Cabo list, we spent most of the afternoon in the local Starbucks, trying to get all our technology ready for the remote coast of Baja and catching up on the latest sailing news. 

We'd come into Cabo to warm welcomes but bad news. Some good friends from our time in La Cruz, a family with 2 small daughters, were in the middle of a rescue at sea. We waded through news articles and social media, trying to sift truth from rumor. As I write, the story isn't finished, nor is it my story to tell. But that night, we stayed long enough to be reassured that paramedics had reached our friends, 900 miles offshore, and had stabilized their seriously ill baby. They were expecting to move the family off the boat the next day, and would most likely have to sink the boat to prevent it from being a hazard to navigation for the other boaters, many of them also friends of ours, headed that way. (As we found out the next day, a salvage was deemed impossible and the boat was sunk.) With heavy hearts, we headed back to the boat. The fine-dining restaurants were shutting down for the evening, and the noisy nightclubs just ramping up.

The next morning, Bryan and I went back to Starbucks for coffee, tea, and news. I stayed to get some writing done, while he went to get enough cash for our weeks in Baja. There are few, if any ATMs where we'll be stopping so we pulled out extra cash, figuring we could always stock up on Mexican treats in Ensenada if we had any pesos left over. The girls tidied the boat and then they met me at the cafe. We walked across the street to our favorite taco stand for lunch and followed it up with churros from the street stand. We nipped into a little shop for a few more bags of fresh produce and took them back to the boat.

Bryan and Hannah took a few minutes to do some engine maintenance. 

Hannah replaced the spark plugs and assisted while Bryan replaced the fuel filter, cleaned the points, and checked on the oil levels and the distributor cap. They fired up the engine to make sure they hadn't broken anything in the process and then cleaned up and put the companionway steps back into place.

Bryan wanted to get a beer at the local Baja Brewing Company and I went along for company. We sat in the beauty of the warm, Cabo evening and tried to process the contrast between our pleasant day and the heart-wrenching hours our friends had just lived through—their daughter well, their family safe, but their home and dream lost at sea.

We took our whole family up to the cafe again for one last weather check. The boat was stocked and ready, the weather window still looked wide open for a morning departure, but I had pre-trip jitters anyway. I woke about 3am and, with the marina's only-works-in-the-middle-of-the-night wireless connection, checked the forecast one more time. I listened to the nightclub's thumping bass and talked myself back to sleep.

We left Cabo San Lucas a little after 6am. The fishermen were heading out to sea 

and the rising sun was just lighting Cabo's signature arch. 

I went back to bed and let Bryan deal with whatever the cape would bring. Our forecast was good, but actual conditions may vary. Cabo Falso, at the bottom of the Baja peninsula is notorious for hurling nasty winds and choppy seas at optimistic sailors. The sea state definitely picked up as we rounded the cape, 4 miles west of the harbor, but it never got uncomfortable or scary and it settled back down within an hour or so. Bryan received a radio call from another sailor, a delivery captain on his 40th Baja delivery. I felt reassured that his experienced decision to head north this week supported our novice one.

The morning went well. I even had the energy to bake snickerdoodles for a grateful crew. We weren't able to sail, but the wind was up just enough to keep a reefed main full, steadying the boat in the mild sea. 

About mid-afternoon, I got up to pump a pitcher of fresh water and was dismayed to see what looked like dirt in the pitcher. Bryan and I both smelled it and came to the conclusion that our freshwater tank had likely been contaminated with bilge water. I started a mental inventory of water from all the various places we store it—12 gallons on deck, 5 gallons in solar showers, 6 gallons of emergency bottled water, 30 gallons in isolated tanks under the girls bunks—and Bryan lifted the floorboards to investigate. A few cups of water in the bilge is normal, as the engine's propeller shaft lets a little bit in to lubricate it as it turns. But it was good we noticed when we did; the bilge was getting pretty full and some of the bilge water had seeped in around the access port in the top of the water tank. Fortunately that meant the tank was not permanently compromised and could be made usable again after some serious flushing. Unfortunately, there was clearly something wrong with our bilge pump. 

Bryan grabbed the manual bilge pump and Hannah and I helped steady the hoses as we pumped the seawater overboard. 

Then Bryan spent an hour or so diagnosing the source of the problem (an intermittently faulty float switch, we think) and creating a work-around. 

We talked over the pros and cons of continuing on versus going back to Cabo, but going back was never really an option. Both the bilge pump and our freshwater access will take a little more work than usual until we can get them fixed. But neither one is a true emergency, both will be easier to fix in the US, and ignoring the splendid weather window would only delay our return.
We put the floor back together and brought in some bottled water for drinking and cooking. I made a huge pot of pressure cooker macaroni-and-cheese for dinner (and midnight snacks) and sprinkled it with the last of the vacuum-sealed bacon from San Diego. At sea, we live on different schedules and often eat separately, grabbing quick calories whenever we're hungry. It felt like a small victory to pull off dinner together, everyone awake and happy at the same time.
The evening watches passed by easily. The girls still enjoy sitting out on deck during their watch, but I've discovered that long-term exposure to the elements aggravates my anxiety levels. If I sit in the wind and stare at the sea long enough, I forget to relax and start seeing danger over ever wave. The little bit of afternoon wind died down before midnight and I spent most of my watches below in the cozy cabin. 

Though we kept a careful eye out, we didn't see any boats all night. We were far enough away from land and the major fishing/shipping areas to relax a little. Bryan took the long night watch and the girls and I took turns the next morning. The motion was quiet, the engine noise low, and we spent a lazy morning reading and chatting.

In the afternoon, we started doing some figuring. Fuel in Bahia Magdalena is hard to come by. It's there, but visiting sailors either need to contact the retired port captain and arrange a delivery from the bigger port in San Carlos or take the windy channel up to San Carlos themselves, anchor in the unprotected channel, and bum a ride to shore. Either way, refilling the fuel tanks could take several days. The weather was supposed to be good, amazing even, for another few days and we were concerned that, if we pulled into Bahia Magdalena and had to wait a day or 2 to refuel, we would lose the rest of the great weather window. But we didn't have enough gas to last us all the way to Bahia Asuncion, where we got gas on the way down from Turtle Bay.

I pulled out the guide books and scoured their entries for hints about fuel availability. Most sailboat engines require diesel, but cars and pangas run on gasoline. We figured we'd be able to get at least a few gallons in the small community of San Juanico, another day or so up the coast. Even if it still took us several days in port to get it, at least we would have gotten as far north as possible in the flat-calm conditions. So we called a conference with the crew, weighing our weariness, our desire to get in versus our desire to get north. 

Everyone agreed it was a chance worth taking, so we extended our GPS route to head straight past the entrance to Bahia Magdalena. We passed the entrance to the bay sometime after dark and those who were awake exchanged quiet high-fives. Leg 3 complete!

Leg 2—Mazatlan to Cabo San Lucas

March 31-April 5

We left Mazatlan late in the afternoon on March 31. The wind was up a bit and we had to rev the motor up to get across the small bar at the entrance. We motorsailed in the afternoon wind chop and then, as the evening calm arrived, took down the sail and motored through the night. 

Our new watch schedule makes better use of the girls' energy and the whole crew's natural rhythms. 

On a good day, if everything is humming along, a typical watch schedule looks like this:

8am-10am—Bethany (I usually wake about 6:30 or 7, but Bryan sends me back to bed for a few more luxurious minutes of dozing.)

10am-12pm—Meira (She typically wakes earlier than Hannah and likes to take a 2 hour watch and get it over with!)

12pm-1pm—Hannah

1pm-2pm—Bethany

2pm-3pm—Hannah

3pm-6pm—Bryan (This gives the day crew a solid break before sunset, but it also give Bryan a chance to check on all the systems and adjust anything that needs it—sail set, course, etc.—before he's off for a while in the evening. It's also good for him to be on watch to fiddle with the sails if the afternoon wind picks up.)

6pm-7pm—Bethany

7pm-8pm—Hannah (She likes the sunset watch!)

8pm-10pm—Meira (She loves a starry night watch.)

10pm-11pm—Hannah's last watch of the day

11pm-12pm—Bethany (If all has been going well, I may have been dozing on the settee during the girls watches, but they wake me at least every hour to talk over course adjustments or any concerns. This gives Bryan a few solid hours of sleep before his long night watch.)

12pm-8am—Bryan (He worked nights a lot in our early married life and loves the quiet solitude this long night watch offers. He listens to podcasts, dozes in 10-minute increments, or just stares at the stars.)

Of course, ultimately Bryan is the captain and if something goes wrong, we get him up to deal with it. But the girls and I can handle most things and so far, this schedule is proving much more sustainable than our watches on the way down the coast. For many reasons, we didn't have the girls taking regular watches on our southbound journey. And we needed to hand steer quite a bit, so the watches were much more tiring. I know there will be long days, rough seas, and uncomfortable hours ahead. There will be times when Bryan and I, or maybe even just Bryan, have to take a difficult watch, fighting the tiller. But with the girls each taking 4 hours of watches a day, Bryan and I will go into the tough times so much more well-rested. And in the easy times, we can sneak a little more fun into the long passages.

On our run from Mazatlan to Los Frailes, the point on Baja closest to Mazatlan, Bryan spent his afternoon watch curled up on the settee with the girls watching Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and hopping up every 10 minutes to take a look around the empty sea.

We came into Los Frailes a little after sunrise on April 2. 

It's interesting to watch how our shifting attitudes change our experience. On the way down, we were all about exploration, taking advantage of every opportunity to Go...See...Do! But on the way back, our focus is more on getting the boat (and ourselves) back home. So instead of pushing ourselves to drop the dinghy and take the long row to shore to explore, we puttered around aboard for the day. I made tortillas using our new tortilladora.

And Bryan got a flopper-stopper set up to help calm the motion of the boat in rolly anchorages. While we were in Oldtown Mazatlan looking for computer parts, we stopped in a small store filled with kitchen and household necessities. I'd been looking for a pepper grinder for months and we found one there as well as the tortilla press, some plastic drinking glasses, and a large plastic cutting board. 

Our friends from S/V Gratitoullie had given us some tips about making a flopper-stopper out of a cutting board (handy for cleaning fish on the side decks too!) so Bryan pulled out his drill and some extra line and rigged it up. He hung the board from some lines off the spinnaker pole and hung our dinghy anchor from one end as a weight. This helps the cutting board turn vertically and sink quickly as the boat rolls one way. Then, as the boat rolls away from the flopper stopper, the board flattens out and rises slowly through the water, adding resistance to keep the boat from settling into a pendulum-like rocking pattern. The swell was pretty light, but we think it really made a difference.

The next day, after a good night's rest, we motored the few hours into San Jose del Cabo. We hadn't planned to stop there, but we'd heard it was a delightful little town. We planned to spend one night, just long enough to get Bryan into Cabo to order our English laptop so it would be waiting for us on Monday morning. We got gas at the fuel dock, called the office on the VHF for a slip assignment, pulled in, and walked the 1/2 mile around the harbor to check in at the office. We wandered for a few minutes, trying to find our way.

When we finally located the office, I was so focused on our task, I didn't notice the group of people leaving the office area until I heard one of them call my name. My brain did a lightning-fast tally of the friends we'd met on our trip. Nope, none of them should be here now. I turned around wondering who could have recognized me. As it happens, the marina office is adjacent to a real estate office. And one of the agents and I share a mutual friend, who, when she heard we were going to be stopping in the area, encouraged us to meet. It didn't work out on our way down; the dinghy rebuild and busy holiday season conspired against a rendezvous. But apparently it was meant to happen. Toni and her husband, Bruce gave us a ride back to our boat and offered Bryan a ride into the computer store as well. Toni has been following our story almost since the beginning and she came aboard the boat, posed for pictures with us, and generally made us feel like mini-celebrities.

The girls and I hung out on the boat for the afternoon, while Bryan ran into Cabo. Meira took advantage of a burst of energy to wash some laundry and do dishes on the dock. While she was out there, a fellow sailor from a neighboring boat stopped by and offered to take us to the grocery store. We made tentative arrangements for the next day and I felt great about the hope of getting so many things crossed off our Before-Baja list. Late in the afternoon, Bryan came back with bad news. The Apple distributor for the area was out of English laptops and there was no telling when they would get more in. We'd thought we'd found the perfect solution to our computer troubles, so we took a few minutes to regroup and talk over our options.

Pretty soon, it became obvious that our first priority was dinner. We'd seen a little fish shack called "The Drunken Sailor" on the road near the marina so we walked up and splurged on some fish tacos, ceviche, and sesame fish and chips. The fish tacos were deliciously unique, with sesame, basil, pineapple, and cabbage, and the fish and chips and ceviche were superb as well. We came back with renewed energy for our technical difficulties.

Bryan finally verified that a Linux OS would run the internet from our TelCel stick. This is our most important functionality, as it will be our main source for weather forecasts on Baja. He moved the small hard drive from my old computer (the one with the broken keyboard) to the new laptop (the one with the dead hard drive) and got Linux up and running. The touch pad mysteriously didn't work, but we have an external wireless mouse, so we can limp along until San Diego. We installed important software—a word processor for my writing project, an off-line blog editor, a few games for long passages—and bookmarked the low-bandwidth interfaces for several weather forecasts.

The system is working so well that in retrospect, it seems like an obvious decision. But lately, I've been working on subduing the A+ student in me who wants to get everything right the first time. Life is not a True/False question. It is multiple choice, usually one of those tricky ones with more than one right answer.

The next morning, our kind neighbor drove Hannah and me to the MEGA for the last of the non-perishable provisions. We stopped at a Subway for lunch on our way out. What a treat! Ordering in Spanish was a bit difficult, and there are no foot-long options in this metric country. But the food tasted just the same.

Back on the boat, we ate our sandwiches and put away our haul in a hurry. 

Then Bryan and I walked over to the marina office to check out. The afternoon wind had picked up considerably, but we only had 10 miles or so to our intended destination and we thought the wind would be from a helpful direction once we got out of the harbor. So, with only a little bit of trouble in the wind and current, we pulled out of our slip and headed out to sea. We cleared the breakwater and turned west, but the wind stayed on our nose. We were only making 3 knots against the breeze in the steep chop and we started doing the math to see if we would get in before dark. We planned to stop in Santa Maria Cove, a little one-boat anchorage a few miles east of Cabo and spend a day or so there enjoying the reportedly fabulous snorkeling before heading on into Cabo San Lucas. But we didn't want to risk a night entrance in a strange place with questionable chart accuracy.

About the time Bryan and I were trying to come to a conclusion about the wisdom of continuing, we heard a noise. It came again regularly, but not rhythmically. I was trying to identify the source—animal? vegetable? mechanical?—when Meira poked her head up. "I hear a noise coming from the engine." Bryan throttled down and I took the helm while he went below to have a look. He quickly identified the trouble. The accessory drive, a pulley that powers the alternator, had lost its something-something and that meant that something-something-something, but we're OK for now.

I tend to have selective hearing in a crisis and Bryan knows I only want to know 1-If he knows what the problem is, 2-If he thinks he can fix it, and 3-If we're all going to die in the meantime. Reassured with “Yes, Yes, and That's ridiculous,” I stayed at the helm while Bryan raised our jib. 

The wind was perfect for a reach back through the breakwater and, though we could probably have safely used our engine for the last few seconds of docking, we didn't need it. The slip we'd been at the night before was empty and perfectly situated for an emergency dock-under-sail. The girls prepped the docklines and fenders and I reminded them, “We'll be coming in hot!” Bryan trimmed and released the jib sheet to keep our speed under control and, at the last minute, turned us a little upwind and backfilled the sail to spill off more speed and blow us close to the dock finger. On the bow, Meira ducked as the sail came over and then stepped gracefully down onto the dock. I followed a second later and fumbled the midline around the end cleat. “Gently, gently,” Bryan called, “we've got lots of room to slow her down.” Hannah stepped down when the stern swung in and we eased the boat to a quiet stop.

Bryan and the girls all looked to me, usually the most nervous of the crew. When they saw my wide grin, their faces responded in kind. We all agreed, “That was actually really fun!” We've practiced sail maneuvers many times, sometimes from desire, other times out of necessity. This time, the wind and slip configuration had been so perfect, the crew so reliable, I hadn't even gotten jittery.

We walked the long path over to the marina office again, stopping to play around the sculptures and study the art along the way. And then we took the deserving crew out for gelato.

Later that evening, Bryan dangled over the engine compartment, muttering. He has spares for just about every system on the boat—extra fuel pump, water pump, gaskets, wires, fuses. Even a spare engine head. But he remembers looking at the accessory drive before we left and thinking, “That's so straightforward. It's just a pulley. How could anything go wrong with that?” Thankfully, we didn't need the whole pulley, just an extra bolt. He stepped through the cabin to his spare-parts locker and fished out a couple. One was just the right size to fit the drive and he cleaned it up and reinstalled it with a little bit of lock-tite. He took a few extra minutes talking over engine specifics with his willing assistant, Meira. She asked great questions and soaked it all in.

The next morning, we got up early, tested the engine, and headed back out through the breakwater. 

We wanted to beat the afternoon thermal winds and get anchored in the bay before the tour boats arrived. As we approached the cove, a huge tour boat slipped in ahead of us and dropped anchor right in the middle. A line of snorkelers in bright orange life jackets waddled to the stern deck and dropped, flippers-first, into the water. We circled around in the entrance for a few minutes, considering our options. We wondered about the safety of anchoring with all those people in the water and peeked over the gunwales at the low-visibility water. Finally, we decided to just head on into Cabo San Lucas. We turned away, not really all that disappointed, and spent a couple of bouncy hours tacking into the headwinds toward Cabo. 

It's an awful lot more fun to be at sea in choppy conditions than to deal with them in a rolly anchorage.

We came into the marina in the mid-afternoon. Pangas, pelicans, and sea lions vied for our attention in the busy entrance. 

We'd e-mailed ahead to let our friends know we were coming, but were still pleased to see a familiar face on the dock as we pulled in. We tied up a greeted each other. “Marcilio!” He seemed surprised to be remembered but responded, “Bethany!” If he was surprised, I was shocked. I didn't expect to be remembered by name; hundreds of boaters come through each month. But I suppose, not very many build boats in the parking lot. We chatted for a few minutes, his English much improved, my Spanish a little rusty from our month with mostly cruisers. And then he shooed us on up to the office. “They're closing at 2!” (I'm not going to bore you here with the saga of our time-zone issues and how difficult it can be to figure out the correct time when some devices change automatically, others don't [or change, but not correctly], and US and Mexican Daylight Saving Time don't start on the same week. It shouldn't be this difficult, but it is.)
The office staff was so glad to see us, they almost forgot to charge us for our stay. We told stories of our recent adventures and assured them all that Rover was doing well. “No leaks!” Even behind-the-scenes personnel we barely remembered came out for hugs and greetings. It was a great way to wrap up an easy second leg.

Leg 1, Intermission—Mazatlan

We spent most of our first afternoon in Mazatlan in or around the pool, 

but Bryan and I also did some information gathering, trying to figure out where to buy a replacement hard drive for our computer. On the coast of Baja, we planned to use the computer along with a USB internet stick to pull in all-important weather forecasts. We had no other devices aboard that had this capability, so we felt quite a bit of pressure to get it working again.

Take your daughter to work day?

The next morning, Bryan and I took several buses into Office Depot and the computer store in downtown Mazatlan. Office Depot doesn't carry hard drives and didn't seem to have any way to order them. We eyed the new laptops, just in case we had to go that route, but all the keyboards were Spanish keyboards and all the operating systems were in Spanish too. The computer store downtown was closed already, since it was Sunday, so we grabbed some lunch and made plans to come back the next day. We spent the afternoon in the pool and I spent some time working on our health insurance situation, trying to beat the deadlines for the Affordable Care Act while jumping through some illogical hoops (The website for the Oregon Exchange was broken, so we had to use an agent. But the agent referral website I found was broken too. Finally, I found some agents in our area and started gathering information, much of it contradicting. You have to be physically present in Oregon to apply. But you have to apply before March 31 whether you're in Oregon or not. Moving back will qualify you for a 60 day open enrollment period. Moving back will not qualify you for a 60 day open enrollment period. And on. And on.) We just wanted to make sure we were covered when we hit the US, but dealing with all of this hoopla, without phones and on sketchy internet required more than one pool-side pina colada.


March 24, we took another trip to Oldtown Mazatlan. The main electronics store didn't sell internal hard drives. 

As we walked down the street, we saw computers in a pawn shop window and went in to ask if they knew where we could find them. 

They sent us around the block to “Computer-Repair-Shop Alley” and we popped in to one shop after another 

only to be told they didn't have any way to find us a hard drive. It was hard to believe that in a city this size, we couldn't find a replacement hard drive, so we kept looking. 

The last shop we went in sent us to yet another store, a little no-name repair shop around the corner. They weren't open, but the woman in the store next door 

said they were just out for lunch and would be back in 30 minutes. 

(You should know that almost all of this communication was in Spanish, so we did our best and hoped we'd understood correctly.) We spent a few minutes in a Mexican-style Sur la Table, where household goods of every sort stood shoulder to shoulder on ceiling-high shelves. We picked up a tortilladora (it's way more fun to say than tortilla press) and a few other things we needed, including a large cutting board for a project on the boat. We stopped in lots of fabric stores and finally found some polar fleece to cover our settee seats. The current upholstery picks up salt from our wet clothes and then attracts the humidity. Polar fleece doesn't attract dew in the same way and we wanted dry seats for the trip home. I fumbled through a description of safety pins and Bryan finally rescued me by grabbing a pen and playing a quick round of pictionary. While we were getting ready to check out, the power went out. They print multiple sales tickets and receipts for every sale, so I hoped we could still make our purchases, but the power came back on right away and we got what we needed.
We'd gone back to the no-name computer store several times during all of this, but they still hadn't returned. Now, after all the shopping we could think of and a little lunch ourselves, we walked back and sat down in front of the store. The glass doors were still locked, but the metal gates were still open. We figured they were coming back at some point today, but didn't know how long we should wait. 

About the time we were thinking about making a plan, the owner pulled up. We followed him into the cool shop and explained, with all of our new vocabulary, hard-earned from a day of searching all over town, what it was we needed. He understood right away and started tapping away on his laptop to see if he could find us anything in the area. The only drives he could find that would fit our computer were similar to the hard drive in my old laptop. It's keyboard was broken, so we couldn't use it for weather, but Bryan figured he could use recovery media to reinstall our current system on the old, but still usable hard drive. He spent the rest of the day trying to pull in recovery media in the marina's computer room only to discover that it wouldn't install on any disk but the original which, of course, was broken. You should thank me right now for all the computery details I'm omitting from this story, but we spent much of the next few days fighting, with bad internet, in another language, to solve a problem Bryan could have solved in the states in an afternoon with $50-100. I finally summed it up to a friend. “This computer problem is just as important, just as expensive, and just as frustrating as our dinghy loss (though, of course, not as sad). But it doesn't make for nearly as good a story!” He downloaded a whole new operating system, only to discover the install wizard was in Spanish. It failed to install on my old hard drive, but only after it had erased the old operating system. We seriously considered just buying a Spanish laptop for the Baja weather and then re-selling it in the US. I finally found a shop in Cabo San Lucas that said the could get us a new, English-keyboard laptop in only 2 business days. Problem solved! (See the next post for the disappointing truth:-)
We spent the next few days dealing with the computer, insurance, and bank fraud issues. The bank wanted us to mail in our paperwork or come in in person. We finally convinced them to let us scan it in and e-mail it—whew! 

We made a run to Walmart for groceries and some clothes and shoes. Meira is still growing and we all are going through shoes far faster than at home.

Devouring our salad, a special treat!

Market day tradition: meat for dinner

We spent more time in the pool. Meira joined a group of 50 and 60 year-old sailors who play a daily round of water volleyball. 

And Hannah and I relaxed in our own way:-)

One day a friend, a single-handing woman we'd met in La Cruz, showed up just down the dock from us. When she heard we were hoping to add a sail rig to our dinghy, she dug out a dinghy sail and passed it on to us. She'd grown up sailing and really wanted the girls to have the opportunity to learn on their own in a small boat. Hopefully we can get the rig finished before the trip is over.
March 28, we planned to leave. We checked the weather, had all our groceries ready, and made one last trip for fish tacos at The Fish Market, a favorite restaurant in the area. But in the afternoon, after we'd checked out, I started feeling a migraine come on, so we made the decision to stay another day. The weather looked good for several days, and we didn't want to leave for the long, Sea of Cortez crossing down by ¼ of the crew. The next afternoon, we had checked out again when we got the news: all the kid-boats we'd hoped to meet here had just gotten back from their inland trip to the Copper Canyon. We made the easy decision to stay “just one more day” and let the marina office know. Somehow, we managed to corral all the families for a 22-person dinner out. 

The waiters opened a tab for each boat and quickly figured out which parents from this end of the table went with which kids from that end. While there, the other boats enticed us to stay just one more day with the promise of an evening of bowling together. The weather was still good, and we knew it might be the last time in a long time we would see these special people, so we were an easy sell. We spent a delightful day around the pool with friends and had a fun time bowling together in the evening.

March 31, our really-truly last day in Mazatlan, I went out to breakfast with my good friend Jen, from s/v Appa. 

Her family is finishing up a similar trip, heading back to Seattle about the same time (some of them sailing the boat back by way of Hawaii, others beating to windward the quick way, in an airplane.) They and several others we've met will end up within driving distance and we're already starting to toss around thoughts of summer sailing in the Puget Sound together.
Despite the 36-hour passage ahead, we all managed to relax for the morning. 

We'd been ready to go for days, so we didn't need to do any last-minute running around. 

In the afternoon, we said our goodbyes and motored out into the sea for the start of leg 2.