Back in the Northwest (sort of...)

We last two nights we have woken to the sound of rain, something we had not heard for a while. We had had a pretty dramatic change in the weather. It have had low overcast skies, drizzle and rain, and much cooler weather; sort of like summer in the Northwest! We were pretty traumatized by having to pull out our rain gear!
We are now anchored in San Juanico, a small bay south of Loreto. We are expecting some higher winds over the next few days, first southerlies then the wind will switch to the north. This means moving around a bit as few anchorages down here offer protection from both directions. We may get winds up to 40kn but we are hoping that we don't see anything that strong.
This is a pretty bay here and it will be interesting to see how the rain affect the vegetation. We haven't seen any significant rain in about a year. Hopefully it washes the boat off, and we don't find too many new leaks.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Best Wishes to all our family and friends!
We celebrated the holiday with some of our cruising friends down here in Conception Bay. After talk of a potluck, we decided to go to a small restaurant on the beach that was doing a special Thanksgiving day dinner (only way any of us was going to get turkey). Nice dinner with 10 of us around the table, and afterwards we had pumpkin pie on Sea Change(thanks to Steve and Adele).
Hope everyone had a nice holiday!

Some family time in mexico

Long since due for an update!

After San Francisquito and the strong winds, we had light weather heading further south to Santa Rosalia. We spent a few days cleaning up the boat, including a trip up to the top of the mast with a water hose!  The boat looked like we had taken it off-roading. The water running down the boat was the color of chocolate milk. We prepared the boat for a visit from my parents ( Jim and Sally), and found an RV park for their Scamp trailer. My parents were coming down for about a week to visit, they were also bringing us a bunch of goodies from the states (hard to find food items and boat parts).

We unloaded some of the goodies and did some sightseeing in town, then headed off to Isla San Marcos for a few days. We had a nice spinnaker run and even got Sally to steer the boat for a while. Jim reeled in a nice Mexican Bonito on the way, which made an excellent BBQ for the night’s dinner.  We found a nice spot to drop the hook at Sweetpea cove. We had wonderful weather, with warm days and cool nights, plus we had an amazing dolphin show for two days. Hundreds of dolphins were swimming up and down the coast of the island, coming very close to the boat and often leaping completely clear of the water.  We put on the snorkel gear one day and tried to swim with the dolphins. The dolphins would have none of this, and refused to come anywhere near us!  Funny how they won’t come nearer than 20-30ft from an anchored boat, but will swim inches off the bow when underway. We did a day trip down to the village on San Marcos, this is a town for the gypsum mine on the island. The town was interesting and very neat and clean, the local church was built from blocks of gypsum so was quite unique. After a few days we headed back to Santa Rosalia. Since we had a vehicle we wanted to drive down to Mulege, a town that does not have a good anchorage so we did not stop there in the boat. It one of the oldest settlements in the Baja as it has the only fresh water river.  The town was nice with some older building still existing, but the river west of town was spectacular. The river meandered up the valley and the valley floor was completely covered in palm trees. The most greenery than we have seen in Mexico so far. There was an old Mission (first in California), and the old prison (inmates were let lose to work during the day, but they had to come back in the evening to get locked up overnight), unfortunately both were closed so we could not go inside.  After a bit more provisioning with the car for items like fuel and propane (which is located 5 miles from town!), we had to say goodbye. We had run out of time and my parents needed a few days travel time to get back to the states.  We had a very nice visit and everyone enjoyed the time spent together.

We left Santa Rosalia a few days later and are now down at Punta Chivato. This is a point with a nice beach and has a beautiful resort that we cannot afford to visit. There are several other cruising boats here so we have done a bit of visiting around the anchorage.