Vaka Visit

Seven beautiful vakas (traditional polynesian voyaging canoes) pulled into our marina today. They are on their way to the South Pacific via the Galapagos while filming a documentary on preserving the oceans. More about their journey...

Today was Australia Day and since we have a few boats from Australia here, we had a bit of a celebration and potluck. Mike and I even had our first taste of Vegemite - not bad!
Not having a lot of time between boat projects I threw together a quick pasta salad. The recipe is on GalleySwap.

Ensenada, Mexico

This morning we headed out looking for a fast internet connection to place some orders and call family. The connection at the marina can get a bit sluggish especially when the cruise ships come in.  

When we got into town the first thing we noticed is that it was eerily quiet and everything was closed - including our favorite coffee shop. Everyone must have been sleeping in or at church. Luckily, Starbucks doesn't seem to follow local custom and we got a great connection for the price of a cup of coffee. 

By the time we left at lunch time it was time to head to our favorite taco shop which was jam packed. We were serenaded by mariachi (actually it's banda around here) bands and watched the commotion at the fish market. The fish scale is always entertaining as there is usually a group of men trying to pack as many slippery fish as possible onto a flat surface. 

By the time we got back to the boat there was just enough time to pull Mike up the mast to replace our anchor light with a new LED light, attach some spreader boots, and add reflective tape to the top of the mast. We hope the reflective tape will help us find our boat in a dark anchorage. The concept being that rather than shine our flashlight into the other boats' windows, we shine the flashlight up high and our unique markings will guide us home.

Coffee and Culture

Ensenada's Cultural Center is just across the street form the marina. They have a cozy little coffee shop with free WiFi so we head over there to make phone calls once in a while since the WiFi in the marina is not fast enough to use Skype.

Full moon

Beautiful full moon here in Ensenada. The Santa Anas have been blowing all day so we don't even need to turn on the heater tonight.

We had another whirlwind weekend in California. Dropped off a bunch more things at our storage trailer. Spent many hours at West Marine and hardware stores. Took our biennial First Aid/CPR class to keep our captains licenses up to date. And even had some time to visit with friends and family.

Now we're just waiting on the life-raft, Froli bed springs, head spares kit, spare autopilot and few parts to finish the watermaker install. Meanwhile we are busy installing and/or finding room for all the things we have bought...

A Successful Day

Our current home port - CruisePort Marina in Ensenada

The view up our dock

Most things on a boat take at least twice as long, cost twice as much, and are three times as difficult as anticipated. But today we had two projects that took hardly any time and cost us nothing at all! 

The fridge had been running a bit too often. Not a problem here at the dock but very costly (in energy) at sea or on the hook. We have a freezer that chills the fridge via a small computer fan. It seemed like the fan was not working, so I removed the fan cover and pulled it out gently to get its info to purchase a new one. While I was doing that the fan started up! Turns out it was installed backwards and has been blowing warm fridge air into the freezer (for the past ten years I'm guessing). Problem solved! 


Our windlass (the winch that pulls up the anchor) was working intermittently. Again, not a problem here at the dock but a huge problem at anchor. Today it wasn't working so we started pulling things apart to figure out what was going on. After about an hour of going back and forth between breakers and wires and switches and miscellaneous buttons Mike took another look at the wiring behind the electrical panel. We only had our house battery turned on but the windlass was wired into the starter battery. We turned on the starter battery and voilà! Problem solved!

A good day. So we had to go out to drinks and dinner with a boat-neighbor to celebrate. We only wish all projects could be this simple.

A New Year

A great start to a new year because we're finally doing what has been in planning stages for years. We're living on our boat and traveling the world at five miles per hour!

We've slowly been getting tasks checked off the list. Watermaker install is nearly complete, liferaft and new (smaller) dinghy are on order. It's getting a bit chilly here in Ensenada so we hope to be ready to leave in a couple of weeks.