Los Frailes to La Paz (Ginger)

Last Friday (11/17) we rode our bikes down a soft sand road 8k into Cabo Pulmo to have lunch. Riding our pixies in soft sand was better than walking that far but it was a biking challenge, it felt like an accomplishment that we made it with no road rash or heat stroke. We had a great lunch, rode back to Los Frailes, met some burros on the way, loaded the bikes into the dinghy and headed back to the boat. The outboard decided half way to the boat that it was done so we paddled the rest of the way to the boat and made plans to leave the next morning. Saturday we sailed north to Los Muertos, it was a fine anchorage and a great half way point to La Paz. The big draw is the Giggling Marlin "yacht club and restaurant" at the head of the bay. For the prices and the ambiance this place might as well have been in Cabo so we decided to wait for a meal ashore until La Paz. We spent a couple of nights and our last day there was calm, muggy and scorching hot. Peter went for a swim in the morning and got some jelly fish stings so swimming was out the rest of the day. I read somewhere that the best cure, if you can't identify the type of jelly fish, is a hot water wash. Since we don't have a bathtub Peter got a hot washcloth for the stings and some beer as an analgesic. The stings were better after a couple of hours and as the weather from the south was heading our way we decided it was time to leave. We left at 2AM Tuesday for the best tides and motored until mid-morning when we started sailing slowly toward La Paz. Our friends on Wiz reserved a slip at Marina Costa Baja and we tied up to the dock to equalize the batteries and get some other dock jobs done including re-bedding the self steering gear and making the bug screens we knew we'd eventually need. The next couple of days ended up being devoted to Thanksgiving meal preparations and we enjoyed a dinner with several Seattle boats for Thanksgiving. The mosquitos here were bad our first couple of nights so my bug screens project became more important. It's been in the 80s here so Peter has moved installing fans up the list too. Yesterday Peter and I finally went into downtown to explore. We were able to get snaps for the screens, a dry erase pen (say that in Spanish 3 times!) and the fabric for the screens. We met Baloo and Kinship and had lunch with them. Peter ordered the daily special which turned out to be fried pig skin simmered until it was mushy and soft again (for those of you who would like to avoid this in your adventurous ordering it's called Chicheron - the waitress just told him that meant pork) We returned to the boat, took a nap and then headed into town to experience a Saturday night in La Paz. There was a national folklorico dance festival so we were able to see an hour of dancing in the public area on the Malecon (the promenade by the water) then we went to a tequila bar and ended up at a cowboy concert complete with two-step dancing and a live band. There was supposed to be a guitar duel but by about 1:15AM we couldn't wait any longer and we headed out in search of food. The problem is that people drink very late here but they don't eat after 10P. So, Nick and Peter ate hot dogs from a corner vendor along with all the other guys and the women were out of luck. We had a fun night and since I'll probably never be up that late again, unless I'm on watch, it was great to see what people do here. There was so much traffic last night the cars were barely crawling down the main street. I think that's more of a rush hour than any time mid-week during the day.
We leave the marina Wednesday morning and hopefully we'll have groceries on board and be ready to head to the islands for a few days. We're going to make our way south after 12/5 and plan to be in Puerto Vallarta by 12/11 or so. La Paz has been a nice stop.