Puerto Escondido

From Agua Verde, we went to Puerto Escondido, where we picked up a mooring. Oddly, the mooring balls are arranged in such a way that the moorings for the biggest boats are closest to the dock, while the mooring for smaller boats are waaay out in the back of the harbor. I say oddly because bigger boats are more likely to have powerful, fast dinghys, and so would seem to me to be best equipped to have a longer way to travel to get to the dock than would smaller boats. Whatever. We tied up to a mooring for a boat of our size and then proceeded to go beg Raphael, who is in charge of the harbor, to let us tie up to a mooring ball about 30 fet from the dock - no doubt intended for some hundred foot mega yacht. Since there were no boats fitting that description here at the time, he was more than happy to let us have it.

Having a close in mooring that meant we didn't have to deal with putting the dogs and the motor on the dinghy, which turned out to be a very good thing, as when Art looked at the motor, there was a crack in the integral fuel tank. We went through various possibilities - try to find a new one in Loreto? Get one ordered and sent up on the bus from the place where we bought the motor in La Paz? Convert the motor to use an external fuel tank (possibly voiding the warranty on what's basically a brand new engine)? None of these seemed like particularly good options. Luckily, Alvin, who runs the shop at the yard here, put us in touch with Mitch, who thought he might be able to epoxy it back together, and if not, was driving down to La Paz in a couple of days and could try to get one for us there. Luckily, the epoxy job seems to be holding, and we'll order a new tank when we get back to La Paz.

We rented a car here, and took a few side trips to Loreto, San Javier and Mulege. We also did some provisioning. Loreto is a surprisingly great place to provision - there is a store called Dali that has a fantastic selection of frozen meats and imported stuff like good wine and crackers, and also a fairly large supermarket called El Pescador.

Puerto Escondido is very protected - lucky for us, as it's been extremely windy here, so we've wound up staying a few more days than we'd planned.