New Toy

While I was back in the US recently, I bought a lensbaby kit. I have some experience using a view camera, where you can alter the angle between the film and the lens (among other things), and thought it might be fun to be able to do something similar with my SLR. It is:




I'm going to need a lot more practice with it, but I'm looking forward to using it in Mazatlán this winter.

Isla San Francisco

With Art back in town and a favorable weather forecast, we decided to take off for a short cruise on June 2nd. Our friend Crit came along on her boat, too. This was great, both for the company and because we shared meals pretty much every night, which meant only half the cooking and cleanup for each boat as we otherwise would have had.

Our first stop was Caleta Partida. We've been in this anchorage quite a few times, and it remains one of our favorites. The water, though, was still too cold for comfortable swimming - I need to be really, really hot before I'll voluntarily jump into 24c (75f) water. It was hot, but it wasn't that hot. Still, there was plenty to do - we spent some time enjoying our new outboard motor and tooling around the anchorage. That was a great way to create some breeze in the middle of the day, when there was none otherwise, but we both got a wee bit baked from the sun and the fact that we stupidly forgot to bring any water with us.

After two days in Partida, we headed up to Isla San Francisco. Isla San Francisco is a drowned, extinct volcano. The anchorage is in the crater. It has beautiful white sand beaches. It is so very much the perfect Sea of Cortez anchorage that it is the cover of the main cruising guide for this part of the world. It is, in short, gorgeous. I'll shut up now and post some pictures. These next five were taken by Art, as I cleverly managed to break a toe our second afternoon at the island - no hiking for me.


Arione at anchor with the Sierra Gigante mountains behind:










Looking across at the Sierra Gigante, early in the morning:



Crit's boat, JASDIP*, at anchor at Isla San Francisco:




*JASDIP = Just Another $#!^^y Day in Paradise

Carnaval!

Carnaval in La Paz runs through tonight. It started last Thursday. The Maleçon is pretty much shut down, and lined on both sides with booths selling food, beer, drinks, souvenirs and games.

For some reason, I really get a bang out of the balloon vendors. They look like they're carrying an impossible amount of stuff until you remember that what they're carrying is mostly, well, air. Still, I'm guessing that many mylar balloons has got to be pretty heavy.

Balloon Sellers

Most of the games involve shooting things or fishing them out of a pool of water.

There are also lots and lots of rides.

Things get going around 4:00 in the afternoon and get more and more raucous with music and dancing until the whole thing shuts down sometime well after 3:00. This has made getting any sleep an interesting proposition, as our marina is right downtown and it's been too hot to close the hatches at night. However, since someone either re-aimed or muted the freak show loudspeaker that was blasting "La niña más pequeña del mundo!" over and over at approximately 20,000 db on Thursday and Friday nights, it's not too bad.

(I have no idea why Mary Poppins is on this sign.
I'm also pretty sure "la niña mas pequeña" is
bigger than that. By quite a bit.)

The last three nights of Carnaval, there are parades. We went to the first one, on Sunday and watched from the street. That was fun, but the crowd was so dense it took us about an hour and a half to walk the mile back to our marina. And, in this mass of people all pressed together and moving different directions, we kept seeing women with strollers, usually trying to get from one side of the street to the other. It was wild. And I was a little afraid for the kids.

We went to last night's parade as well, but this time we had seats on the balcony at a restaurant above the action. Much better view, less claustrophobia, food and fun people. Much better. Unfortunately, set back a bit from the street, so it was hard to throw eggs at the parade. Not actual eggs - in La Paz (and who knows, perhaps in other parts of Mexico as well) they sell hollowed out eggs filled with confetti to throw.

Eggs

It's very festive. For some reason, the crowd was quite a bit thinner last night, so the walk home wasn't bad at all.

Some floats:




I believe these three ladies were the queen of Carnaval and her court:







There was a kids court as well:





Because where there are pelicans, there is guano, I like the realism on this one:



We were at the tail end of the parade route, so many of the participants, including, I suspect, this guy who got off of one of the floats and came up to see us in the restaurant, were pretty well lubed.

Caleta Partida

Art's son Todd is down visiting this week, so we wanted to take him out to the islands. We went to Caleta Partida, which we're been past a couple of times, but never visited. Nice spot. The coromuels cooperated (by not piping up) and we had two very pleasant nights there. Unfortunately, it's been uncharacteristically cloudy (it even rained a little yesterday afternoon and this morning), but it was warm, and the afternoons brightened up fairly reliably.



Before we left La Paz, we bought an outboard for our dinghy. We'd been trying to be purists and get by with just rowing our (hard) dinghy. That works fine when it's calm, but with any sort of wind or chop, it takes a really long time to get anywhere. We found a 2.5 HP Mercury at a shop here. Outboards are about twice as expensive here as they are in the states, but short of driving up there and bringing it back (hard to do, even if we had a car, which we don't) there's not really any good way to bring one down. So we paid up, and now have the world's tiniest four stroke outboard sitting on our stern rail. It works great, especially with the dinghy dogs on the Trinka. We aren't going to set any speed records, but it beats the heck out of rowing everywhere.

Todd and I each went for a paddle in the kayak - Caleta Partida has a passage at the back of it that leads between Isla Espiritu Santu and Isla Partida - it's too shallow except at high water to even get the dinghy through, but since the kayak draws about four inches, you can get pretty far back in it. We played around with the outboard on the dinghy (under the pretense of breaking it in), and did a lot of reading and lounging around. After the past two weeks, it was just what I needed.


They're not kidding when they talk about gin clear water. It felt like I was paddling around in a very large puddle of Bombay Sapphire. Except that wouldn't have smelled very good:

We have an inflatable kayak (the double/single one all the way at the bottom) with a frame and a backbone. It is one of my very favorite toys.


Sunrise in Caleta Partida:




On the way back to La Paz, we were boarded by the Mexican Navy. At least we think they were the Navy - they never actually identified themselves, but the uniforms and automatic weapons were sort of a dead giveaway. At first, we thought they were trying to sell us pictures of our boat (our Spanish, while a lot better, is still bad), as two of the guys had digital cameras and were snapping away like mad, but when we tried to tell them we already had a lot of pictures of our boat, it quickly became clear that that wasn't what they were interested in. They asked us all about our safety equipment, checked our paperwork (thankfully not dinging us for not having updated our crew list with Todd's name, which I think is technically required, but seemed like an awful lot of work for a three day trip), and then had Art complete some sort of customer satisfaction survey. He answered "¡muy bien!" to everything - with a guy holding an AK-47 about 5 feet away, really, what else was he going to check?

We're back in La Paz at Marina Palmira for a few more days. Next week, we'll move to Marina de La Paz, which finally has space for us. That's much more convenient to downtown, restaurants, etc. Marina Palmira is nice, but it's kind of out in the middle of nowhere, and you have to take a taxi or the three times a day shuttle to get anywhere. The bus, at 8 pesos, is much less expensive than a taxi, and more fun, too.

Todd goes home tomorrow. It was kind of a bummer that the weather was so cloudy and cool for the week of his visit - it was in the 70's and sunny all week in Menlo Park where he lives, but it sure was great to have him here.

Ford Point

When we went out yesterday to pump out and fuel up, I noticed the old Ford plant building up by Marina Bay. That, I thought, is a really cool looking building. Because I love old industrial buildings when we got back to the boat, I drove over there and took some pictures:














A lot of old assembly line buildings are mostly glass - it was expensive to light a line, so why not use natural light when it was available?




















I'd think that might make them difficult to light at night, though.



















Maybe they had curtains.



































I'm fairly sure that most of the interior partitions are later add ons - it must have been really impressive as a huge open space.



















It's apparently part event space and part offices for companies - most outdoors-y or green - e.g. Title IX and a solar energy company (which had several Priuses parked in front).

Some other shots in the same general vicinity: