Paradise Found

Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico

We left the dock in San Diego around noon on Tuesday, with a lengthy stop at the incredibly expensive fuel dock at the head of Shelter island (would you believe $4.29US per gallon for diesel).  After topping up our fuel and propane and disposing of our used oil (I did an oil change while here in San Diego), we managed to head out of the harbour around 1 PM.

We motored for the first 2 hours, heading directly out to sea to get completely out of the busy San Diego harbour area and into deep water.  Because of the possible threat of lobster traps (of which we have never seen a single one as yet), we decided to stay well off shore where no-one would ever put such a trap.

We had raised our mainsail for the first time since leaving Neah Bay, double reefed in anticipation of a forecasted south wind.  Indeed, the promised wind arrived (around 7 knots initially), and we shut off the engine and sailed close hauled into the fading daylight.  We were actually in Mexican waters by around 3 PM.  As night fell, Susanne took these pictures of our first Mexican sunset - note the completely different range of hues from the sunset pictures we have taken north of the border.

Because we were sailing so far off shore, and having to tack back and forth into the south wind, we managed to turn the 65 mile journey into something closer to 83 miles overall.  This was ok, as we wanted to go slow so we did not arrive in Ensenada in the dark - we hate approaching any unfamiliar port at night.  With the double reefed mainsail and a full Genoa, and winds that were mostly in the 8 to 10 knot range, we were mostly sailing at around 3.5 to 4 knots.  When the wind freshened up to around 10 to 12, we managed closer to 5 knots, and actually saw 6 knots once (so Susanne tells me as it supposedly happened on her watch).  In all, we sailed for about 15-1/2 hours non-stop, some kind of record for us.

As morning broke, I was treated to a spectacular display by a pod of dolphins playing in our bow wave.  We have seen dolphins on pretty much every passage we have made down the west coast, but these stayed with us for the longest time, more than an hour.  There were probably 30 or 40 of them altogether, at times swimming in neat formations - a pretty cool welcome to Mexico.

We managed to stay ahead of a quick-moving winter storm that was threatening us from the north.  By the time we were approaching Ensenada, San Diego was reporting heavy rainfall and high winds.  It arrived in Ensenada about the same time we coasted into the marina.

During the night, we saw no ship traffic except for a Carnival cruise ship that was motoring slowly by us (missed us by about a mile), also heading for Ensenada.  When we arrived in the harbour, they were already there ahead of us, seemingly welcoming us to Paradise.  We tied up at the dock in the Cruiseport Village marina around 10 AM and then spent the bulk of the rest of the day (in the pouring rain), getting all of our paperwork done.  We had to get visas from immigration, entry clearance from the port captain, customs clearance (pushed the button and came up as "Passed", so no inspection necessary), and get a Temporary Import certificate for the boat.  This was all made much easier by the fact that all of these offices, and a banking outlet where you pay for everything, are all housed in the same one-storey building here in town, and also by the extremely friendly service of the marina staff (Jonathon), who lead us through the entire process, free of charge.  By the time we got back to the boat in the late afternoon, we were exhausted (a combination of the sleepless overnight passage and the stress of clearing into a new country), and we collapsed into bed early while the storm raged on outside for most of the night.

Today, our first any only task has been to find the Telcel office and purchase a 3G cellphone stick to allow us to get internet access so I could do this post.  If you are seeing this on the blog, you know it worked.  If there are lots of spelling errors, it is because the spell-checker now seems to be stuck in spanish.

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