BIG CHANGES ON MIRADOR

Mirador has been sitting at a dock in Marina Santa Rosalia since Saturday, August 10. Arlene returned to Tacoma on Saturday, August 17, and Jerry is trying to decide what to do from this point forward.

Despite the recent gains in the stock market; Arlene felt that she needed to return to work in order to provide us with a continuing source of income, medical, and dental insurance. Arlene was upset by the fact that we have lost about 25% of our total financial assets since I retired in June 2000. She was most upset that my retirement account, that we planned to live on for 10 years, has lost 41% of its value, not counting our withdrawals, since I retired.

My philosophy was and still is, "we will always be able to make our boat payments, and after that we'll just try to adjust our life style to fit our available income. If things get really bad in three to five years we'll sell Mirador and either get a smaller boat, or try something else. Let's keep cruising while we still have our health and the inclination to do it!"

Arlene's idea is that she can work for 18 to 24 months and thus insure that we will never have to sell Mirador. Then we can return to Mirador and continue our cruise with fewer money worries.

At this time I am still planning to single hand Mirador around the north part of the Sea of Cortez for the remainder of hurricane season and to sail to Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta, and then south along the Mexican Gold Coast for the winter. Puerto Vallarta is 525 miles SE of my current location.

Santa Rosalia is a neat little town of about 20,000 right in the center of the Baja coast of the Sea of Cortez. The marina here has slips for 10 boats and is run as a co-operative marina. The boaters in the marina, and we are all transient cruisers, take care of the slips and the club house which has a book trading library, showers and rest rooms, laundry facilities and two big upright coolers. One cooler is full of beer, 90 cents apiece, and the other is half full of soda and half full of cruisers food. Everything is run on an honor system chit basis. You just mark on your boat's chit for any thing you take from the cooler or anytime you use the laundry. When you want to leave, you settle up. The same with dock fees.

The slips do have water and power to them. Ricardo is the marina "manager" and is part of the family that owns the marina. Ricardo is in the clubhouse from about 9 AM to 3 PM most days. His main job is to ensure that anything we cruisers need is promptly provided. His extended family seems to own many of the businesses in Santa Rosalia. Any time you want or need anything, Ricardo has a "cousin" who provides just such a service. His wife owns the best restaurant, "El Muelle", in town where we spend a lot of time. The Muelle has the coldest beer and best hamburgers in Santa Rosalia. They also serve good pizza and great Mexican dishes. And, they are air conditioned inside.

We can get clean diesel fuel delivered to our boats while tied to the dock in the marina. You tell Ricardo how much fuel, exactly, you need and he drives his pickup to the PEMEX gas station where he fills one or more plastic 55-gallon drums. He then backs his truck up to the top of the dock ramp and siphons the fuel from the drums into your fuel tanks. The system actually works well and provides very clean diesel because the PEMEX station is a high volume diesel supplier to all the large trucks that operate between Baja Sur and California.

The of source of beer, both for the club house coolers and our boats personal supply, is another interesting example of how business is done on a personal level here. Ricardo will flag down the appropriate "route truck" as it drives by on the highway when beer is needed. For example, if we need Pacifico, Ricardo somehow knows when the big Pacifico truck will drive by the marina. He just sticks out his hand and the driver pulls into the parking lot. We then all buy cases of Pacifico beer at the same price it is sold to the Pacifico distributors.

The facilities are fairly run down. Hurricane Lester, 1997 I think, and then Hurricane Juliet in October 2000 took their toll on the marina and the buildings above the marina.

Santa Rosalia was a company town until the late 1970's when the French mining and smelter company pulled out. Santa Rosalia was built in the late 19th century to mine high grade copper ore and to then refine and process it. The mining company built a beautiful community in the canyon running down to the marina.

The Catholic church was designed and built out of iron by Gustav Eiffel. He displayed the church at the base of the Eiffel Tower; yes-it is the same Eiffel guy, at the Paris exposition. The Church was then disassembled, shipped to Brussels where it was used for a few years. During the 1890's the church was again disassembled and shipped to Santa Rosalia where it has been the center of town ever since.

Santa Rosalia is now home for a very busy Panga fishing fleet. This time of year about 50 Panagas leave the harbor about two hours before sunset and head 10 to 20 miles out into the Sea to catch squid.

The main part of Santa Rosalia is about a five-minute walk from the marina. There are four main streets running up the canyon from the waterfront. The town has three lovely; tree lined squares where it seems everyone hangs out. There are two fair sized grocery stores and a dozen tiendas that sell some food and produce.

The three autoparts stores have most anything a boat needs and there are several machine shops that can fix anything that can't be replaced.

We have found three or four excellent restaurants that are quite inexpensive. The two of us can eat a big dinner, with appetizers for about $12. Beer, of course is extra, but is still only $1.50 a bottle.

Several of the boats in the Marina arrived in late June on their way north and never left because they like it here so much. The entire Santa Rosalia harbor is man-made. The French mining company built the 15' high breakwater about 1890 in order to have a safe place to load and unload the square-riggers and then steam ships that brought coal for the smelter furnaces and hauled away the copper ingots. The harbor entrance faces Southeast and provides excellent protection from anything except a hurricane headed up the west coast of Baja.

Last year Tropical Storm Juliet (she was a hurricane until she crossed the Baja Penninsula from the Pacific into the Sea of Cortez) made a direct hit on Santa Rosalia. But, the 50 to 60 knot wind was from the NNE so the breakwater served its purpose. The waves from Juliet were high enough that they knocked over a semi-trailer that was parked on top of the breakwater, waiting to unload a shrimper. Even though the winds were from the NNE the storm surge and wrap around swell was enough to seriously damage the marina docks. At the height of the storm all the boat owners in the marina, three of them are here again this year, took their abandon ship bags and retreated to the safety of the club house, about 10' above high tide. Eventually the ramp to the docks broke free but the boats were not damaged.

We have a pretty active social schedule in the marina. There is a dominoes game every afternoon from 3 PM until 6 PM on the promenade overlooking the marina. For you dominoes aficionados, we play "chicken foot", rather than "Mexican Train" which I prefer. I don't want to imply that less skill is needed to play chicken foot, BUT, last night Stevie, a 7-year old off of SV Youlan, (a Tartan 34 from Seattle) beat four other adults and myself in a three-hour game to 500 points.

We have a pot luck dinner, again on the promenade, once a week. Last Monday we had a Chinese theme and I was astounded at the quality of the food. Paul, from RioKoSha even made California rolls with real seaweed. Six to ten of us go out to dinner in Santa Rosalia several times a week.

We do have an abundance of excellent cooks. Two cheesecakes and two Key Lime pies have appeared on the promenade for a late evening dessert during the two weeks I have been here.

The promenade is well sheltered from the afternoon sun and almost always gets a nice cool breeze coming in off the Sea of Cortez. Of course cool is a relative term. The afternoon airtemp in the sun is seldom below 104 but in the shade it is usually about 93, or so, and the five or ten knot breeze makes the afternoon almost pleasant.

The chairs in the picture above are around the dominoes table and the beer coolers are just inside the door. The buildings in the background are part of the abandoned copper smelter which is being slowly recycled, as locals need parts for their houses or businesses.

There appears to be no security for any of the abandoned buildings and no environmental concerns. Our home in Tacoma, Washington was just a mile from the ASARCO copper smelter, which closed its doors about the same time as the Santa Rosalia smelter. The ASARCO smelter site was treated as an EPA superfund site and no one was allowed anywhere near it because of the quantity of arsenic dust and heavy metals that are a by-product of refining copper ore. But, the concerns are different here in Mexico.

The small road, between the parking lot and the abandoned building, is Mexican Highway 1 which is the ONLY highway from California, Tijuana, and Ensenada (or anywhere else) to Baja California Sur, including the capitol La Paz, and Cabo San Lucas. As Mexican 1 passes thru Santa Rosalia it is narrower than a typical older residential street in the US. The town of Santa Rosalia has built two speed bumps across the highway to slow traffic. I'm not trying to say things move slowly down here, BUT, it is not uncommon for there to be no traffic on the hiway for minutes at a time during the middle of the afternoon.

We left Bahia Santo Domingo on August 8 and motored almost the entire 32 miles to Caleta de los Arcos (Cove of the Arches) on the NW corner of Isla San Marcos. We were able to sail, for a while, at three to four knots with the drifter and the main but even that wind finally died. The los Arcos anchorage was spectacular. The water was crystal clear and 12' deep just a few feet off shore. There were many rocks sprinkled around the anchorage in deep water so we finally dropped anchor in 16 feet of water, about 100 yards off shore. I really wanted enough swinging room to put out 120' of chain and 30' of nylon snubber line to deal with the anticipated Chubascos.

A Chubasco is a late evening squall or thunderstorm that comes in from the eastern part of the sea. Like almost any squall they happen very suddenly and can be quite violent. We stayed at los Arcos two nights with no Chubascos. However, the first night in Santa Rosalia a Chubasco hit at 4 AM with 45-knot winds and heavy rain for about an hour. When the sun set at 8:15 PM there had not been even a small cloud in the eastern sky. The weather usually comes from the thunderstorms that build up in the monsoonal flow over the Mexican mainland on the eastern side of the Sea of Cortez. It is only 77-miles across the sea at this latitude so a Chubasco can blow from the Mainland mountains to Santa Rosalia in just a couple of hours. We were lucky because we had not put up our sun awning the afternoon before the Chubasco.

Los Arcos offered great diving. There are three or four caves to explore; one has two or three entrances, depending on the tide level. Since the water was so clear I was able to chase, as in not catch, many tasty looking fish. I am now convinced the fish know the exact range of a Hawaiian Sling (spear gun) and stay just outside that range. I did corner one nice three-pound pargo (snapper) between a couple of rocks. I shot it with the spear from about five feet. Somehow it managed to dart out of the way because the spear hit exactly where the fish had been.

l also had a neat encounter with a huge Green Moray eel while snorkeling between a rock cliff and a big rock that had broken off the cliff and fallen in the water. The passage was about four feet wide and six feet deep. Just as I got to the middle of the passage I noticed an eel headed toward me. When we ended up nose to nose, about three feet apart the eel dropped down to the bottom and I stayed on the surface at which point I realized the thing was over five feet long and as big around as my thigh. It just sat on the bottom and watched me as I swam over it, about two feet above its upturned jaws. I never felt like the eel was threatening me, but I also never saw that the eel was afraid of me.

While anchored at los Arcos we were able to watch the Panga fleet come flying out of Santa Rosalia at sunset, headed for the reef and shoals NE of Isla San Marcos. These Pangas are all 25 to 30 feet long, wide open, and using 75 to 100 HP outboards. They all exhibit one (1) all around white light and they all travel at 25 to 35 knots. Each boat has a driver, who steers the boat by holding on to the tiller attached to the outboard, and a helper who stands on the bow, holding a rope and watching for ???

I don't know how they avoid collisions. One night at 11 PM I counted over 50 pangas within two miles of Mirador. And, those were just the ones with lights. Lots of them don't display any lights while underway, a few switch to all around green lights when underway. None of the outboards have alternators so each panga carries a Group 27 car battery to power their single light. A dead or weak battery is no reason to miss a night of fishing.

We sailed the 10 miles from Caleta de los Arcos to Marina Santa Rosalia in a very nice 12 to 15 knot SE breeze. But it was hot, the cockpit air temperature, in the shade, on the water, with 10 knots of apparent wind thru the cockpit was 97 degrees at 3 PM as we approached the Santa Rosalia breakwater.

The weather in Santa Rosalia has been decent since our arrival. As I mentioned earlier, the afternoon air temperature is always above 100 in the sun. We keep the sun awning up all the time and the interior boat temperature seldom exceeds 91 or 92. By 10 PM the cabin temperature is back down to 86 and by daybreak it is usually 79 to 82 degrees inside and outside the boat.

We purchased a 6" 120V fan to help move air inside the boat. That has made a huge difference in the living conditions. I've found that 90 degrees is bearable, as long as at least a little air is moving. Many of the boats have three or four 120-volt fans running all the time.

My plans for the next six weeks are a little indefinite. The original idea was to take Mirador to San Carlos, 77 miles northeast across the Sea, and put her in dry storage for a month or two. I thought that would allow the keel to dry so I could repair the fiberglass damage from our reef grounding at Punta Cobre in early July. Now I am told that San Carlos is so humid this time of the year, due to the aforementioned monsoonal flow, that nothing will dry until after October. So, now I see little reason to go to San Carlos.

My tentative plan is to continue on north to Bahia de Los Angles, 135 miles, where there are several excellent hurricane holes. There is no good anchorage and only one tenative anchorage for the first 77 miles of the trip north. I guess I'll have to leave here early in the AM, Chubascos are supposed to all die out after 4 AM, and try to make it all the way to Bahia San Francisquito in one day. If the weather looks benign I can stop at Punta Trinidad which is 44 miles north. The problem with Trinidad is that it offers no protection from the East and NE which is were most Chubascos come from. Mirador can motor easily at 6.5 knots and with any kind of wind we can sail at six knots so I should be able to make Francisquito in 13 hours or less.

After Francisquito there are many nice and secure anchorages in and north of Bahia de Los Angels. There is even a small store in the pueblo of Bahia de los Angels where I can buy supplies.

If I go north, I will stay up there through the end of September in order to avoid any late season hurricanes. Only four hurricanes have made it as far north as Bahia de los Angles during the last 50 years.

Once hurricane season is winding down, October 5 or so, I will start south again. It is 330 miles from B of LA back to La Paz where I will put Mirador in dry storage for a month to dry the keel. That means that I will probably return to the States sometime in late October.

But, all this is subject to change.