Lazy Blogger

Sherry
Mar 13, 2019
5 min read

Updated: Dec 30, 2019

Well, we have returned again to our homestead in New Mexico after a short but enjoyable season in Mexico. I am ashamed to admit that due to my laziness/propensity for procrastination I did not write one single blog about our adventures. Now that we are home, I thought I should at least write about a few highlights for those of you where wondering where we were and what we were doing.

Our goal upon arriving at the boat yard was to spend as little time as possible on the hard completing projects, and gave ourselves one month to get onto the water. While Jim had plenty of time to leisurely work on some maintenance and small projects, for me, the pressure was on! My project this year was sewing a dodger for the boat so that for the first time we have some wind and rain protection, as well as some additional shade, while sailing. No, I am not a seamstress, nor do I have the appropriate skills or equipment to be a seamstress; but I do play one on the boat. With all the compound curves and thick layers of heavy materials, it was by far the most difficult sewing project I have attempted. However, we did meet our one-month deadline, and the dodger turned out pretty nice (if looked at from a distance), and what it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in function!

We spent Thanksgiving in the boat yard by attending a huge Thanksgiving potluck hosted by our friends Ron and Diane of Batwing. Everyone had a great time socializing and feasting on incredible amounts of food. We also went to the Annual Guaymas Shrimp Festival, something we wanted to do last year but missed due to our misinterpreting the date on a billboard. The festival included too many gourmet shrimp dishes to try them all—but we gave it our best shot!

Shrimp Festival

Thanksgiving in the Boat Yard

Leaving the Boat Yard

Once on the water, we spent a few days in the local area just to make sure all systems were working properly, then headed across the Sea of Cortez to Santa Rosalia where we stayed through the new year. Santa Rosalia is a very cool historic mining town. A French mining company, Boleo, founded it in the late 1800’s exploiting its copper until closing in 1954. The old mining operations were never dismantled and are mostly deteriorating, but they have rescued some of this history for public display throughout the town. They have a wonderful mining museum as well. The main church, Iglesia de Santa Barbara, was designed by Gustave Eiffel and continues to be used. The French influence in this town (particularly the architecture), made it quite unique for a small Mexican town.

Another neat feature in Santa Rosalia is the bakery El Boleo. They bake their bread in some old gas fired brick ovens and shuffle the bread in and out using an incredibly long wooden paddle. We unfortunately chose Christmas Eve to purchase some bread--a day where most of the town's residents seemed to have had the foresight to order ahead, while the rest of us stood in line for hours. You might wonder why one would stand in line that long for bread. Well, after the first half hour we think, "we have been in line for this long, so we can't leave now as it couldn't be much longer...". We thought the same thing after the hour mark, until it became comical. After all, what else did we have to do that day besides stand in line? It gave our day a purpose. Any other day we could have been in and out in minutes, however EVERYONE is buying fresh bread on Christmas Eve--and lots of it. Pre-ordered bread was baked in advance an ready to go, but they weren't able to bake fast enough to keep up with the demand from people who didn't order ahead. As we stood in line there were moments of excitement (every 20 minutes or so), when a fresh hot batch of bread was brought out, followed by disappointment when we realiezed that the people in the front of the line were buying it all up. But in merely a matter of hours, we too had our bag of hot, freshly baked bread...delicious! You will see in the pictures that they had several turkeys they were preparing to bake in the ovens. We wished that we were on the list to be getting one of those.

At the Marina in Santa Rosalia there was a giant Osprey nest on top of a tower. The parents regularly hunted for fish to feed their baby and kept all other birds out of the air space around their nest. There was a nearby flagpole that the parents would sit at as they ripped the fish into bite sized morsels. Under the pole was a mess of dried fish pieces they had dropped, which Lily thought had been left as a tasty buffet for her---yum!

We restricted our sailing to a very small area this year, knowing that we were returning in only a few months. After Santa Rosalia we spent most of our time in remote anchorages around and in Bahia Conception—though many of Conception’s anchorages seem less than remote due to their popularity in sailing and beach RVer communities.

Staying in this relatively northern location made for a much colder season than we anticipated. We were only able to get into the colder water a half dozen times or so and spent a lot of time inside the boat reading. Lily on the other hand was not daunted in the least by the colder weather and water. She became quite the confident swimmer in her passionate desire to chase any nearby Grebe duck. Several times she got so far out that we rowed out to her in our dinghy to make sure she was okay. We always made her swim back to the shore as we rowed nearby hoping to teach her the limits of her ability, however, she never seemed to tire!

The cooler temperatures made it perfect for desert hiking, of which we also did plenty. One of our favorite peaks was a hike out of El Burro to the musical rocks. The views were spectacular! And be sure to check out the video of Jim demonstrating the musical rocks in the video section of our website.