June 25, 2005
Ensenada Puerto Almeja (aka La Ramada), 26o 23' N 111o 27' W
About 40 miles south of Mulege
After three days of blasting wind all day the wind finally quit, of course now it's a LOT hotter, 88o F during the day and cooling off to 80 by bed time. The bad thing is, at about 3am a westerly wind comes up that's just as hot as the sun beating down on the deck. Last night it was 87o F at 0400. Makes it hard to sleep even without clothes or covers...
Ray and Jayne from Adios and Alan from Blue Moon taught us about 'Chocolates' yesterday. Chocolates (prounounced "cho ko lah' tays") are brown clams that live in 10-20 ft of water. They're easy to find by the tubes they use to breathe and feed through. They show on the bottom as two small white tubes at the bottom of a 1/2" indentation in the sand. To gather them you look for the two holes from the surface and once you sight them you swim down (it helps if you do it at low tide, that way the water's shallower) and dig them out of the sand. I even designed and built a special shovel made out of a piece of 2 inch ABS plastic pipe. An hours worth of diving and we had more than enough for dinner. We cooked them over an open fire on the beach at sunset with nothing more then a bit of tobasco sauce to garnish them. Very tasty.
We also did a little snorkeling, even though the water has been very opaque (making the visibility bad - maybe 10 ft), and I saw what I think was a Jeweled Moray Eel.
The fishing hasn't been that great and the worst possible thing I can imaging happening happened the other night. I was trolling out around some rocks and getting a lot of needle fish strikes (needle fish have very bony mouths so they rarely get hooked) when I got a big strike and pulled hard to set the hook. That's when the line parted and I lost my best (read most productive) lure. Bummer! Lures like it are simply not available in Mexico, so now I have to find my 'next best lure'.
Adios left this morning, leaving only Blue Moon and us in Ensenada Puerto Almeja. Alan says he's taking off tomorrow, which may give us the chance to have an anchorage to ourselves for once. Hopefully no one will come in tomorrow to spoil our skinny dipping plans.
John and Linda