Arrived

April 9, 2007
La Paz, BCS, Mexico

We arrived in La Paz this morning after a very fast passage. We sailed almost all the way, and with the wind just aft of the beam we were able to do 7 knots at times. It too just over 48 hours for us to cross from Mazatlan, which is a good 10 hours shorter then the last two times we've been over that stretch of water.

We've both had hot showers and a nap and are both very happy to be back on the Baja side and cruising again. I (John) even opened a book for the first time in almost 6 months!

John

Outbound for La Paz

April 7, 2007
At Sea

Well we were waffling on going across the Sea of Cortez today and had decided not to leave Mazatlan until tomorrow. But then we got out in the ocean and started sailing and it was so nice out we changed course for La Paz. How's that for decision making.

Hopefully the windy weather reported by other boats on the Baja side will break up a bit by Monday and we'll have a better ride. We'll see.

Our position at this time is:
23o 20'N 106o 40'W
ETA La Paz, Monday afternoon

John

Crash!

The inevitable happened on Tuesday. We suffered a complete hard drive crash on our notebook computer. Windows was wiped out and the computer would not boot. I put in the recovery CD and it couldn't even read the file system on the hard drive.

I have a couple extra notebook sized hard drives laying around on NAKIA so I put one in, installed Windows from the recovery CD and began the long process of getting all the applications loaded again. Man what a process.

We have a back up from November so our data was just out of date, not completely lost. The one thing that was really bad was that our back up from Quicken was a week or two old, which meant all our tracked expenses for that time were lost. In an effort to recover that, I bought some recovery software online and put the crashed hard disk into an external USB case. The recovery software (Data Doctor Recovery) was expensive but worked as advertised and I was able to recover all our Quicken data and all the pictures we'd taken since the November backup. Whew!

The one saving grace in all this was that this year I decided to do my taxes online at TurboTax.com instead of downloading the software and doing them on the computer. As a result, I didn't loose any of my yet-to-be-filed tax data. Yeah!

Now, everyone repeat after me: "I resolve to backup my valuable data every month!"

John

Mazatlan to San Carlos/Guaymas road trip

30 March 2007
Marina Mazatlan

As part of getting ready to leave Mazatlan for another summer in Baja we returned our truck to San Carlos, Sonora yesterday (Thursday). Here are some of the stats for the drive north:

490 miles
9 hours
9 toll road stops
545 pesos in toll fees
340 pesos for one premium gas fill-up on the road (we departed with a full tank, and left it empty in San Carlos)

After dropping the truck for storage with Ed and Dorothy we caught a TAP primera class bus back to Mazatlan that same afternoon:

11 hours
520 pesos per person
70 peso cab ride from the bus terminal back to the marina

Total trip time was about 23 hours, and it's obvious that bus travel is the most cost effective way to travel in Mexico. But having the truck with us for three months in Mazatlan was invaluable for making multiple trips to Home Depot and the industrial park for refit supplies.

We'll spend the next week putting the boat back together for the passage to La Paz. We've had the booms, sails, halyards, and sheets off to get them out of the way of the refit projects and all the condo construction dirt. John's put two coats of paint on the dodger, and we have the dinghy inflated again. It's almost difficult to imagine life on the hook again, and I'm sure we'll go through a bit of marina amenities withdrawal, but we're looking forward to going cruising again!

Linda and John