Zabels At Sea

This . . .

is a whaleshark.  We went on a trip on a local boat today to see whalesharks, and we saw at least five, probably more.  After a while, we weren’t sure if we were seeing the same one repeatedly.

Whalesharks are about 15-20 feet long.  They are the largest fish species in the ocean (i.e. they are not mammals, they are big sharks).  They eat plankton, like a balleen whale, thus the name, I suppose.

They are large, swim as fast as they want to – not generally very fast – and are tolerant of inter-species swimming.  They have very powerful tails.  When they get tired of your shenanigans, they just move a little fast or deeper.  Before you know it, they are gone.

Big tail.

They like this part of the Sea of Cortez for its warmth and food supply.  Their bodies are spotted.  Our trip companions, Cynthia and Butch, got much better pictures than we did:

The spots are beautiful and more colorful than they appear in these pictures.  You might try to find other pictures on the internet.

All of us had a chance to get up close and personal with one of these animals today.  Larry touched one by mistake (you’re not supposed to touch them.)  I swam beside one for a ways before my mask started to fill up with water (I hadn’t put it on securely before I jumped in.)

We would not have seen any of these magnificent animals without the help of our terrific driver, Juan:

The lady standing behind him is the business side of the business (so to speak).  She was there to organize us (quite a feat in itself!), send us off, and greet us on our return.  I think her name is Tessa.

We are pretty sure that this final best picture – person and shark — is of Cynthia, the participant in our group who got us together:

All in all, a very successful and exciting day!

Tomorrow, we are going to Caleta Partida, or bust!  It is an anchorage between Isla Ispiritu Santo and Isla Partida.  We’ll post a report over the weekend.

***Edit by Gilligan:****

Muggs asked me to insert this neat video they took of the whalesharks, so here it is:

We also have a  YouTube video prepared by someone who went on the whaleshark trip with them:

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Just taking some time out for some personal business – Muggs had a lot of dental work done – and then getting ready for something called La Paz Bayfest.  Larry will be teaching a one-hour class about knot tying, and Muggs will be displaying her artwork at the Art Show!  Maybe I will get a chance to get pictures of this for my next posting.

Meanwhile, we are getting ready to go out for a few days in the local islands.  Earlier this week, we purchased a 120v juicer.  Yesterday, Larry bought 10 pounds of oranges (at least – maybe more!!).  So we are having fresh-squeezed orange juice for the next week or so, courtesy of our 150w inverter that runs the juicer without having to turn on the engine or generator:

Pretty cool, huh!!

We hope to see whale sharks soon.  These are the largest living fish species.  They congregate not far from where we are anchored, so maybe we will see some as we leave tomorrow.  Possibly not, though, since a lot of breeze is expected which will make the water choppy and not conducive to seeing these big guys.

I will report later.  Until then, remember that manana (tilde on the first n) doesn’t really mean tomorrow – it just means not today!!

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Larry went with Cecile and Leo of Chat de Mer to Mazatlan where they joined and watched the celebration of Carnaval.  You can see Chat de Mer in this picture, but I won’t trouble you with the how-to-find-it details.

They were joined much of the time by fun-loving fellow cruisers, Doug and Linda of Aquadesiac:

Doug and Linda went in search of a taco stand, and they met a guy named Ernesto who reassured them that it was OK to eat at a particular place – the food was very good.  So Doug and Linda struck up a conversation and friendship with this guy instantly (that’s how it works down here), and the next thing you know, they’ve been invited to Ernesto’s home for his wife’s birthday party.  Doug asked Larry to tag along, so off he went, never one to turn down an invitation to a party!

Here is Ernesto’s wife (Larry can’t remember her name) beginning the pinata pounding that is required at all birthday parties.

At Ernesto’s home, they all met a man named John who invited them to his home for a small gathering.  Ernesto did the cooking at John’s condo where Larry ate four helpings of shrimp ceviche!!  That’s Larry Zabel, non-fish eating person!  Also at John’s home, they met a neighbor and guest of John’s named Bob St. Claire.  Bob played for the SF 49er’s in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s and is in the Hall of Fame!  He signed his ‘49ers player’s card for Larry and several other guests.Left to right:  John, Bob, and Ernesto.

View from John’s condo.

The view from his condo at sunset.

Then our boy was off to enjoy a big-time street party.

Street gate.

The Tecate girls.

Linda and friend Pat with a real party animal!

Leo and Doug with the Bud Light girls!

Our very own party animal in a special disguise!

They paid for a buffet and bleacher-style seating for the parade.  Here are the desserts.  Droollll!

Colorful (if commercial) parade floats.  The parade went on for a while, past sunset:

The nighttime floats were not commercial.  There were a lot of religious themes.

Finally, it was all over.  Leo and Cecile were going on south, so Larry hopped on a ferry for the overnight return to La Paz:

  Leaving Mazatlan, Larry took a few pictures of the passing sights from his on-board suite.

A final shot of the anchorage he had stayed in during his stay.  The sailboat on the right is Doug and Linda’s Aquadesiac.

Upon his return to La Paz, Larry realized that Carnaval wasn’t over yet!  So, of course, he had to join the festivities here in La Paz:

This was more of a family affair, both in subject and execution:

But it was not without beauty and beast:

Larry says that the public threw “eggs” at the police car which were actually emptied shells filled with confetti!

   One of our fellow cruisers was in the parade with her hula hoop.  She and her husband are cruising around the world with the plan of visiting and participating in all of the world’s major fiestas and celebrations!

Above, a cock fight and warriors from centuries past.

Muggs’s trip home was much less exciting, but not without its moments.  One Friday night, she went with Larry’s mom, Elizabeth, E’s mom, Brady and Russell to her first-ever live ice hockey game in Stockton.  She snapped these phone-pics of Brady in a foam ice-hockey mask and #1 finger:

Brady practiced basketball at the house across the street:

Then she watched him play goalie for his soccer team at a very nice, indoor soccer field:

Brady is right in front of the goal, in yellow shoes.

There was a birthday celebration for Elizabeth’s mum:

Otherwise, I ran around taking care of various bits of personal business and spending money at West Marine like a wild thing.

We are both back in La Paz now with crazy plans of maybe going sailing some day soon.  We shall see what we shall see!  First, we have some dental work to attend to.  We have found a great dentist down here – a woman whose physician-father sent her to high school in the Bay Area so that she would learn perfect English.  Last night, we went to a local place where a gringo band played great blues and classic rock.  Larry got himself a job helping with the sound at their next gig.  Right now, we are going to take the bikes and ride down the malecon to the ice cream parlor.  Adios!

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I have just been reminded that I did not tell the story of fixing our starter.  It’s interesting only because it illustrates the way things work down here in the cruiser community.

Roger on Avalon came over one day and spent the afternoon taking the starter solenoid apart and putting it back together.  The rebuilt solenoid still didn’t work properly.  Roger knew the guy we bought the starter motor from last September in Oakland, and he called him.  He arranged for a replacement to be provided since it was determined that the original was faulty.  (The quick replacement was possible because Muggs was able to find the original purchase paperwork!)

A friend of ours from Grand Marina, who is cruising now, went home in January in order to bring his car back to Mexico.  John of Aventura picked up the new starter in Oakland and brought it to us about two weeks ago.  Larry installed it, and it worked first time, every time!  Muggs will return the original starter motor on her trip to California next week.

John on Aventura came to Mexico this year because he was talking with Larry in the marina, wondering what to do next in his life.  Larry suggested that he do the HaHa, and now he has an FM3 visa and is living the good life here in Mexico!

Hasta luego, mis amigos!

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Why waiting for the Oscar nominations, you ask – because, for the first time, and I am quite certain the only time, we have a (very small) personal connection.  There is a very good chance that Jeremy Renner will be nominated for Best Actor.  There is pretty much a 100% chance that the picture he was in this year, “The Hurt Locker”, and its director, Kathryn Bigelow, will be nominated for best picture and best director.

Jeremy Renner came to Modesto Junior College in the fall of 1990 and auditioned for the role of the Scarecrow in our production of “The Wizard of Oz”.  We cast him in the role, and the rest, as they say, is history.  My best friend, Elizabeth (Brady’s mom) was our Wicked Witch of the East with the green make-up.  Many more of you receiving e-mail messages regarding website updates were part of that production.  You know who you are. 

Anyway, when Larry and I heard about this movie last summer, we went to see it.  We agree with all of the many-starred reviews that this is a terrific movie.  Jeremy’s performance and Bigelow’s direction are both stunning.  If you haven’t seen it, you must make a point of buying a copy of the DVD of “The Hurt Locker”.  My favorite scene – in the desert, taking out the snipers.  Fun fact – Kathryn Bigelow is the ex-wife of James Cameron, the director of this year’s Big Movie “Avatar”.  I would put the odds at better than good that she will take the director’s award while his movie gets the best picture nod.  The director and movie wins are usually for the same movie, but money talks in Hollywood.  “Avatar” is taking it in by the bucketload.

So, back to La Paz, Larry will be leaving in the next couple of days for points east.  He is going to Mazatlan on a boat called Chat de Mer.  We have spent a bit of time recently with the Skipper and First Mate, Leo and Cecile, and they are adding much fun to our lives here in La Paz.  The trip to Mazatlan is timed to coincide with Carnaval, Feb. 11-16.  Larry will return on a different boat, Carefree II, since Chat de Mer will continue cruising south on the mainland of Mexico.

Cecile and I joined a group that traveled to Todos Santos on Saturday.  TS is on the Pacific side of Baja, about an hour’s drive away.  The migrating whales are sometimes visible from the beaches there, and we got lucky.  There was a whale that spent over 45 minutes near the surf line, blowing and swimming, a little spy-hopping, and once rolling in a wave parallel to the beach.  Of course, I got not a single bit of evidence of this on film, but I took lots of pictures of the surf!

This gorgeous beach is only accessible by dirt track with 4-wheel drive.  The route is not marked.

Earlier, the group had lunch at the Hotel California.  This beautiful hotel and restaurant is nicer than anything we saw in Cabo:

Silvie from Puddytat took the picture:

I just had to put her picture in here, because she was such great fun all day long with great stories and lots of laughs.  This lady was born and raised in, and carries a passport issued by, Zimbabwe.  Many of her stories explained, from a very personal point of view, what it was like to live in a country run by scary people.  Cecile, myself, and Sylvie spent the late afternoon on our own, browsing through the galleries and art shops at leisure.  We also found the best ice cream in Baja.  It was so delicious and creamy that we went back again later and had some more!

Sometime during the afternoon, we stopped at the bus station and purchased tickets for a 7:00 pm return bus.  Then we called my husband, who spent the day with Leo, skipper of Chat de Mer, and told them they had a few hours before they had to send the dancing girls away – LOL!  On the bus ride home, we saw the second half of a missable movie called “Wild America”.  It caught my eye, though, because a Ryan PT-22 airplane figured prominently in the drama.  This is a primary trainer from WWII.  My father owned one of these planes  for about 10 years in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s.  The movie brought back a lot of fond memories.  When we were first married, Larry used to ride in that plane with my dad when he (my dad) competed in “spot landing” contests at fly-ins.  They took first place more than once, as I recall, mostly due to all the weight Larry added!  It made putting the plane down in a specific spot a lot easier!

Earlier last week, Larry had already visited TS when another friend here, Roger on Avalon, took his wife, Jean, to the airport near Cabo.  They asked us to come along because I have a Costco card (yes, Elizabeth, I finally have my own card!) and they didn’t.  The only Costco store down here in southern Baja is in Cabo, so we did a Costco run last week after delivering Jean to the airport.  Then on the way back to La Paz, we stopped in TS for lunch and a quick look around.  We had lunch at Hotel California that day, too:

Kind of a funny picture of a funny guy!  (Actually, this is a cellphone picture.)

Three musicians on the roof:

Metal sculptures!

Last but not least, Muggs had a birthday, so we went out to dinner with friends, Donna and Greg of Magic Carpet.  They helped us out by taking this picture:

Note that Larry is wearing a jacket!  It’s a little cool in the evenings, sometimes.  You see that I am NOT wearing a jacket, and we were both comfortable.

I fly to California on Saturday for a two week visit with a busy calendar.  I hope to see many of you then.

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Yup, we are back in La Paz!  But this time we didn’t get blown out.  We actually had a lovely time as reported earlier.  However, when we were planning to leave yesterday and proceed farther north, Larry got to thinking and decided that he just wasn’t comfortable with getting farther from La Paz without fixing our balky starter motor.  Pretty much every time we go to start the engine, there are several unsuccessful clicks by the starter.  Then he has to beat it into submission.  We just weren’t anxious to deal with that and have it fail on us completely in a remote anchorage.  Why we couldn’t have decided to deal with this last month when we were footloose and fancy free here, before and after the holidays, is anyone’s guess, but I think it is related to some funky aspect of the Mayan calendar (i.e. we are not getting any younger!)

So we had a wonderful visit to our boat yesterday by Roger and Jean Wise who have established a boat mechanical repair business down here in La Paz. (Jean is a friend of  Muggs’s from the Oakland Yacht Club ladies’ book club.  She and Muggs ran into each other (well, not literally, of course!) last summer while Jean was up in Alameda.  Jean immediately offered to help us learn the ropes of cruising and living in Mexico.  We met her husband, Roger, at the club on the night of our get-together.  And now we have met up with them again here in La Paz where they are in the thick of things at the Club Cruceros.)

Anyway, Roger specializes in electrical problems and refrigeration, so he is the first person we called when we got back.  He and Larry spent two or three hours yesterday, kneeling on the floor, rebuilding the starter motor solenoid.  The engine started nicely twice, but then not again for about 5 or 6 more tries.  Very disheartening, but at least he was pretty certain that the problem is a manufacturing defect.  As of now (next day afternoon), the supplier we purchased it from (in Oakland) has been contacted.  He is rebuilding another one for us in Oakland.  Our friend, John Rollins, will go pick it up and bring it to us when he returns to La Paz in a week or two in his car.  John Rollins was a boat neighbor of ours at Grand Marina in Alameda, and he just happens to have returned to the area in order to take his car out of storage and bring it down to La Paz.  This is a REALLY small world.

In the meantime, we are “trapped” again in La Paz but loving every minute of it.  Today, we received this picture from Rod and Elisabeth of Proximity:

This was taken in Puerto Balandra where we had our scary evening at anchor a month ago.  This was taken as the sun was setting behind the photographer.  The gray “slash” below the main boom is our dinghy partially hoisted.  This is probably two hours before all hell broke loose.  I hope you agree with me that this is an amazing and beautiful picture.  Unfortunately, we didn’t take any pictures of Proximity for them.

That’s all for now.  Adios!

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At GPS 24 degrees 25.6’ lat., 110 degrees 21.6’ longitude.

Close

We are in Bahia San Gabriel on the west coast of Isla Ispiritu Santo which forms the east side of Bahia de La Paz.  Last night’s sunset:

Larry took four shots of the sunset, and he got birds in this one.  they are pelicans.  Other daylight pics before the sunset:

Guess who

Next day we went to short by dinghy:

The camera I used here is nearly impossible to use during bright sunlight.  There is no way to preview the image.  I literally pointed and clicked and hoped.  That dot on the horizon is our boat at anchor.  The distance to our boat is about one-half mile.  The boat is anchored in 16’ of water way out there.  These coves are very shoaly – lots of banked up sand and shallow water.

We had the waterproof camera (hence the problem) thinking we would be snorkeling.  It turns out there isn’t a lot of good snorkeling here, but we did go over to a lagoon that was used in the past for oyster/pearl farming.  I think the oysters died out suddenly sometime in the 1940’s.

When I tried to go ashore there, I was chased by a couple of wasps.  We got out of there, sprayed again with bug repellant, went back, and then chickened out.  Like Larry said, I didn’t want to get up on the rocky bank and find myself in the middle of a swarm of wasps!

Tomorrow, we will continue our travels to another cove called Caleta Partida.  For the rest of today, Larry is napping and I am updating the blog.  Please note the “stuff” required to make this happen:

Inverter to run the computer

Various assorted gizmos to take pictures, transfer pictures, gain internet access.  It doesn’t all show up well in this picture, so I will just have to tell you to be impressed!  Adios for now.

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Today, I (Muggs) went to the Club Cruceros meeting place and met with other cruisers who like to sketch and paint.  I have never really done this before, but I have an interest and brought some paints with me.  I had fun and learned a lot, and here is my first effort:

But the real fun started when I returned to the marina.  Larry had already returned a couple of hours before.  During this time, a dolphin wandered into the marina and swam around in the slip next to our boat for a while!

How high tech is this, for just a couple of old f*&ts – Larry used his cell phone to take this picture, then he emailed it to our email account from which I downloaded it to the computer!  I know, I know – not really very high tech, but consider who’s doing this and where! 

When I arrived, I took several pictures as we waited for a boat to arrive that was going to escort (we thought) the dolphin back to open water:

  See the paddle – I wasn’t sure what they had in mind, but it turned out not to be herding:

In the last picture, you can barely see the dolphin’s snout under a wet rag – on the floor, bottom right.  The worker is washing him down with a hose:

That’s all for now.  Tonight, we are going to a place called Bandido’s for hamburgers grilled in the engine compartment of an old Chevy!

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I only just now have posted the picture from the party at Larry’s mom’s home on the Saturday before Christmas.  My good friend, Elizabeth, took many more terrific pictures while we were in the Stockton-Modesto area:

Brit-style tea with Elizabeth and her mum right there in Escalon, California at the Lavender Hollow Farm.

At Elizabeth’s home for Christmas Eve.  Left to right – Larry, Mom, Muggs, Elizabeth, Mum with Brady in front.  Brady calls us Grammy and Poppa.

Poppa and Larry – being silly – our most highly developed skill!

Grammy and Brady playing Nascar Monopoly.  Brady always remembers exactly which of us owns which property without checking.  He also usually gets complete sets of property.  He was the only one who got to put any hotels (actually garages in this version) on his property.  And Grammy landed on it every time around, I think!  Brady won at the end.  We didn’t have enough time to play to bankruptcy, so we added up assets.

We took Brady to a winter fun park:

Russell, Elizabeth and Poppa on a haywagon ride thru a lighted path.  It was VERRRRY COLD!!  BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Brady and Grammy both rode the zip line! 

And here’s the proof!!!  I think I will become a stuntwoman in my next life!

We returned to La Paz yesterday (Tuesday, the 29th), and we had a bit of fun along the way.  First, we had a layover in Los Angeles (whoever designed the layout of that airport should be shot) where another couple from this year’s HaHa befriended us (Larry was wearing the hat, as usual).  They are Sherry and Gordon of Serenity which is located in the same marina as us here in La Paz!  They are a very nice and friendly couple, and they didn’t know how they were going to get from the airport back to La Paz.  We told them we planned to find the bus station – we weren’t sure how – and take it back for a price of about $20 per person.  We knew that the last bus left at 5:30, our plane was scheduled to arrive at 4:00, so we were operating on the “hope” system – we hoped that the business at customs wouldn’t take very long so we would have a chance to figure out how to get to the bus station.

At the airport, we used a porter for our baggage (considerable as it included a foldable bicycle in a rather large box).  He handled all the luggage without breaking a sweat, and then got us on a shuttle van that took us all – us, the other couple, and two more people who just happened to need to get to La Paz and heard us talking about it – to the bus station.  We bought tickets, got on the bus, and we are all safely delivered to our new homes in La Paz.  Good thing, too, as all of the other folks seemed to be depending on us to be the leaders – scary thought!

We will not be venturing out for more sailing adventures until the weather (northerly winds) allows, probably sometime next week.  Until then, Happy New Year everyone.

Which reminds me – the cruisers are celebrating the new year with a potluck tomorrow night at 5:00 pm which is midnight Greenwich mean time.  That way we can all be in bed by cruiser’s midnight which is commonly accepted as 9:00 pm!

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