Thursday, February 06, 2014

The Cruising Life - So Far!

Ninty days ago Nancy and I quit our jobs and started this little 3 year adventure at sea with Adam (full time) and Allie (part time).  We've travelled over 1700 nautical miles from San Diego to Mainland Mexico during this time, staying in a variety of marinas as well as anchorages.

So what have we learned and done during this time?  I thought I'd share a bit of what we are experiencing with those who care.

Part 1 - The Boat

Our home.  Antipodes has been our primary residence for nearly a year now.  The first nine months were connected firmly to a marina dock in San Diego while we prepared for this adventure.  The last three are what this boat was made for, life at sea.

We've been lucky so far, no real problems with the boat to speak of.  We also have only faced a couple of bad days as sea.  As usual, the boat handled the seas much better than the crew.







When we are at marinas (my least favorite), we plug the boat into shore power which runs all of our systems.  We have A/C, a washer and dryer, full size fridge, a separate ice maker and trash compactor.  Most of the luxuries of a real home.  

We also have good access to shopping, entertainment and wifi, the latter sometimes good enough to stream Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Movies.  Many of the marinas have pools and other cruiser activities and clubs that keep things interesting.  You also meet an awful lot of friendly folks doing the same thing as you are.  Adam has met several friends along the way and has enjoyed the company.









We do have one problem in the marinas, we do not like to use the local water supply as our boat has one tank and if we get bad water we would need to clean the tanks and refill with our water maker.

Our water maker is a reverse osmosis system, what that means is that the system literally pushes seawater through a series of filters and removes the contaminants and the salt, the end product is clean water which actually tastes very good.  The issue with the water maker is that it only makes about 20 gallons per hour so we need to run it a lot to keep our tanks full.  It also needs fairly clean water to work so making water in a dirty marina is not an option.

We really like the time we spend on anchor in these beautiful bays in Mexico.  Time on the anchor seems much more isolated and free as opposed to the marinas. The boat gently moves with the breeze which gives us nice air flow throughout the boat as well as an ever changing view.






Anchorages allow many other activities as well.  We spend a lot of our time (outside of our daily chores) in the water or on the beaches.  We also can dingy into the small towns and fishing villages that dot these shorelines.  Adam and I swim a lot, jumping off the top of Antipodes being one of our favorite activities. Snorkeling is a close second along with kayaking. Nancy likes her SUP (stand up paddleboard) and I tend to fish a bit from the back of the boat catching small bait fish and then using them for bait for larger, still uncaught, fish.  I will also take the dingy out for fishing, sometimes trolling near shore or casting up to the rocky shoreline.  My success as been muted to say the least.

Besides the poor luck with fishing, we've been fortunate to see lots of wildlife out at sea and inshore.







We also enjoy the beautiful sunrises and sunsets that the anchorages provide but you've seen enough of those pictures!

So the bad?  We no longer have that nice marina power and Wifi to enjoy.  For Wifi we try to find a local business that provides "free" service.  Sometimes it's good, other times very frustrating.  This is the main reason we have not posted as many blogs as we wanted to do.  

Power is another concern.  The boat has a very large battery bank that will run our systems for about a day.  We need to trim our use of the power hogging devices such as the water maker, ice maker, A/C and trash compactor.  Not too bad actually. 

When we get low on batteries we need to charge them using our generator.  The generator is a fairly powerful unit that will run all the power hogs as well as charge the battery bank.  We typically run this about 4 hours a day.  We schedule our chores around this so we can wash clothes, cool the boat if needed and cook while the generator is running.  Works very well!

Being on anchor also means more limited access to shopping.  I recently posted a "day in the life" on Facebook regarding this topic:

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So here's how this goes when you are cruising. Today we took a water taxi to the local village (11 AM), other times we take our dinghy and do a beach landing, usually getting something wet. A long walk up the main village street got us to our first goal, lunch. Today we ate street tacos, actually fish tacos this time, muy bueno!

Our friend needed to see the doctor (bad knee) so we dropped her off and headed to the port captain to officially check into the port (we've been here four days but who cares?). Took 15 minutes of winding through the streets to find him but all is good. We'll need to check out again on Monday.


Another long walk back to the doctors and then to the tienda (market) for lots of fresh fruits and veggies, the produce truck comes on Tuesday and Saturday so we got the best choices today.


We strolled back through a tree lined street where we ate dinner the other night, the pizza place is on the second floor of the "tree corner" area of town. 


Finally back to the water taxi docks where we headed back to the boats. Once back we need to wash all the produce in a special cleaner to ensure we don't get any nasties from the food. Then into the fridge.



All in all, an easy, a four hour event to get some food in the fridge! Paradise takes work!




I'll post again soon with the next part of the story.  I'm still working on getting Adam motivated to do his next post, he's taking tests this week and is not happy!