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!

Isla Isabela, the Galapagos of the Sea of Cortez - by Adam

Today I am blogging about our visit to the island of Isla Isabela (Also called Isla Maria Isabelita) in the Sea of Cortez.

The island was put aside for researchers to study the birds called frigates and also blue footed boobies that nest there. Now the facility is abandoned and there is only a fishing village. 

The birds called frigates are majestic black birds with red pouches on the males’ necks to attract females by inflating it and hitting it with their beaks. The females have white feathers on their necks and the chicks are white once they get feathers. 

 

Frigates have a wingspan of 7.5 feet and only weigh 3 pounds! Can you believe that? It’s like stretching out my dad, yet he only weighs 3 lbs! Believe me, my dad is as tall as a pro basketball player! 

The birds were so calm we were in touching distance of their nests and chicks.

Now, the other bird I mentioned, the blue footed boobie, is another rare bird on the island that has, as the name suggests, blue feet. On the island is another bird called the brown boobie with green feet, only it is more common. The boobies have nests on the top of the island, only they live on the ground? Why don’t they live in the trees like frigates? I guess no one will know…

Before telling my story, I need to tell you about the last two types of creatures there are on the island, iguanas and lizards. The reptiles were every color of the rainbow, from white to black and small to large. The reptiles were not eating the lettuce we gave them and there were not any bugs on the island so we wonder what they eat and if they eat.

The animals would not even budge when we got near because they have no predators on the island and they have all they need. The island is called the "Galapagos of the Sea of Cortez" because of it.

Now I will describe our hike through the avocado forest and up the boobie hill. On the way over on the dinghy we saw some splashes in the water so we stopped. Then, we saw a huge, whale breach in the bay. 

Soon, after seeing one more breach we made it on land where we found sea-glass and weirdly colored barnacle shells. We asked a fisherman, who was going to the showers, where the trail started.  We immediately found out he could not speak English (and we don't understand Spanish), so we followed him to the research facility when he went into a ruined room to shower.

We had a book on the island and it was only a year old that said the place was used by researchers, but the place looked like it had been abandoned 20 years ago. After wandering for 30 minutes looking for the trail we found one that was not a dead end and followed it up the hill through the eye-level trees that the frigates nest in. At the top we stood up and whoa! All of a sudden we see a tornado of birds circling around us in a flurry of brown, white, blue and green. These were the boobies that live here. They did have blue feet for the blue footed boobies and green feet for brown boobies. They seemed uneasy so we tried to find the trail leading onward.


We hiked back down after we found that the trail was lined with nests and we didn't want to disturb the birds.  

  

On the way back we went to some volcanic tide pools with cool crabs.

My dad went to the other side of the bay to check out the islands caldera, it was full of water and very green!

After that we got back into the dinghy and went home. We spent the afternoon snorkeling around the caldera and saw several cool fish and even an Eagle Ray!

The next day we left saying goodbye to the birds. We think that a nesting pair might have made a nest on the Antipodes because two frigates followed the boat really far out. I still miss the Isla Isabella and its rare animals. I also miss everyone, San Diego and sometimes even the food! Bye!

You can see more details of the island on this web site:

http://10000birds.com/isla-isabel-mexicos-galapagos.htm