Dreams For Sail; Cruising Sailors

La Paz
We made it!
Dec. 5, 2006

David, Linda, Laura, Me, Linda and Jack, our new found Canadian friends

After hanging in Muertos for about a week waiting for the weather to change, we finally got a break. According to the local net we were good to go. Toketie, Wyntersea and us (Hanali) decided to head out around midnight on Dec 4. Little did we know that the Northerlies weren't quite done. So much for the weather report. As we headed out towards the Cerralvo Channel we were hit with some big waves and wind coming right at us. All night we tacked trying to make headway towards La Paz. By morning we still hadn't cleared Cerralvo Island. Sometime in the early morning we got a radio call from Rhumb Line who were way ahead of us, saying they were heading through the San Lorenzo pass with 35knts of wind on the nose and 15' waves on the beam. Needless to say, after fighting heavy seas and wind all night, we weren't looking forward to even bigger conditions. I radioed David on Toketie and asked him what he and Wyntersea thought about the conditions. Did they think we should wait it out for awhile or what? David radioed back and said "look over your side. You've been sailing in about 8-10' waves all night what's a couple more feet?" We'd also been sailing in about 25 knt winds. Well, ok then, these two sailors were by far better sailors then we were so we went with the flow. Just before we got to the pass we had a huge freighter pass between Toketie and us not more than 100-150 feet of each of us. As it turned out we did hit a little bigger weather but not as bad as was reported to us earlier. Once we made it through the pass it was almost dead calm. We headed for La Paz. Wow! we finally made it and it sure felt good. Heading toward the channel at La Paz we decided maybe we would stay in a marina for a couple of days. Just then we got a call from Rhumbline to see if we made it ok and they said there was slips in Costa Baja Marina, so in we went. We stayed in the marina for a week. Oh man! nothing like a hot shower. While we were there we got together with all of our new friends we met along the way and had some great times. We will miss a lot of people we met and hope our paths cross again. A call came from Laura's parents that they were having some medical problems. We decided we had to get back to the states to help out for awhile. We put Hanali in dry storage and headed back to the states.To be continued when we return.