It’s due to the kindness of strangers that we were able to move further south today. Yesterday we dropped anchor behind Punta Ipala and soon a neighboring boat came over to say hello and invite us to join him and a friend for drinks on shore. We went below to clean ourselves up a little and Ken ran out of water in the shower. Bummer. Turns out the gear that runs the belt on the house water pump had cracked and so the belt and gear slipped off. Bigger bummer. We did a quick epoxy fix on the gear and went to shore for drinks.

When we mentioned our problem to our new friends, one of them said that he had an old pump just like ours on board that we could have. The pump doesn’t work, he said, but you can salvage parts from it. Perfect!
We stopped at his boat after our little get together and sure enough, it’s a very similar pump. We salvaged the gear and Ken put it on our pump. The new gear is a little different in size so the belt doesn’t fit well but it gets the water going so I’m happy! It’s a temporary fix as the pump makes all kinds of unhappy noises but we’ll work on making further adjustments to it tomorrow.

We are helping our new friend out too. He forgot to get distilled water for his batteries and so I made him a couple of gallons of watermaker water today and will deliver it to his boat in the morning (both guys happen to be anchored next to us again today).

We are in the first truly calm anchorage we have found in Mexico! Woo Hoo! Small things make me happy. Small waves, that is. We are in Bahia Chemela for a couple of nights. The bay is large and shallow and it is lined with little palapas, small houses and a few little hotels. Nice.

We saw a whale jumping and splashing several times. I think the game was to see how much noise he could make. We also played count-the-turtles today. We got to 9 including the one that was just swimming behind the boat a few minutes ago.