Sailing the Karina C

2/22
We stayed in Puerto Escondido 4 nights. The place is beautiful with the Singlar Marina a wonderful place to arrive to. Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot of anything in the the little community of Puerto Escondido. There are 2 restraunts, 2 tiendas (one of which just carries pop and chips) The other tienda is pretty good. As usual, we didn’t sample the food much as Anita cooks on the boat.
Singlar PE doesn’t have much of a dock. It has a small dock where charter fishing boats hang out. The sailboats all hang on the hook and pay API fees or lay on a mooring ball and pay pretty well the same fee. Singlar has a stranglehold on the inner basin as well as a smaller long term basin called “the elipse.”
The people seem nice, but there is a glass half empty kind of attitude that sucks the whole place down the toilet to our feel. Another cruiser mentioned this to us and we agreed. The morning net is kind of useless as it doesn’t really accomplish anything as the long term folks don’t chime in when needed. A case in point was the propane bottle. We do have one empty. Monday morning I asked where one can get a fill. Nobody volunteered that one of the community goes in on Wednesdays and gets propane for all. All I got was that the propane place was just S of Loreto on the highway.
Today we were late leaving as nobody could figure out how to turn the water on in the marina. Eventually, they managed to paralyze the whole operation. Shortly before noon they got it working again. By that time we had given up and Anita was showering on the boat. I did take a tepid shower in the shower place. Unfortunately, the water was pretty cool. With us both clean, we left PE at 1140. We made Ballandra Bay by 1500. Not a good time to be travelling as the wind was up in the early afternoon.
The regulars are reluctant to offering a ride to anyone, as the taxi cab drivers view this as cutting into their business, and in past have sliced the tires of the cars who gave anyone a ride. Taxis cost as small fortune, $700 pesos each way into and out of the 14 mile trip into Loreto. Renting a car was cheaper, though the quoted $65 USD ended up costing us more due to the fact that they would not accept our US cash, and wanted payment off our Visa (converting from Canadian, to pesos, and then to US dollars). I did make a few bucks back as I shared the rides with others.
The scam at the fuel float was a 20% mark up in price for fuel that was given to boats. We couldn’t approach the fuel float as a pleasure boat and a panga were plugging up the dock while the owners went off to have lunch. I would have paid the extra for the convenience of not having to lug the cans, but ended up having to pay the fuel float price and the chiropractor.
I was not impressed with the fact that every time the marina put a roll of toilet paper in the washroom, someone would steal it. Needless to say, the marina stopped putting in rolls, and we had to always make sure we carried our own.
There was free WIFI but it was very weak and slow. On the plus side, the marina offered a room with electricity to do WIFI.
Today we went from Puerto Econdido to Puerto Balandra. It was an uneventful ride in 10-12 knots of wind. Puerto Balandra has a couple of nice short walks in the harbour. One was up a hill on the N side. We watched whales spouting out in Loreto Bay from the top of the hill. We also walked the beach. There was a burnt out fish camp. Apparently, there was a fire last week.