We're fine after the passage of hurricane Jimena. Sarka and I spent two nights in a steel bunker of a marina building, sleeping on our upside-down inflatable dinghy. We came back to the boat this morning after 30 hours of very, very intense winds and rain. The boat was perfectly fine, no leaks even, and it didn't blow away and wind up on the rocks like six other boats did (there are about 50 boats here). The storm was incredible...the air was totally white with rain and spray at times...we couldn't see more than about 100 feet and we were holed up on dry land, protected by a two-story building. At times people on their boats couldn't see anything at all.

The whole thing started at 1:30 on Tuesday morning and hasn't totally let up yet. The maximum sustained winds here were probably around 60 knots (75 miles an hour) with gusts over 100. There were probably 20 hours of very serious winds and very heavy rain. We got 9 inches of rain.

The only Mexican cruiser anybody has ever met, Jaime, was on his boat during the height of the storm, when it broke off its mooring and drifted. He called out on the radio "I'm loose! I'm loose!" and then managed to get his boat moving under power to a slightly more protected cove, where he anchored somehow by himself. Then he started to drag into some other boats that were already there, and a big, very fancy powerboat left its own mooring, drove over to him and dropped off a crewmember to help Jaime. The two of them managed to relocate Jaime's boat to a new mooring where he rode out the remainder of the storm. It was extremely dramatic, as we watched it from shore with our binoculars.

Anyway, we're really tired now and waiting for the storm to go away altogether. Right now the winds are 10-20 knots with 40-knots gusts, and the sky has some blue windows in it that we are hoping will expand to replace the mess of every other kind of cloud streaming by below it.

The storm apparently traveled north-northeast from here and struck the town of Mulege and then Santa Rosalia, and perhaps went northeast and is now bashing San Carlos and Guaymas. Our different weather sources don't agree about the location, intensity, or future direction of the storm, although multiple reports would have it come back our way. This is hard to believe so we're not believing it and just waiting for things to pass. The eye of the storm apparently passed only about fifty miles west of us, putting us well within the hurricane-force blow.

We took some pictures--of the storm, of flailing boats, of the waterfalls streaming off the cliffs, of our storm shelter, of the orange sunrise through the black clouds--and will post them when electricity and Internet service have been restored.