La Paz
12 November 2011
Carole
We left Los Frailes on Friday and headed for Los Muertos, one step closer to La Paz. These were quick stops and we will definitely go back to visit these anchorages.
Saturday Nov 12th 2011, we left Los Muertos at 4:30am as we wanted to get to La Paz at a decent hour that afternoon, hoping that we would be able to find a slip at a marina. The usual story, we sailed part of the way and motored the rest due to little wind. The weather was warm and sunny. As we got closer to La Paz we checked with a marina to see if they had room, yesterday they were full. We were in luck they had a slip for 3 nights which is exactly what we had wanted. We needed to wash the boat due to all of the salt on it from the bash up from San Jose del Cabo and we needed to get our TIP (Temporary Import Permit) for the boat. We stayed at Marina Palmira, great marina. Luckily they provide shuttle service into town.
On Sunday a group of us shared a taxi and went 17 kms out to the ferry terminal to get our TIP, this process was painless and all 3 of us left with our TIP in hand. Now we can bring parts into Mexico for our boat duty free or at least that is the idea. The rest of the day was spent checking out La Paz, what a great little town, banks, stores, etc were readily available. We also managed to wash the boat today....much better.
Monday was spent at the boat, we had some fellows come and wax the boat and clean all of the stainless for a decent price, it looked a lot better afterwards. Ken mentioned to them that we needed a diver to check the zincs on the prop shaft and prop, the young fellow advised us he was a diver and would do that for us and take pics with our camera. To our surprise the pictures showed no zincs on the prop shaft and yet Peter had checked them out when we were in Cabo a few days earlier and they were all intact. We can only assume that someone dove the boat and wanted them and took them somewhere along the way. They were pretty much brand new. Oh well we now have new zincs back on the shaft. Now that all the work is done we can go out to dinner with Daragh and Catherine on Chantey V. We found a great Italian restaurant in town..good food and great service.
Tuesday came and it was time to move the boat out to the anchorage and anchor for a night. It would be much easier to visit with a couple of friends on their boats from the anchorage. We went into town to the Chandlery in town and to the grocery store to re-provision for our next jaunt across to Mazatlan. By the time we got the groceries we decided we needed a taxi to take us back to the dinghy, 50 pesos later we were at the dinghy dock. That evening we had David and Kathy over from Lightspeed for dinner, they have so much information that they shared with us on the trip down to the Panama and through to the Caribbean. Thanks David and Kathy. We also managed to get a visit in with Rich and his family on Third Day. Wow what a busy few days!