Lame, lazy, busy, glad to be home. Those are the reasons that I haven't added a blog post since we've been back. Let's see if I can recount what we've done in the past week.

We arrived back to La Paz under rain clouds and a full day of rain. Even when it rains at 70 degrees it still is gray. The plan was once we arrived back onboard Scott Free Tuesday we would get everything ready for a few days out in the islands with us leaving Friday morning. Wednesday has us meeting up with John and Lisa who we had brought parts down for. They have a car so they drove us to lunch, the grocery store and then they offered to buy us dinner at a local pizza place; Rusitco Pizzeria. Pretty good actually.

Thursday Scott was busy doing some boat chores and installing our new BBQ. I had some work to do on my Alaska projects. Since I process the construction draw requests for the contractors I didn't want to hold them up on their payment so it was a priority and a must do before we left. Of course I was waiting for some final info that didn't until noon on Friday so we decided to leave on Saturday morning.

After showers Saturday morning we shoved off on our way to Ensenada Grande on Isla Partida. We hadn't gone much past Pichilinque when FISH ON! A nice size Dorado brought aboard and asked to join us for dinner for a couple of nights. The new BBQ would come in handy!

After getting settled in at anchor we decided to wait to put the motor on the dingy since we would be going to Isla San Francisco the next day. The weather was beautiful, about 78 degrees and completely windless. We light the BBQ for our fish and what the heck, it doesn't work. Now it had worked the night before so this was a puzzle. Scott has done a troubleshoot on it and we think something is wrong with a connection on the hose. Seems strange that it would fail and so we'll try to find a small portable bottle of propane to test to make sure it isn't the regulator. I baked the fish in the oven with lots of veggies and was very good. After dinner we went out to look at the fish that were attracted to our anchor light as we had been hearing them splash around. Outside we had the best display of phosphorescence that we have ever seen. You could see the fish leave trails as they swam around and the surface away from the anchor light looked like it had thousand of stars on it. When you flushed the head the whole bowl glowed and lit up the room. Amazing! About 10 pm a Coromuel came up and by 1am the boat was bouncing around but we held tight but didn't sleep too well.

Sunday morning we upped anchor and set off for Isla San Francisco. Sailing out here is a lot like in the San Juan's as things are fairly close and you can almost dead reckon you way there. The "Hook" at Isla San Francisco is the picture you always seen when you see pictures of the Sea of Cortez and is the photo on this blog entry. It is beautiful, azure water, white sand beach. We got the outboard on the dingy and set off exploring around the island. The weather was again perfect about 75 degrees.

Monday we had breakfast and packed a backpack with drinks and snacks and set off for the island for the many hiking trails. Again the day was beautiful and we hiked up the ridgeline and across the salt pond flats to the other side. Early afternoon had us back aboard and swimming of the boat to cool off and wash our hair. The water was 73.4 degrees. We finished off the Dorado with fish tacos for dinner, watch episodes of The Office and then sat on deck in the surprisingly warm temperature (68) to watch stars.

Tuesday (today) we woke up to listen to the Amigo net on the SSB radio to catch the weather as there is a system that is coming we've been tracking. Sure enough, Don Anderson the weather guru says by tomorrow all the way from La Paz to Mazatlan it will be UGLY, capital U.G.L.Y. so we wanted to be back in our slip when it hit and thus pulled up anchor.

The trip back was amazing! We we're out of sight of the anchorage and caught a small tuna which we let live to grow bigger. We then caught a bigger tuna we asked aboard and showed him our knife collection. Shortly after getting that settled out we caught a small Dorado that we threw back. By the time we were next to Isla Partida and Espiritu Santos we had spotted whales, dolphins and Scott thought he saw a shark. A lot of life here in the Sea of Cortez.

So there, it is now Tuesday afternoon and that is how we've spent the last week. I was lame for not posting an update as soon as we returned and then I got lazy as we spent time with friends and then we got busy getting ready to head out to the islands.