Three miles from Santa Maria it was brilliantly sunny, but as I set course into the bay, the clouds rolled off the hills creating thick fog with visibility of maybe 75 feet or less. We nosed in through it at maybe 2 knots, Naomi monitoring the radar and Emily peering into the total whiteness ahead. Naomi predicted a boat right in front of us and suddenly a white shape appeared 75 feet away; it was another sailboat. I had the coordinates of a suitable place to drop the anchor from one of the pilot books and we cut through the fog to drop the anchor there, monitoring the position of other boats using radar, to be sure we could swing clear of them. As we were digging the anchor in (it is good practice to run the motor in reverse for a couple of minutes to lessen the chances of it dragging) a panga came up and we were offered lobster. We bought 4 for $10 and decided that we would have our thanksgiving dinner that night, ie the day before thanksgiving, because we were leaving the next evening for Los Cabos. A little later the same panga reappeared, asking for two AA batteries for his GPS. I handed them over and got another lobster in return.

Santa maria has a number of small beaches, so we had one all to ourselves, getting a little swamped as we arrived in the dinghy, though Rory is getting better at judging the waves and flipping up the motor as we ride in on a crest.

We snorkeled in the afternoon, lots of fish but similar fish to those in the channel islands - garibaldis, ect.

We had a spectacular Thanksgiving dinner. Along with the lobster we had mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans, sweet potato and orange, followed by a delicious pumpkin pie make by Rory. A meal to remember....

The next morning we took the dinghy to our beach and hiked up a trail which took us to a saddle between two peaks. Rory and Emily decided to take the right hand peak, which looked steeper and more ambitious than the left which Naomi and I decided to hike up. As it turned out, Emily and Rory were eventually thwarted by a chasm, while we continued up, serendipitously following the only ridge (and there were many to choose from at the bottom) that lead to the top. I got to a point where the loose scree and 500 foot drop required all fours so after this I decided to stop, but then had to watch Naomi, with my heart in my mouth, scramble up the last 150 feet to the next peak. She yelled back at me that she was not quite at the top - she would be back in view 10 minutes later. It seemed like an eon, but finally she reappeared and came down to me, facing the hillside on all fours, moving crabwise as a I called out what looked like the best route down. My spot happily had an incredible, nearly 360 degree view, so we stayed happily for 20 minutes eating energy bars that had more or less dissolved in the heat. Naomi looked longingly at waves breaking on the other side of the headland from our beach, unfortunately a 5 miles trip round the headland in the dinghy with the surfboards - too far.

We ended up at the wrong beach, but fortuitously we met Connor and Chase, two brothers who invited us for thanksgiving drinks aboard their boat, Sea Casa, and then a bonfire afterwards. We had planned to leave at 6PM, but decided we could leave at 8PM and spend an hour at the bonfire before we left. The brothers are on a small 31 foot Hunter sailboat and while Connor has been living and sailing on this boat for the past 3 years in LA, Chase is hot from a marketing job in New York - but now fast becoming a sailor on this trip. After trying to hail Chase to come chat with us, we saw he wasn't coming our way, but was drifting away while his dinghy engine was proving temperamental and not starting (later this proved to be a faulty spark plug). Connor was on another boat, so Rory and Naomi zoomed off in our dinghy and got him under tow. Connor, upon seeing the situation came to the rescue and got the engine started. Just as well as Chase would have drifted 5 miles to the other side of the bay. As he said, the wind was too strong to row against.

The bonfire hadn't happened before 8pm so we set off for another 40 hour sail to San Jose del Cabo, which is about 20 miles east of the bottom of the Baja Penninsular. We heard later that three boatloads of people took their dinghies to the beach at 8:30pm to celebrate Thanksgiving. It turned out the bonfire was more to dry them out as they all got swamped as their dinghies came up to the beach. Apparently when leaving the beach one of the dinghies hit a rock and broke its propeller so, all in all, it sounded like a somewhat exhausting Thanksgiving celebration.