Well after three months it's finally time to bid farewell to Ensenada. Most of the work is completed on the boat so at the end of this month (today week as I pen this) we back out of the slip (berth) and head back up to San Diego. We will spend a month in San Diego finalizing a few things on the boat, doing some provisioning (it will be great to buy food with instructions that we can read), catching up on good ol?? American hamburgers and hash browns before setting off south again in the Baja Ha Ha Rally at the end of October.

Ensenada and Baja Naval (the yard we stayed at to do the upgrade work on Volare) has been a great place to do the stuff we have done. The only problem has been that we have stayed about six weeks too long. Most of the big jobs were completed by the beginning of August so there hasn't been a lot to do since then. There is really no where to go, sailing wise, because there are no overnight anchorages in this part of the world. We could have headed south about 70 - 100 miles to explore (can't go further than that because it's hurricane season and we are hunkered down north of the hurricane belt - sort of like being in Brisbane during the summer when tropical north Queensland is subject to Cyclones), but then it's a serious bash to windward to get back up to Ensenada. During summer (which we are just coming to end of) the prevailing wind is 25 knots out of the North West, short steep seas and about 4 knots of southerly setting current. Boats returning from the winter cruising season on the Sea of Cortez and ports further south refer to coming back as the "Baja Bash�. You forget about sailing and just motor into it and consider yourself lucky if you make 1 or 2 knots across the bottom.

For those geographically and climatically challenged, this is why we head south at the end of October. In theory the hurricane season will be over (as winter approaches) and we'll get a downwind ride all the way to Cabo San Lucas. At last count there were nearly 200 boats entered in the Ha Ha which on world standards ranks right up there with the biggest cruising rally/race of its kind. The start coincides with the ?official� start of the Mexican cruising season (remember� no hurricanes after October) and most boats will spend the season in Mexico then do the Baja Bash back home in April/May before next hurricane season. Some, like us will be leaving from Puerto Vallarta to make the crossing to French Polynesia in March/April. The significance of this date is that by that time a big high pressure system (called the "North American High�) that sits over North America during summer moves south by then creating ideal North Easterly winds for the crossing of the Eastern Pacific north of the equator. These NE winds gradually get confused once we reach the Intertropical Convergence Zone (doldrums) about 3 ??" 5 degrees north and south of the equator and are replaced by South Easterly trade winds once we are south of the equator which will carry us onto French Polynesia.

Here endeth the climate lecture.

Ensenada has had its moments�. We?? ve met some great people, shared some very funny moments, got sick, got better, got dirty, got clean, learned a few words of Spanish and learned to walk around inside the boat at night without bumping into things.

One of the things you don't do in Mexico is drink the tap water. We learned the hard way. For the first two months we were filling our tanks from the hose and boiling the water before drinking it. Not good enough. Debbie came down with something that necessitated a trip to the doctor. She was sweating a lot and the doctor said "no problemo, you need muchus hormones� and proceeded to inject her with 100 somethings of Testosterone. Well I sometimes forget that she's only 5 feet nothing and isn't as strong as me when it comes to pulling on sheets (lines) but I don't think either of us wanted a Debbie Swartzeneger on the fore deck. The blood tests that were taken subsequently came back with a positive reading for a form of typhoid so now I had a muscle bound midget with some disease that we thought had gone out during the London plague. Fortunately a dose of drugs of questionable origin seemed to do the trick and within a week her symptoms seemed to have past.

Needless to say we no longer use the tap water except to wash the boat. We buy our water instead and it arrives in 5 gallon jugs and is supposed to have been purified. We haven't commissioned the water maker on the boat yet because the water here in the harbor is too dirty and oily. But as soon as we are out of here next week the water maker comes into action and we will be drinking water so pure we have to take a supplement of vitamins to replace the minerals we normally get from tap water.

There is a restaurant just outside the shipyard that is the unofficial ?Ensenada Yacht Club�. It's owned by an English lady who came here about twenty years ago on a cruise ship, got off to look around for the day, met a Mexican and married him (I don't believe it was on the same day but soon after). He was a chef and after some years they bought the current restaurant. Every Thursday night the expatriate community (mainly "yachtistas�) gather there because from 5:00 to 7:00 it's two for one drinks followed by free food. Whisper the word "free� to a yachtie and you'll be knocked over in the rush. Depending on whether we are drinking beer or Margaritas on the night, the whole exercise usually ends up costing 50 to 70 pesos (about US$5 - $7) so it's pretty good value. Debbie's new best friend is a lady we met there last week. She's from Melbourne, is in her late 60's and is a retired heart surgeon. She's had a few husbands and the last one was an American who died a few years ago leaving her, in her words: "filthy effing rich�. She owns two houses here in Mexico, has bought each of her children in Australia hotels, goes back to Australia every few months to see the kids and they come over twice a year and mum takes them to the Caribbean for a few weeks of diving. She's lived around Ensenada for 11 years and loved it. However, there's a bit of a crime wave happening here at the moment so she's selling up and thinking of moving to Belize.

The three marinas here in Ensenada a full of people (Americans mainly) who have come down here to stop over to do work on their boat of whatever and who have just stayed here. There's an old fellow on a boat across from us. His boat is completely covered in shade cloth and he disappears down there and surfaces once a day to go to the toilet. No one knows what he does down there all day but I think he's been there for about five years. There's a retired marine staff sergeant who's married to an ex marine nurse and they live aboard with three huge dogs. After walking the dogs in the morning you never see them because they spend all day downstairs watching DVDs. They've also been here for a few years. They are both heavy smokers and once we borrowed a few DVD's from them but we had to leave them out in the cockpit because they smelled so badly of cigarettes. We can't imagine what their boat is like downstairs ...it would be like one giant smoke encrusted fur ball. Then there's Ron who did four consecutive tours of Vietnam with the Special Forces. He's restoring an old wooden schooner and I think he still sees VC coming at him at night after he's had his few scotch and sodas to put him to sleep. Then we have Dave, a retired submariner who lives with a white poodle called "Gigante�. Dave's a great mate, and being an ex-submariner, knows his plumbing. He just keeps doing things to his boat and talks about going south but I doubt he'll ever do it. Debbie has her Friday Friends - a couple of girls we've met at a local restaurant. One of them lives with her husband on a ranch outside of Ensenada anf the other lives with her husband on a boat at Marina Coral (the posh marina four miles north of here). Every Friday they all go off somewhere together - to the wine country, to galleries or just shopping. Yesterday they spent most of the day at the pool and spa at Marina Coral.

And finally there's Jean - a singlehander from San Francisco who has spent 14 years sailing around the world. He spent time here getting his boat repainted before departing last week for the final stretch home to San Francisco. We became very good friends and shared some very good times together. It was a sad day when it came time to let go his mooring lines and see him back out knowing that perhaps we'll never see him again.

This cruising lifestyle is wonderful in that the people you meet along the way have such diverse interests and world experiences. The downside is that most often there comes a time when you need to say farewell.