Ensenada, Mexico

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

031-51.707 N
116-39.736 W

Ahoy from Ensenada, Mexico!

I'm happy to report that we made our first leg of this journey and we arrived in Ensenada, Mexico on Sunday afternoon. The plan was to leave the marina that we had been staying at in Chula Vista and head to the public docks in San Diego in order to save 2 hours transiting the bay. Well, when we started to back out of the slip, I found that I was having trouble steering. It took me a little while to figure out what it was but I suddenly realized that I had reversed the steering cables when I replaced them a week or two ago. Having your steering work in reverse isn't exactly easy to correct, so we pulled back into the slip and within an hour we tried it again and this time we were successful in leaving. Yeah!

We had a nice trip down the bay and had great views of the naval shipyards and the city of San Diego. We pulled into the public docks, which definately offer the best deal around. You can dock a boat up to 55' for $10.50/day (see details below)! The only problem was that the pilot boats dock nearby and they head in/out at all hours of the night making it noisy and wakey. Hey, it's $10.50/night...

The next morning we departed for Ensenada which was about 61 miles away. It was virtually windless and we motored along on almost glassey seas. At one point I was zoning out listening to the engine drone on when suddenly 2 whales surfaced very near the boat. That got my attention! Thankfully they kept their distance and when we looked carefully we could see others in the vacinity. We also had dolphins and sea lions pop their heads up and check us out on a regular basis.

The coastline started out bright green, but quickly darkened as it got drier and the landscape became much steeper. There were long stretches where all that you could see was the road which wound through hills. Around 4 PM we headed into the Hotel Coral and Marina which is N of Ensenada, but probably the nicest marina here. We picked up fuel at $2.81/gal, which was much better than the $5+ prices in San Diego. We only have 55 gallons of tankage, but we also carry 30 gallons in jury jugs on the side. We may need that as there will only be one other place to pick up fuel for the next 850 miles.

The marina itself is quite nice, but they stuck us on the sailboat dock between 2 work-in-progress boats which had the docks covered with stuff. Virtually all of the boats which are here are from the US or Canada and most of the staff speaks English. Boats from CA come here for the 1st year to avoid paying sales tax. The grounds are very well manicured and there are multiple beautiful pools.

Generally we take care of clearing into countries on our own, but they offered a for fee service where they take care of most of it for you. Well, this ended up being money well spent. They took all of us to immigrations and the port captain's office, which is in same building, and handled all of the transactions. It took several hours to process everyone, but while we were waiting they told us where to go for products. They even drove us to a grocery store, translated while we got a cell phone, and took us to a Napa store. We got all of the refrigerant gasses we needed in case there are any issues (if we have it we won't have any issues, but if we didn't you can only guess what would happen!)

We decided to take today as a lay-day as we've been working non-stop since we got here and for weeks before we left home. The trip down the Baja is 900+ miles, with this being the only port along the way. So, it will be 10-12 days of non-stop moving with probably only 3+ places where we can stop along the way.

From here we're going to head 236 miles to Cedros Island, which should provide a good anchorage. Then we'll head to Turtle bay, which is one of the few protected bays along this coastline, where we'll pick up more fuel.

I'll be posting position updates along the way, but they won't get mailed to you. If you check my web site, you'll be able to see the latest position updates under "Latest logs."

If you want to call us in Mexico, our phone number here is 011-52-646-116-8924. You can always call our home phone number and leave a message which will be translated to text and e-mailed to us.

-- Geoff & Sue

For the cruiser:

Dockage at The Hotel Coral and Marina is $1.50/ft. Nice docks and very friendly English speaking staff. Clearing in assistance is $45, which was well worth it when combined with other shopping. If you don't take advantage of this, the hotel has a shuttle which will take you to customs and immigration. Everyone there seems to speak English, so you should be able to do this your self. Fuel was $2.81/gallon which includes a 15% discount for staying here.

Log ID: 1414