Today was the famous party at Bahia Santa Maria. It really is pretty fun and a bit surreal. The fun part is that there’s a rock band and amazing food, tuna and shrimp caught fresh by the fishermen who live here. The surreal part is that it’s all on a cliff overlooking the bay and there’s absolutely nothing anywhere around within 100 miles! The rock band comes from across Baja somewhere near La Paz and they bring a generator to power the electric guitars, amps, speakers and such. You get to the beach/cliff by dinghy. You have to motor in an inflatable dinghy over the sand bar to get to the beach. You have to time it so the waves don’t break on you as you’re moving into the shallow water. We were successful. We saw one dinghy at Bahia Tortuga, not here, flip in the surf and go upside down. Definitely bad because the outboard engine gets soaked by salt water. Anyway, fun party. Good day. One funny thing happened after the party when we were all back at the boat. Elan and Ann were in the cockpit enjoying the end of the sunset, I was in the galley cooking the last of our Mahi (with rice and red bell peppers) and Danna was swimming around the boat to cool off and rinse off from a warm day. It was getting dark and through the darkness we heard; “Can I rest on your boat?” Huh?! Turned out “Nate” swam from the beach, which is about 300 yards away and he was swimming back to his boat which was named Panache. But…it had gotten dark and he didn’t know where HIS boat was. But as Nate put it; “It’s all good”. We offered to call his boat on the VHF and get some bearings for him, but he said he’d just swim until he found it. You meet some “interesting” people out here. Anyway, we invited him to sit in the cockpit to rest a while. Then as dinner was getting ready, he thanked us for the hospitality and jumped back into the bay. I left the radio on “just in case” as I had a feeling this wasn’t the last we’d heard from Nick. We sat down for a great Mahi dinner and sure enough, in the middle of dinner, we heard a call: “Panache, Panache, this is Cleo Two”. “Cleo Two, go to channel 71”. We couldn’t help it, we wanted to find out the story, so we switched the radio to 71 and heard Cleo Two say; “There’s a swimmer resting on our stern who says he can’t find his boat”. We then heard Panache say; “Oh no, NIIIICCCKK!” They sounded very exasperated. Eventually by turning on strobe lights and other stuff Panache’s location was identified and Nick realized he was swimming in exactly the wrong direction to get back. Oh well.

Well, that’s our day. Ann’s now trying to teach Elan and Danna how to play cribbage. We have two more days (hopefully only one night) to Cabo. The start is at 0700 tomorrow and Cabo is our next stop. We’ll update there and hopefully add some pictures.