December 25, 2014 - San Jose Del Cabo

Feliz Navidad

We spent the last few days here in San Jose Del Cabo to celebrate the holidays.  What a beautiful marina and town.  It is growing and looks to be turning into a Cabo San Lucas.  Many resorts are already here, and many more large ones are under construction!  We are however, in the marina and separated by an estuary from the resorts and town so it is quiet here.  Our 3 hour transit from Cabo San Lucas had us motoring along the shoreline where we could see, first hand, the obvious hurricane damage.  Resorts completely shut down, with boarded up windows.  Beaches completely empty.

We have ridden our bikes into town twice now.  Cute town and town square.  We managed to go to two big stores, a Walmart and then a store called "Mega."  We have some fruit and vegetables again, and we are quite happy about that.  We will not be getting scurvy anytime soon.  The Mega store had many American shoppers, likely due to its close proximity to the oceanfront resorts.  One woman came up to me (Kathy) and asked if we live here.   Maybe we are just looking so nice and tan!  I stated no and told her that we are traveling through.  She asked if I was cooking Christmas dinner, which I thought was an odd question, that I answered with a maybe not as our boat is too hot to be cooking!  They invited us over for dinner today - and they have a pool.  They moved here from Dallas just less than a month ago and the kids have not really met anyone yet since school got out for Christmas break just as the kids got into it to attend.   The family of four has kids our ages and in the same order.  My family is not all that interested so I am trying to decline by texting her.  The husband is in insurance and I believe working with folks and hurricane damage although don't quote me on that.

The marina here is beautiful.  They are still recovering from the hurricane as most everyone here seems to be.  There are paths completely washed away.  We feel quite safe here as the security is patrolling the marina constantly.  We have met two nice American couples here in boats adjacent to us on this motoryacht dock we are on.  I should change the description motor yacht to sport-fisher dock!  One couple has a home here and their yacht at the dock and the other couple lives in San Diego and keeps their boat here.  In fact, most of the boats we are seeing are American.  There does not appear to be a large contingent of sport-fishing charter boats here.  Most of the boats are sleek 40'-50' sport-fishing boats.  Our dock was bustling with activity yesterday with multiple boats being washed by Mexicans.  They offered to do ours but we decided not to spend the $100 (we could have talked them down some).  Also, our next voyage will make it moot since our boat will be getting more diesel grey on the transom, and salt spray all over the rest. There is beautiful artwork throughout this marina, see below.  Most of the vessels here rode out the hurricane in their slips.  Yesterday some divers raised a boat that sank during the hurricane and we were told they do not know whose it is.  Not sure how that could be!  Life is a little different in Mexico, I guess.

A large bird at top of mast on our friend sv Namaste's vessel

The marina grounds are lined with interesting sculptures.

One of many, very intriging sculptures.

Artwork and the stern of Adagio in view behind (you can see solar panels)

Beautiful plants in San Jose Del Cabo

The Town square and a sand sculpture.  Christmas tree in the background.

Town square nativity

Town Square Christmas tree

Cindy is going to eat the iPhone!  She is ready for a.....
Mega-Bite!

Hurricane damage.  This used to be an entrance to a marina dock.

Crossing the bridge from San Jose Del Cabo, Beautiful!

This Mega store had A LOT.  Look at the cereal selection!

The basin that the marina has a "tourist" Dolphin encounter pool where you can swim
with dolphins.  Here this morning they are feeding the dolphins.

These palm trees took a beating from the hurricane

Some of the old docks.  They are cement exterior and foam filled.
They are destroyed.

The days here have been MUY CALIENTE (hot) we can tell you.  Made it so we really did not want to cook big meals for the holidays.  For Christmas eve we hosted the sv Namaste and sv Kialoa folks here.  Steve actually turned on our air conditioning for a few minutes to cool down our salon before people arrived.  It was a nice evening of chatting and eating.  We certainly do not suffer out here, we had appetizers of chips, homemade salsa, stuffed mushrooms, cheese, crackers and pepperoni.  Dinner consisted of Marlin and homemade pizza.  See Marlin picture below that I took in Cabo.  We ate part of this exact fish as some of the crew helped them haul off coolers of the filleted fish so they were given a bag of it.  It was yummy and I believe most of us had never had marlin before.

240 pound marlin, we had a small piece of for Christmas Eve.

Cindy, Kevin, and Journey played a game of Line Up and I understand the newbee Journey won. Well, things got crazy last night when we broke out the Jelly Belly's.  Many dares of stuffing one into a black olive were requested and taken.  No one got sick so that was good.  Then of course everyone was trying those flavors that m ake us wonder why they were even created; buttered popcorn, yuck.  Kevin remarked after everyone left (and again today) that he really enjoyed the evening as there were a lot of jokes and ones he could understand, not like what is typical when adults get together.

Cindy taking on a challenge of a black olive stuffed with some jelly belly.

The kids separated out a bunch of jelly beans by color/flavor

Christmas morning the kids woke up at a decent time. I think it started around 6:30am.  Last year Kevin got up at 3:15am and got Cindy up as well so we were all up by 4am.  Christmas last year was on the boat, at the dock in Ganges Marina, Canada.  They were excited this morning to open their presents although disappointed that Santa did not bring them an Xbox One.   We had asked in the office if there were festivities in town for Christmas Eve and had a response of I don't think so from two employees. So when there was partying all night last night, Christmas Eve, with music, voices, laughter, singing, and a PA system, we wondered what we were missing.  I said all night, and I mean it was ALL NIGHT! We still heard it at 5am.  Can't say that Steve and I are completely rested today.

The morning and presents

Cindy trying on my cooling eye mask.

Kevin got the cooling eye mask off, no pictures of him he said!

Now they are just playing and lounging around

Christmas afternoon was spent at the beach, meeting with friends, swimming and relaxing.

sv Namaste dinghy including Scott from sv Kialoa

A quiet beach club here; Steve, Tanya (sv Kialoa), John and Cindy (sv Namaste)
Kids are swimming!

John from sv Namaste with Nanuq, the lucky dog.  We thought Zappa was spoiled!

Kevin, Cindy, and Journey working on a castle creation....................

We are leaving tomorrow morning, and we are headed across the Sea of Cortez 180 miles to mainland Mexico.  We have talked to a bunch of cruisers with experience down here, as well as local boaters, and the almost universal advice is to cross the Sea of Cortez and go to the mainland for a few of the winter months.  The Sea of Cortez cools off dramatically this time of year, and the mainland is noticeably warmer, both air and water.  If we don't cross over now, we may never do it.   We have a great forecast for the 28 hours transit, with ocean swell less than 2', and winds less than 5 knots for the next 2 days.  It couldn't be a better forecast for a power boat!  So, off we go to a destination we hadn't originally planned for this portion of our trip.  But, we have never formulated an official itinerary because we knew that when we arrived down here, local knowledge/advice would help direct our next moves.  In keeping with the flexible, spontaneous, and adventurous spirit of this journey, we are setting off tomorrow morning for Mazatlan where we will find warmer air and waters than we would get if we stayed in the Sea.  We will return to the Sea of Cortez in a few months, when things begin to warm up again.  

Merry Christmas Everyone!  We are missing home but still enjoying this adventure.  To our families and our friends back home, we miss you all and wish you good tidings!

We need to go say goodnight and farewell to friends just a dock away.  We have met so many nice people and families that make it that much more difficult to say goodbye.  We all have hopes of following one another and meeting again soon..............................................