Well, here we are at last in La Paz, the premier cruisers' crashpad of the Baja Gulf, home of "The La Paz Waltz". Amongst the gringo community, La Paz is called "the place where so many cruising dreams die" upon the tables of delicious food at cheap prices, tee-shirt weather in December, and a somnolent, too-easy lifestyle complicated by really good and cheap tequila.

It is all true! This must be the all-time Easy Street. People are nice, the food is good, the weather is great, there is a strong support network of US and Canadian people down here to talk to, it is safe to be out walking at night, and there is pretty good system for mail and parts delivery to the States. Perhaps the town is misnamed, however. Depending on the tides, there are two or four strong currents per day which sweep the boats first south, then north, no matter what the wind. This begets the appellation "the La Paz waltz". Of course, at slack water the wind takes over again influencing the anchored boats which should lie head to the wind. But this gets complicated because there are fin keel boats and lots of catamarans and tri's which respond to the wind first, being all superstructure and little hull in the water. On the other hand, there are the full-keel cruising boats, like Active Light, with relatively low freeboard and less windage which respond more quickly to the demands of the tidal current. The two different hull types will usually wind up playing stern-to bumper boats with each other during slack tide. It is not unusual to hear a hail on the VHF trying to locate the shoreside crew of such and such a vessel which is bumping into someone's boat or dragging anchor. Most boats make at least one 360 degree trip around their anchor per day. If you have a CQR plow type anchor out, the exposed rear fluke can get caught up in your wrapped chain, and when any strain comes on your anchor line, the plow pops right out. We have given up on our 45 pound CQR, which is hard to set anyway in this gravelly Mexican sand, and we are using the new 44 pound Bruce anchor, which seems to bite more quickly down here and will reset when, . . . not if, . . . it is pulled from a different direction. Our first day here, there was a little Santa Ana blowing down from the north, winds about 20 knots over the deck. We had gone ashore earlier in the day to walk our papers through customs and the winds were not yet too strong. We came out of the Port Captain's office, way downtown, about two miles away from the marina. Since the town is strung out along the bay we could still see Active Light quite easily.The tide had just turned and was flooding in from the north. Good old Active Light, with her full keel, got turned south because of the strong current and started charging downwind toward the other anchored boats. We watched in horror, thinking she had broken loose from the CQR plow. We panicked, hailed a cab, paid way too much for a quick ride back to the marina, where Steve Merrill from the catamaran Papillon most kindly got completely wet ferrying us out to our boat. By the time we got to her, she was nose to the north again, had not broken free after all, everything was all right, . . . but it sure scared the heck out of us. Soon after we were on board, Ed, the manager of the new Marina Santa Cruz Bay, showed up in his big inflatable to see if we needed any help. What a nice guy! We were not even customers in his marina yet. We have since moved into the near-shore "virtual marina" of Marina Santa Cruz where the tidal currents are not so strong, but we will never forget that sickening feeling of seeing our beloved Active Light yawing around on her anchor like that.. The point is that as far as anchoring out is concerned, this is not the town of "The Peace". Perhaps we should rename it "La Vals", translated "the waltz".

Life is so easy here. There is an ice cream store about a quarter mile up from the marina which has the best vanilla and coconut ice cream we have ever eaten. The coconut chunks are so big, its as if it was chopped with a machete. There is another store further in town which Nancy declares has the best lime sherbet in the world. She declares she will never be able to eat Safeway lime sherbet again! We hit one or the other of them once a day. A single big scoop is 10 pesos or $1. Up from there just a bit is a taco stand where you can eat six tacos for 20 pesos ($2) and get a 16 ounce glass of pure fresh-squeezed juice (you watch the lady squeeze it from a huge bag of oranges, it takes about 10 oranges to fill the plastic cup) for 10 pesos. All the food in the central market and in the Safeway-like supermarket (CCC) is pretty reasonable if not inexpensive. And the food in the restaurants is so good! It is hard to describe how easy life is here. The food is so good, the breezes so soft, the pace of life so tranquil. One thing that contributes to the pleasantness here is that the people in La Paz are not geared up to trying to hustle you for every cent they can squeeze out of you. There is a large US and Canadian retirement community in the marinas, and these people, through the Club Cruceros de La Paz, make big efforts at supporting local children' charities. We feel this does some good regarding relations between the foreign retirees and the local people.

The weather is very mild, even into November and December. We are in tee-shirts and shorts every day. Once in a while a Santa Ana will blow up and we will have three or four days of strong winds (20 plus knots over the deck at anchor), but that's not too bad. Otherwise the wind is so soft, gentle, and even caressing to the skin that we leave the hatches open at night to scoop in the wind and sleep under a single blanket.

We are anchored out in the Marina Santa Cruz Bay about 150 meters from shore in 14 feet of water. There is a safe dinghy dock with allegedly potable chlorinated water on the dock. We drink bottled water, $1.40 for five gallons at the marina office. There are good, clean showers ashore as well as a great laundry service, propane refills for $5 per bottle and ice. For all this we pay the amazing fee of $2 per day. The Capri Restaurant at the foot of the dinghy dock offers a good breakfast if we don't feel like cooking. We are happy here. Many of Neil's minor ailments are going away. He has to remember to take Tums Extra Strength tablets every day for the calcium supplement because he no longer has the constant heartburn to remind him. His arthritic right shoulder is much better, and a lot of little aches and pains and skin things have just disappeared. Nancy still has a torn muscle in her right shoulder sustained while diving down the main hatchway to answer a hail on the VHS, but it is slowly getting better. She really enjoys the window shopping here.

The other morning after "The Net", a tradition of tuning to channel 22A on the VHF at 0800 for all the local news amongst the cruisers, arrivals, departures, emergencies, weather, buy, sell, swap, trade, etc. . . . we were hailed by a station called Manu Wai. Turned out to be Cecil Lange, the builder of our own Active Light. Cecil is very well-known and even famous in the sailing world as the owner and founder of Cape George Shipbuilding in Port Townsend, Washington.

Interestingly, Cecil made heavy arguments to us to postpone our planned trip to the Marquesas this Spring in favor of spending another year in the Baja Gulf. He feels there is just so much to explore and see, that it cannot be done in the four months remaining to us. We are seriously considering this. Are we falling heir to the prophesy that "cruising dreams die in La Paz" because it is so easy living here? We'll see.

Getting to the story of our trip up from Cabo San Lucas, we were trapped in Bahia Los Frailles for four long days due to strong north winds from one of the famous Santa Anas. We failed to take pictures in Los Frailles, probably because Neil's primary concern was dealing with a persistent case of the "Mexican quick-step". Anchoring was a real challenge there, The sandy bottom sweeps up from 300 meters deep quite close to shore to a pretty steep beach. Wading out into the gentle surf, you could be about knee-deep in water, ten feet from the beach and then one more step and you'd be in up to your neck with the sand caving in beneath your feet. The viable anchoring area was in about 10 meters of water only around 50 meters offshore. Several boats drug their anchors in the strong winds and found themselves trying to lift 200 feet of chain hanging straight down, not touching bottom, in a 300 meter deep canyon. Scary! We managed to set our old plow pretty well and had no problem except for the occasional boat that would try to anchor almost on top of us.

We also remember the peculiar method of beaching their boats employed by the Mexican fishermen. There is a pretty good-sized encampment of fishermen at this bay who sleep in very crude lean-tos and blue plastic tarp tents to go out fishing in the daytime. Their open outboard boats are called "pangas", usually about 20 feet long, modified vee bottom with a transom stern about four feet wide. When returning from a day of fishing, they will wait offshore about 50 meters or so until a bigger wave rolls up the beach. As it recedes, they know another wave will follow which will carry them up the steep beach. So they gun their BIG engines, we are talking about 40 to 90 horsepower outboards, and shoot through the surf while killing and tilting the engine forward as they hit the beach. They are going so fast by this time that the momentum they have established carries the boat about 10 or 15 meters above the highest surf line, and there it sits for the night. When you see about 30 of these come in, one after another around sunset, it is quite a sight. Every once in a while, there will be a younger fisherman who doesn't quite have the technique down, who will usually foul up his landing by dry-revving his outboard in the air. He will get quite a razing of hoots and laughs from the older fishermen.

We caught two puffer fish here and let them go, of course. We rowed ashore and got 22 gallons of fresh water from a real old-fashioned water well. The well was dug and is owned by some nearby (North) American hacienda and had a sign in English (!) roughly painted above the well stating that one could use the well but please not use any soap near it. The well was made of cement and rock in a circular shape about five feet in diameter. It had two upright posts and a crossbar with a pulley and the leakiest old beat-up galvanized bucket you ever saw. You could let the bucket down about 25 feet into the well with a 1/4 inch manila rope and just pull your water right up to the surface. We asked about taking 22 gallons back to the boat, but Miguel and Walter, who were washing their cloths nearby, told us not to worry because there was plenty of water this year. We told them not to worry, that we would not try to steal their cloths which they left to dry spread out on bushes. They laughed. Allegedly most people drink the water straight off without even filtering it. We did not, being a bit conscious of what we put into our bodies by this time, we were drinking only bottled water.

We finally pushed on to Bahia de los Muertos for an overnight, then had a lovely one-day passage up inside Cerralvo Island. The Baja Peninsula is especially green this year due to heavier than normal rains, and it was just so lovely to see all the soft green, purple and brown dramatic foldings of the land as it slipped down toward the sea. The Baja Peninsula is pretty mountainous for parts of this passage. Neil kept wondering, "What if we owned that (desolate) strip of land and retired there?. How would we like that?". We aren't really serious about it, just fun to speculate. This is pretty remote turf down here. Most haciendas include an airstrip nearby, one had nine airplanes parked on the runway.

We caught two fish on the rod and reel on this passage, one we later learned was a "sierra" and good to eat. We let it go. Nancy hooked into a HUGE fish that she fought for about fifteen minutes, took out all the line with Nancy straining and uttering a variety of kind and gentle expletives. The fish spit the hook just before the line ran out. Neil was glad. It was too large fish to fool with, . . . perhaps a large dorado? We were out of ice at that point anyway.

We anchored up that afternoon in Bahia Ballandra, a pretty and shallow bay just five miles north of La Paz. We were negligent about taking pictures of our previous two anchorages, but we did our work here. We rowed ashore and strolled the beaches. Nancy is becoming the world's foremost beachcomber. There must be a connection between window shopping and beach coaming, shell-collecting, . . .whatever the gene is, she's got it!

That brings us up to date. We are waiting for a package of boom vang parts to arrive from Downwind Marine and our monthly mailing from Susan to see how much more money we have lost in the stock market due to the election jitters or whatever. We have vaguely heard that we do not have a President yet, that the election was really close, something about 400 votes in Florida. Someone was circulating a paper here stating that England was re-colonizing the States, that Tony Blair would appoint us a governor and would ban US football and US-manufactured cars, and require the teaching of English in all public schools. But we figured out that was a joke. On the contrary, the Mexicans have a new President, Vincente Fox, who has filled everyone with wonderful hopes of ending the years of corrupt politics. We believe him to be a truly good man who can make a difference down here and we wish these deserving people the very best of luck in the coming administration.

Nancy says she wants SailMail for a Christmas present, so we have upgraded our ham radio to receive and broadcast in seven modes and we can now get the weather over the Chubasco Net and others. We will soon (around February) be able to send and receive daily email right from Active Light. We will let you all know when this capability is in place, but don't hold your breath. Everything takes a while to happen down here, no joking!

 Finally, here are a couple of last minute pictures of Cecil and his Cape George 38 and the Marina Santa Cruz as seen from Active Light. That's the dinghy dock and just to the left is the Capri Restaurant where you can get a very decent breakfast and pass the hours just watching the boats and talking to other cruisers as they come ashore.

We will post another letter in about a month after we meet Neil's sister and her husband, Dave and Virginia Myers, in San Carlos, Sonora for Christmas. We will need to work our way north about 200 miles to get a good angle on the north wind for the run across the Sea of Cortez (about 70 miles) to San Carlos. We will come back to La Paz after Christmas to pick up our mail and the SailMail package.

Then on to Mazatlan for February where we have booked a berth in Marina Mazatlan for the whole month. Thanks for all the email we get. It is nice to hear from you all. We will soon (in a couple of months) be more able to respond to each of you personally when we get SailMail. Until then, have a wonderful Christmas season. Cherish the time you get to spend with your family and loved ones.

Love,

Nancy and Neil
S/V Active Light
La Paz, BCS, Mexico