5/20/10 - Bahia Los Frailes

We arrived here at Bahia los Frailes Monday evening and stayed three days.  It’s a beautiful anchorage with a clean, white sand beach and a rocky hill to climb overlooking the ocean.  We’ve spent most of our time swimming, diving/snorkeling, and going back and forth to the beach.  Andy has gone diving twice and taken lots of good pictures. Jake even got to get in the water with him and “snorkel” around using the regulator.  He’s becoming a regular fish in the water.  He wanted to go swimming yesterday and he told me that he couldn’t breathe out here in the air because he was a fish and he needed the water so could we please, please, please go swimming before he died.  How do you say no to that?

Our friends Scott and Terri arrived on Wednesday. Terri took Jake to the beach and I was finally able to make a dive with Andy and Scott.  We’re sitting right in the middle of a National Marine Park.  While we didn’t have time to dive the reef here, there are tons of boulders on the bottom with a variety of different fish.  Mostly really small ones.  We also saw lots of starfish.  Surprisingly, only one lobster.  There are supposed to be some turtles here but we didn’t see any.

There are about six other boats here, all heading north (no surprise there).  There was a potlock  dinner on s/v Mandalay Wednesday night where we were able to meet everyone beyond the casual wave in the dinghy.  Anthony owns Mandalay.  He was a very gracious host on his beautiful ketch.  He even made Jake a little sail boat out of a water bottle, skewer, fishing weight and some extra fabric.  He keeps bugging me to make another one so we can have sailboat races.  He still hasn’t figured out his mother is not very crafty.  We also met Judy and Hugh from s/v Freebird, Kristen and Ned, and Alisia and Tom.

After a nice dinner with Scott and Terri last night, Andy and I were marveling at our life again.  We thought not only is it cool that we’re technically “doing nothing,”  we have friends that “do nothing.”  We swim, dive, chat, play and do more “nothing.”   We ponder whether to stay on the boat and watch the manta rays jump out of the water or go to the beach and build a bon fire.  How cool is that?

The next anchorage is in Bahia los Suenos.  We heard from another visitor here (via car from San Diego) that it’s one of the prettiest places in the Baja.

 

Here are some pictures Andy took while diving his first day.  I'll load more from the other days tomorrow.  Hopefully in La Paz I’ll finally be able to get his website up and running and we’ll load all of his pictures there for public consumption J.