Pepe's Inferno

We have spent the last week in Santa Rosalia Harbor, tied to a dock. Barring the center of the Earth, it is one of the hottest places on this planet, I think. Yet, we survived smiling. How can this be so? After spending a few weeks here last year, we did something that proves how desperately our brains were baked. We bought an air conditioner - just a small, in-window unit. We couldn't find one here in Santa Rosalia, so we had one shipped to a friend. We had already left Santa Rosalia by the time we picked it up from our friend.

It has sat in its original box, unopened, unused, for one entire year. I can't tell you how many times I cursed the huge, heavy box that took up so much room under my bed. There was never a cause to use it in all of the places we have been in Mexico. And then we returned to Santa Rosalia. Within one hour of tying to the dock here, we had the box ripped open and the unit fitted into our salon cabin window. Ah, Heaven.

Santa Rosalia is so hot and humid that it is hard to even bring ourselves to leave the refrigerated confines of our boat. Yet every morning, we leave before 11 am to get ourselves to Pepe's Taco Stand for the BEST SHRIMP TACO IN THE WORLD. He opens at 7 am, and he closes when he runs out of food. Every day, he starts with a fresh pile of shrimp and fish, and every day he sells out around 1 pm. We don't want to risk getting there after closing, so we head in around 11.

So the days have passed, waiting for Rudy to get better - eating tacos, braving town for provisioning trips and the vet visits, and hanging out in the luxury of our air conditioned boat. It is hard to leave Santa Rosalia, but we plan to untie tonight and keep moving north. Our next anchorage is 80 miles away and so we will be leaving around 3 am to make it in sometime next afternoon. The wind has died now, so it will just be a motor boat ride.

Rudy has recovered well from his latest issue. He is still not a pretty sight and mothers in town drag their big-eyed children away from his pestilent looking hide, but I can't blame them. He really does look like Hell.

We rented a cab for one hour yesterday and had the driver take us all over town provisioning - the modelorama (beer store), two tiendas (food), three ferreterias (hardware stores), and the vet. It cost us $22 US for the cab, but it was the only civilized way we could get all that stuff back to the boat in the heat. By the time he was driving us to the marina, the back end of his car was riding very low from all the weight.

Now we are stocked and loaded, so we will be heading straight up into the islands of the Northern Sea of Cortez, bypassing the next town (LA Bay) which is about 124 miles away. We plan to hit a few islands in the next weeks including Isla Salispuedes (Leave If You Can Island), Isla Partida Norte (North Departure Island) and Isla Angel de la Guardia (Guardian Angel Island). When we finally run out of vegetables, beer and fuel (or some combination there of), we will head back into LA Bay to re-provision, so our next internet will not be for two weeks or so.
Cheers,
Laura