12/6/2010 - A Buffett day if ever there was one

"It's freezing up in Buffalo,
They're stuck in their cars.
While I'm sitting here
'Neath the sun and the stars."

"Mañana" by Jimmy Buffett

Okay, today was what this whole thing is all about. We awoke fairly early since we went to bed fairly early last night. Maybe we're getting into the cruisers' timetable. Although I thought I got up at 0600, turns out it was actually 0700 since they apparently didn't make any changes for daylight savings time here. We have since adjusted our clocks accordingly.

Anyway, it was very mild out at that hour. There was no wind and the water was completely still. I went topside to turn the propane on to make coffee and ended up just leaving the hatch open as it certainly wasn't cold enough to close it.

We decided to stay here for another day rather than to just rush off to La Paz for no particular reason. Good decision. After breakfast, we put the dinghy together and gathered our snorkeling stuff. Took a little dinghy tour of the bay.

(we're the boat in the middle)

As we got near the shore, the clear water let us look down and see coral formations and lots of colorful fish below. Further in, the bottom turned to beautiful white sand. The water was so clear that it was difficult to tell how deep it was and Lulu had to use an oar occasionally to let me know we weren't about to hit bottom with the outboard.

We headed over to a detached rock that was supposed to be good snorkeling. We tied the dinghy off to a convenient rock and then donned our shorty wetsuits. Could have lived without the wetsuits but they made it a lot more comfortable.

I wish I had an underwater camera but since I don't I'll just have to tell you about the various fish we saw. There were little ones that were downright electric blue-violet, there were lots of small yellow and black striped guys and some fairly curious brown fish. Once in awhile you'd see one that had a brilliant purple head followed by a bright yellow stripe and then a blue-grey body aft of that. There were spindly looking green and black sea stars and some pretty good sized clams that would close up if you touched their shells. And coral everywhere. It was extremely cool.

After an hour or so we headed back to the boat where we set up the deck chairs, put some Jimmy Buffett on the stereo and popped a couple of cold ones while we dried off in the sun.

Later we broke out the solar shower and rinsed the salt water off and dried off in the sun again. It was supposed to reach 86 degrees in La Paz today. I don't doubt that it got that warm here. Can't really tell from our on-deck thermometer because it's behind glass when the companionway doors are open creating a bit of a greenhouse effect. But it shows a high of 96 degrees for whatever that's worth. You can see the thermometer behind the door in the photo above.

Tomorrow we'll head in to La Paz to get much-needed showers and replenish our provisions.