We have enjoyed our sojourn in La Paz, where we have been for the last month. Overall the weather has been nice, mainly sunny and warm during the day but cooling off nicely at night. We reacquainted ourselves with the joys of the town, the ice cream parlors, restaurants and outdoor bars where you can sit and watch the world go by. We also enjoyed the pools at the Marina.

We made new friends here as well as met old friends from last year who somehow never left La Paz. We think we will be underway next week and have already provisioned for our next leg to Puerto Escondido. This will take us along the same route we took in March 2012 but we hope to send time in anchorages that we missed when dodging ‘Northerners’ as we did last year. However, at this time of the year, the days begin to get warm and it is time for the Coromuel winds to fire up. These are westerly winds, usually starting in the late afternoon and often lasting until morning. They can be gentle and they can be fierce and are quite unpredictable. It means the west facing anchorages on the islands are good during the early part of the day but you need to get tucked into a sheltered cove on the east side of the Baja for overnight anchoring.

We expect to miss out on Isla Espirtu Santo as all of the best anchoring spots face west, right into the face of the Coromuel. However Isla San Francisco has some protection on its eastern side and San Evaristo which is close by, offers good Coromuel protection. San Evaristo is close enough to make forays during the early part of the day to other interesting nearby places.

Of course, the weather was nice last week, but now we are leaving it wants to make our lives a little more difficult, however the winds may give us some decent sailing. We did some maintenance chores while in La Paz including changing out the raw water pump which was starting to fail. The outboard needed some help to get going as we had not used it in almost a full year and we will use it heavily over the next 30 days. There were also a few hoses that looked suspect, and these were replaced.

We expect to arrive in San Carlos on mainland Mexico at the end of this month and plan to make the crossing back across the Sea of Cortez from San Juanico which is north of Puerto Escondido.