La Paz

Well here we are in La Paz, arrived around noon and easily found a relatively inexpensive slip in marina at the edge of town. It's called Marina Costa Baja, designed for high end clientele and megayachts,  but now forced to accept riff raff such as ourselves.
 It's always  nice to get into a snug a marina after several days at anchor, for one thing it makes getting Liam ashore a lot easier.
We had spent a couple of pleasant days at Ensenada de los muertos, ( Bay of the Dead), an attempt has been made to develop the area into a golf/beach resort and the developers changed the name to Ensenada de los suenos,(Bay of Dreams). It's not exactly thriving so the standing joke is that the new name is now Ensenada de los Muerto Suenos, dead dreams. But it is a beautifull place with great mountains crashing down into the sea, and an excellent north wind anchorage.
Leaving Muertos and going north to La Paz means transiting the Ceralvo Channel, basically a large windfunnel with a ripping current, I was a bit intimidated by this, particularly having heard hairy stories about cross currents and large confused seas, bashing 35 miles to windward in those conditions does not really appeal to me, and Heather and Liam would not be happy. But I figured out the tides by talking to a local fisherman who also told me that the wind tended to drop at night , something that I was already aware of but he added that Saturday night would be light and then it would start blowing again. So as a result I was up and weighing the anchor ( it's 25kg by the way) and underway with a reefed main and the engine running at 0230. And it was flat and easy, in fact a light sourtherly came up and we motored all the way to La Paz.
From which you may deduce that the engine is running well and you would be correct, we can now motor at close to hull speed instead of clomping along at 4.5 knots, I have to run in the rebuilt motor for the first 100 hrs, even so at 1600 rpm in flat water we can now go about 6.25 knots, it's all very exciting and scary fast.
Our digital camera has malfunctioned, so no new pictures until I can figure out what to do with it, it overexposes  everything and the manual settings don't seem to work.
Aside from that we are all well and look forward to exploring the beautiful Bahia de La Paz.

M