Happy Halloween y El Día de los Muertos

Happy Halloween to our American Amigos; Feliz El Día de los Muertos to our Mexican Amigos!

We have been in San Carlos for two weeks now, getting Moondance read to sail again - it has been much more work than we thought!

Besides putting Moondance back together, we (Doug) has been repairing lots of important stuff, plus installing some of our new goodies!

In our "spare" time, we have enjoyed watching all of the Major League Baseball games (go Phillies), plus some football. What a treat - San Carlos is definitely Gringo friendly!

We met a lot of new boat buddies, plus hooked up with some of our old friends. San Carlos is pretty festive this time of year - lots of activities and parties - our kind of town. It was a special treat to spend time with our Alameda buddies, Marv and Ardy on Odyssey.

We hope to leave San Carlos on Sunday/Monday; heading to Punta Chivato. It is about 70 miles, so we will leave around 5pm and should get their about 7am.

If all goes well, we should have a beautiful moonlight sail over to the Baja - how romantic!

Most likely, we will be incommunicado until we hit La Paz - around November 15. We hope to get caught up on our R&R time, plus catch some fish along the way. Hope you are well and enjoying life!

Hasta Luego!

Naked Man and the Raccoon!

4:30 am - Doug (Naked Man) staring down a Raccoon that had scampered inside our boat, found the snack bin, and stole a bag of Snyder pretzels - hah!

The Raccoon would have got away with it except opening a bag of pretzels is very noisy and I sleep very light!

I wake up Doug who flies out of bed, grabs a flashlight, and sprints up the steps - a very attractive site for Naked Man! The Raccoon jumps off the boat, leaving the pretzels behind.

The Raccoon doesn't appear to be afraid of Doug. He is more interested in the pretzel bag Doug has in his hand. The Raccoon runs up and down the dock thinking ... flee or tackle Naked Guy and grab the pretzels? The Raccoon finally decides to run away, but we are sure he is going to come back. He knows where we keep the goods!

We have checked with other boats at the Marina - Raccoons are harassing everyone. Guess we had better start closing the hatches at night!

PS: Photo is not of our Raccoon, but a good substitute!

Back on Moondance!

Yahoo - it is wonderful to be home again and sleeping in our own bed - even if it is a mess! Our summer vacation lasted 3 1/2 months and completely wore us out. We decided that was too long to be away (for lots of different reasons) - but especially because of the hardships to the boat and equipment caused by the heat, humidity, and lack of care.

Our first day back, we spent the day goofing off and checking out some of favorite watering holes - just to catch up on some rest, plus acclimate to the weather.

Next day, we actually starting to "think" about our projects and shuffling stuff around. We have been keeping busy multi-tasking: catching up on email, blogging, and bombing cockroaches that snuck aboard while we were gone - oh my!

Today, we actually got some boat projects started and worked all day (almost).

We had an easy trip from Arizona to San Carlos. Thanks to Bill and Linda for letting us crash at their place, plus for the wonderful steak dinner. We went through Mexican customs, plus a Checkpoint, without much stress. Doug overwhelmed everyone with his fluency of the Spanish language (not!), his impressive amount of paperwork, plus the quantity of stuff stashed in the pickup. The locals didn't even want to start digging through the pile of boxes and bags that we called treasures!

San Carlos is in much better shape than we imagined, plus it beautifully green (from all of that rain). Tropical Storm/Hurricane Jimena left it's mark and there is still a lot of work to be done on the infrastructure, but it is coming along.

We hope to have Moondance sailing away by the end of October. Wish us luck!