Holiday celebrations in San Carlos

With old and new friends in town, we had a great excuse to delay our departure here, and celebrate the holidays with them. We were glad we did!  Tod and Tessa baked cookies for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve and they were set out on the companion ladder; Tessa and I enjoyed some Christmas caroling in the marina, and several boats organized a colorful boat parade with pretty Christmas lights. Life is good here in company of great people, no need to rush to our next place. Bliss is happily back in the water, and her crew is content to just go with the flow/wind.

Although we are in Mexico, this part of the Sea of Cortez is not very warm in the winter and has strong Northerly winds blowing through. We are still sleeping with duvets, have our oil lamp burning at night, and our fans have not been needed much. We have played on the beach, but no swimming yet. We will have to sail several hundreds of miles south to experience that in January. And that will happen when the time/winds are right.

Is it something about traveling in a different culture that bonds people and make them pull up chairs and share stories, laughter and drinks, independent of the mode of transportation? On our first and only night in a tiny RV park in Mexico on our drive south, several RV'ers invited us over for happy hour, and made us feel welcome, just the same as we experience in the boating community.

Tessa and I made holiday decorations with pine cones from our land travels

Tod and Tessa prepping the cookie dough

Lighted boat parade coming back in the marina

captivated by her new toys

" and she is coming down the mountain", Bliss driving from the boat yard,
ready to launch

Ready to splash

Double trouble and 4 Bliss too many

The crickets doing their concerto outside, Tessa and Tod are having happy hour, and I have a quick moment to update our blog.

After 9 days of being on the hard in the work yard, Bliss is being launched in her natural setting tomorrow morning.  We arrived in San Carlos on the 11th, and we were all excited to see our home again. Mhm, yes, she was supposed to be in the work yard, but where is she? Somewhat confused we walked back to the office. "Yes, she is all the way in the back". Ok, second try, but no she was not there. Turns out, this large yard currently has 5 boats named Bliss in their dry storage (yep, seriously, could we be a bit more original in our name picking), and they had moved another Bliss to the work yard. No big deal, one hour later we recognize our home on the stands. She had the expected dirt on the outside after 7.5 months, but inside she was just how we left her. For Tessa, it was early Christmas, or late Sinterklaas (Dutch celebration on December 5th), as she was having a blast with all her toys we had left here.

We have been reading the book "Double Trouble Groundhog Day" a lot before bedtime lately, and double trouble seems to be applicable to us when it comes to refrigeration. The LPG fridge on our RV Betsy started to act up during the last days of our trip to Mexico. When Tod turned on our DC fridge aboard, there was not much coldness coming our way. The engineer he is, he tinkered with it all night, but with no success. Not wanting to travel without a fridge here, back up plans were formulated, like driving back to Phoenix (7.5 hrs drive) to pick up a new unit, as DC units are not available here. Fortunately, the morning cruising net came through with an excellent recommendation for a local fridge guy, and 350 pesos ($22) later we were back in business.

We are looking forward to be back on the water again, and our tentative plans are to head South on the East side of Sea of Cortez after Christmas, once we have a good weather window. We will miss our cruising family buddies on s/v Kiribati and s/v Let it Be this season, but were glad we got to spend some time with them on land before we drove down.

Happy holidays from the Bliss crew!

Bliss with raised waterline. Five months from now we will strip all
the bottom paint off to the gel coat. 

hundreds of boats sitting in the dry storage waiting