Bienvenidos a Bahia de Tortugas….1.13.08

We made it - woohoo! Whew! What a long passage. We had decided at Bahia San Quintin to just continue which turned a 12 hour passage into a 38 hour one. We arrived in Turtle Bay at around 2:30am and tooled around the harbor watching for unlit vessels & rocks looking for a nice safe place to drop the anchor. We are currently anchored just off the pier. We set the hook, watched the darkness as another big boat left the harbor & just decompressed for a bit then hit the sack. Michael was up early
but Chad & I slept in until about 9am. We still had hot water so we showered up & was visited by Luis, the fuel panga driver. We told him we needed about 80 gallons of diesel and he brought us 90, which was fine. He has a huge tank in a panga that he fills up with fuel, then motors out to the visiting vessels. I took some pictures which I will upload when we get internet again. We can't get anything here…although there may be a little internet café in the town. Right now we're charging the
batteries with the generator, running the refrigerator & freezer & I hope to get a good enough signal to send this update!

We continued to motorsail last night and the stars were even more magnificent than the previous night. I found a book on board this morning detailing out the constellations and can't wait to identify all 88 - or as many as I can in this sky! We did the same watches as the previous night and this time I got the short end of the stick….everyone was roused when we made the turn into Turtle bay and I had the 11-1am shift…so I ended up being on from 11pm to when we finally arrived. Needless to say,
I was exhausted by the time we got here. It was still freezing cold, but this morning the sunshine is out, it's 77 degrees in the sunshine and is NICE!! I was able to break out a pair of shorts even! Woohoo! The water temp is still a balmy 60 degrees, so no swimming yet.

We're going to hang here today - in fact the boys are waiting for me to finish the blog & send it and we're going to hail a panga to take us into town. We're going to check out the town, look for the grocery store, the hospital, the internet café, etc. There's some great sweeping rocks around that I'm looking forward to taking a photo of Ahea Kali sitting at anchor!

I'll write more later…
Rene