More Cabo Fun!
Saturday we again stayed around the boat, ate at Baja Cantina for breakfast and then we got in line to pick up our completed documents from Victor. Victor checked all six of us in to Mexico, procured our six-month tourist Visa’s and completed the special crew manifest document for the Port Captain. The one thing we can’t get done in Cabo is to obtain the TIP (Temporary Import Permit) for our boat. We will have to get that in La Paz later on. After we picked up the papers, we accompanied Jason and Ashton to the Tesoro Hotel where they had arranged a van to the airport. Once our awesome Baja Ha-Ha crew members were safely in the van and headed out, we walked back toward the boat.
We stayed on the boat for a bit, relaxing, until it was time to go to the final Baja Ha-Ha event–the awards ceremony. The awards ceremony was in a parking lot area near the marina’s boat launch. They had beer and water available for everyone and of course with the Baja Ha-Ha, everybody wins something. There were a lot of “3rd Place” winners as well as a few special awards like “Most Enthusiastic”. Due to our pre-tuned spinnaker performance, we were not able to break out of 3rd place in our class. No biggy though since we still got a little souvenir and the girls had fun.
After the awards dinner we caught up with s/v Taliesen Rose crew and conned them into going to dinner with us. The 10 of us found a little restaurant a few blocks from the marina that looked promising on Yelp. We walked in to find a large table unoccupied, as if it was reserved for us, which of course it was not. After looking at the menu and prices, both of which looked pretty awesome, we all sat down and proceeded to have an awesome dinner. El Peregrino is a decidedly upscale restaurant in Cabo with really good food and quite reasonable prices. We had wonderful drinks, great appetizers including octopus, and the main courses were fantastic. The drinks were also great of course. When the dinner came to a close, we indulged in three different, but equally awesome desserts. Rowan and Vikki of Taliesen Rose surprised us by paying for our dinner, apparently since I had bought them some drinks and shots at El Squid Roe. Either way it was unexpected and very nice.
Back at the marina in the morning I started to look for someone who could wax our boat. I had been told it was inexpensive in Cabo and the deck of our Jeanneau hadn’t been polished or waxed in the 4 years we’ve owner her, and for who knows how long before that. I asked one of the marina security guards about it and they brought over Luis, who apparently cleans a number of the yachts that moor in the Cabo San Lucas marina. Luis said he could wash the whole boat for $50 (seriously??!!) while a wash and wax, including cleaning up the stainless, and the teak floor would be $150 (again, what?!?). By comparison, having just the hull waxed, in a boat yard near home, would be $1500 or more. So we agreed and Luis started washing the boat. By the end of the day, the boat was super clean and the cockpit floor teak looked new. Luis said he would start on waxing the hull the next day and he was off for the night.
Meanwhile, Devon and Ellie had gone off to find someone to braid Ellie’s hair. Morgan stuck with me at the boat for a while and then for dinner we thought we’d try the pizza place near the boat ramp that we had walked by on the way to the Awards Ceremony the prior night. So Morgan and I walked there and arrived to find that Devon and Ellie had already secured a table. Da Vinci’s was a nice restaurant and we had good pizza and pasta, plus some nice wine (had to do something different than margaritas). After dinner we strolled back to the boat and headed to bed.
Over the next couple days Luis waxed the hull while we tried to clean up the inside of the boat more, and also start provisioning for the next leg. Devon went to a couple of grocery stores, including a trip to WalMart with Vikki that took a bit longer than either of them would have liked. In the meantime we kept looking for some easy way to get the laundry cleaned without having to drag all of it across town. I finally asked Luis if he had any ideas and he offered to handle it for us. So Luis grabbed out cart with laundry, took off and came back with a laundry claim ticket. Later that day he even went to pick it up and bring it back (washed, dried, folded, and bagged). I paid him the cost of the laundry bill as well as a tip for helping us out. Unfortunately this extra help burned up some time that Luis would have been waxing the boat and he needed another day for the hull.
Slight digression here.. One of my stated goals (just for fun) once we arrived in Cabo was to chat up some super yacht owners or crew and find a way to get invited over for dinner. I don’t know why, but I thought it would be fun, and potentially feasible. Despite my chatting up two different crews as well as one of the yacht owners, I didn’t make enough progress in the limited time to achieve this goal. However, on the same morning as the laundry project, the super yacht moored next to us was making breakfast and we could smell garlic while we sat in our cockpit. We could see the chef in the window working away and I had already met him briefly on the dock a few days prior. Later this day, when he came out I asked him if he was the once cooking with garlic in the morning. He apologized, to which I said there was no need to apologize for cooking with garlic, and then Rowan, who I was talking with before this, told the chef that Devon and I were foodies. To this, the chef surprisingly responded with “I’ll sneak you some breakfast tomorrow.” Awesome!! Modified goal achieved, maybe. The names of the chef and yacht are withheld to protect the innocent.
So the next morning, as Devon and I were Internetting in the cockpit and before Luis showed up to work on the hull again, sure enough the chef walks across the dock with a platter. Actually the platter was a Zip-Lok plastic container lid with a piece of parchment paper on it. On the glorious paper and plastic platter were three glorious omelettes. He apologized for his “plating” and left it with us. The omelettes were fantastic, with cheese, jalepeno, butternut squash, bacon, shallots, and a few other ingredients. Just a little bit of spice but SOO good.
While Luis worked on the boat, we wrote some blog posts, caught up on news, organized the boat, etc. That night Devon found another restaurant for us to try in Cabo so we walked up the street to find the Outpost. The Outpost is an organic, farm-to-table, tapas bar.. Or something like that. The proprietor walked us around to see the kitchen, seating, bar, special Instagram bathroom, and their organic store with vegetables, soaps, and other items from their farm located near San Jose del Cabo. We had some really interesting drinks, including a hibiscus margarita and a free dessert courtesy of the Outpost’s Instagram bathroom..
If you post an Instagram selfie from their bathroom you get a free dessert, I believe the bathroom actually has it’s own Instagram account. They set the mood inside well, including running a fog machine every so often to keep a specific level of fog inside. A place like this in the states would have never let kids inside, but here in Mexico.. well, rules are different.
This was our last big restaurant visit before departing Cabo and it was a good one. After dinner we walked back to the marina and crashed.
It was our last day in Cabo and we needed Luis to come by so we could pay him. We had decided to leave, even though the deck had not been waxed yet, but since it was us leaving and Luis was still willing to wax the deck, we had paid him the full amount the night before, with the expectation that we would tip him when he was done today. But we didn’t want to stay any longer so we left a tip with the security guard who knows him and we shoved off, right behind Taliesen Rose. We did not stop for fuel because of the fuel surcharge in Cabo, being $50 to $100 just to tie up to the fuel dock, nearly doubled our fuel cost. We had enough to get all the way to La Paz so we decided to skip it.
We motored out of the harbor and set up the sails in the light winds to head to Bahia Los Failes.
