Margarita's
Voyage
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Margarita's
Voyage
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North America
(Click on thumbnails for full-size maps and photos.) We started here, and thankfully we ended here as well. When we started
we had only shortwave email, very slow, very limited. By the end of the
trip we were churning out the Reports about 2-3 per month and Sarah was
taking lots of digital pictures. So, there is more to read and see
from the return trip to Click here to go to reports USA We started, of course, in Washington, on September 21st 1997 (from where we took an anticlimatical day-sail to Friday Harbor before all else, but we like to think of it as the official start of our trip), and left the States again from San Diego on the 18th of November in the same year. It wasn't a very exotic part of the trip, but we had some of our worst weather on the first ten-day passage down to San Francisco from Friday Harbor (fifty-knot winds at times, and when surfing on some waves we had the speedometer pegged at twelve knots) and did all the working-out of our lifestyle, as well as some major provisions in Washington and San Francisco and San Diego, most of which were completely unnecessary. We returned on the 9th of April 2002 to San Diego and experienced an extreme culture shock, with boats racing around the bay, airplanes and helicopters taking off all around us, and everyone we met speaking English. Mexico We arrived in Mexico for the first time (in Ensenada) on the 19th of November, 1997, coming from San Diego, and left again on the 4th of May, 1998, from Manzanillo, on our way to the Galapagos. In that half-year we went from Ensenada down Baja, pottering around in the Sea of Cortes, went around the mainland and spent considerable time going back and forth between the beautiful marina in Barra de Navidad and the equally beautiful (or so we, with our lack of experience, thought) Tenacatita bay. We became acquainted with the northerly winds that came in every few days and gave the whole anchorage an exciting time, as well as the Freyas (see the "Friends" page). We left for the Galapagos and came back four years later, on February 22nd, 2002, to Huatulco, and shortly afterward completed our circumnavigation in Zihuatanejo, celebrating with the Hoptoads and Gypsy. We had an unpleasant and rather cold bash up Baja after that, and although we said goodbye to Gypsy a little up the way beyond Zihua the Toads accompanied us all the way. Some cruisers say Mexico is the best cruising place in the world and even if they've been around the world they haven't seen anywhere they liked as much, but none of us would agree with that. Not only were the beaches and water not as clean as in other places for the most part, on the way up again we found it uncomfortably chilly. (You may think we're wimps, but it's true.) The street food was wonderful, though, and for the most part the people we met were friendly. Reports from North America:
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