A visit with the whale sharks. La Paz, BCS.

We had most of our day planned out today taking care of chores as well as having two workers coming aboard to do a couple of repairs that were above my pay grade.  The first one showed up, even on time, to help sort out the issue of the alternator not charging the appropriate battery banks.  At the beginning of the season we installed a new battery isolator and I figured there was something amiss with the install but couldn't figure out what.  It wound up being an incorrect connection of wires and within a half hour or so we had the wires swapped around and charge heading to all three battery banks.  Problem solved.

The other worker was going to help with our Raymarine wind instruments.  When Hurricane Newton blew through San Carlos this summer it took my wind speed transducer on top of the mast with it as it stormed through town.  I replaced the transducer with a new one but we still are not squared away.   Our wind speed shows correctly but the wind direction does not.  I have spent plenty of time researching the internet and talking to Raymarine tech support but still have not figured it out.  Anyway, that worker had problems with his dinghy so he was unable to make it.

So, around 1pm or so Marne and I decided to take a little dinghy trip out to the Magote to see if we could find some whale sharks.  We traveled much farther than we thought and almost ran out of gas on the way back to the boat which is anchored out front of Marina La Paz.  We got home with about 2 cups of fuel in the tank.  It would have been a LONG paddle.

However, we did find a large group of 10-15 whale sharks and hung out there visiting most of them over the course of about an hour or so.  The are amazing animals.  Slowly moving along opening and closing their enormous mouth to scoop up huge amounts of plankton and krill. They are very passive, very gentle, very LARGE animals.  One of the ones we saw was easily 35+ feet long.  I hope we never take experiences like this for granted because...who gets to do that?  Right?

No bad days!

SV Liahona
Bret and Marne