Not surprisingly we don’t often have the ability to connect to the internet when we are exploring uninhabited desert islands. This has taken a little adjusting to since we spent so many years connected almost intravenously. Jonah and I both worked remotely for years for our jobs and all we needed was a cell phone and wifi and POOF we had an office, and most of our meetings and conversations were done via email, skype, etc. These days we don’t really miss it when we don’t have a connection, though it’s necessary periodically to check on finances, pay our few bills, and of course to update this blog. Fortunately we are able to send and receive text-only emails through our single-sideband radio and a service called SailMail, so we can keep in touch with family and friends as well as access important weather information. But when we do find internet it is not uncommon to spend days catching up.
Our fancy wifi source
From Agua Verde our sailboat flotilla headed north to Los Candeleros. This a little cove, just south of Puerto Escondido, that is the site of a large resort that is otherwise in the middle of nowhere. This place is well known to the cruisers because you can poach their wifi and perhaps get fancy for a few days. If you have a wifi extender (most of us do) you can actually get wifi on your boat! I’m a little embarrassed about how exciting this was for us. We had been told by other cruising friends that the resort was a great place to get nice meals and drinks and use the pool, but we found when we arrived that they had a strict no pool policy unless you bought a $70 day pass (ouch!) and the prices in the restaurants were out of our price range (granted we are quite cheap these days), so we forwent hanging at the resort. I mean we have good food, cold beer, and a big turquoise swimming pool directly beneath us. It was however amazingly convenient to have free wifi on the boat, and we were so grateful to find that they keep one of their networks unlocked. We decided that in exchange we were providing the service of making the bay look more picturesque and idyllic with a few sailboats anchored in it. I was able to communicate with colleagues about an upcoming work trip I was preparing to do in northern Baja, skype with the parents, plan a trip to the back to the states, catch up on the blog, etc.
Don’t sailboats make coves look prettier?
Funny thing is that we all arrived, anchored, got online, and then emerged a few days later, pale and sullen, suddenly realizing that we hadn’t done anything else in days. We finally jumped in the water and went and hung out with our buds next door and it was like we hadn’t seen each other in ages. Fortunately everyone was doing the same thing. S/V Sangvind was communicating with several potential crew that were coming to meet up with them. S/V Resolute was working on their blog… and streaming Game of Thrones. I was glad we weren’t the only ones caught by the Net.
