During the last couple of days we were in La Paz it was as if a switch flipped and we went from kid boat famine to feast. We had spent our entire trip up to that point with pretty much just the four of us, and while we love each other dearly and never get on each other’s nerves (ha ha), we recognized that the kids needed peers around for fun as well as social growth. We were desperate for other kid boats. We intentionally got a little more social in La Paz; going to the Club Cruceros coffee hours and all of the Bay Fest activities, but there wasn’t another kid boat to be found until the last day of Bay Fest we met the family from The Vortex. (Their son smoked Alex and Brenden in the backward kayak race.) We spent an afternoon with them, but unfortunately, they left to head North shortly after, and we were still tethered to La Paz waiting for our new anchor, so we couldn’t follow them.
We met a lot of other cruisers in La Paz and pretty much told everyone we met to let us know if they run across other kid boats. Eventually, that worked. We were alerted on a VHF radio call that Resilience had pulled into La Paz, and they had a son somewhere around our boys’ ages. I’m sure we had good intentions to hail them directly, but instead, our true anti-social colors came out and we started VHF lurking. Well, Tim did. I was still morally opposed to eavesdropping on the radio traffic of other cruisers, but I have since learned that “everyone does it.” I’m still not sure that makes it right, but it does mean we are not the huge social outliers I was thinking we were. We found out that a group of kid boats were meeting at The Shack for dinner, so we just showed up. We walked to the table and Tim said something like, “We heard there were kid boats here…” They quickly asked us to join them and we had a nice evening of $1 Negro Modelos and good conversation. They were all planning to leave La Paz the next day, but I threw out the invitation that if anyone was still around the next evening they were welcome to come to Exodus for happy hour. We had one bite, and that’s how we got to know the family on Sweet Dreams. Turns out Star Passage was also still in La Paz, and although they weren’t available to join us at the Exodus happy hour, they invited us to spend the next afternoon with them up at the Costa Baja Marina. It was like a mini-vacation from the cruising lifestyle. There was an infinity pool and waiters who brought food and drink to your lounge spot by the pool. Very decadent. Star Passage was planning to leave the next day, and by some sort of miracle our anchor arrived and we were able to get out of La Paz just a few hours after them to meet up with the rest of the kid boat fleet at Ensenada Grande on Isla Partida.
Gresham Family Exodus 