That’s right. We’re still here. After anchoring at Cat Harbor for, what, a week? Longer?, we moved on and found this sweet anchorage at Goat Harbor on the other side of the island. We have had it all to ourselves for four days, maybe five. Who’s counting?  We have good holding, reasonable protection from the winds we have had so far, peaceful nights of sleep and, most importantly, beaches with rocks. Three of them. I have spent many happy hours loitering around looking at the rocks on exhibit here and rooting around in the little arroyos. Our next stop will be somewhere more “civilized”, so why hurry away? This is why we are out here cruising.

Our next stop will be somewhere San Diego-ish and we will be looking for a place to leave the boat while we go home for the holidays. We had planned to leave the boat in Mexico, but, turns out, we need to replace our batteries and this time we will be going with Lithium and considerably increasing the number of amp hours we have available. That’s a project most easily accomplished in the states, so leaving the boat here is on the table right now if we can find a place that is even mildly reasonably priced.

Would Mexico be cheaper? A bit, especially if we forgo staying in the resort marina. But we would also either have to bring the boat back to San Diego to do the work or take a chance that we have everything we need to do the project in Mexico. Although we likely could find what we might need in Mexico, that can become an ‘adventure’ in product sourcing. In addition, we’d need to negotiate getting back to the US to fly home and while it’s pretty easy to do that, it’s just another logistical piece we wouldn’t have to deal with if we stay here a bit longer.  Once we make a decision about batteries and who we are buying from, we will know about the timeline for ordering, and then everything else should fall into place. Either move on down Mexico way or stay stateside. Crossing fingers on that.

Does it not seem like goats would enjoy all that sweet green grass on the hills? We saw a deer way up at the top, but no goats yet.

Although we have not seen any goats here, Goat Harbor is one of the sweetest anchorages we’ve ever enjoyed. Here are a number of photos, just taken with my phone, of the wonders of rocks that abound here.

That beautiful Catalina Blue Schist, and some sandstone. The blue of this schist is like the blue of the deep ocean. I’ve never seen rocks this beautiful shade of blue. Also, this sandstone! Wow!

Blue and green schist, formed at different temperatures, and therefore different colors, and again with this unspeakably lovely sandstone.

This sandstone! Am I right?

Yes, it’s really these colors of purple, yellow, cool white. I just get a little gaga over this stuff.

A close up of this area that I swear someone with consciousness had a hand in designing. Unreal.

But wait! There’s more. You are lucky I did not photograph literally every single rock on the beach or in the arroyo because I’m telling you there were no losers here. None. They were all beautiful.

How’d this little guy get in there? Ok, he can stay.

The metamorphic folding on this guy! This was the entire side of one area of the beach. I would take a class in Geology if they didn’t use so many big words that I literally would not remember. I wonder if I could find one where they just explain things to me like I am 5 years old listening to storytime. I would remember it that way.

I love that there are three different beaches all easy rowing distance from our boat. I would like to stay longer, but we are running out of fuel for the generator. Stupid dying batteries.

Ok I won’t make you look at more. S/V Galapagos standing by on channel 16. (Lying. We have it turned off for now. So peaceful.)