We have been in Mexcio for over 1 month now! Leaving busy, loud and military packed San Diego wasn’t hard! After a passage into the early hours we docked in Ensenada, MX. The channel was wide and clear as it’s a cargo depot and cruise ship dock. First thing we walked to the marina office with our ships documents in hand. It was challenging finding exactly what documents we need to cross the border so we wrote a LLC release document for Jack to operate Gemini in Mexican waters, a copy of Fathom vet docs, passports and had them notarized.
Upon arrival to the office they didn’t like the LLC doc because it didn’t specifically state “Jack is allowed to sign documents at Port Captian's office” and the notary would take 3-4 days for a stamp. But Sonya and I sat quietly and played dumb as the officials called in another guy. Finally, the “cool guy” walks in and fist bumps everyone and has a plan to get around the notary and hands over someone else’s documents for the office to white out and copy, then tear up and throw away.
Very officially unofficial but that's the game and we played along. Then Sergio drove us to the port captains office. Of course we arrived on a Saturday and they closed at 2pm so we hoped we didn’t run into any speed bumps along the way. We stood at window 1 of 4 with him as the lady behind the glass talked with a friend on speaker phone. Causally chatting with our agent, her friend and wildly stamping page after page. Next window, more stamps and a serious woman in official clothing with badges and what not. Next window was to one we needed to worry about but we didn’t know that yet. Sergio’s attitude changed as he quickly handed over the LLC doc and immediately began chatting as to distract the woman, she flipped through and started typing and asking for more pages, then found he forgot to have one of about twenty pages copied. He apologized and ran out the door to make a copy next door. I guess she wouldn’t let him use the copier right behind her. Anyway, he comes running back in out of breath and we go over the slack of documents for a final stamp. Phew so close, more credit card handing and stamps then we officially were checking into Mexico. 180 days and we’ll redo most of that process.
We walked down to Gemini and raised our Mexcio burgee on our starboard shrouds as the visiting country. Our tattered U.S flag flying from the backstay, slightly lower than the visiting country out of respect. Then it was off for tacos.
Ensenada was a weird tourist trap with thousands of cruise ship people walking around and the street vendors trying to peddle them useless crap. The cruise ships are docked, but still rely on running their massive generators to power the entire ship, since the dock itself doesn't have the power capabilities of such a large vessel.
We spent two days provisioning and slowing down before heading out. We did get to meet a fellow boaters in person who we saw a few time up in Canada and randomly sailing down the west Coast, SV DeNovo. They were super excited to meet Fathom and we had a quick chat before they headed into town. We also had dinner with our new friends on SV Motion as they arrived a few hours behind us and it was Nikki’s B-day. Sonya surprised her by baking a carrot cake and she blew out candles onboard Gemini after we enjoyed dinner in town together.
It sure didn’t feel real yet but as we sailed away from the busy city, our quite and solitary sail to San Quintin had us exclaiming “we’re in Mexico!” with happy grins and cheers! We sat at anchor for 4 days, vegging out and soaking up the sun.
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