The guide  books show 3 different anchorages and a large mooring field, managed by Marina San Carlos.  We initially intended to anchor, but apparently the mooring field has been expanded, cutting into the size of the main anchorage and all but eliminating one other.  Even the little bay listed as an anchorage now has a few mooring balls in it.  Of course, this causes a potential problem: most of the bay is 40′ deep and laying out 150′ of chain in the middle or on the edge of a mooring field causes a potential swinging problem.  Marina San Carlos ignored our repeated calls on the VHF with regards to acquiring a mooring ball.  The guide books state that you are supposed to radio them, then wait for them to send someone out in a boat to assign an appropriately sized ball.

After cruising the field and the crammed anchorages, we ended up anchoring on the extreme NE corner of the mooring field, behind the last of the boats in 10 feet of water.  Be careful if you’ve got a deep draft boat here: it shallows our fairly quickly (our depth sounder beeped constantly and read 7′ not very much further N.) Due to the growth on the bottom it’s difficult to tell depths by merely looking at water color.  We’d also like to note that we had a difficult time setting our primary anchor, something we’d never struggled with before.  We ended up hauling it and re-setting.

We scoped Marina San Carlos’s facilities, as we are scheduled for a haulout in 2 days.  It’s an extremely tight, shallow marina which will be challenging to get Oblivion through.  There’s a portside turn we’re not looking forward to in really tight quarters.  We’ll see!