Thank you for all the responses - great information here! Also lots of questions from the Forum, so let me elaborate on what I have, what I was thinking, and what the folks at West Marine suggested yesterday. As mentioned in the original post, I've just picked up a 2000 Catalina 18. I'll be sailing it on the reservoir near my home in Denver, CO for the next couple of months to get more experience with the boat, and then will be transporting it to my home in San Felipe, Baja Mexico in November. My plan (at least initially) is to dry sail it and keep the boat in my enclosed, secure garage. The marina in San Felipe, which is a small fishing village, is home to a small fishing fleet and a Mexican naval base - there are only about a dozen pleasure boats in slips at the floating dock inside the marina's breakwater. I'm not comfortable putting a boat in a slip there until the town invests a bit more on security and infrastructure around the marina.
For the next year, I will just do day sailing in the bay off the coast in front of the city as this is my first time sailing on the ocean, but may venture just a short ways up or down the coast if the weather is favorable. The boat has no galley but should sleep two comfortably for an overnight. The boat has a 12v marine battery, a solar trickle charger, and the 6hp Tohatsu has an alternator which I plug in when the engine is mounted so I can charge the battery with the engine as well. The electronics that came with the boat are: 1) old Garmin which doesn't do me too much good as it cannot take any additional maps - right now I just use it to tell me my speed, 2) handheld VHF radio which looks to be pretty new and in very good condition, and 3) Raymarine Wireless Multi Wind System (I haven't used this yet as it was just repaired by the factory and is on its way to me as we speak - I'll have it up and running in about a week and can check it out then).
The reason I was interested in a GPS is not only to locate my position on the map locally, but it might be interesting to either sail across the Sea of Cortez to Puerto Penasco, or down the coast to Puertecitos. Also, the tidal action (both depth of the tide and tidal currents) can be quite dramatic up near San Felipe. At it's peak, the tide depth can vary by as much as 17 to 18 feet from high tide to low tide - so a depth finder might be quite useful to keep me off the sand bars that can shift around. I bought the Baja Chart for the area I'm looking at, but there's not much detail there. I'm not looking for anything built-in, nor anything that takes a lot of power. I don't think I can rely on cell service once I get a little ways off the coast. The guys at West Marine here in Denver suggested the Garmin ECHOMAP Plus 43cv might be a good choice. It's relatively small, can load the map I want with an SD card, won't break my budget, and I should be able to easily mount the transducer on the transom rather than through the hull (not excited about punching any holes in the bottom of the boat). The RayMarine unit may also be expandable to do what I want, and then I don't need to have an additional system to deal with - but I need to read up on it when I get the documentation and/or call the manufacturer.
Thanks again, and I'll go back and read through all the responses once more to glean all I can from the folks here with far more experience than me.
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