sailing casita

Due to the weather/sea state we ended up departing Bahía Santa Maria on Tuesday (November 18th) rather than Monday as we had originally planned. By the time we left, we were both starting to get a bit stir crazy. It was quite windy in the anchorage, there were some lulls but it was blowing over 20 knots, gusting above 25 knots, pretty much the whole time we were there. I think the temperature was only in the mid 60s and a couple of the days were pretty cloudy, so with the wind it was pretty chilly. This meant we spent little time on deck and we never launched the dinghy. A few other boats were anchored in the bay, but without the dinghy we couldn’t go visiting. We passed the time doing chores and working on a few small projects, and Devon made some excellent banana bread. Our only interaction with another human being our whole time there was when a local fishing boat stopped by to see if we were interested in buying some lobster (we declined, we still had a lot of tuna to eat). As the saying goes “any port in a storm” so I don’t want to complain about our time there, but it started feeling pretty lonely and we were definitely ready to move on!

The trip to Cabo San Lucas took 36 hours, we left BSM at 2:30am and arrived at CSL at 2:30 the following afternoon. The trip was overall pretty nice. We saw a couple of sea turtles, some frigate birds, a ray of some sort flying out of the water, and quite a few dolphins. The dolphins were different from the ones we have seen previously. These were larger with a very curved dorsal fin and looked to be solid gray, vs the two-tone ones we have seen previously.

We had good wind for sailing most of the way, though overnight it was very rolly with the waves pushing the boat over to one side and then the other, so sleeping was difficult. I’m not sure if I’ve posted before about the way we do watches during passages. Typically we don’t do a formal watch schedule during the day, we just take informal turns being at the helm and keeping an eye out for traffic, etc. At night we do either 3 or 4 hour alternating shifts. We try to do any sail changes that require 2 people or anything that requires going out on deck during the watch changes. That way the person off watch gets 3 or 4 uninterrupted hours to sleep (or to try to sleep anyway).

It felt great getting to Cabo, like we had finally arrived! The anchorage was very busy with tons of sport fishing boats and swarms of personal watercraft buzzing about. There were also a lot of “party boats”, glass bottom tour boats, and tall ships taking tourists in and out of the bay. The anchorage tended to be pretty rolly, a combination of the swell and all of the boat wakes made the boat roll from side to side day and night. To help combat the rolling we deployed our “Rocker Stoppers”. These are plastic cones suspended in the water on either side of the boat that help to dampen the vertical motion. Not 100% effective but they are very helpful and made the boat much more comfortable.

The day after we arrived in Cabo 2 cruise ships came into port, which cranked the activity level up to 11! At night there were fewer boats zooming about and no personal watercraft but there was usually a party boat or two out, plus we could often hear music coming from the resorts on the shore. It was definitely never boring. Not really our typical scene but a very welcome change after the isolation of Bahia Santa Maria.

After a few days at Cabo were ready to move on to make the final push to La Paz. We are breaking the trip up into short day hops. Our first stop was Los Frailes, where we spent 2 nights. This is a very pretty anchorage with room for lots of boats, we went ashore and explored a bit, Unfortunately we managed to swamp the dinghy when we launched it from the beach to return to Casita. It wasn’t a total disaster, we didn’t flip it, but it still made a mess with tons of gravel and sand to clean out of the dinghy. It was very annoying, obviously we still need to practice our technique.

We spent the following night at Ensenada de los Muertos but we didn’t go ashore and we left early (around 4am) the following morning. Our early departure paid off and we were anchored at beautiful Puerto Balandra by early afternoon. This is a beautiful cove with white sand beaches and crystal clear water. Being only 12 miles from La Paz, this is a very popular spot. There were lots of people on the beach and in the water having a great time when we arrived. By evening most boats had departed leaving only 3 other boats here with us. We will be leaving today for La Paz, so we won’t go ashore, but I’m sure we will be back!