The Voyage of Padma

Chris and I are taking our time on the outside of the Baja. We spent a week anchored in front of the tiny village of Bahia Magdalena, where we took some time getting to know the locals. Not a whole lot goes on there. These people live a very marginal life with houses made of clapboard and subsisting on whatever fish they catch during the day. It sounds utopian, but it’s not, the environment is a harsh one with a cold North Pacific wind sweeping across a bleak, desert landscape. Since leaving Cabo San Lucas, both of us have been fitted out head to toe in our ‘foulies’ and we’ve had to put socks and shoes on (Gosh, what we put up with!). While we’re complaining about having to wear socks, the people who live here have to face huge seas, and a cold, often gale force wind, in an open 25-foot panga with an 80-horse power outboard motor. I find that amazing.

From our anchorage in front of the village, we could see the striking profile of a building partially built out of sun-bleached whalebones. A quick look through the binoculars showed a cantina sign. Excited, we hopped into our dinghy to check it out, only to find out that they didn’t have any supplies. More than likely they couldn’t afford the inventory. We found out later that the cantina is only open during the busy whale-watching season.

Magdalena Bay is famous for its grey whale population. Hundreds of California Grey whales arrive every winter to breed and rear their calves before migrating back up to Alaska. Because it’s June, the whales had already fled up north. While I love seeing the whales, when you’re in a small boat and you see creatures gliding past that are significantly larger than you, it gives you pause, wondering if they dive at the right moment should we happen to cross paths in the dark of the night. The ‘Lonely Planet’ guide says that this is one of the places where you can pet the whales, and that they are ‘receptive to it’. I can’t comment on whether that is true or not. But I do wonder how one knows if a whale likes to be petted?

It’s pretty amazing that we’re anchored in a remote village like that, yet we can still surf the Internet. We bought a portable modem or ‘Banda Ancha’ a few months back that allows you to surf over the cell-phone network and it’s been great. Sometimes I can get the net when we’re coasting along about 5 miles off the shore.

Besides spying on the locals, our week in Mag. Bay was also spent trying to find fuel and checking the weather to determine a good time to make the move 240 miles to Turtle Bay. When we finally managed to scrounge up some fuel from one of the fishermen, and we saw the weather moderating slightly, we moved the boat 30 miles up the coast and anchored in Santa Maria where we met two other boats also waiting for a weather window. Finally the wind looked calm enough, for at least two days in a row, with 10 to 15 knots most of the time and then 20 knots in the late afternoons, all three boats decided to make a run for it. We rounded Cabo Lazaro during the morning and as expected, there were some large waves, churned up seas and about 30 knots of wind. We kept going thinking that these conditions would eventually moderate once we were clear of the cape. Wrong again. The waves were pretty large at eight to ten feet, and with the Padma bashing into them, we were only making about 2 knots, sometimes less.

From where we were, the village of San Juanico was due north in the centre of the bight and the best part was that we could actually sail to it. Closed hauled with a double reefed main and a single reefed Genoa, we managed a respectable 5.5 knots all the way into the anchorage. In the end, this was a much better plan, as we saved fuel sailing here and while a longer route, it still cut 80 miles off of our journey to Turtle Bay, leaving us 163 miles for the remainder of this leg.

There are several other anchorages along the way to Turtle Bay, and instead of trying to do it all in one go, we’ve decided to take the less taxing route and to point hop, breaking the journey into day or single overnight passages. It’s tough going upwind, there’s no doubt about it. Whoever said that ‘one doesn’t get to Ensenada, one earns it is definitely correct.

Our next challenge is to round Punta Abreojos, another one of those nasty capes, but for the moment, we are hanging out in town of San Juanico. We were expecting another bleak, impoverished fishing village, but to our surprise, it’s pretty nice here. Because it’s a somewhat popular surf spot, there are restaurants, cantinas and groceries. A vast contrast to where we’d just come from.

P.S. I’ve added a position report. You can see where we are under the ‘Donde Esta Padma’ link.

We made it into Mag Bay yesterday evening. We’re trying to locate fuel at the moment.  The Port Captain will apparently sell us fuel, but unfortunately he’s off this weekend.  We may be delayed for a week, depending on the upcoming weather and the fuel situation.

We’re anchored right in front of the village, Bahia Magdalena, and if it wasn’t for the Mexican music blaring last night, we could be moored at a strange interplanetary outpost.

Just rounded Cabo Falso. Quite churned up and wavy. Glad we waited an extra couple of days.

We are just now past the cape. Seas are moderately choppy with a 10 knot breeze out of the Northwest. SOG is about 3.5 to 4.0 knots. Not too bad. All’s well on board.

We’re still in Cabo San Lucas or as some people call it: Cabo San Pucas. I would concur with that latter statement. It’s expensive and off the charts touristy. Non-stop cruise ships full of the masses inundate the place, most of whom rent jet-skis for the first time in their lives, and dangerously zip around our boat like hornets. I’m waiting for one of them to get caught up in our anchor line.  The jet-skis are so loco that we don’t risk taking our dinghy into port for fear of being run down by one. Instead we hail a water taxi, and for the same price the marina charges just to leave your dinghy, it will get you to shore in one piece.  I’d much rather give the panga guy my $20.00 then the marina anyway.

I have to admit that the tequila is pretty good.

We stocked up on a few more groceries, which were pretty reasonably priced. I didn’t find food anymore expensive than in La Paz. We’d heard stories contrary to this. The restaurants on the other hand are very pricey and beer is a shocking 40 pesos a bottle – double what we’d seen in most places in Mexico.

Enough wingeing, and on to our strategy. When we were in La Paz a few days ago preparing, we were lucky enough to run into a seasoned Delivery Captain and former fire chief from California, who for the price of a few gin and tonics, came over to our boat and spent all night giving us a seminar on the Bash. Captain Mike has done the bash over fifty times in many different kinds of boats, including a few cats.

He stressed to us that the worst will be Cabo Falso, where we are right now. After that the other headlands\convergence zones to watch for include: Punta Tosca, Abreojos, Ascencion and Punta Norte on Isla Cedros. The winds on the Baja tend to blow strongest from 11 am to 11 pm, so he suggested that we time our arrivals at these capes for dawn or earlier or to be out far enough to lessen the effect.  And on the final leg, crossing Bahia Vinzcaino, up to Ensenada, we will give Sacramento reef a wide berth. Have to be on our toes for this little trip, for sure.

Yesterday, two of the boats anchored with us made a run for it around the cape. The wind was blowing all night again though, and for me, I thought the waves might be too big for my comfort level. One of the boats, Adirondack, was kind enough to hail us on the VHF and tell us what the conditions were like as they were rounding. They agreed that it was pretty sloppy, with the odd 10 footer thrown in for good measure and they thought it was the right decision to stay put if we didn’t want to get too beat up.

So, we wait. Hopefully the wind won’t be howling again tonight.

I have to say that the pacific cruising community has been incredibly welcoming, and very generous with their local knowledge. I wish we were cruising around here for another year, as we’ve met so many awesome folks.

Today, coming back from Cabo, we were talking to our panga guy, Miguel. He’s native, born and bred to this area. Says it’s very expensive for him and his family to live (no kidding), but that he loves it, and it’s his home. Kind of changed my whole perspective on Cabo, anyway, he gave us a great tip about rounding the cape.* Tomorrow morning, he told us will be good. One of the things he looks for is if the winds blow strong before 2 or 3 in the afternoon to wait, but today he said it was calm, and it was. So, hopefully he’s right and Chris and I will give it a try tomorrow morning.

*Really helps to speak a bit of spanish. You wouldn’t believe how nice people are to us just because we speak a little, and not that well, I might add. I love the people of Mexico. They are unbelievably hospitable and chilled out. We gringos should observe and take some pointers.

We woke up this morning to howling winds across the cape. It’s been blowing over twenty knots all night long, which pretty much guarantees some steep waves around Cabo Falso.

Unfortunately, we’re missing a great weather window for the northern portion of the Baja. But what can you do? We’ll just hang tight until the winds lighten up.

Cabo Falso is just on the other side of these rocks

Well, it looks like Chris and I will make a move tomorrow at dawn.  The cape, called ‘Cabo Falso’ is blowing 15 knots according to the grib files, which means 20 knots, but to the north of the cape, the gribs indicate smooth calm seas for the next six days. So we’ve decided to batten it down, and bash through a few miles (maybe 12? perhaps 30?) of confused seas to get to the good stuff.  The cape effect generally causes the winds and the currents to converge, often accelerating their affect. This is why one must add 5 to 10 knots to any weather model file (or GRIB file) you are looking at when you are evaluating a cape. I’m nervous, but kind of excited at the same time. It’s going to be an interesting passage.

We are splitting up our 700 mile passage into three legs: Cabo San Lucas to Magdalena Bay, where we can fuel up, then Magdalena Bay to Turtle Bay and finally Turtle Bay to Ensenada. Mag Bay and Turtle Bay are the only settlements where fuel and sometimes provisions can be obtained. It’s hard to imagine these places so close to the U.S. yet so remote.

I am looking forward to this challenging run. Hopefully, our only issue will be keeping the sea lions off of our transoms and the kelp patties off of our props.

It’s time for Chris and I to get the heck out of the hurricane zone. A low is currently forming off the coast of El Salvador and Guatemala, which has a 60% chance of becoming a more organized tropical depression within the next 24 hours.  Where we are right now, in the Sea of Cortez, the water is still quite cold, and does not generally warm up enough to sustain a hurricane until at least August.  At least statistically, this has been the case in this area.

We have almost returned to ENSO-neutral conditions , indicating that the El Nino episode has weakened and is expected to dissipate completely by June. Currently, water temperatures are only about .5 degree Celsius above normal.

So how are we planning to avert the hurricane zone?  Well, we’ve decided to head up to Ensenada for the summer. This means taking on the 800-mile upwind sail on the outside of the Baja, from Cabo San Lucas to Ensenada, affectionately referred to as the “Baja Bash”.

My  guidebook for this run refers to sails as “Dacron Vertical Stabilizers”, so unless we get lucky with a southwest wind, there won’t be a heck of a lot of sailing going on.  From what I can gather it’s going to be heavy on the weather monitoring, along with a careful watch of our fuel consumption. The winds on this coast frequently blow for weeks at a time at gale force from the northwest (the direction we’re going), and so one is mostly looking for a weather window with less than 15 knots. With us traveling at 4 or 5 knots, 15 knots will make for a 20-knot apparent wind on the nose with the accompanying wind chop and not to mention the 2 or 3 knot southbound California current.

I suspect it’s not really going to be a pleasant trip and definitely not a trivial one. Hopefully, I will be proven wrong once again.

We’re in La Paz at the moment, making preparations. Since we could get stuck waiting for a weather window at one of the four places to stop, and I don’t want to be eating creamed corn out of a can, I have a lot of provisioning to do. We’re also giving our bottom a thorough cleaning, changing engine oil, checking the transmission and doing a little once over everything to make sure the Padma is ready for the roller coaster ride. I’m sure she’s just fine, us, on the other hand…well, Chris is fine.

We leave for Cabo San Lucas tomorrow morning where we’ll wait for light conditions to round one of the most exposed capes in the world (at least according to my Guidebook mentioned above). Then we’ll head to Magdalena Bay, wait again for weather before making way to Turtle Bay. From here we’re out of the hurricane zone and more than halfway to Ensenada. I’ll send some SSB blogs along the way.

“Let us go, into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we will become forever a part of it . . . we shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something, too.“

-John Steinbeck, “Log From the Sea of Cortez“ (1940)

I’m pretty much in total awe of this place. It has certainly exceeded all of my expectations. Yesterday we were anchored in the Bahia Partida on the northern end of Isla Espiritu Santo. The water is a brilliant shade of turquoise. Rose-coloured cliffs rise all around us like giant Henry Moore sculptures.

It’s so deafeningly silent that you can hear the flap of a bird’s wings, and the gasping of the Sea of Cortez Green Turtles coming up for air and if that isn’t enough, a whale also came into the bay, swam a few circles, checking us out and then left again.

We’ve seen so many fantastic places on this trip, but this place has to be one of the most unique.

Will post some snaps when I get back to a faster connection.  We broke our polarizing filter…something you kind’a need here, so I don’t know what they’ll be like.

I can honestly say that we have consistently fished for a few years now, which may lead some to think that we actually know something about fishing, well not necessarily. Whenever we’re underway we do have that line in the water. While we’ve caught a few, we haven’t been what you would call successful anglers.  We often research our lures and try out different configurations, hoping for that big tasty catch.  Yesterday, while I was at the helm, trolling down the Cerralvo Channel, heading towards La Paz, I noticed some fish action. Something was swirling around our nice little ‘offshore mock squid’ lure.

A: “Fish!”

Chris took the reel and jerked it back and forth to entice our visitor. A couple of seconds later, we heard: “Zzzzssst….” as the reel played out….a lot.

C: “This sucker is strong!”

A: “Maybe it’s a Mahi Mahi? That would be a nice ending to our cruise. We finally figured out this fishing thing.”

C: “I don’t think it’s a dorado. He’s not jumping, and Dorados tend to jump. This one’s gone really deep.”

A: “Ok, I’ll settle for a blue fin tuna or a yellow fin.”

I had visions of grilled tuna on the BBQ, maybe I’d even make sushi. It’s always exciting trying to imagine what beast from the depth is on the end of your line.

C: “How about a four-foot shark? Now what do we do? This guy’s huge and he looks like he can hold his liquor. We don’t have enough ‘fish vodka**’ to pacify him. ”

A: “And he’s definitely not getting any of my wine.”

C: “Cut him loose?”

A: “Yeah.  I don’t want to risk losing any parts trying to get that lure out.”

**At the men’s cultural centre in Florida, aka “Bass Pro” one could buy a club of varying sizes, called ‘a pacifier’, but we learned a more humane way of pacifying, which is to buy the nastiest, cheapest booze you can find and pour it down its gills. Works like a charm and you can rest easily that maybe the fish was too drunk to know what was happening to him.  (I don’t feel that great about it really. But our philosophy is if you kill it then you better eat it. We tend to release the ones that are too big. Like the dorado we hooked in El Salvador. Huge! And he had a girlfriend, which bothered me. Did you know that dorado mate for life and swim around the sea together? Aw…puts a new spin on that Mahi Mahi, doesn’t it?)

P.S. While anchored in Playa Bonanza, we saw our first seal! Way too cute for words.

Finally, Chris and I made the southern crossing from Mazatlan over to the Baja Peninsula (about 187 nm). We are officially in the Sea of Cortez and what a spectacular place. I can certainly see why cruisers spend years here in the ‘Sea’. We are anchored in beautiful clear, blue water with a fantastic desert landscape in the background. Chris and I were commenting on how it kind of reminds us of the Bahamas but with cacti.

On the way over to the Baja we witnessed all kinds of wildlife: a grey whale, a humpback whale, an orca (?, I think) and of course dolphins. The Sea of Cortez is home to the largest variety of whale species in the world and with over 5,000 invertebrate species is also said to be one of the most diverse seas on the planet (from Desert Museum ).  It is truly worth all of the hype that it receives. It’s so beautiful here that it almost makes me rethink selling our boat It’ll be another night on the hook for us and then we will make way over to La Paz and then Isla Espiritu Santo.

The sunset during our crossing. Whales leaping in the background. Yes, life is tough!

View from "the Giggling Marlin", a tequila bar.

Roadrunner-Wiley coyote cacti. I expect to see those Acme trucks on the road.