May 1st to May 17th
We spent a full week in Bahia Aqua Verde, first time we have spent that
long in the same anchorage. It is a beautiful bay surrounded by tall,
rugged, and colorful mountain peaks. It's suppose to have a cute little
village but never set foot on shore (except for one hour on the beach).
Vaughn's ankle was still weak so we spent the entire week either on the
boat or in the water. Vaughn got excellent at swimming with one fin.
"Uniboy" speared us fish every night or caught lobster. The lobster was
large and great tasting, Sharon loved it. We went for a scuba dive and
saw several large grouper. They were too fast to be caught for dinner.
During our stay the "migration" of other boats north continued around
us. We saw over 50 boats come and go. Everyone was heading up to the
next boaters Regatta/Festival in Loreto. We are not alone.....
We finally decided to check out where everybody was going and headed to Loreto just in time for the Loreto Fest to begin. The sail there was nice, a day of sailing down wind going north is always fun. Loreto Fest is actually held in Puerto Escondido, a huge, extremely well protected bay 20 miles south of Loreto. We counted over a hundred boats in the bay with lots of room for more. We joined in the fun with about 150 to 200 other cruisers for evening potlucks and chicken BBQs. This Festival doesn't have any boat races instead they have all kinds of games going during the day (dominos, bridge, horseshoes, volleyball, cribbage, etc.) The main theme of the Festival is a Bay clean-up day. It's how the Festival got started four years ago. Locals organizes all the fun events and it is all free to the cruisers...in exchange for having all the participants spend a morning picking up garbage all around the bay. At 10:00am on Saturday about 75 dingies met at the dingy dock. We gathered two huge bags of garbage and an old tire from the water front. By the end of the morning with everybody's help a huge trailer was full of garage....and Puerto Escondido had a nice clean bay.
We decided instead of playing games we would go check out the town of Loreto one day. We asked around about how you get the 20 miles into town. The most popular answer was to try hitchhiking. So we stuck out our thumbs. The first car we saw picked us up and took us to the main highway. On the main highway the first vehicle to come by was a huge 18 wheeler truck. We figured what the heck an stuck out our thumbs. To our surprise the huge truck pulled over a stopped. We climbed in and rode to town. We tried to communicate to the Mexican truck driver, Senior Jamie. Through mixed communication we figured out he was hauling tomatoes and chili peppers from La Paz to San Diego. He makes the run to San Diego weekly.
Loreto is the oldest town in Baja. We visited a lovely old mission. The town square was full of flowers which Sharon really enjoyed. There were quite a few fun shops with items made by local artist. We enjoyed the day...and then again on the first try hitched a ride back to the boat. Only in Easville.....
We left Puerto Escondido and sailed to Honeymoon Cove on the island of Danzante. We stopped here for lunch and a nice snorkel which included big octopus. We continue sailing north, downwind to the Isla of Carmen. The southerly winds start about this time of year in the Sea of Cortez and it's fun to be sailing north again, "Downwind" Here we anchored at Puerto Ballandra. We spent two great days in the water. We went scuba diving one day and snorkeled the next. The visibility was only about 20 feet, pretty poor. The best part of the dive was Sharon seeing a huge moray eel and a seal circling us at 40 feet.
Next we headed to Bahia San Juanico. On the sail there we saw three Blue Whales! This is the first time we have seen Blue Whales. They were huge, about 70 feet long. It's kind of scary seeing something swimming next to you that is bigger than your boat! We spent about a half hour motoring around them taking pictures. They would come to surface and stay for several minutes. They would pop their head ups and spout water and then dive down for over ten minutes. While they were on the surface they let us get quite close to them. Quite an experience.
San Juanico is a large bay 2 mile across. We had heard a lot of great things about it so were expecting it to be wonderful. We were a little disappointed. It is quite open to the winds which made the visibility terrible for snorkeling. We didn't even bother to try diving. The locals say the water clarity gets better, up to 100 feet, as it gets hotter. The water is still a chilly 68 degree...thanks to "La Nina". We did a bunch of snorkeling and did see lots of fish. One cove was beautiful with lots of sea fans, soft corals and kelp like sea grasses. The beaches were the prettiest part of the bay. There were long stretches of white, white sand. We took a hike on the beach. The beach cliffs were quite interesting with lots of different layers of rocks and sandstone. The rocks are carved and pitted into strange, wonderful shapes by the wind and waves. Sharon found a vein of quarts crystals in one cliff. One of our friends found a perfectly fossilized sharks tooth. Another fun thing in this Bay is a collection of things put into what is called a "Cruisers Shrine". It's a collect of artwork, stone carvings and paints left by cruisers that have pasted through this way. The art work includes the boat name and the names of the people on the boat. We add a small piece for "Reality".
From San Juanico we sailed to Punta Pulpito. Punta Pulpito was a wonderful anchorage! To make it even more special we had it all to ourselves! Punta Pulpito is a huge rock cliff 470 feet high protecting a small bay. The rock has got tons of different layers and is full of caves and cracks. One of the caves was so big (50 ft long end to end) that we motored through in our dingy. We went for a hike up to the top of the rock point...470 feet straight up. The view from the top was beautiful. We snorkeled the whole rock face seeing lots of fish in very chilly water. Having this beautiful bay all to ourselves was wonderful. We went into the beach one night and had a campfire on the beach, lovely.
We reluctantly left Punta Pulpito continuing north. We sailed by Isla San Ildefonso. It is a bird sanctuary where all the Brown Pelicans nest. We had been wondering with all the Pelicans we have seen in the ocean...where the heck do they nest! Well, now we know! Boy do we know. There were 100's and 100's of them on the cliffs. We would have like to stay at this island but we couldn't anchor. The island was very rocky and had sharp drop offs to over a 100ft deep just 100ft off the shore.
We continued our sail up to Bahia Conception. We arrived just before
sunset and will explore the bay tomorrow. At fist look we are back in
civilization.
Leaving Bahia Concepcion we contined north to Punta Chivato. Punta Chivato is a lovely little point. The beach runs for miles and miles (at least 10 miles). We spent hours walking the beach looking for sea shells. There were lots and lots of beautiful shells. It was the best shelling beach we have seen since the Bahia Santa Maria on the Pacific side of Baja. Then we explored the couple islands a couple miles off shore from the point. It wasn't pretty but there were lots of fish. On the point there is a nice resort Hotel complete with an dirt runway for Pilots to come visit. As the privite planes came and went it reminded Sharon of her past "Pilot Life".
Next we sailed to Santa Rosalia. Santa Rosalia is a cute old copper mining town. The town was founded several hundred years ago by a French Mining Corporation. The French influence is very unique. All the building and homes are a French Colonial Style, made of wood with fancy carvings, big covered porches circling the homes and picket fences. Very different from the cement and stuco building you see throughout the rest of Baja. Giving there are no forest or trees on Baja seeing anything out of wood is unique...was all imported. The mines are currently shut down but the buildings, tunnels and smoke stacks were fun to explore. The highlight of our several days in Santa Rosalia was to experience the ceremony of the Mother Mary. The ancient painting of the Virgin Mother Mary from the Cathedral in Mexico City is being toured thoughout Mexico in celebration of 2000 years since the birth of Christ. Eveybody in town came out and lined the streets as a truck with the painting on the back drove by. The swell of emotions was tremendous. You could feel the "Love" in the air. Everybody fell in behind the truck and started parading through town. It was beautiful to experience a memory we will hold forever.
Santa Rosalia was the furthest point north we reached. From here we turned around and started heading south again. We spent a couple nights at Island San Marcos, and island full of Gypsum mines. Large freighter come from Californai and load up. It's non stop. Then a nice sail back to Punta Pulpito. Then onto Isla Carmen. We pulled into a beautiful tiny cove on Island Carmen, "V" Cove. The cove was surronded by tall white rock cliffs that were full of caves. The water was crystal clear aqua blue color and a small white sand beach was tucked up at the end of the cove. We thought we had found paradise, it was beautiful. We got to enjoy one evening there....it was so beautiful we wanted to spend several days....but Mother Nature didn't cooperate. The wind and swell started coming from the one direction that wasn't protected...so we got blown out and had to move on. We spent the nice day hiding from the wind (25 knots!)at a well protected anchorage on Carmen. We wanted to do some scuba diving but the wind blowing killed the visibility. We left Carmen in the morning and continued sailing south to Island Danzel. Island Danzel has huge colorful peaks rising right from the ocean to 1500 ft. It is very dramatic and quite beautiful. Maybe tomorrow we will get a chance to do some diving.