MOVING ON SOUTH IN BAJA

We had a surprisingly social time for our last couple of days at Punta el Pescador. We enjoyed sundowners with Kiwi Julie and Karl on Phoenix Rising on our penultimate night, then the following day we hiked across the point to a “secret” cove with Ethan & Cynthia on Eyoni, Marga on Dogfish, and Travis & Elana on Island Fox, followed by a fun gathering on Dogfish to celebrate Elana’s birthday.

The morning of Saturday 19th October saw us prepping Tino Pai for the appx 120 NM passage down to Santa Rosalia. We weighed anchor at noon, and motored out into a building wind, with sails up as we rounded the point from Bahia de las Animas. We were able to sail all the way from there to Santa Rosalia on just the poled-out genoa, for much of the passage sailing close to Marga on Dogfish. It was a rolly night with the wind mostly astern and swells on the port quarter, making for an uncomfortable motion that made sleep on the off-watch a challenge. We tied up at the marina in Santa Rosalia at 10am on Sunday, grabbed some birria tacos from the stand across the street (a favorite!), and slept for a large chunk of the afternoon.

We think Santa Rosalia is one of the friendliest towns we’ve been to in Mexico and have enjoyed all our visits here. The food is invariably good, the locals are very friendly, and there’s good infrastructure and provisioning. It’s an excellent place to sit out the northerly - and we can see it’s howling outside the breakwater wall. It was great to stay a few days, enjoy some great food, provision and refuel Tino Pai by lumping jerrycans from the gas station across the road from the marina.

After several days sitting out the northerly in Santa Rosalia we were ready to get back out at anchor. We’d never made it to Sweet Pea Cove at Isla San Marcos on our previous visits to this area and, eager to check it out, we motored the short 10nm to the island in calm and hot conditions.

It’s a pretty enough anchorage (Baja has high standards!) which can be exposed to anything but NW-SW winds. There are nighttime views of the lights of Santa Rosalia to the northwest and those at the gypsum mine at the bottom of the island southward. We had another lovely sunset, complete with Mobula Rays slowly flapping by, ahead of a delightfully calm night. The stars and Milky Way were at their brilliant best. Baja is a wonderful place for stargazing.

After a nice couple of days at Sweet Pea Cove on Isla San Marcos we started to see some wraparound swell from the north, so decided to head towards the more sheltered anchorage of Bahia Puerto Viejo at the southern end of the island. We’d heard there is good snorkeling at the rocks near that anchorage and were keen to check it out. Rather than the shorter westerly route we decided to sail around to the north of the island and down its eastern side and get in a sail and some fishing - we’d caught Dorado around there in the past.

Sadly, there were no fish biting, but we did have some unwanted excitement when the genoa snagged while gybing in sporty conditions. We’d mostly furled it for the gybe, and the sail was able to wrap itself up in flapping sheets. It took Andy 20 minutes to untangle the lines - lesson learned! We’d been a bit too relaxed and will be sure to leave more sail out in future and control the sheets better.

We spent a couple of nights at Bahia Puerto Viejo. It’s not the most beautiful Baja anchorage, but we found the snorkeling at the rocks south of the anchorage to be excellent. Somewhat grandly called Isla San Rafael though little more than a rock, we felt like we were in an aquarium surrounded by so many fish. It could be our best snorkeling yet in Baja. We shot a nice grouper each with the spearguns the first day and decided to go back the next morning with just the GoPro to shoot some video. It was that good!

After our second visit to Isla San Rafael on October 28th, we prepped Tino Pai and sailed the short hop down to Punta Chivato. We had a nice few hours tacking to windward, visited by a pod of dolphins and landing a nice Dorado hen as we approached the anchorage. We’d decided to stage there for a daylong passage south to Punta Pulpito (Point Octopus) where we knew we’d find some more good hunting.

We headed out just before 9am the next morning, and after a couple of hours motoring were able to run south for the rest of the day, dropping the hook just after sunset at Pulpito. It was a rolly day in the swell, but comfortable enough with the swell just to the port quarter astern of the boat. We did see a huge pod of dolphins surfing the rollers, and they accompanied us for a while though with only a couple of short visits to the bow. We caught another Dorado too, but it was too small to keep and we released it for another day.

Our stay at Punta Pulpito was delightful. We had a relaxing day on the boat to start - sometimes time reading in the cockpit is all you need - before hunting the point the next day. Andy shot a nice Grouper and a Hogfish so we were well provisioned on the fish front. The water clarity was terrific, and it was warm, so we spent a while poking around once we’d shot enough for the larder.

We’d not climbed the point on our previous visit and were determined to do so this time. Our efforts were rewarded with fabulous views of the sea north and south, and of Tino Pai looking tiny in the bay below us. SV Vatanali arrived, we’d met them in Bahia de los Angeles; Christian is Uruguayan and Flo is French. It was Halloween, and that evening we had trick or treaters! Their young girls arrived on a kayak in masks; an American flagged boat is a ripe target for Halloween and, luckily, we had some candy and nuts to share. Mangled conversations in Spanglish and Franglais ensued!

November 1st was perfect for moving on with a rare ESE providing a beam reach in no swell. We had a lovely run southward, originally planning to head into San Juanico, but deciding conditions were right to visit La Ramada. It’s a north facing cove across the point from San Juanico which needs conditions to be right, and surprisingly we had the perfect white sand cove to ourselves. The next morning, we hunted along the rock walls west of the cove, bagging a grouper each. We tend to look for them and have been enjoying a lot of ceviche. We cleaned the fish and motored the short distance around the point to San Juanico.

This was our fourth time in San Juanico. It’s a lovely spot to spend a few days, sheltered from night-time westerlies, and we sat out a brief northerly for a couple of days. The hunting is good here in several locations, and there are some nice hikes ashore. We spent a few days here before we needed to head south towards Puerto Escondido to meet a bunch of our Tahoe friends in Loreto - something we’d been looking forward to for a while!