Vol 1 Iss 8: On your mark. Get set. Go!

May 12, 2022 | Posada Concepción, Bahía Coyote, Baja California Sur, Mexico | 26º45’26” N 111º53’35” W | Winds: N 22 kts | Weather: 86ºF Sunny, getting hotter by the minute

Posada Concepción, Bahía Coyote, Baja California Sur, Mexico

It’s 4:45 a.m., dark enough still to see all the stars in the night sky.  No one is stirring in the six other sailboats with us in the anchorage.  Not even the bay’s resident pelicans have awakened to start the frantic fishing they’ll do all day.  

Yet we crawl out of bed and begin to prep for battle.

We have a 50-nautical-mile sail ahead of us - the longest sail we’ve done since January.  A fifty-mile sail is particularly tough because, with our average speed of 4 kts, we’ll have to sail for at least 12 hours.  We only have 13 hours of good daylight so if we dilly dally our way north, we’ll be anchoring in a poorly charted area in the dark.  Definitely not fun, potentially dangerous.

Andrés Jacobo has studied every weather forecast model and we’ve decided today is the day to make the jump. We’re up early so we can sail with the last bit of Coromuels, the nightly westerly winds.  We’ll motor a bit while the wind clocks around to the south then we’ll fly the spinnaker as the wind builds.  Once the winds get strong, we’ll pull down the spinnaker and sail wing-on-wing (mainsail to leeward and genoa pulled out with the whisker pole to windward).  All the forecasts say we’ll have 22 kts behind us for the entire afternoon so we should practically fly all the way to Bahía Concepción.  

Like any good sailor, we don’t trust the wind to behave as the forecast predicts.  In our sail a few days ago, the wind bucked against the puny forecasts and showed up 25 kts strong with 5 ft steep waves.  With our complicated lunch planned, our reliable-but-weak autopilot in place, and our wing-on-wing equipment buried deep in a locker, we felt like we showed up with a knife to a gun fight.  “Oh, so you thought you were just out for an afternoon cruise?”  The wind taunted us with each dousing of salt water across the side of the boat.  

Today we brought out the big guns:  dramamine to head off seasickness, our hefty offshore autopilot, a quick sandwich lunch, all sailing equipment at the ready.  We will not let the wind beat us today just because we’ve underestimated it.  Ana María is prepped for 30 kt winds.  We’re determined to make the most of the strong winds and sail the vast majority of the 50 miles.  

Unfortunately we’re off to a disappointing start.  The Coromuel winds we planned to ride out of here are a no-show.

Oh well.  Not a big deal…we’ll just motor one more hour than we planned.  

We’ve been motoring for almost an hour when I catch a glimpse of a mast behind us.  Must have been one of the other sailboats in our anchorage.   I keep an eye on it for the next hour as it quickly gains on us.  We’re making a steady 4.3 kt progress at our fuel-optimizing 2000 rpm.  An hour later the sailboat’s passed us and I see its name “Kukui” and its husband and wife crew.  It’s at least a 36-footer and burning more fuel than we are.  I itch to rev the engine up a bit so we’re not left trailing them.  Then I remember the ‘fun’ of performing engine oil changes and hand-carrying jugs of diesel to the boat.   I sit back and try to let it go as I watch them pass us.  

It’s not long before we begin to close the distance so we pull out our binoculars to see what they’re up to.  We see white sails going up!  They’ve found the beginning of the wind and have started to sail.  

The wind hasn’t quite filled in for us yet, but we decide to start the long process of raising the spinnaker.  “By the time we get her flying, we’ll have reached the wind.”  We methodically work our way through the steps and thanks to good coordination, we are flying the huge red, white, and blue sail in no time.  

The conditions are great:  steady 7 kts of wind to fill the sail, no waves forming speed bumps yet.  We’re cruising along at 4.5 kts - faster than we normally motor - and we’re catching up to Kukui.  

As we pass them, we can almost hear the wife ask, “Honey, why is that small boat going faster than us with only one sail?”  We imagine him mutter in response, “I thought this was a gentleman’s white-sail-only race. But there they go, flying that colorful spinnaker, the cheaters.” 

We study our opponents.  They’re in the same battle with the wind but they have slightly different weapons at their disposal.  Winds are light enough that, if they had a spinnaker, they’d probably be flying it.  We know our spinnaker gives us an advantage in light wind races.  We were “not racing” our friends Sam and Jesica from Cabo to Los Frailles.  “I knew we had you smoked then I turned around and up goes this colorful sail.  Oh S*#@!  They just pulled out a spinnaker. We’re toast,” he admitted when they pulled in behind us at the anchorage.

Life is not a race.  We’re not racers.  We strictly cruise.  Today’s sail is not a race…or at least it wasn’t.  

Suddenly today is no longer just about sailing.  Today is about sailing FASTER!

The Mainsail

I spend a lot of my life trying to keep up with my husband.  (I didn’t realize exactly how true that is until I wrote it just now.)   It hasn’t always worked out for me, as in I have a broken elbow and leg to show for 2 failed attempts.   But 99% of the time, by following him, I wind up in astonishingly beautiful places I would never have explored on my own.  

I was nervous when he mentioned wanting to climb Steinbeck Canyon while in Puerto Escondido.  Known as Tabor Canyon by the locals, gringos know it is as the canyon where John Steinbeck and biologist Ed Ricketts were taken by locals to hunt Big Horn Sheep during their 1940 expedition detailed in Steinbeck’s “Log from the Sea of Cortez.”    The hike is classified as a “Class 3 Scramble” and I hesitated after hearing the trip report from our friend Rob.  “There are ropes you have to climb and they’re sketch!  But you have to use the rope.  I made it to the 3rd rope.”  Third of how many? I wondered…

“Yeah All-Trails reports say the ropes are kind of sketch but I only want to make it up to the pools after the 3rd rope.  It’s only 4 miles.  We don’t have to go the full 6.” Andrés Jacobo tries to reassure me.

He really wants to do it and I don’t want to hold him back so we set out early one morning for the pools after the 3rd rope.  We walk on dusty burro trails for 2 miles before arriving at the canyon.  For 3 miles we follow the cairns set every 50 ft or so.  We’re used to the groomed trails in the Cascade Mountains which are quite different from bouldering up canyons.  Here we have to use our whole bodies to climb, pulling up to the tops of the boulders, exercising our triceps to push up to the next level of rock.  

We arrive at a spot where we see no way to continue.  We look around, trying on the left side, then the right.  Dead ends.  Then we see a rope hanging from one of the boulders.  We’ve found rope 1!

The first one isn’t bad…not much longer or more difficult to scale than a rope on a children’s playground.  

We haven’t climbed far when we come across the second rope.  This one is way more challenging, involving a u-shaped climb across logs propped up to give footholds.  It takes me 5 minutes full of coaching from Andrés Jacobo and some pauses and deep breaths from me to grab hold of the rock at the top.   I glance down 20 ft below to the bottom and get nauseated.   “Even my heart was racing on that one,” he admits.  A quarter mile later we’ve reached the 3rd rope which is thankfully not as daunting as the 2nd.   

We hike half a mile and we start hearing frogs.  Frogs!  We’ve been hiking for 4 miles in a dry dusty canyon.  Frogs must mean fresh water!  Sure enough we can even see palm trees up ahead. 

Pushing ourselves up on boulder after boulder we finally see them:  pools of fresh water!  The cool water looks so inviting after our sweaty climb up.  We haven’t seen anyone else on the trail, but we listen for voices behind us anyway.  Not a peep.  We’re all alone up here so we strip off our clothes and slide into the rock pool.  The bottom of the pool is slippery but the cold water feels divine.  We soak up all the refreshment we can get before our climb back down.

The Challenge

Food poisoning knocked us both off our feet for several days.

The Lingo

The “No-Go zone” is probably not something you’ve had to deal with if you’ve spent most of your days on the water in a powerboat.  In a powerboat, you turn on the engine and point the boat in the direction you want to go.  You throttle up, you throttle down, turn right, turn left at your whim.   

On a sailboat, the wind in your sails is your propulsion.  As you’ll read today, the wind does not bend to your will.  It does wherever it wants.  It shifts, it dies, it builds and you just have to deal with whatever it throws at you.

The sails can only use the wind at certain angles to propel the boat forward.  If the wind is coming from directly in front of the boat, the sails can’t catch the wind and they flap about violently, leaving you dead in the water.  The front or bow of the boat has to be pointed at least 30º to either side of the source of the wind before the sails fill and the boat moves.    If, heaven forbid, the wind is coming from your desired destination,  you have to point 30º degrees left or right of your destination.  You sail awhile then turn the front of the boat to cross the wind and you go 30º to the other side.  These 30º on either side of the wind source becomes the “no-go zone” because while in it you no go anywhere.  

Our boat loves to sail when the the wind is coming from the side or beam of our boat at 90º.  She sails well when the wind is coming from behind the boat (90º-150º).  If the wind starts to come more directly from behind you (close to 180º), you get into a smaller ‘no-go zone.’  Wind from behind still fills the sails, but at any moment the wind could shift and backwind the mainsail.  If the wind catches the mainsail from the other side, it’ll push the mainsail and boom across the boat with huge force.   This is called an accidental jibe.  It’s terrible for the rigging that holds the mast on the boat and it’s incredibly dangerous for any crew member’s head who happens to be in its way.  

(Click here and scroll down to see a diagram of the points of sail with the ‘no go’ zone.)

Now we’re racing.  We can feel the adrenaline start to course through our veins as we adjust our sails and look to our starboard side to monitor Kukui’s progress.  We’re pretty much neck and neck, like horses at the Kentucky Derby, as the wind starts to build and our keels gain traction in the ocean’s motion.  As Kukui sails 200 ft from our beam, we watch confused as she starts to slow down.  The man hops out of the cockpit and up to the foredeck.  Are they trying to fix a problem?  Only moments later we see a whisker pole pop out to windward.  He heads back to the cockpit and they unfurl the genoa to windward.  They get a burst of speed as the wind fills both their genoa and their mainsail in a wing-on-wing configuration.

Both boats settle into a course and we watch each other carefully.  With our lighter-material spinnaker sail up in these lighter winds, we estimate we’re going .1 kts faster than Kukui.  Seems like every 15 minutes we gain maybe a foot on them.  

We’re sailing with the rocky coast of the Baja Peninsula only a couple miles off our port side.  It’s obvious we’re both trying to clear Punta Concepción before rounding the point and taking refuge in Bahía Concepción.    With the point as our goal, the treacherous shoreline a formidable obstacle to our left, and the wind coming directly from behind us both, this race is all about wind angle.  

The wind is almost exactly 180º off the point.  Neither of us can sail at 180º.  Kukui’s wing-on-wing setup can get them probably to 150º but it also means they have a mainsail and boom out.  If they get too close to 180º, the wind could clock around the stern to back the mainsail, slamming the boom to the other side of the boat, “jibing” the boat and causing damage to their rig and crew.  

We’re flying under spinnaker alone with our boom sheeted tightly in the center of the boat.  We know from experimentation when rounding Cabo San Lucas we can reliably sail at 175º with close monitoring. A jibe for us could mean damaging the spinnaker, but in this wind if we watch carefully we will see the spinnaker collapse before Ana María jibes.  Every couple of minutes we recite our plan, “If she starts to jibe, go fast 30º to starboard.”  For now though, even if our speeds are the nearly the same, their angle to Punta Concepción is probably 20º impaired to ours.  

We spend the next hour watching the sails and the wind angle like hawks.  Forecasts predict the wind will shift to the east throughout the day.  We’re both fast on the trigger with any degree of shift. “Go two degrees downwind please.” “Aye aye Cap’n” becomes our refrain, repeated every couple of minutes.  Each degree of shift in the wind is matched with a shift in our tiller.  We get a little aggressive from time to time and watch the sail collapse so we head back upwind until the spinnaker fills again.

They’re being aggressive as well.  We keep looking back, studying their course against the wind angle.  They must be sailing at 170º! “Look how far downwind they’re sailing.  So close!  There’s no way they aren’t on the cusp of a jibe.”   The woman must be pleading in vain, “Come on, honey.  This is not a race.  Our rig is not worth losing just to win this race.”  We watch as their main starts to flutter, a sign they’re dangerously close to an accidental jibe.  They must have seen it too because they resign to a controlled safety jibe, heading off shore, losing their great angle towards Punta Concepción.  They may have speed now, but they’re not heading in the right direction.

Confident in our lead, we give our tiller a break from our micromanagement and relax a bit.  That is…until the wind starts to pick up just as forecasted.  The spinnaker gives us a great course to Punta Concepción but it has its limits.  If we leave it up too long, it gets dangerous to take down and we risk ripping the sail into shreds.  We start to see 20 kts of true wind and concede we don’t want to lose the spinnaker just to win this unofficial race.  It’s time for a sail change.

We dread the sail change because it’s gonna take FOREVER.  We have to douse the spinnaker, bring down the spinnaker, coil all the lines so they don’t catch in the prop, turn on the engine, turn around to motor directly into the wind, raise the mainsail, turn back downwind, trim the main, set up the whisker pole for wing-on-wing, and unfurl the genoa to windward.  Kukui’s just jibed again so while we do all of that, we’re going to be eating their dust.   They’re headed straight for the point, making 4.5 kts while we putter around with the sails.  

The sail change goes off without a hitch and soon enough we’re trailing them towards the point.  They’re on a better course, but we’re still crossing our fingers for the wind to shift to the east.  An easterly wind would force them to jibe again and put us on the inside track.  

Instead of shifting, the wind…dies.  It just dies.  Instead of the 22 kts on our beam forecasted for 3 p.m., we have a dismal 4 kts behind us.  We’re headed away from the point at a leisurely 1.7 kts.  Maybe it’s a fluke?  Sometimes the wind dies right before the wind shifts.  Maybe that’s what’s happening?  Unfortunately, though the wind has disappeared, the seas have shown up in full force.  Every time we gain a bit of speed, a set of 3 4-foot-high waves crash into our stern, sending us spinning and slowing us completely.  

The wind we prepared to battle all day, the wind that was supposed to propel us easily into Bahía Concepción is nowhere to be seen.  All that hype and nothing to show for it.  I go down into the galley to make the teriyaki sauce for dinner and try to take my mind off the frustrating situation.

“Hey!”  Andrés Jacobo calls from the cockpit.  “They’re speeding up!”  I climb up with the binoculars so we can see more closely.  Did we make a tactical mistake?  Is there some kind of bizarre wind close to shore where they are?  

Nope!  We watch in the binoculars as they take down their sails.  They’ve turned on their engine and are motoring straight for the point.  Cheaters, cheaters, pumpkin-eaters!!!

So much for racing for pink slips.  We didn’t want their stupid boat anyway.  

With the motion of the boat getting worse, no wind in the horizon, and our competitors forfeiting the race, do we continue our disappointing battle with the wind?  Or do we too throw in the towel?  

The Galley

“G’morning!  You want some fish for lunch?”   Andrés Jacobo is making us french toast for breakfast in our deserted anchorage.  We’re the only boat in Bahía Ramada and we’re alone save the VW van camping on the beach.  He’s quite surprised to look out the galley portlight to the man in a kayak making the offer.  “Uhh sure?”  

We scramble out to the cockpit to see what we’re in for and are delighted to meet Roger, the VW camper, fishing from his green Hobie kayak.   While we were sleeping, Roger was up and at ‘em, peddling the kayak around the bay, catching the 5 colorful fish sitting under his legs.   One of the fish hasn’t quite given up yet and is thrashing around the bottom of the kayak.  “This one here gave me quite the fight.  It towed me around the bay for a good while before I could bring him up.  So…which one do you want?”  

I stare at the fish, unfamiliar with all of them.  His offer is so generous but I have no idea what I’m going to do once we accept his gift.   I have a cookbook below that explains how to filet a fish so I guess I’ll start with that?  Surely we can figure it out from the instructions.  BUT the blood….oh all that bright red sticky blood running all over the pristine white gelcoat Andrés Jacobo just washed.  This is not going to be pretty.  

“Ummm any of them are fine, thanks.  But ummm just… ummmm I’ve never made a whole fish before,” I admit.  “How do I….how do I, you know, do it?”  Some people would have rolled their eyes, regretted their offer, knowing this girl surely can’t appreciate what a special gift this is.  Not Roger.  

Roger whips out his knife and teaches us how to prep the fish and cook it.  “First you gut it,” he starts.  As he shows us, he explains he’s from a “holler in West Virginia.”  No wonder I like him - we’re both just two hillbillies who’ve somehow found their way to the sea.   He pulls out things from the fish that we don’t recognize (and don’t want to), douses the fish in the salt water, and continues with his story of his enlistment in the Navy.  It was while he was stationed in Long Beach that he fell in love with a little Catalina sailboat.  “So I call up my cousin in West Virginia and say, ‘Man you gotta come out here so we can learn to sail,’” he goes on as he flips the knife and starts to scale the bright orange fish. He recounts his adventures of breaking moorings during a sea trial on Catalina Island and of sailing in the Baja Haha down the Baja Coast.  

He has to take a break from his stories to paddle towards his Mexican street dog Pico who is attempting to swim the half mile from the beach to meet Roger.  Roger comes back with our fish still in hand.  Pico sits patiently at the bow of the kayak while Roger teaches me how to make diagonal slits on the belly of the fish.  “Now what you really want to do is go to the beach, build a bonfire, let the fire burn down a bit and put the fish on the coals.  Put some salt and pepper on it and cook it 10 minutes on each side.”  With those directions, we extend a bucket into which Roger plops our prepared lunch. In exchange for the fish we send Roger on his way with a bar of Theo dark chocolate from Seattle.  We wave as he peddles away, promising to keep in touch.  

By the time lunch rolls around we’re too impatient and hungry to build a fire on the beach so we settle for the grill.  We’re setting up the propane grill when we see the problem:  this huge fish may not fit on our tiny 12” x 9” grill.  We position the fish on the diagonal and laugh as we see the fish tail stick out of the back of the grill.  Twenty minutes later, we’re feasting on deliciously tender fresh fish.  What a treat, both the man and the fish!

The Wildlife

We pick a calm day to snorkel the wreck of a 200-ft fishing boat that sank on the shoals of Salinas on Isla Carmen.   We’re astounded by the sheer number of fish filling and surrounding the wreck.  There are literally tens of thousands of fish swimming all around us.  I look down at the brown rusting hull and it looks like a giant sardine can, packed to the brim with little brown fish constantly wiggling and rearranging themselves in the tight compartment.  

The snorkeling is so good that, though Andrés Jacobo has finished, I decide to make one more pass along the wreck before we leave.  I’m so enthralled with the sights below that I am oblivious to the action going on at the surface.  I arrive back at the kayak and see Andrés Jacobo sitting stiffly and looking behind me.  I twist in the water and see a small powerboat only 30 ft away from us.  I didn’t feel or hear it come up but I can still see the wake settling behind it so it must have arrived fast.  

I listen to Andrés Jacobo speak to the 3 men in Spanish, but I only pick out the word pistola.  Pistol?  Gun?  Did they drop a gun and want me to dive for it?  I’m not that good of a swimmer.   Then I see their hands are all resting on the holsters of their own big handguns.  My heart starts to beat a little faster.  The exchange continues, brief questions from the men, brief responses from Andrés Jacobo.  Apparently whatever it was has been resolved and they wave and speed away.

“What was that all about !?!?!”  I ask when they’re out of earshot.

“They’re federal fishing game wardens.  They saw us here at the wreck from far away and came in to see if we’re spearfishing.  Spearfishing is illegal for gringos.  I told them over and over we don’t have any spear guns, we’re just snorkeling.  I think they thought the kayak paddles were spear guns.”  

Phew!  Glad that encounter didn’t involve their guns but also grateful this beautiful wildlife is actively protected.

The Entertainment

While in Loreto, our friends Sam and Jesica rented a car and graciously offered to drive us and our friend Fred up to the Missión de San Javier.  The Jesuits established the Missión in 1744 and it became the base from which 23 other missións were established in ‘upper and lower’ California.  It was from this mission that Franciscan explorers headed north, eventually ‘discovering’ San Diego and San Francisco.  We spent the day marveling at the old stone structures, walking among the first olive trees from Europe to be planted in the Americas, and reading the history of the peninsula.  It reminded me of watching the movie  The Mission in Mrs. Dickey’s IB History of the Americas in senior year of high school. 

We seem to have reached a stalemate with the wind.  What’s the wind scheming?  Has it too given up?  Or is it just waiting for us to let our guard down?

We look at the forecasts we had downloaded this morning.  None of them predicted this.  

We look behind us.  Thankfully we see fewer whitecaps which means the waves and swells are beginning to subside.  Unfortunately this indicates there’s not much wind behind us.  

Can we make it to the anchorage in the daylight if we keep sailing?  We do the calculations.  With the smoother seas, we’re averaging 2.5 kts.  If we can keep this speed, we’ll crawl into the anchorage at 7:50 and still have 20 minutes of light to anchor.  It’s close, but it’s not the closest we’ve ever cut it.    

“What if I make dinner while we’re still sailing?  We can eat the chicken teriyaki in big bowls in the cockpit then sail into the anchorage.”  Andrés Jacobo likes my suggestion but wonders if we should take down the wing-on-wing and fly the spinnaker again.

More calculations.  We’d gain a half knot of speed but we’d lose maybe 20 minutes in the sail change.  MAYBE we’d save 20 minutes total under the spinnaker.  Not a convincing argument for the energy-zapping spinnaker - especially at the end of a long day.

“Yeah, and we are about to go around Punta Concepción.  The wind always does weird things around a point.  Wing-on-wing gives us more flexibility to respond to whatever the wind throws at us.”  

I head back down into the galley to finish dinner as we sail wing-on-wing towards the point.  The wind picks up a bit so Ana María’s motion improves as I dice the chicken below.  “We’re picking up speed…3 kts…. 3.1 … 3.5 …” Andrés Jacobo calls from the cockpit.  “I’ll need your help to jibe the boat in probably 20 minutes….well 15.  Maybe 10?”   I quicken the pace of my chopping so I can have the chicken in a place where I can safely abandon it to jibe.

Not 5 minutes later we’ve passed Punta Concepción and I chuck the chicken into the pan on the gimbaled stove.  

We quickly furl the genoa from the cockpit then go forward to lower the whisker pole and set it up on the other side.  We can feel Ana María’s speed increase even under the power of the mainsail alone.   The wind must be picking up.  We raise the whisker pole on the other side, securing the fore- and after-guy to keep it stable while we jibe the main. 

It’s hard to center the main under the increased wind but we manage to jibe the mainsail safely and without much pull on the rig.  We unfurl the genoa to windward and I skedaddle down below to finish dinner.

“With this wind we have an hour before we need to take down the mainsail to anchor.”  That gives me plenty of time to sauté the chicken and veggies and steam the rice.  We’ll have dinner and be ready to anchor. Perfect timing.

I’ve just put the rice to simmer when I feel the boat heel before I even hear Andrés Jacobo’s report from above.  “The wind’s picked up.  I’m seeing 20 kts of wind.  We’re flying at 6 kts now.  We may only have half an hour until we ancho….WOAH!  Just saw 7.1 kts.  Maybe only 20 minutes.”

We’ve rounded the point and whoosh!  The wind fills in behind us at the perfect angle.  We’re averaging 7.5 kts with an occasional 8 kts popping up on the knot meter.

I rush to throw the rice into bowls and top it with the teriyaki chicken and vegetables.  With only 10 minutes left before we have to anchor, I hand up a bowl for Andrés Jacobo and tell him to go ahead and start eating while I crawl up into the cockpit.

We scarf down our food while we scope out the anchorage.  There are 5 boats already settled for the night and we have a boat on our starboard side coming in from the north.  (We’ll meet the couple on the boat the next day and he’ll admit “We saw you coming in.  I told Carole, ‘We’ll beat them no problem,’ but then we saw how fast you were flying and I thought, ‘No way we can catch up to them!”)

We’re galloping toward the anchorage at 8 kts and if we don’t take down the sail RIGHT NOW we’re going to beach this boat.  

We throw our half-eaten dinners into the sink and rush to furl the genoa.  We don’t have time to take down the whisker pole.  Andrés Jacobo winches the mainsail into the center of the boat as he heads up wind.  I climb up to the mast to set up the lazy jacks.  As soon as they’re secure, I yell back to the cockpit, “I’m ready!”   “Okay!  Going to loosen the mainsheet then drop the main halyard. Watch the boom!”  I hold onto our granny bars at the mast and wait to see the sail drop and lose power.  “Boom is secure!” He gives me the signal it’s okay to move aft.  I hold fast to the boom and pull the mainsail all the way down so it flakes inside the lazy jacks while he turns the boat back downwind.   

We ‘puppy dog’ the anchorage to look for rocks and obstructions just like Captain Woolly taught us in our Bareboat Cruising Class.  It’s only 6 p.m. so we have plenty of light to see the sandy bottom.  Content with our chosen spot, we drop the anchor, set it well, and take a deep breath.

We did it!   We sailed 42 of the 50 miles! AND we’re here safe AND with 2 hours of daylight to spare AND probably only 30 minutes behind that cheater boat.  

It wasn’t the battle we’d been expecting.  Much more about patience and tactics than hand-to-hand combat with the wind and seas.  But we won.

We finish our lukewarm dinner, immensely satisfied with our day, our teamwork, our performance.

The Horizon

Hurricane season starts May 15 so we need to hustle north to the top of the Sea of Cortez to get out of the way of tropical storms.  We’ll pass through Santa Rosalía before moving up to Bahía de Los Angeles where we hope to find cooler water and weather.  

Fair winds and following seas,

Katherine

P.S. Thank you for all of your kind words, texts, and prayers for my dad after the last edition.  I’m thankful I could be with my parents for round 2 of 6 of the chemotherapy. They’re hanging in there, having just finished round 3.   We’re hopeful for a full recovery.