03-15-2010 - Update 5

03-15-2010 - Update 5 

Hello again,

As always, thanks for all of your wonderful replies and updates from home.

Turtle Bay is quite the yachtie mecca; we didn't blend in at all. It seems the primary industries there are fishing and selling fuel to sailboats, and the Mexicans are as just as pro-active about it as possible. Often a panga would pull up to Orca and offer (demand?) to sell us fuel. Since we've been running down wind the whole trip, and all of our electrical needs are taken care of by our solar panels, we've used less than a gallon of diesel since we left California; our 10 gallon tank is still almost full. The zealous fuel salesmen were not convinced.

We left Turtle Bay--after replenishing our stock of beer and tortillas--on the arduous passage to Thurloe Bay, a distant 2 miles down the coast where we had heard that there was rich beach combing. In Baja two miles is more than enough distance to find yourself in the middle of nowhere; there are no suburbs, the buildings that make up settlements here seem huddle together for protection against the wind and sand of the desert.

Bahia Thurloe would have been a popular anchorage had Turtle Bay not been quite so close. Well protected from everything but due S wind, it's light green water is bordered by uncounted miles of white sand beach. A line of driftwood, cobblestones, and what turned out to be thousands of seashells separates the beach from the desert (the only difference between the beach and the desert is the vegetation, small hardy shrubs that never reach above 2 feet high).

After an exciting beach landing, during which we almost lost our whole dingy-load of gear to the surf, we began to explore the beach. Old lobster traps, buoys, driftwood and fishnet littered the beach. We found large clam shells, cone shaped snail shells called turbans, other white and purple snail shells ranging from the size of a fist to a much larger cream colored variety, and delicate white snail shells with a long spindly protrusion.

After lunch, we snorkeled around in the sandy bay with our spears, hoping to surprise a halibut or other flatfish, but we didn't see any. Back at Orca the wind was really whipping through the rigging. Our weather report was forecasting light and variable winds for the next day, so we decided to set sail for Punta Abreojos that evening, sailing through the night.

That evening was rough, with steep seas close together chasing us down the coast. We averaged 7.5 knots for the first few hours, but the wind gradually subsided. Kara has become a master fisher woman, it seems, always one step ahead of the fish and two steps ahead of me. Some sort of gut feeling, a new kind of feminine intuition, tells her exactly which lure will be effective on any given day. She caught a large bonito, which we threw back (since we don't have a fridge, we can't finish the bigger fish before the meat goes bad), and a fair sized yellow-tail tuna, which we immediately sashimied. We found it a bit chewy, but the flavor was good. Cooked, the meat was much better. I caught nothing at all that evening, even though I dragged my lure twice as long as Kara did, dutifully staring hopefully at my pole the whole time.

One interesting feature of yellow-tail tuna is that their skin is very tough, made of thousands of tiny BB-sized scales which are completely invisible when wet. The scales come off the fish easily but stick to anything else permanently, where they dry and become opaque, stinky and unsightly. We now have yellowtail scales plastered all over the boat, from the bilges to the solar panels. It wouldn't be surprising to find some at the top of the mast, probably having ridden up on a halyard.

The next morning we arrived at a point helpfully named Abreojos, which means “open your eyes,” so named to warn of the nearly invisible reefs littering the point. The famous surf break there was onshore and flat, the wind was a stressful SW, then SE, then calm but with conflicting leftover chop rolling through the anchorage. In the middle of the night a mysterious East ground swell sprung up from somewhere out in the desert. In addition, our radios didn't work there, so we had no weather forecast. We gladly left for San Juanico (Scorpion Bay) bright and early the next morning,.

Determined to catch a fish , I beat Kara to the tackle box and grabbed the lure that she had such success with previously. I tossed it over and sat back with a beer, smugly ready to start reeling 'em in. Unperturbed, Kara rooted around and came up with a feathered lure from the very bottom. I'd tried dragging feathered lures every other day or so an had yet to catch anything on one, so I felt confident she would catch nothing and leave all the fish for me. Naturally, Kara quickly caught two nice bonito, the smaller of which we kept and ate. It turns out bonito make much better sashimi than yellow-tail; we ate the entire fish raw.

I resigned myself to my novel, despairing of ever catching the big one. We were reading Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez aloud to each other, in which the author says his favorite Mexican eating fish is the Pacific Sierra, a lovely slender fish with distinct golden-spots growing to 2-3 feet. As we finished this section my pole started dancing; and we landed, of course, a beautiful two and a half foot Pacific Sierra. We seared fillets and found the meat tender, almost sweet, and not at all fishy.

The moonless night was very conducive to star gazing. We used a star book to re-affirm our knowledge of Orion, Cassiopeia, Scorpio, Big and Little Dippers, and the Corona Borealis. We spent the remainder of the night trying to identify increasingly obscure and formless constellations, all of which must have been invented by someone with much more imagination than either of us. According to Stienbeck, we should be able to see the Southern Cross soon, once we get below about 25 degrees North.

In the pitch black we arrived outside Scorpion Bay. Were it not such an open, hazard-less bay we would not have attempted entry at night. Around midnight the wind died, so we felt our way in under engine power and dropped the hook well out from shore in 6 fathoms, but not before tangling a forgotten trolling line in the propeller. The next morning, Kara suited up and went over the side with a mask, snorkel, and knife to clear the line from the prop while I checked the charts. We've relocated to just over ¼ mile off the inner point break to await swell. San Juanico is the nicest town we have visited so far, probably due to the gringo surf influence.  The waves are currently absolutely perfect, but only about 6 inches high. We plan to stay here a week and hope for swell (outlook looks good!) before leaving for Bahia Santa Maria, about 80 miles to the South.

Love,

John & Kara