Bahia Tortugas and Bahia Asunción
Ok, these came out of order. It’s much harder on the phone to schedule posts so read this one first!!!
Update: We made it to Cabo! A year ago we doubted our ability to make it to San Francisco and although it was a bumpy ride at times, and the schedule wasn’t ideal (financially) we’ve had a blast and are so incredibly excited to have made it this far.
Look out for emails the next 3 days as I’m gonna try to catch up on missed posts from the Baja stretch, WiFi pending.
In the mean time:
We spent 2 days in turtle bay. It’s a cute but dusty little town. The locals were very helpful, and presumably everyone knew of us as we were the only boat anchored in the bay. A man who spoke a few English words met us on the beach and offered to take our trash to his dumpster. He pointed us in the direction of the grocery store with a water filling station. En route a 12-ish-year old boy met us and offered to show us the rest of the way. We’re glad he did because it was an unmarked bright green building. Inside he helped us find the water spigot and offered a tour of the grocery store. We hauled our water back to the dinghy and strolled around town musing about becoming ex-pats in a cute town like this.
We were alerted to the carne asada tacos being served at 6 at a little restaurant and promised to come back. We took everything back to the boat and dinghied ashore again for dinner. The 6 o’clock invitation must have been cancelled because we were the only ones there. Taylor went rogue and got fish tacos which was wise. They were far superior to the beef. I suppose it makes sense in a fishing town.
The next morning we pulled the hook at first light and set off to our next stop. The morning showed us the calmest open ocean we’ve ever seen. So under sail, we decided to fish. We almost immediately caught fish and the fight was harder than usual because we couldn’t simply throttle back because the sails kept pushing us along at 5 knots. We hauled in a tuna! It was a bonito but unlike the ones off Catalina it was 12 pounds and 33 inches! We filleted the first fish and quickly caught 3 more. Taylor’s was a little larger but we had enough meat for days so we released the rest.
The last few hours into Bahia Asunción were great. The winds built to 26 knots gusting to 30 but since the sun was up and we were only a few miles from safe harbor we kept the sail up and flew into town with the boat heeled and waves coming over the bow.
Asunción protected us from swell and we made ceviche. The next morning we opted to delay our town adventure so we could sleep in and tidy the boat. The dinghy got a bath and a fresh coat of sunscreen. The dodger windows needed to be scrubbed and as always the boat needed to be put back together after a hard sail.
We were a little ripe after 10 days since our last shower so we jumped in. The water is still freezing. Here’s hoping that the next turn will bring warm water.
We’ve been using dr. Bronner’s soap since it sudses in saltwater and wanted to try to shampoo our hair. Unfortunately, we didn’t know the soap turns into wax in cold enough water so we were unable to rinse it out and ended up in a much worse situation than before. No pictures of this process as we were wet and flustered.
We had tuna steaks for dinner as a consolation prize. We tried dunking our heads in a bucket of slightly warmed water but are still rocking the mostly waxy hairdo.
The following morning we wandered the town, collected some essentials (tecate), got a wonderful lunch and some much missed WiFi.
If the weather holds we’re planning a 4 day sprint to Cabo.