Flashback- Final Week Sea of Cortez February 2011.

After our crossing from Santa Rosalia to San Carlos, Steve needed to head back to the states. Diny and I still had some free time to play and decided to stay out for a while longer. Steve left the boat in our hands when he left, and she and I took off for another week of gunk holing (exploring bays and harbors along the coast) . Diny and I share many of the same ideas about sailing, we both preferred to sail rather than motor too much, and we ended up not getting too far too fast, but we had a blast.

We tacked upwind with Bahia San Pedro as our goal, but as the wind was right on our nose we didn’t make it there that first day, but instead anchored in the lee of Punta Bandito. To be honest we were a bit lost, thinking Bandito was another mile or so along and we thought we had discovered a sweet little cove not in the guide book, but upon closer examination of the GPS we were indeed at Bandito after all. Nonetheless, we enjoyed the illusion of “discovering” a bay all by ourselves. It felt like rock climbing without the guidebook to tell you the ratings of a climb before you start. You just approach a cliff, scope out a nice looking line, decide it looks “do-able“, and you do it!. Never no mind that thousands of other folks had already climbed it and every move was completely described and graded in the book. To you it was a first ascent!

The next day we caught a wind shift coming from the South and coasted on up to San Pedro. Diny and I both were interested in practicing our “man overboard” drills along the way, but since the water was cold and neither of us was willing to actually jump in to be the victim, we found a small piece of wood and took turns tossing it overboard without warning while the other was expected to mark the point on the GPS and bring the boat around under sail to pick up the victim. We made it more realistic by screaming hysterically “man overboard, man overboard” and punching at the skipper while they were doing all this. We did pretty good, snagging “Bob” (what do you call a guy who can’t swim? “Bob”) 4 out of 5 times, but for some reason we never did find him the last time and after criss-crossing the search area several times, we left him to the fishes. We figured he just didn’t want to be rescued and was diving down to hide whenever we came near…..

The next day we headed out and around isla San Pedro, a big 3 mile rock about 7 miles offshore. It was a very pleasant sail out and back, and we enjoyed seeing all the sea lions basking on the rocks. It was amazing how high, 20-30 feet up the cliffs, they could get to, considering they only had flippers for climbing. On the way back to the Bahia we saw a piece of garbage Styrofoam floating and headed around to practice rescuing her. When the boat refused to head up and tack around as we expected, we realized we had been sailing all day with the keel still cranked in the “up” position! ARGH. We really hated it when we did something stupid like that. The boat had handled just fine with the keel up all the way out and back with the wind to our beam, but when we tried to tack around into the wind it just wouldn’t without that keel down. (What was really embarrassing was that we had discovered that very thing weeks before, and had even created a pre-launch check list that included putting the keel down. The problem was that we went through the list each morning but delayed putting down the keel until after we had motored out of the anchorage and would forget to do it later! We decided we needed to check the list twice each time.

The days in paradise sped by. We hiked and explored on shore in the deserted bays, we fiddled around, we guitared, we ate, we drank, we made merry as we gunk-holed along back down the coast. One day was pretty cloudy, rainy and blustery but we just donned our “foulies and fuzzies” and had a great day sailing. Soon it was time to head in and pull the boat out for storage for the year but we decided at the last minute to head out one more time for a nice sunny day of sailing and put off the haul-out for another day. It was so hard to end our little adventure but we took solace in the fact that I live on a boat up in Dana and could keep sailing, and Diny would be buying a boat soon to put in Florida, so it seems there will be many opportunities for more adventure for a long time to come.