On Monday the 11th there was a break in the weather so we made a run up the coast towards our next major destination ,Santa Rosalia, about 90 miles away to the north, (Santa Rosalia is north of Santispac where I first connected with Steve and Diny a month ago, and will be our jumping off point for the 80 mile crossing back over to San Carlos where the boat will be pulled out and stored for the year. Diny had so much fun the first time that she is planning to come back down, meet us in Santa Rosalia, and join us for the crossing back). We planned on making it to isla Coronado, about 10 miles, that day. As forecasted, The winds picked up pretty strong dead into our nose before we got there and we considered making a detour over to bahia Ballandra on isla Carmen but decided it was no further to grunt on Coronado so we just bashed on and dropped anchor in the lee of the island. The forecast for the next day was for light to moderate winds from the south, perfect for making miles towards the north, so in order to make the most of it we turned in to bed early, and pulled anchor at 3 AM and were on our way. We took turns 2 hours each at the helm steering by compass and GPS in the darkness. It was a beautiful night, clear skies and bright bright stars, But a heavy dew soaked us in the cockpit by morning. We motored when the winds ever died, and sailed wing on wing (with the wind at our back, jib out to one side, main sail out to the other: "wing on wing". Fun!) down wind when they blew, and made it 50 miles to Los Pilares, a small bay clear up on the tip of Punta (point) Concepcion, near Santispac , (where I met up with Steve at the beginning of this voyage.). We had a good protection from any wind but the swells wrapped around the point and rolled us all night so we didn’t sleep too well and were up and off again early the next morning. We sailed slowly all day with very little motoring and made it 14 miles to Punta Chivato. We were in no hurry, the forecast was mild so we had fun trying to get the boat to sail as well as we could. We did have one very frustrating time approaching the anchorage at Punta Chivato when no matter what we did she didn’t seem to respond well to the rudder. We suffered very strong "lee helm" where the jib sail overpowers the main sail ,pushing your bow downwind, forcing you to push the tiller way over "to the lee" to balance it out. No matter what we did, smaller jib, bigger jib, nothing seemed to help. Hmmm. Need to study and practice more.

Punta Chivato is a gringo home area, a beautiful 3 mile long curve of beach with billions of shells piled up. Billions. Instead of sand and gravel, billions of shells of every size and shape and color. Realy quite extraordinary. There is a hotel here and several very nice homes. But very remote, very off the grid,: no electric, no phones, no internet. Every home has it’s own solar panels or diesel generator for electricity. We needed fuel to ensure we can make it the next 26 miles to Santa Rosalia (I know I know, it’s a sail boat. Don’t ask…) and there is none for sale here but we met a guy on the beach who offered to take our gas can into Mulege when he went later that day and fill it for us. A big wind has built up again so we had to wait 2 days before we could paddle in safely to get it from him.

The next day (today) we jumped up early and headed out. We thought we may only get halfway to santa rosalia and would spend the night at isla san Marcos, but we made such good time and the weather was so good we pulled into santa Rosalia harbor about 3:00. This is an interesting town. 130 years ago the french opened a big copper mine here and started the town, even importing a prefab church from the guy that made the Eiffel tower (which is still here) . the copper mine gave out decades ago but there are signs that it will open again, with the price of copper skyrocketing. The town is very NON touristy, very few gringos here, it is very "Mexican", a real working town where Mexican people live and work and american tourists don’t come too much. We plan to spend a few days here preparing to cross over to the mainland. More details to come