January 15 is dawned with the wind still and water glassy flat in the Puerto Escondido Harbor. This was a bit of a surprise since the weather models were suggesting another day of North winds “Northerlies”. What a relief! We’d been experiencing winds in the 30kt range with at least one gust to 38kts on my wind gauge. Immediately, we saw boats beginning to leave the harbor. We made our final preparations and left the next day.
First stop was the fuel dock as soon as they opened. We were in the midst of fueling when a very large power boat arrived and the captain got on his VHF radio complaining he had a 9:45 am fuel reservation and Island Summers was occupying the dock. We had never heard of a “fuel reservation” nor had the Mexicans working the dock but maybe its a thing in other parts of the world when you need to fill your huge yacht with hundreds of gallons of diesel. In Mexico, everything works on a first-come first-served basis. Unfortunately, the captain had to wait which was evident he was not use to doing. Most boaters we meet are friendly and helpful. Once in awhile you run across an old grouchy big power boat guy, who’s going to tell the Mexicans how they should run their business. You just have to laugh and carry on.
We departed, glad to be getting ‘unstuck’ from Puerto Escondido – as nice as it is. Our goal was to make a 70nm trip to San Juanico. Remember we tried this a month ago and had to turn around! At around 6 knots this would use all our daylight and hopefully we’d have enough light to anchor once we made our last waypoint. While we motored up the beautiful Baja coast I sent a message to some cruiser friends on SV Global Explorer, who I thought might be in the area . It turned out that they were planning to be in San Juanico that evening. I thought it was pretty remarkable that although we started 600nm and a couple months apart, we arrived in the same anchorage at exactly the same time on the same day with no coordination at all. We had a nice evening catching up but we needed to leave at first light the next day. Hopefully, we’ll connect up again this season. Graeme is a great fisherman and I’d love to learn his secrets for catching yellowtail tuna.
We sailed to Punta Chivato, anchored and took the dinghy to shore where we found a beach covered with sea shells as far as the eye could see. Bev made the most of the opportunity and we filled a bucket with shells while Riley ran on the beach and got his zoomies out.
We left early in the morning heading to our final destination, Santa Rosalia. As we approached Santa Rosalia, we saw two huge super yachts outside the harbor entrance. Yacht Infinity is owned by Eric Smidt, CEO of Harbor Freight Tools https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/infinity/ accompanied by its support ship Intrepid https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/intrepid/ to store and maintain the helicopters. We can’t help but wonder what the point is to being near Santa Rosalia since there was no evidence that Mr. Smidt visited the town at all other than to fly over it on his helicopter….
As we entered the harbor at Santa Rosalia, we couldn’t hail anyone on the VHF radio at the Marina but once we anchored out in the small harbor and put our dinghy in the water, we were greeted by some Australian cruisers who pointed us to marina security. We quickly arranged for a slip for a week at the 25 slip marina. It was a relief to find a slip since the forecast is for strong winds over the next few days and it would be uncomfortable to be anchored in the harbor being slapped by waves and tossed in the wind. Next up is to explore this old copper mining town, Santa Rosalia.
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