Bahia Santa Maria to

Man “O”War Cove Bahia Magdalena

November 13, 2019

This is a new leg to the Baja implemented this year. The idea was that it would shorten the remaining leg to Cabo to two long days of sailing with one overnight rather than two overnights. This leg was considered a non-compete leg so everyone was encouraged to motor the 30 miles to the next stop.

We set out at 7 am and began the leg. Because we were motoring we decided to run the water maker. We managed to make enough water to refill 1.5 tanks (around 100 gallons of water) and also to have enough water to wash a load of clothes by hand. We did look a bit like a laundromat with all of our laundry flying off the life lines with clothes pins. We had one sailboat hail us on the VHF and say that he would take a picture of our boat but it wouldn’t be very flattering with all the laundry out 😊

We made homemade hummus with our manual food processor, ran the inverter and charged all of our electrical devices and at 1215 pm we dropped anchor in a very beautiful cove surrounded by mangroves and a very small village.

Around this time we began hearing from the organizers boat that there were some storm warnings being issued for the Cabo area and that it could be hit by a tropical storm / depression by Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Without going into a lot of detail we have a system on board that allows us to look up and download 4 different weather modeling stations via satellite. One of the models ( European) shows a weather system moving in and creating some storm concerns and others show it veering to the north or south of where we are headed. On the cruisers net that afternoon and evening many boaters were deciding to either stay where we were anchored or get to Cabo as soon as possible and get a slip in the marina and wait it out. We decided to wait until the evening forecast before we would make a decision. Our third crew member had flexibility with his plans so if we had to wait out the storm we could.

After a light lunch we decided to take the dinghy and go to the beach. It wasn’t much of a beach when you got up close. The sea weed was very thick and we managed to get the prop fowled in it, but luckily it came off easily. We wandered the desolate beach looking in amazement at the number and variety of shells lining the high tide line. Getting back into the dinghy there were so many stingrays in the water and they were darting all over the place. Luckily we managed to escape a sting, but someone we met on another boat had been stung and apparently it hurts A LOT.

Upon return to the boat we listened again to the weather forecast as as well as downloaded updated models. We had a crew meeting and decided to head to Cabo early the next day. The trip would take us approximately 29-30 hours at 5 knots. If we motored the rum line then we could be there in a 25-28 hours. Both of those options would put us into Cabo by Friday afternoon if we left very early in the morning. We decided to get up at 4 am and head out. Once en-route we could check the weather frequently and if we had a slip in Cabo we could wait out the storm. If we could not get a slip in the marina in Cabo then we would check into customs and immigration, refuel, get our papers, drop off our crew member and head directly to La Paz. We settled down for a quiet relaxing evening on anchor and set the alarms for early am.