While we loved the tacos and new friends in Ensenada, we were eager to get back out to sea again to begin poking around some of the more remote parts of Baja. We delayed our scheduled departure from the marina in Ensenada by two days to be sure we’d benefit from the upcoming northerly breeze in the forecast. The forecast held true and on November 5th we finally pushed off the dock around mid-day as the northerly was building into Bahia Todos Santos, looking forward to the nice push for our 200 nautical mile sail down the Baja coastline.
The wind freshened, and we enjoyed a lovely reach out of the bay with our full mainsail and genoa powered up. Our Watt&Sea hydro generator was spinning happily, so we decided it was a good time to replenish all the water we had used while in Ensenada (which, like the rest of Baja, shares only non-potable water from its faucets). The Watt&Sea is a luxurious bit of kit, and still feels like magic every time we get it running. It’s a funny, kick-up rudder looking contraption that uses our forward motion through the water to turn a small plastic propeller and electric motor to generate electricity for our batteries. We can’t help but marvel when we are able to turn our movement through the water into fresh, drinkable water!
An so it was that about forty minutes into our forty hour passage I went below to discover both James and Pauls bunks soaking wet! A quick look around the neighboring watermaker compartment found a geyser spewing from a ruptured hose, and the high pressure salt water was finding every possible seam in the woodwork towards their beds.
With Ensenada still visible only 4 miles astern it was hard to resist the temptation to turn around and spend another day at the dock drying out the mattresses and addressing the watermaker rupture. But our wind-window was closing and we had some plastic sheeting aboard to keep their sheets relatively dry, so we stayed the course and slowly turned southward over the next couple of hours.
A closer inspection of our ruptured plumbing revealed a split in the hose at a rusted reinforcing wire. Further inquiry revealed that our watermaker was entirely plumbed with hoses rated only for vacuum conditions and not the highly-pressurized systems of a reverse-osmosis watermaker! I quickly discovered, however, that the fifteen feet of hosing I kept in the compartment for pickling our system (when we put the watermaker into ‘storage’ mode) was exactly the type of hosing we were in need of. So over the course of about an hour the next day, I replaced all the watermaker system hosing with the proper hose type, all while sailing briskly along at 7.5 knots under full mainsail and poled-out genoa.
As with all overnight passages, these hours passed in a hazy state of minor sleep deprivation, punctuated by moments of transcendent beauty and pure exhilaration. That first night was absolutely stunning. A practically full moon and clear skies made the night watches bright.
Full moons and clear skies in the ocean are a magical thing. I’ll never forget a night when I was maybe 20 or so, somewhere in the Gulf Stream between Bermuda and Connecticut with my father and brother Tom, who took advantage of the brightness and read his book on deck by moonlight. There’s something surreal about the quasi-daylight feeling of a bright moon at sea.
We thought we’d departed Ensenada on our own, but we slowly crept up on a white navigation light later that evening. “Flyer, Flyer, this is Hepatica on one-six, over”our soon-to-be new best friends called on the VHF. “Hey we just wanted to make sure you saw us out here, we can see you a couple hundred meters away” Alex said. We were admittedly a little close but also probably a little curious about who else was out there with us.
At 10am on the second day, our adrenaline spiked when we heard the sound of the fishing line peeling off the spool and Paul landed our very first tuna! After several unsuccessful days of trolling and all the Albacore we missed out on off the Oregon Coast, it was immensely rewarding to catch such a beautiful and prized yellowfin tuna. It found its way into poke bowls within an hour, and became the feature of a few salads and sandwiches over the following days.
Multi-day passages during late fall and early winter are always a bit difficult to plan given the limited daylight hours. Along much of the Baja coastline the challenge is intensified by the minimal (and often wildly inaccurate) charting of the coastline, where we often find ourselves entering an anchorage or harbor visually, without any useful charts for assistance, standing tall on deck looking for areas of lighter color water, breaking waves, or upwelling that would indicate shallow waters. All that is to say we aim for a daylight arrival to any new anchorage in this part of the world! And the daylight arrival can be a tricky thing to get right given varying wind conditions, minimal daylight, and short distances.
After landing the yellowfin, the afternoon of Saturday, November 6 brought a freshening northwesterly breeze as forecast. Our accelerated pace meant that 24 hours in to the passage, we were ahead of schedule, with an anticipated arrival at the remote anchorage of Islas San Benito sometime around 2am! We needed to slow down. At 11am we dropped our mainsail and reduced our poled-out genoa to a minimal scrap of canvas.
By sunset we were seeing steady winds of 30 knots with gusts into the high 30’s, and increasing seas from behind. The scene on deck was mildly boisterous, with the sound of breaking waves right at our quarter and the SuperWind generator whirring along in surges with the gusts. But down below it was a different story entirely. As I popped my head into the saloon, I saw Kristen and the boys sitting happily together watching Schitt’s Creek, as cozy as if we were at anchor.
A little bit Alexis
“Flyer, Flyer this is Raven on one-six” came the familiar voice of Lisa over the VHF around 9pm. “Hey we just wanted you to know that we saw you on AIS earlier but you’ve been disappearing off our screen intermittently. Just checking to be sure you’re still out there somewhere…” Yes indeed we were still out there, and a bit frustrated to learn our AIS wasn’t transmitting reliably! (AIS is the Automatic Identification System used by most vessels offshore, broadcasting your GPS position, speed and heading to other boats within VHF range.) Raven was less than nine miles astern of us, easily within broadcast range of any properly functioning Class B AIS system. Why was our signal not reaching them? More for me to worry about…
The breeze continued to build until the early hours of November 7 when it slowly backed off, leaving us with sloppy, light conditions in the morning. By daybreak at 6:30am we rounded the south eastern corner of Islas San Benito under motor, and made our way into the poorly charted anchorage.
We found our way through some kelp beds towards a nice sandy spot about a hundred meters from shore. Kristen dropped our anchor a little after 7am and the two of us – exhausted from our 40-hour journey – longed for our bunk. But the sound of the windlass and anchor chain woke James and Paul, who poked their heads on deck wondering what the new day would bring! Our first task for the day was to get those mattresses and sheets on deck to start drying in that Baja sun.
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