Continuing on Monday, February 20… After returning from our amazing whale watch expedition, we ate lunch and did a few last minute get-ready-to-go things before lifting anchor. Since we hadn’t gotten the dinghy down, we hadn’t gone out to the top deck yesterday. When we went out there today in preparation for leaving again, we were dismayed to see that the entire top deck, pilot house roof and port side ledge were completely covered in bird poop. We must have had birds stowed away onboard for quite a long time to have accumulated so much poop! Argh! We didn’t have time to deal with the mess; it would have to wait until Turtle Bay.
As much as we would have liked to have stayed in Magdalena Bay for longer, the sea conditions were ideal right now and we needed to take advantage of the smooth seas to get as far north as we could before the seas got rough again. This season has been especially ugly in terms of sea conditions; the nice windows have been few and far between. Since the sea conditions were so great right now, we’d even considered skipping Magdalena Bay altogether and continuing north so that we could make it to Turtle Bay in completely calm conditions, but we knew that we’d regret missing the opportunity to see the whales up close. The weather forecast was for big waves for the last 12-hours of this leg. When we’re seasick, we’ll keep telling ourselves that petting the whale was so amazing that it was worth the 12-hours of rough seas.
At 1145, we pulled up anchor and were on our way. In good news, today the strong current inside the bay worked in our favor. For a while, we were doing 9 – 10 knots! The whole way out to the ocean, we watched the water like a hawk, looking for whales. We saw four sea lions and a turtle before we spotted our first two whales near the mouth of the bay where we’d been this morning.
The tour guide had told us that whales were not nearly as active in the afternoons as they were in the mornings. Nonetheless, we saw quite a few whales during the transit through the mouth of the bay, though they weren’t putting on as good of a show as they had been this morning.
One of the whales popped its fin up next to our port side door and waved to us. It was so close to the boat that it seemed like we could touch it. By the time we got over to where the whale was, it had disappeared! It must have swum under the boat.
Eric thought we saw about ten whales in total. Christi thought we saw more. But it’s really hard to say… they were moving and we were moving, so we may have seen the same whale(s) multiple times
Out in the Pacific, the seas were unbelievably calm. It felt like we were in the Sea of Cortez, not the Pacific! We were allegedly in 4 – 5 foot swells coming from the north, but it was hard to believe that the swells were so big. Christi thinks they were more like 2-feet. The wave period was so long that there was hardly any motion. It was really a lovely ride; though the skies were a bit ominous and got more ominous as the day went on.
On the passage from San Diego to La Paz, Eric had chosen a course that was fairly far from shore. Close to shore, we have to worry about fish traps and pangas and other issues, so we generally preferred to be far enough away that those are non-issues. On the run from Cabo to Magdalena Bay, he’d also picked a course fairly far out. But for this stretch, he picked a course closer in to shore so that we could reduce miles and have more protection via the land formations from the big waves that would eventually come. Running close to shore made Eric anxious.
Unfortunately, the currents were going to be against us most of the trip. We decided to run at 1750 RPM (we normally run at 1600 – 1650 RPM) to try to get to Turtle Bay as soon as possible. It was nice to have extra fuel.
The dark clouds completely blocked the sunset. It started drizzling at around 1900 (7:00 pm). Yay. Hopefully, the moisture would soften up the bird poop and make it easier to clean. At 2030 (08:30 pm), a small squall came though. The waves started to pick up, both in terms of swell and wind chop. This had been forecast. At first it wasn’t uncomfortable, but it continued to pick up, and by midnight, Kosmos was pitching so much that we always had to have one hand holding onto the boat or else we’d get knocked over. The forecast didn’t have the seas picking up this much this fast; it was supposed to be a gradual worsening. This was a bad sign for the rest of the passage… to be continued…