Sunrise on Thursday, February 23
This morning, we got dinghy down and went to shore, along with a fellow cruiser named Garth. Not wanting to deal with the scary pier, we opted for a beach landing on the south side of the pier. With the waves coming into the bay, the landing was a little bit tricky, but the shoreline was sheltered enough that we managed just fine. Here are some shots of the buildings along the shore where we’d landed.
Continuing on with Wednesday, February 22 — We decided to anchor near the only village in the bay. We’re unclear on whether the name of the village is Bahia Tortugas or if it is Puerto San Bartolome — we’ve seen both. There were three sailboats and three trawler-style fishing boats already anchored there, though one of the trawlers looked to be abandoned.
At about 0730, we made our first attempt to anchor. Unfortunately, the anchor didn’t set. When we brought the anchor back up, we saw that it was covered in seaweed. We moved to a different spot. The anchor didn’t set a second time, either. We moved locations again. Fortunately, three times was a charm and the anchor did set. We saw quite a few dolphins while we were anchoring.
Continue readingTuesday, February 21 — The seas had been calm on Monday until about 2030 (8:30 pm), when the swells, swell period and wind chop all started to pick up. By midnight, Kosmos was pitching so much that we had to 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.
The wind continued to increase throughout the night. It was hitting us on the forward port quarter (for a visual, from 10:00 on a clock). Even though it was dark, from the incredibly uncomfortable motion, it was obvious that the wind chop was coming from that direction, while the swells were on our nose, making for confused seas. The motion was like a half-pitch, half-roll.
At 0400, an alarm went off which indicated that the autopilot couldn’t see the data from the navigation system. Christi woke Eric up. He turned it off and back on again, and it magically worked fine.
When it was finally light enough to see, we surmised that it was probably 5 – 6 foot swells at about 4 – 6 seconds, plus 2 – 3 foot wind chop.
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.
Sunrise on Monday, February 20
The panga picked us up from Kosmos at 0740.
It was a 20-minute ride back to the mouth of the bay in their fast panga, as opposed to the over 1.5 hours that it had taken us with Kosmos yesterday. It was the perfect day for whale watching, with light, variable winds and totally flat seas, thus making the whales easy to spot. Only licensed tour operators were allowed to get close to the whales, so taking our dinghy back to the mouth entrance in hopes of seeing them on our own would have been illegal.
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