Sunday, December 8 — Saturday we had mostly hazy sunshine and calm seas: 1 – 3 feet, 1 foot wind-chop, long swell period. At one point, we entered a cloud and rode in fog for a while before popping out of it. It’s a wonderful ride.

It warmed up significantly today. We’re finally at a low enough latitude for it to be shorts weather. 

In the wee hours of the morning, we’d moved into a more favorable current and have been making good time today, averaging close to 7 knots @1800 RPM. Eric wants to keep RPM up because he knows we’ll eventually slow back down again, and he wants to ensure we make it to Puerto Vallarta during daylight. 

In the am, Eric spotted a sailfish (we think) doing several theatrically high jumps. In the afternoon, Keith spotted a whale. We watched it spouting on the surface for a while before it disappeared without a fluke. 

We passed Magdalena Bay in the afternoon, which was roughly the halfway point for this leg. Whale season has just begun, so it is unlikely we’d see a baby whale so early in the season. There was a bit of traffic around Magdalena Bay, but overall, we haven’t seen many boats today.

It was a beautiful sunset/twilight:

After dark, the clouds were wispy enough that we still could get illumination from the almost half-full moon, but the stars were mostly blocked. 

Around midnight, we could see the bright lights of a city. We realized the lights had to be coming from La Paz, as we were on the same latitude. It’s hard to believe we could see the lights from so far away!

On Sunday morning, it was cloudy again. This is a shot of the little bit of the sunrise we could see, shortly after we passed the cruise ship.   

We had a couple of questionable equipment issues. Our new secondary navigation system rebooted itself for some unknown reason, but has worked fine since. Eric tried to run the AC in the pilot house to help load up the generator. There seemed to be an issue with the water intake, so it shut it self down. There is a new intake that might have issues in seas. He’ll investigate when we get to Puerto Vallarta. The AC in the salon worked fine.

Eric saw some dolphins in the morning, but they didn’t stick around long. Now that we think about it, we usually see a lot more dolphins when we were out. Now we realize its strange that we haven’t seen more dolphins. 

Sea conditions continued to improve in the morning, with the swells down to probably 1 – 3 feet and the wind chop virtually gone. 

However, around lunch time, conditions began to deteriorate. We experienced another swell coming at us from the south (so head seas and following seas at once). At first, the swell from the south had a long wave period, so it wasn’t too bad, but the closer we got to Cabo, the bigger and closer the head-sea waves, and more confused and uncomfortable the seas became. 

Here is a shot of the famous rocks with the arch formation, taken as we passed by:

Cabo San Lucas Is notorious for bad sea conditions. As we rounded the point, sea conditions were better than expected. However, we were braced for awful, so the sea conditions were certainly not what we’d considered good. Eric was green, but didn’t get sick. 

For a while, we were in an adverse current, which slowed us down a lot, but after a few hours, we were out of it and speed improved. Eric was relieved! 

With the head seas came a new creak coming from the floor near the port pilot house door. It could also be heard above the bed in the master stateroom. The creak got louder and more annoying as the conditions worsened, making it difficult to sleep. 

There was a lot of boat traffic around Cabo, particularly small fishing pangas. Here is a twilight photo:

As we got further and further away from Cabo, the sea conditions ever so gradually improved. By 0400, based on the motion of the boat, we estimated that conditions were pretty comparable to Wednesday night/Thursday morning… which was on the uncomfortable side, but not bad.