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.