On Friday (January 13), we awoke up to no wind and super clear water. We knew the calm wasn’t going to last for long. The forecast was that the winds were shifting direction and would pick up from the southwest, so we needed to move to a more protected location. We decided to go to an anchorage called Ensenada la Gallina, which was only 3.5 nautical miles south. The west side of Espiritu Santo has many fingers, and this anchorage had a particularly long finger on the south side that offered a little more protection than the rest of the fingers. Moin and Erin Sky decided to come with us.

We pulled up anchor at about 0820, and the other two boats were right behind us. We arrived at around 0900, with the other two boats filing in shortly after we did. We chose a spot in the southwest end of the cove because everything closer inland was too shallow to anchor in. As you can see, it would be a long dinghy ride to shore.

We tried to anchor three times. The first time the anchor didn’t hold. The bottom was kind of rocky, so we guessed the anchor must have hit a rock. The second time the anchor held, but we settled too close to the rocks along the shore. We moved farther away from the rocks and dropped the anchor again. The anchor didn’t hold. 

While this isn’t the best picture of the moon itself, it shows how much light the full moon was emanating on Thursday, December 8, before the sun rose. It was so bright it was almost like daylight.

Here was the sun rising to the east while the moon was setting in the west.

On the morning La Paz radio net, Eric announced that we’d just arrived and were looking for kid boats. After the net was done, someone called us on the radio and said there were two boats in Bahia Falsa with kids close in age to Keith. 

Sunrise on Saturday December 3

Our new friends left first thing in the morning to go back to La Paz. We were sad to see them go. Not long after they left, a park ranger boat came into the anchorage and inspected each of the boat’s park passes. The park ranger asked if we had a dog.

We went to shore after we finished our chores. It was around 1300 (1:00 pm) and the tide was at its lowest point. As we got closer to shore, we could see that that there were indeed two sandbars, separated by a channel. The closer sandbar was quite narrow, was actually more rocks than sand, and was attached to Espiritu Santo. It had one house on it. The farther sandbar looked to be much wider and mostly sand. It was attached to Isla Partida and had quite a few structures on it.

We got as close to the channel as we could until the dinghy was nearly grounded. We dropped the anchor. The Espiritu Santo sandbar was behind Eric.