Category Archives: Information

Information we discovered during our travels.

Bahia de Tortugas, Days 3 and 4

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Sunrise on Friday, February 24

On Friday, we stayed aboard all days and did chores. All three boats took us up on our offer to come over, and we had a lovely time visiting with the other cruisers in between chores.

The only chore of interest to report on (beyond the mundane regular chores such as cooking, cleaning, school work, etc) was that Eric changed the belt on the main alternator. We’d mentioned that when we were in Puerto Don Juan, Eric had removed one of the alternator belts. He did this to stop the vibration issues that was caused by using belts made by different manufacturers. The alternator has been running great with only one belt. Even though it wasn’t supposed to be time to change the belt yet, Eric was concerned that the belt was making too much dust (and thus deteriorating too fast), so he swapped it out with the other belt.

On Saturday, we went to shore with the crew of two of the other boats. Enrique picked up all of us from our respective boats and took us to shore at once. We had no real goal; we just wanted to wander around and see what the town had to offer. We started by walking north up the main drag, Calle Benito Juarez, until the pavement ended and it became a smaller dirt road. We even followed the dirt road for a ways until we realized it was going to dead end. We then followed random streets back towards the water.

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Bahia de Tortugas, Day 2

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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.

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Bahia de Tortugas, Day 1

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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.

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The Rest of the Passage from Magdalena Bay to Turtle Bay

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Tuesday, 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.

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Passage from Bahia Magdalena to Bahia Tortuga, Day 1

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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. 

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