April 18, 2019

Down the Sea 3.2. Bahía de los Ángeles to Santa Rosalía.

We love Bahía de los Ángeles. It’s so remote in its outpostness, but there is plenty going on. Daily motorcyclists arrive in town. A small group of dirt bikers on a trip across the Baja’s mountain ranges climb off their dusty bikes walking like cowboy’s with leather pants and chaps, heavy boots, their gear making clinking sounds. The next day a large group of thirty road bikers describing road conditions as challenging at best. Then there are groups of tourists coming and going from the islands and remote bays from wildlife adventures. In the summer a fishing competition weighs their catch at the ramp. All these and the occasional lonely traveler or couples settle eventually on Guillermo’s terrace under the large palapa roof for beer and margaritas.

We usually sit to the side next to an outlet in front of our computers and watch the coming and goings while reading emails and working on the blog. Drama also unfolds on this terrace. Calls are made on internet apps, there is no cell service in town only wifi and this is the only town within about a hundred square miles. This time an American road biker arranged loudly on the phone to stay longer on the trip, for his flight to be changed, his business to work in his absence and checking if his son-in-law was truly moving out. All this without being a fly on the wall.

We said goodbye to Lucy, who runs Guillermo’s and didn’t mind us hanging out all day for the past three days, carried the dinghy in the water and turned on the outboard. There was a thump noise and the propeller didn’t catch and didn’t move us an inch. Fishermen in a nearby panga saw us struggling, came over and graciously gave us a ride back to the boat. We had big bags in the small dinghy of ours so that rowing was difficult and also one of the dinghy chambers was loosing air, we must have punctured a hole in it on a rock on the beach. We were glad to have the help from the fishermen and be back safely on the boat. Radu immediately got onto fixing the propeller, found out what was broken and manufactured a new pin for the broken one. Fixing the dinghy is more involved and will have to wait until the marina in Santa Rosalia. Until then we’ll take the pump if we’ll go ashore.

Strong nightly winds from the west were predicted for the next couple of days so we moved to Puerto Don Juan, a nearly entirely land locked bay an hour to the south, where we would be protected from swell even in winds. The first night was entirely calm and the bay was like a lake. The following day and night strong winds were howling around us from the south and then west and we set the anchor alarm and spun and spun and spun – we were glad to be here. We saw fishermen checking their trap cages and watched small ducks fishing and diving in unison and relaxed after having worked on the blog nonstop for the last days.

Our next passage brought us to Bahía de las Animas and we anchored behind Punta El Ácran in front of a wilderness camp. Kevin and Anna Marie, who run the camp (link), jumped on paddle boards and came to greet us. ‘Sailboats come by here about once a month’, Kevin says, ‘and then it’s a meeting of like-minded wilderness lovers’.

Winds picked up and barreled down the Baja mountains into our anchorage for the next day again. The winter weather is temperamental and wind direction didn’t look good for a passage so we hunkered down on the boat, watched a group of high school seniors arrive in five pangas on an outing from their base camp at the bottom of Bahía de las Animas. The Dana Hills Highschool in California has a program for forty-five years where marine biology students apply their understanding during a nine-day long field study trip to Bahía de las Animas (more on this program here). The swell and wind that morning were big for our small dinghy, so we spied with binoculars on the high-school kids from the boat when three dolphins made through the bay, diving underneath our boat, jumping out of the water while fishing.

After waking up the next day we got weather via the sat phone. It still looked good for our 21 hour passage to Santa Rosalía with enough N and E winds to be able to sail for most of it.

I went ashore to talk to Kevin and Anne Marie, the camp managers, a bit more while Radu got the boat ready. Their guests were just leaving when I arrived at the beach and secured the dinghy with a small anchor. I visited the plush yurt shaped cabins built on stilts on the sand with a beach view patio out front with a hammock and chairs, kings size beds, bathrooms with flushing toilets and rinse off showers. The owner Kevin started exploring the Baja thirty years ago on surfing trips and organized then the occasional camping trip. He created this camp in 2005 and over the years has improved accommodations with solar, desalination water maker, brick cabins, air conditioning, heating, wifi (marginal) and recently even a washing machine. This is not even glam-ping anymore!Guests pay a premium for six days in solitude including flight from San Diego to Bahia de los Angeles, fishing trips, whale watching, snorkeling and three meals a day. Staffed with local fishermen and excellent Mexican cooks this camp is open from August to April.

Kevin and Ann Marie were in the process of packing up camp and leaving for two weeks when I caught them, and our conversation was so interesting for all of us that they decided to stay another day and enjoy the bay by themselves. The subjects touched were: staying out of the rat-race, fear and trust, how society is like an organism ridding itself of anything non-conform, to how mankind could heal from the effects of the ‘White Man’ or at least how we could personally heal ourselves. How inspiring this was. So much food for thought. Kevin had left for Alaska right after his studies of Communications and Marketing, managing off-grid properties there with his partner Ann Marie, a Yoga instructor and massage therapist. At twenty-eight years old, they have enough experience in how society wanted to rope them in and they stayed clear of that and on their path they are defining each day anew.

For our 100th passage we were unlucky again and the predicted winds didn’t materialize. Under 5 knots and not steady, we kept unfurling the headsail just to furl it back in soon after. It seems that we are too late in the season for steady and predictable northerly winds. So we motored with and against strong currents which made the movement like a washing machine and nauseating. I either slept or sat in the cockpit keeping cold air on my face not to get seasick.

But the night sky was incredible and worth every minute staring at it! It was two nights after new moon and when I came on watch at 1 am, a sliver of a moon had just set leaving just a slight trace of light. Guyamas on mainland Mexico was glowing from afar, some ninety nautical miles away. Jupiter rose and passed over us, then the Milky Way and around 5 am when the sky lightened way ahead of the sunrise, Venus rose clearly visible above the first band of orange on the horizon until it was drowned in sunlight. It seemed that I could see all stars and galaxies on the cloudless sky. Some spots in the Milky Way had so many stars that they look like sparkling clouds or fairy dust (more on night watches here). I am sorry not to be able to name at least some but then there are sooo many.

Made me think of the movie ‘Contact’ we watched recently again, in which Jody Foster plays a scientist listening for radio signals in outer space, she receives a signal from the star Vega and gets to go to meet the aliens. She jumps through interstellar wormholes and encounters aliens in the shape of her dead father on a beach also taken from her memory. Vega is now definitely on my list to find out where it lies and when it is visible.

Seeing this night sky is awe-inspiring and I understand how anyone can believe that we are not alone in the universe or to say with the words of Jody Foster’s movie father: ‘It would be a lot of wasted space’!