Up the Sea 1.1. La Paz to Bahía Aqua Verde
First bay out from La Paz. Left at midday after running the watermaker one more time for two more hours per Bill’s request. Checked out of the port at the marina office with those nice ladies, Cyntia and Martha, got diesel at Costa Baja, looked like a gas station for cars, very modern. Course set onto Isla del Espirito Santo.
Only one other boat was around. The wind came up from the south through the San Lorenzo channel and we sailed for a good 2 hours, before the wind changed directions and finally fizzled out. We reached the island around 6 pm and motored up serval bays with small beaches and mangroves. We had the plan to anchor near Isla Gallo but upon arrival we thought it very open for the Coronel winds, which had been blowing the last week all night in La Paz. So we moved on to Ensenada de Ballena, a smaller bay to the north.
The trip there was incredible. The early evening sun lit the barren landscape and rock formations of the coast line. Small islands were cut sharply against the sky. We were greeted in the bay by hundreds of jumping Manta Rays. They must be hunting like this. First they put both the wings up, which stick out like mini fins of mini sharks, then they dove and jumped. We couldn’t figure out why exactly they are doing this and in what order. Only the sound of them splashing on the water surrounded us. After we found a good spot to anchor the sun set over the Baja peninsula. The night was balmy, we enjoyed Radu’s pasta, listened to the Manta rays and watched a fishing panga making it’s way slowly through the bay. Men were talking and their voices traveled to us over the water. What a first day out it was again. Puts everything in perspective. How much bigger the world is. How insignificant we are as a species, only that our tools are too effective and too destructive. Why there is so much violence over territory and religion, when there is so much beauty and space on this earth. Hard to understand that out here. That’s why I love it here. Slices through the BS.
So does a night with Coromuel winds. They came up about eleven pm and were blowing hard. So hard that waves formed and the Imagine was bucking like a
mechanical horse, up and down and to the sides, pulling at the chain. Radu went out to check about every hour, repositioned the anchor snubber, checked again… The anchor held flawlessly. I didn’t mind the movement so much, but it was still a rough ride. I sometimes held onto the side of the vberth, which is the inside of the hull and slid down to where my feet touched a cabinet to prop myself tight. Needles to say that we’re sleeping the next morning the peaceful hours after the wind died down.
At midday we moved on to another anchorage, Caleta Perdita, and saw on the way a large motor yacht tucked away in a bay behind a hill to be sheltered from the nightly winds. Lessons learned we positioned ourselves better for tonight. Caleta Perdita builds with another bay and a shared beach kind of a high waist band of the island, if you will, and at high tide both bays are connected by a channel. A few fishermen have shacks on the beach, their panga in front. ‘Mui tranquillo’ told us one of them, when we asked if he always lives here, he nods. His kids looked like they were on vacation from the city, one was trying his english on us, the other wore fashionable reading glasses and was more shy. They wanted to know Samba’s name, I told them gesturing a dance and we all laughed. Our red dinghy bounced on the water back to the boat and got my butt wet. The water opal green had turned steel gray with the setting sun. The air was cool, refreshed by a strong breeze blowing in the afternoon from the east. Very pleasant. I was so glad we left civilization. Heat is so much more bearable after a cooling dip and out on the sea!
That night we slept well. The Coromuel winds supplied nice airflow and we were shaded from it’s swell. Perfect! We left after breakfast for Isla San Francisco. The island is not far from the mainland and looks like a squirt of frosted lava. It’s main bay is perfectly crescent shaped with a white long beach, but it is open to the south so we opted to go around the point to a protected anchorage. We took a trip to the beach before sunset and explored the inland a bit with a large salt pond and interesting desert plants common also to the Sonoran and Arizona deserts.
The next day we went past Isla Coyote, seemingly a rock from the south, it is inhabited on the northern shore by families working in mining the island. The houses were built up the rock and fishing boats were beached at a small beach. This is one of very few inhabited islands of the Sea.
We arrived early afternoon in San Evaristo, a small fishing village. At shore we heard from an American reading in a hammock in the shade of a large palapa, that both owners of the local restaurant and store went to La Paz for provisioning and father’s day. He was here, in the Sea, with his wife for 7 years, from San Francisco/US on his Catalina 27. He likes his small boat without any luxuries and wouldn’t want it any other way. He has been up in the Sea for months and hadn’t had trouble finding water, ‘Not these days’, he said. That day he was house sitting this large house on the beach, enjoying a quiet afternoon.
We went back around the bay and sat down to eat at a new restaurant with a high palm-frond roof, Brisas de San Evaristo, where a woman, Ancelma, was making tacos from scratch and offered us fish tacos. As we were waiting for our meal, we watched her husband, Augustin, and a friend playing a board game and a woman and a girl chasing flies away. Again, time stopped in these small fishing villages. It is Saturday afternoon and the fishermen have come back from their last trips and selling their catch. People slow down, tomorrow is Sunday and nobody works. We finished our delicious meal and right then the fastest things moving were the flies. Time to get back to the boat for a nap. We enjoyed the view of the beautiful shell-shaped bay and sunset for the rest of the evening from our cockpit. We also installed another fan over the berth in the v-berth, as we are going north the evenings have been getting warmer, so both of us have now our own fan and Samba is using the ones in the cabin.
The next morning we left for Bahia Aqua Verde with a brief stop at Puerto Los Gatos.
We ended up circling in the bay at Los Gatos to take pictures of the incredible red and pink rock formations, because it was too hot to go ashore at midday. The softly rounded rocks are petrified sand with rings of red, beige and white alternating which give an impression of pink overall. A sphinx like rock guarded one of the sides of the entrance to the bay, the other opened to a second bay with a beach and to a brown rock tongue reaching far into the sea creating a large plateau in front of a hill and several more layers in front of a large mountain range aptly named, Sierra de la Giganta. This was the most spectacular bay and beach so far and well worth staying several days. It is very remote and one has to come prepared.
Bahia Aqua Verde was very different. The dramatic afternoon sun lit the bay situated at a dry river delta with palm trees and riparian shrubs, quiet like an oasis. The bay seemed lush, verde, with green plants everywhere all up the surrounding hills and mountain. We went ashore right away to find a small village, where goats roam freely among the wide spread houses. We followed a singing voice all across the dry river bed and found a church service and also a small tieda nearby to stock up on essentials like mangos, drinks and sweets. The next day we stayed for finding goat cheese at the local goat dairy and to check out another tienda, who had small, local mangos from Los Dolores. The goat farmers house was right across the tienda and more like a shack, if you can even call it that, a roof over dirt floors. A young woman sold us a wheel of two pounds of delicious fresh goat cheese the size of a salad plate for 40 pesos or $ 2.50. The poverty was apparent, but again everyone seemed content, young, old, all sitting together, their baby daughter playing with the goats under a large tree. The fishing sustains most of the needs of the community, but one of the stores is part of the food assistance program of the government (Fidelist).
Hearing and reading about the Sea of Cortez I imagined it differently. I expected a low coastline like in Southern California. Instead we were met with a dramatic landscape formed by teutonic movement. Slices of land were pushed up into mountains and cone shaped peaks while exposing a multitude of geological layers in an array of colors from beige, yellow, green to red and brown. Other parts were squashed low into valleys, as if a giant had walked through a layer cake, forming a fascinatingly undulated landscape. An enormous valley was filled with a sea, like Monument Valley meets the Grand Canyon, but still partly flooded, that is the lower Sea of Cortez. We haven’t even started to explore the aquatic life surrounding us, so fascinated are we by the majestic beauty above water.
14-20 JUNE 2016
La Paz behind us.
