We just got into comfortable Marina Santa Rosalía this morning, had some lunch and went out for ice cream. Today’s post will focus on our experiences heading north from the Caleta San Juanico Area to Bahía Concepción and Isla San Marcos. A future post will cover Caleta San Juanico (where we anchored in Ramada Cove) and our contribution to the “Cruiser’s Shrine Tree” there. I’m doing this post first because I have so many pictures from San Juanico that it’s a challenge to choose what to share.

We chose to leave Caleta San Juanico (a.k.a. Ensenada San Basilio and not to be confused with San Juanico on the west coast of Baja) early in the morning of June 7th. We’d gotten up early hoping to get a sighting of some meteor shower called the Daytime Areitids or something only to see that the skies were clouded in the direction we were due to see them. The cloudy skies gave us a gorgeous sunrise and we were motivated to raise anchor around 6:30 AM and leave the bay having breakfast underway.

Less than 30 minutes after pulling anchor we found ourselves in dense fog and turned on our nav lights and steaming light as well as our radar. We never saw any boats nearby but with our experiences of the typical panga fisherman along the coasts in the mornings we took the extra step of periodically sounding our horn. By 9 AM the dense fog was starting to open up and we had some more visibility. We were approaching Punta Pulpito and you can see in the following pictures both how quickly the fog cleared and how striking Pulpito is – almost like seeing El Capitan from Yosemite situated right on the ocean.

With the fog cleared but still some good cloud cover and underway with motor so making reasonable trolling speed (about 6 knots) I felt it was probably the best chance I’d had in a while to catch a fish and put a line out. We soon learned that boobies are just the stupidest birds and watched them attacking a flashy spoon lure I had out. One was briefly hooked so I pulled the line in and switched it out for a simple white octopus. One booby kept trying to get that lure and totally misjudging the speed and crashing into the water about 5-10 feet behind the lure. We noticed that only the larger brown boobies did this… smaller blue footed boobies did not try this nonsense. In any case, I managed not to need to remove a hook from a booby and as we turned west past Punta Concepción and saw some interesting currents and swell I hooked my second skipjack tuna! Since it was hot and we weren’t far from where we wanted to anchor for the night I simply removed head and guts and put the fish in the freezer to cool him fast for later filleting (had to cut the tail off to fit him in one of my reusable freezer bags). We anchored easily at Bahía Santo Domingo and I got the fish back out (not frozen yet but my fishing book emphasizing cooling the fish quickly helps the meat from getting mushy). I found this one was lighter-fleshed than the one I caught outside Baja and I was better at the filleting so was able to save some of hte fatty belly meat. We had a little bit as sashimi and then I seared half of what was left later in soy, lime and sesame for a tasty dinner with sushi rice and salad. With all the clouds sunset was gorgeous.

We decided the next morning to head over the the Bahía Coyote area which has campers and vacation and year-round homes on shore. Many of the vacation houses were clearly closed up for the season and it was hot and humid. Really hot and humid and the water was 86 degrees – similar to the hottest we’d seen on the mainland. A real surprise after seeing water drop to 68 in San Juanico area only days earlier. We got to meet a nice couple on S/V Hoptoad who had been living aboard for years and had previously circumnavigated with their kids. We stayed in the area two nights having dinner on shore with Hoptoad Thursday night. We learned that the current ownership of the tienda on shore really doesn’t stock much fresh veg and decided we’d need to head to better provisioning grounds.

We woke up hot and tired on June 10th unsure how much energy we had, but eager to get away from the still hot bay of El Burro that we were anchored in. We agreed we would at least motor to the Santo Domingo anchorage at the north end of Bahía Concepción where we had anchored on the 7th because the water and air were cooler there and it got great nighttime breeze without any exposure to the southeastern wind waves out in the main Sea of Cortez. When we got there we decided to keep heading north with a goal to go anchor by a beach around the north corner from Punta Chivato.

Crossing to Punta Chivato could have been great sailing weather but we had not expected 20 knot breeze and did not have our high life lines up so did not feel comfortable doing unnecessary operations that involved leaving the cockpit to raise the sails. Well, we actually tried and decided it was no good when a halyard got twisted and we were seeing increasing height of wind waves so it was decided just to tidy up the halyard and motor. When we got to Chivato we could see that it was unlikely the beach on the north side would provide protection from the swell and were able to confirm that when we got there. I quickly checked the route to anchor at the NW end of Isla San Marcos and we saw it could be just 2.5-3.5 more hours depending on our route and decided it should be okay to go south of the island using the waypoints from a cruiser guide we have, but we would turn away if it looked rough. Luckily it was fine and soon we were on the west side of Isla San Marcos protected from the swell.

We could see on AIS that there was a boat in the anchor spot we hoped for and reviewing the google / Bing images we have loaded on Open CPN thanks to chartlocker.com we could see that there were maybe two more sandy areas to anchor in some tiny bays north of there. We have no charts iwth depth readings for those bays but both of our cruising guides seemed to indicate anchoring there would be possible. And it was very possible. Getting there before dark allowed us to circle over the sandy area near the Los Arcos beach and confirm it was sand and did not have rocks that might foul our anchor chain. We dropped anchor and marveled at the caves formed by the action of the northern winds and waves on shore. We were eager for morning to go exploring by SUP or dinghy.

Morning came and we had the best time padding our SUP boards over to the caves, actually padding through one to a beach on the other side and so forth.

We ended up spending two nights there because I still wasn’t totally out of fresh produce and it was just such a sweet little spot. There was some activity from a couple boats fishing and some tourists from Santa Rosalia being dropped off and picked up by a panga for a hike, but generally very private and comfortable. The second afternoon we did start to get bees coming looking for fresh water on our boat so we had to put screens up and/or close windows which led us to decide not to stay a third night. Maybe we’ll check it out again before we cross over to Marina San Carlos later this month.