As the southern waters continue to warm up, we are headed north and out of the hurricane zones. We have a spot saved for us in San Carlos, Guaymas, for the summer, so we have about 2 months to explore as much of the Sea of Cortez as we can. But first we have to get there, and as Rachel described, we did leave La Cruz with the rockets.

We could not have asked for a better sail from Banderas to Mantanchen, nice close reach to get us right into the bay. We ended up staying there just one night and left early the next morning for the overnight sail to Mazatlán.

The exit from Banderas and arrival to Mazatlán feels pretty nostalgic. It both feels like we were just here in Mazatlán and at the same time, like it was a lifetime ago. Certainly the conditions are different, there are less boats, less activity, and we feel like we stand out more. But that’s ok. 

Our sail from Mantachen to Mazatlan was a mixed bag. We had some wind for the first half of the day ,but the current and wind was doing it’s best to drift us into shore. This is a fairly shallow coast to begin with, about 50 feet deep miles out, and it’s poorly charted, and to top it off, there was a new moon this evening, so with reluctance we had to drop the sails before dark and motor into the wind to get away from the shore. Then, as predicted the wind died, so we had a long motor boat ride into the anchorage in the morning. 

We spent Sunday afternoon as the only boat in the anchorage, watching the locals ride hot dogs around the bay,  it’s a major vacation activity here, basically you get on a long plastic hot dog and a panga drags you and 2 to 10 of your closest friends around.  Eventually you either fall off the hot dog or you throw yourself off, and then everyone gets back on the hot dog and you do it again. 

This morning we cleaned up the boat from the passage, the windward sail brought a ton of water on the deck, dousing the decks multiple times and some of the water had gotten in through the bow air vent that wasn’t positively sealed,  so we cleaned that up, then we checked the engine and got everything ready for the next leg. Then we launched our new dinghy and rode to shore in a building breeze, this was a nice comfortable ride for a change. 

There’s a restaurant and beach club on shore that is tucked into a shallow bay. It may have been called Benji’s at one point, now it is La Caleta, part of some nice clubs and restaurants in the city. The only way to get here is by boat or a long drive around the whole bay, so they get mostly tourists that come by water taxi and cruisers like us.

Tomorrow morning, Wednesday, we will sail to a bay on the south coast of Baja. Then by Friday we will aim to get to La Paz. The weather seems cooperative for many hours of beam reaching. We hope so.

I will update this post with pictures when I have more bandwidth.