KatieKat 2007 Cruise Chapter Five

Mid-March, 2007 -- Sea of Cortez Mini-Cruise

We spent about three weeks cruising up into the central-Baja Sea of Cortez coast. This webpage is primarily a boring travelogue of a few of our favorite anchorages.

My crude attempt to show the area we cruised. The green dots mark a few of our anchorages.

Views typical of our surroundings in the Sea of Cortez, these at a lovely anchorage at Bahia Santa Marta.

More panoramic views of our anchorage at Bahia Santa Marta, with a fishing (shrimping?) boat coming in to anchor after a night's work.

Obligatory photo of a beautiful beach - one of many.

Puerto Escondido. At the present time Singlar, the owner of the inside anchorage/moorage and beautiful brand-new (as yet, unfinished) marina, is charging ridiculously-high fees for zero amenities and thus the place is deserted! Duh! On St. Patrick's Day, we were invited to the local liveaboard/palapa community for a fun party. Thanks for the photo, SunLover Connie.

North of Puerto Escondido we dropped the hook at the open roadstead by Loreto and went ashore to reprovision. Coming back, the afternoon breeze had picked up and it was interesting - I was bone-dry, whereas those going back to neighboring boats in rubber dinghys were mercilessly drenched.

It was a pleasant two-hour sail to Isla Carmen (Balandra anchorage) from Loreto where we spent the night. The next day, completely unexpectedly, we were engulfed in fog for the passage to Juanico. We arrived in Juanico in zero visibility and it was rather interesting anchoring as the charts of Mexico in general are terribly inaccurate.

Photos of the anchorage after the fog had partially lifted.

Photos of the lovely anchorage at Juanico.

Who cares?

Across the peninsula from Juanico is Ramada Cove. We hiked across to visit it, and the next day sailed there and anchored for the predicted southerly winds which never materialized.

We returned to Juanico and vegg'd out. The dories were sailed by an adventure team leadership group - they arrived tied together after dead-reckoning in the fog! BTW, "dead-reckoning" should really be "ded-reckoning" for "deduced-reckoning"

The night before we left Juanico the wind whipped up (peaked at only 28 knots). We were securely anchored (with less than a foot of water under the keel at low tide!), but another boat had troubles that night and dragged - luckily, they were able to extricate themselves. My defense mechanism is to snap a photo of the radar screen and have the print handy in order to be able to see any changes. The boat that dragged is shown just above the rock in the left side of the photo. I had positioned my radar cursor on the rocks 0.047nm behind me. In conditions like this I love my GPS anchor alarm!

Lots of wildlife, both above- and below- the water. I didn't get any good photos of the whales nor of the rays jumping six feet out of the water, but here are a couple of shots of porpoises... or were they dolphins?

No, you don't get to see the photos of beautiful kayak tour girls cavorting naked off the beach where we had anchored and they had pitched their tents ... after all, this a family website. Wow, kayaking sure kept them all in great shape!

We greatly enjoyed this mini-cruise and returned back to La Paz in advance of a predicted Norther. One benefit of the warm-water anchorages is that over the course of a few weeks I had completely scrubbed KatieKat's bottom - amazing difference in boatspeed!

We're presently in La Paz provisioning and preparing to do the Baja Bash back up the coast to California ... or maybe a gentler sail to Hawaii...

What, me worry?

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