Big beautiful dorado
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Big beautiful dorado |
We left Santa Maria at 0300 to make the next 170 miles to Cabo San Lucas by dark the next day. It was quite a parade out of the anchorage with Rouser, Waking Dream, Dos Brisas, Alii Kai Too, and Kailanhi all making the passage with us. We motored for about two hours, mostly to charge our tired batteries then were able to sail with the genoa and main into the sunrise and the next afternoon. After sunrise, we put out our trolling line. A few minutes later Sara saw a brilliant green flashing following behind the boat and yelled "Dorado on!!" She pulled in the struggling fish and then Michael saw how enormous it was and got ready with the gaff. Together we pulled in a beautiful huge dorado, about 5 feet long and probably 50 pounds. We felt sorry killing this gorgeous fish with his brilliant green and blue scales highlighted with purple spots. As he died his color faded to a dark gray as the life left him. It took another two hours just to clean and fillet him. We feasted on the fish's creamy delicious meat for over a week and even shared several pounds of meat with several friends once reaching Cabo.
We sailed through the day and into the night. Around 2100 squalls appeared on the horizon and we took down the sails as the wind began to circle crazily around us, die then pick up again. Finally the wind freshened off our port bow, blowing steadily off the land around 25 knots for the next two hours. We had to change out the genoa with the working jib on the wet surging foredeck, but at least the water that drenched us was warm and together it only took 15 minutes. We spent some time that night envying our friends with roller furling.
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Crowded but pretty "Lover's Beach" |
But the sailing was wonderful as Pelican charged along, not following too far behind the larger boats ahead of us. With a beautiful sunrise over Cabo Falso, the wind died down a bit and we drifted around the Cape, excited to finally be viewing the famous arch of Cabo San Lucas. As we motored into the anchorage, the engine made some terrible sputtering noises and almost died. Nervously we quickly dropped anchor and then Michael set about unclogging our fuel lines which had apparently sucked up some nasties from our old fuel tank.
Soon after we were celebrating our successful arrival in the tropics at the Baja Cantina with cheap beer and nachos -- the first of many here in Cabo.
The next day we set out to do our first check-in in Mexico. Thankfully we had the dance steps down from several cruisers who'd done the check in here a few days previously so the process went very smoothly for us, although expensive as promised. With our finest khakis on, we first had to take the bus nearly clear out of town to Immigration who stamped a bunch of papers including out tourist visas, then the bus back into town to the Port Captain's office who stamped some more papers, kept some and gave us some; next was the bank who we gave some money to and in return gave us more stamped papers; the API office on the other side of town gave us another stamped receipt in exchange for more money; finally the Port Captain's office took all the papers, stamped them some more then gave us some back. We were officially cleared in to Cabo! As it was just before the weekend, we were able to clear out at the same time and stay until Monday morning (otherwise we would have had to do the steps all over again on check-out).
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Cabo's busy inner harbor and marina |
As they say in Cabo: when in Rome...so that night we went out with friends and had a crazy night drinking of much tequila and dancing the night away. With that out of our systems for a good while, we hung out on "Lover's Beach" the next day and had a great time playing in the huge warm blue surf with the hundreds of other tourists. The next two days were spent doing a few chores such as laundry, buying some fresh groceries, and using the internet (great deal at about $1.50 an hour!). Although we enjoyed Cabo's restaurants and music, after about two days we found the town to be much like Las Vegas -- gaudy, expensive, and overrun with tourists and timeshare salesmen -- and were ready to move on to a more authentic Mexico.
We found the anchorage at Cabo to be rolly, noisy, and busy with all the PWC's, pangas, and parasailers running around, so we were glad to depart for Los Frailes that Monday morning with a light SW wind blowing. For the next five hours we had about six sail changes and the engine on four different times as we made our way in the extremely fluky shifting winds. But the sun was warm and we enjoyed the beautiful mountainous Baja coastline and beaches as we traveled past. We rounded Punta Gorda now heading north into the Sea of Cortez and were hit with a 20 knot norther right on the nose. The next five hours were spent pounding into the sea's infamous square seas as the wind howled down on us. We just wanted to get to our anchorage as quickly as we could (or at least by dark) so we motored into the waves, some of which were 6-8 feet, and about the same length apart. Every few minutes we'd get stuck between two waves and only make about 1 knot forward progress until Pelican managed to punch her bow out of it, spraying us way back in the cockpit. As we watched the shore creep by we wondered at times if we shouldn't turn back, but we only had 15 miles to go in these seas, and Cabo was 30 miles behind us, so we pressed on, the huge rock of Frailes getting closer inch by inch.
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Frailes - a lovely change from Cabo |
After what seemed like ages of fighting the seas we arrived at last in Los Frailes and were very glad we had not turned back. The anchorage was gloriously flat with the large rocky hill blocking all of the northerly seas and of course we were out of the ocean swells at last. The circular bay had only three other anchored boats, and was lined by a creamy white sand beach. The water was very clear and we could actually see the sand contours 30 feet under our boat. On shore was an interesting variety of surprisingly green foilage, including some of the giant cactus we'd been waiting so long to see. There was a fish camp in one part of the bay, a small resort on the far west side and a few RV's camping out on the beach. Otherwise the bay was beautiful and pristine, the sun and water warm and lovely. We found our butter melting on the galley counter, put it in the fridge and decided to stay awhile.
