Blog Post 18 - Asuncion & Magdalena Bay

November 11, 2015

27:08.21 S  114:17.40 W

It’s time to take a pause to tell you about all the marine life we have seen on this trip. The further south we go, the more we see. We have seen at least 10 whales, sea lions, seals, sea snakes, jelly fish, squid, flying fish and too many dolphins to count. It is like we have our own aquarium, right off of our bow. It is an incredible thing to behold. Pinch me to remind me that this is real and not a dream.

The ride from Turtle Bay to Asuncion, just 50 miles south, was uneventful. We are all in the rhythm of the boat and the trip now. We are really coming together and bonding as a family. It takes team work to do this successfully, and everyone is pitching in and doing their part. There are no petty arguments, we are all very tolerant of one another and so excited to be doing this.

We arrived in Asuncion right after dark. It is a bigger town than Turtle Bay; they even have nicely paved streets. How does that work that one town has paved streets, street lights and robust electrical power yet another one does not? It certainly seems like the infrastructure dollars in Mexico are not distributed evenly. It appears as if these little towns are pretty much on their own. Asuncion has a wide bay, easy access and is protected from the prevailing NW wind and swells. Most cruisers passing by, stop here. We went ashore and had a nice meal in a little restaurant. Again we were the only people there. The meal took a while as everything was made from scratch.

Again we had to beach the dingy. It was ok going in but when we left, Jirig got nailed. He was holding the dinghy for me so I did not get wet but we lingered just a little too long and got nailed by a big wave. He was thrown backwards out of the dingy and got completely soaked. It was so bad that the pockets of his sweats and his hoodie were completely filled with sand. You have to be prepared to get wet every time you beach the dingy. We rushed back to the boat so he could change. He was freezing.

We went to bed early as we were going to leave at 4AM again for the 180 mile slog to Magdalena Bay. Mag Bay as it is fondly referred to by cruisers, is massive. It is 25 miles long from north to south and 15 miles wide from west to east. It is about the same size and shape as San Francisco Bay. It is a cruisers playground. There is amazing fishing both inside and outside the bay, too many little towns and anchorages to mention, and the port of San Carlos. Huge cargo vessels call on the port. It has the largest salt mining operation in the world. Ships come from all over to fill up with salt. Many of the fishing villages and small towns around the bay have very little in the way of provisions or infrastructure. Most do not even have schools. Each little village has a specialty they focus on. A few are dedicated to drying fish. You do not want to anchor near one of them and it smells really foul. The southern and shallower part of the bay is known for their clams so those villages focus on harvesting and canning them. As usual everyone is a fisherman or supports them in some way. Mexican fisherman primarily fish out of pangas and are called pangueros. They are small (about 18 ft.) sturdy wooden boats with no covering for shade, and have a large outboard motor. I read that in the 1950’s, when the population of Mexico was soaring, that the Mexican government (similar to the Homestead Act in the US), encouraged people to come to Baja and settle. They offered about an acre of land, a panga and an outboard motor to anyone that would settle here and raise a family. Tens of thousands of impoverished Mexicans took them up on the deal and they were largely instrumental in populating Baja which until then had fewer (excluding Tijuana, Mexicali, Ensenada and La Paz) than 50,000 people.

We did not go inside Mag Bay. It is so large it would have taken too much time. There was some bad weather coming and we needed to get to Cabo San Lucas before it hit. We would like to thank our dear friend Bruce Bonney and my sister Liz Taylor for their tireless efforts to provide us with weather forecasts through our SSB radio email when we were unable to get a cell signal or internet. Thanks guys. It was much appreciated. There is comfort in the fact that we have people following our every move and are ready to raise the alarm if we do not make it to our destination when we were expected to. It takes a village!