Blog Post #16 – Ensenada to San Quintin

November 6, 2015

30:21.97N  115:57.72W

We are finally ready to go. It is Thursday, November 4, 2015. Even though we left for this trip this past July, we have spent the last 3 ½ months in San Diego and Ensenada waiting for hurricane season to end before we could head further south. It has been an excruciating wait. We are all so ready to go. Daniel has joined us for this first leg. We wanted to do it as a family and as he and Jirig have much previous experience with this boat and work as a team it is a great help to have him aboard.

We planned to leave in the evening. Our first stop is San Quintin, 118 nautical miles south. As one never wants to arrive in a strange and unfamiliar port at night in the dark we have planned it so we arrive at mid-day. In order to do that we had to leave Ensenada just after sunset.  We have been preparing the boat for weeks. Jirig has had one boat project after another. I have been provisioning like crazy. This boat is packed to the nines! We will want for nothing.

Jirig has checked the weather numerous times and believes we have a good weather window to head south. We say goodbye to our dear neighbors from S/V Pickles (who have been cruising for 8 years with 4 kids!) and we are off. As we head out of Ensenada the seas are a bit rough 18 knots and choppy with 4-6 foot seas from the west. We expected this at least until we get past the point at Punta Banda and are able to head south. The swells are coming at the boat from the side. It is one thing to be heading into the waves at the front or from behind, then the boat just rocks up and down. But to have the swells hitting our sides and rocking side to side is whole another ball game. Nico and I immediately get nauseous. I am not prone to sea sickness and neither is Nico but we were both out of commission. Once you get sick it is hard to recover and your nausea and trying to prevent it becomes your primary focal point.

Setting a watch schedule and keeping to it is very important. You can never leave the helm unattended and you want to set the watch schedule to match the temperament and internal time clocks of the people who need to man it. During the day Jirig is in charge but we all are watching and keeping track of what is going on. Jirig goes to bed early and gets up early. Daniel stays up late and sleeps late. The plan was for Daniel to do the first watch from 9pm-2am and then for Jirig to do the watch from 2am until approximately 9am. As Nico and I were incapacitated we could not be relied on that first night.

Although it was a little bumpy at first later that evening after we rounded the point everybody settled in for the night.

We woke up to a glorious sunrise and I made breakfast of scrambled eggs and bagels. We were all settling in to a routine. Nico was having withdrawals from Wi-Fi, Daniel was missing his girlfriend Christina, I had my nose hurried in a book and Jirig was manning the helm. Early that morning Jirig decided to put out a trolling line to see if we could catch anything. After about an hour he gets a hit and reels it in. It is a small Bonito. Within minutes he catches another Bonito. About an hour later he hears a huge whiz (it is a very distinctive sound) and gets a hit. He know it is a huge fish. Jirig immediately puts the boat in neutral and wakes up Daniel to help him reel in the fish. They get it in a use the gaffing hook to get the fish in the boat. We are not sure what it is. We look it up and realize that it is a Blue Fin tuna. We are a little freaked out because there has been a ban on fishing for Blue Fin in Mexican waters. Daniel does a quick Google search and finds out that the ban has just been lifted a mere 48 hours previously. We are relieved as the fish is already dead and if we're were caught with it under a ban by the Mexican Navy there are huge fines and they can confiscate your boat. We immediately stars to clean the fish and make fillets. We are not expert fishermen and we are not quite sure how to properly cut up a fish this large. It was about 15lbs.

We arrived in San Quintin around 12 PM.   It is a huge bay but it is very shallow, has crazy and unpredictable currents and sand shoals that shift daily. You cannot even attempt to go inside the bay without the assistance of a local fisherman ( panguero). For those dedicated readers of this blog we had been in San Quintin just a few weeks before on our way to the Sierra San Pedro de Martir. Nico my hamburger loving son never forgets a great burger and he begged to be able to go back to the restaurant we had eaten at Don Eddies Hotel and sport fishing establishment.  As we were planning to leave early the next morning we did not want to go 8 miles into the bay just to traverse them again the next morning so we succumbed to his pleas and called Don Eddies and asked that a panguero come out and get us. Jirig was not about to leave the boat at anchor in a new and potentially treacherous place so he stayed behind. The negotiations for the panguero were a little jumbled. More about that debacle later. It took a good 40 minutes to get into the bay and to the restaurant. The pangueros are a proud bunch and they know their stuff but even ours had to use a handheld GPS to navigate the ever shifting channel. When we finally got to the restaurant we had a fabulous meal.

After lunch we took a walk around the bay. As I have mentioned in an earlier post it is a bay surrounded by defunct volcanoes; it a very strange place. There is volcanic rock everywhere and some very strange land formations. We made an arrangement for the panguero to meet us at 4:30 to take us back to the boat. As Tony from Don Eddies made the arrangements for the panguero, we asked before we left in broken Spanish how much it would cost. He said 70 each way. I asked 70 pesos? He said si. As we arrived at the boat I took out 250 pesos and handed it to the panguero. He laughed and said it is 70 dollars each way not 70 pesos!  I called Tony on my cell to get clarification and he said yes in fact it was $70 dollars each way. Shit! That was a very expensive lunch! Chalk that up to experience. That will not happen again and Jirig will never let me forget it. We settle in for the night as we are planning on getting up early in the morning to continue our journey.