November 10 - November 13

San Quintin and Passage to Cedros Island

We spent two nights in the anchorage at San Quintin, 110 miles south of Ensenada.  We dropped our hook off the north-west point, in about 25 feet of water and about a half mile from the beach.  The beach here is deserted, with a combination of lava rock formations near the water and windswept dunes a little higher up.  This made for great tide pooling and exploring, giving us and the dogs ample opportunity to stretch our legs.  There is lots of marine life here - dolphins, seals, and we even had a humpback whale about 10 feet from our dingy one morning.  Unfortunately, we didn't have the camera with us at the time.

We felt rested up by Saturday morning, and decided to make the 130 mile passage to Cedros Island.  We left San Quintin at 9:30 AM and were having a fairly comfortable sail until about 4:00 PM, when the winds and seas really started picking up.  The next 16 hours were pretty rotten- huge, rolly following seas that made it impossible for the autopilot to keep up, leaving us to hand steer the entire time.  Even though we weren't taking much spray over the bow, it was still pretty damp and cold.  Bryan and I were both wearing harnesses and tethers while in the cockpit.  At one point, Bryan had to go on deck because he thought the boom might have broken, but thankfully it hadn't.  We were having issues with the dogs, also tethered in, but who were scared and anxious, and unable to find a comfortable spot to lay down where they wouldn't slide around.  It was near impossible to sleep during our off-watches, so Bryan and I were exhausted.  My log entry from 5:30 AM reads: "What a miserable night.  The seas made it very rolly and uncomfortable from about 5:00 PM on.  Nobody got any rest. Sadie is miserable - cold, wet, and tired."  All in all, I was thinking that I might not have what it takes to endure too many passages like this one. 

You can imagine then how much our spirits were lifted when the sun rose and we could see Cedros Island off our starboard bow.  There are three anchorages on the leeward side of the island that are recommended in the guidebooks, and by 8:00 AM we had checked out the northernmost one.  Our impression was that it wasn't much of an anchorage, so we headed south to the next one.  It seemed a bit better, although not very protected, but we dropped anchor anyway.  It only took us about ten minutes to decide the anchorage was too rolly and too overrun by kelp flies before we weighed anchor to head south again. The winds were calm by now and the sun was really warm, giving Bryan and I renewed energy, although in reality probably just masking the underlying exhaustion we were both fighting.  When we pulled up to the third and southernmost anchorage on Cedros, we were disappointed to discover that not only was it very small and unprotected, the only real spot to anchor was already taken up by  a large Mexican fishing boat.

At this point we had to make a decision about what to do, and concurred that we'd take advantage of the nice weather to continue on to Turtle Bay, another 27 miles (and 6 hours!) away.  This would put us in to Turtle Bay around dusk, which we figured was early enough to get the anchor set and take our poor dogs and their bursting bladders to shore.  As it turned out, we pulled in around 6:00 PM, having followed another sailboat in, and anchored in the dark.  Our night vision was so screwed up- either from being so sleep deprived or from the huge mega yacht in the anchorage with every light onboard blazing- we couldn't tell which lights closer to the beach were from houses, the pier, or other boats. We decided to play it safe for the night, anchoring a ways out in about thirty feet of water. (The light of the following morning revealed to us that we had actually anchored about four football fields away from the pier!)  Sleep came easily that night in the calm, protected waters of Turtle Bay, a refuge from the elements we had endured for the past 33 hours.