Notes from the Midriff Islands

March 4

There are lots of lizards on these islands, but hardly any on the peninsula. Same for iguanas. On Isla Salsipuedes, we saw a whole village of birds' nests made from dead shrubs. The nests looked almost exactly like the standing bushes except flattened and more carefully spaced apart. They may be seagull nests or tern nests. Now is not quite the season so no one was home, though pelicans were nesting on nearby Isla san Lorenzo. Also on Salsipuedes, we saw forests of cholla that seemed to be like alpine krumholz; the cholla were small and misshapen, formed by wind and sun. We have seen ospreys galore. Every cove has a pair of ospreys tending nestlings on big piles of sticks and feathers and tidbits of ropes teetering on a lofty column of rock.

Up the canyon behind our camp on San Lorenzo, I saw three iguanas. They all scared me. We were pinned down by wind for three days. It blew like a mother. We waited, on the second day, to see what the gradient winds would do. A norther! Caution paid off. It looked like nice sailing at 9 AM. But I was worried about landing at our next camp three hours later. We decided not to go.

Our camp on Isla San Lorenzo

After lunch, while Tim hiked a huge loop over hill and dale, I parked myself on a chair in the lee of an outcrop. Rollers were combing our bay. The pounding got on my nerves. It made me feel battered, though we were relatively protected and had great hidey-holes out of both sun and wind. And a spot that was a sun scoop all day that then radiated warmth after dark. We sat there until nearly 8 PM one evening, without putting on down jackets.

As I sat in my chair, expecting Tim to return, the wind really amped up. It seemed to  be blowing out of the west, making huge breakers at the edge of our cove, beyond the shelter of the point to our north. The waves were starting to wrap around the point and invade the cove, leaving Valdesca kind of exposed. She was bucking hard over the incoming waves. Perhaps we should have moved up the cove into the more protected area right under the point. It was only 2:45. I figured it would blow until almost dark, probably until about 5 PM. Then it would drop off. But that was still another 2 hours away. Tim wasn't there to give me a second opinion. My nerves finally couldn't take it any more so I moved my chair up the canyon to a place where somebody else had built a campfire, probably in conditions like these. Another iguana scared me as it scuttled into a crack to hide.

As the afternoon advanced, gust of wind started blowing down canyon from the interior of the island. This seems to be an afternoon trend. Whatever you do here, in the way of moving on water, the morning seems to be the best time to do it, as early as you can but before 9 AM if you want to be sure it's calm. That's if you don't really care about sailing. If you want to sail, you wait to see what the gradient winds do at 10:30. Or you start out early, if the breeze blows early, but get to shelter before the winds amp up.

As I sat in my chair writing, I couldn't help but compulse about the worsening conditions. There were now huge breaking waves out in our bay. I hoped tomorrow would be better. We wanted to get to the southern tip of San Lorenzo and then cross to the peninsula.

Buffeted by wind, I felt off kilter, like I had just had a beer. Wind speeds were up to 30 knots, or the current going by was really humping things up. San Lorenzo felt as out there as any place we had ever been. The day before yesterday we saw no boats all day until about 3:30 PM, when three pangas passed us at a distance, headed for San Rafael or San Francisquito. Yesterday, did we see any boats at all? Today, none. No cruising sailboats at all since day 1, expect the Hobie Cat. The east side of these islands has to be even more remote.

5:30 PM. Tense. Tide going out, to new-moon low. Valdesca riding big waves now. She's doing OK. But we have maybe an hour to low tide and there's not much water beneath her, and the bottom is bouldery. Fortunately, it's the time of day when the wind usually abates. If it does, the waves will lay down and we won't get such big rollers coming into our cove. We can only cross our fingers and hope. Moving Valdesca now is dangerous--to us and to her. And the more protected part of the cove is getting big rollers, too. As long as the anchor doesn't drag! We have probably 70 ft of rode out in maybe 10 ft of water, a 7:1 ratio, which should be plenty with a good set in sand. We don't have chain on the rode, though, which is not the best situation. So...here's hoping.

We continue our vigil, cautiously sipping wine. Tim suggested I turn my back to the boat so I don't compulse about every wave she has to ride.

March 5

Still afloat! Rollers still coming in, though the wind laid back some during the night. When I got out of my sleeping bag, ready for tea, I asked Tim to pass me the milk. He said, "There's no milk." I could see the quart container of milk right next to him. We had opened it the day before so there should have been plenty. He told me that he had discovered a big hole chewed in the side of the carton, and inside there was a dead mouse. He pointed out to a rock where he had disposed of the mouse, for the seagulls who were begging from us. The mouse was laying out there, all four feet in the air. Tim called him, "Rigor mouse-is." The gulls didn't like that mouse. He was there when we left our camp the next day.

Animas Slot

Can you tell where the entrance is?

Is it worth it?

Land of the saints and angels

We are now in Santa Rosalia. In recent days, we've also been to Isla Angel de la Guarda (Guardian Angel Island), Isla San Lorenzo (Saint Lawrence Island), Cabo San Miguel (Saint Michael Cape), Punta San Francisquito (Saint Frances), Punta Santa Ana (Saint Anne Point), Tres Virgenes (Three Virgens), Boca San Miguel (Saint Michael's river mouth), and Cabo Virgenes (Cape Virgens). For good measure, we also passed Punta Animas and Isla las Animas (Spirits Point and Spirits Island). I guess all these names come from people who traveled these same waters and kept crossing themselves and saying novenas that they'd make it out to tell the story. Kind of like us.

This leg of our trip, from Bahia de los Angeles to Santa Rosalia, has been a ball buster, in the parlance. We stopped at Isla Salsipuedes (Leave-If-You-Can Island). We tried to get to Puerto Refugio (Refuge Port) but had to turn back because we were in dire need of refuge, and Puerto Refugio was too far away to be useful. You haven't heard from us until now, though we have been sailing since February 25th, because we have been out there, far far back of beyond, in a place where nobody else seems to go. At least in winter. We kept wondering, "Why are we the only ones out here? What does everybody else know that we don't?" There are no stores. No internet cafes. The charts are terrible; the GPS plots our locations on land when we are at sea and at sea when we are comfortably camped on shore. There were days when we didn't even see any fishermen in pangas. Was the weather going to change? We wouldn't have known. We couldn't get any weather stations on our shortwave radio. And there was no traffic on the VHF radio. We finally gave up trying and left the radios in the navigation box.

We had to learn the signs of an impending weather change. One morning on Isla San Lorenzo, Tim started packing up camp and moving gear down the beach in preparation for taking off. I told him, "I don't feel comfortable going. The wind is already blowing from the north and it's only 8:00 AM. There are horses (whitecaps) out there already and the tide is ebbing. Let's wait until the gradient winds kick in around 10:30 and the tide changes. We'll see if the wind amps up or dies out. And we'll see if the horses get bigger when the tide is running contrary to the wind. I'm not worried about the conditions right now but in three hours when we want to land. If the wind amps up, we're going to have to cross some fierce wind sheer along the island with giant waves." Tim agreed that we would lose nothing by waiting. So we waited. And what do you know but by 10:30 it was blowing hard with seas too big for us to sail in safely. We had predicted a norther. Thereafter, we'd take notes on our observations: mares' tails streaming from the north, cloud cover building in the north, barometer climbing and falling but no consistent trend, wind from the south, backing to the east. And then wait and see what happened, as a test of our hypothesis that a north wind would soon begin blowing. The day we made those observations, it did.

This is hard-won experience. A few days before we learned some of these signs, we left Punta Pescador (Fisherman Point) in a happy little northerly breeze at about 8:30 AM. We set all the sails and gaily sailed toward Animas Slot, a tiny little cove in Punta Animas. This part of our route was a series of large bays punctuated by big headlands that jut out into the Gulf. The points influence the wind and the current, creating tidal races and wind sheer that can be dangerous when the wind is up and deadly when the wind and current are opposed. We were sailing towards Punta Animas in a northerly breeze with an ebbing tide but the tide soon changed and the seas built, accordingly. As we approached the point, the seas were getting truly gigantic. And the wind was amping up. I had a photo of the slot and a chartlet in a cruising guide but they were on different pages so I kept having to pull the guide out of the plastic chart case to flip back and forth. This was before I decided that it wasn't only weenies who plugged in waypoints to navigate to destinations. Tim was at the helm. I told him where I thought the slot was located. He looked at the photo and said I had it right on. We got in close, doused the jib and slacked the main. We got the motor ready in case we needed an extra boost. As we got close, I said, "This isn't it! It's the next cove!" Tim said, "You're kidding!" He turned us around, did a few unplanned jibes. I jumped to the transom and tried to start the motor. We hit a big wave on the quarter and I went tumbling into the cockpit, giving myself a few new bruises and scraping some skin off my knees. I kept telling Tim to aim high, as close to the northern shore as he could get. We didn't want to get close to the southern shore of the slot because of the rocks and breaking waves. Tim said, "Are you sure we can get in here?" I told him I could see that there was calm water inside. Besides, we really had no choice. Well, the only choice was to keep going south, but the guide book warned there were no protected camps for a good long ways. I suppose we could have gone back out and deployed our para-anchor, but we hadn't even practiced with it yet. It was tense, but we made it in. We tossed an anchor down in a quiet eddy out of the wind. And Tim christened the cove, "Enema Slot." Forever after, that's what it will be.

Another day, before we'd learned our lessons, we headed out from a beautiful white beach to round Cabo San Miguel. Tim asked me, "What does the kayak guide say about this point?" I told him, "It says nothing. But I wouldn't conclude that it truly IS nothing. It may be like the Grand Canyon after you run Horn Creek. Then you run the Gems which are all rated class 7 but everybody runs them without a nod. Not that they aren't hard. But by then you should be firing on all cylinders." As we approached Cabo San Miguel, we had some wind from the north but no more than a good day's sailing wind, 15-18 knots. We did have the tide against us. But we were south of the Midriff Islands, where the tide has to squeeze through narrow channels between islands. We were in the full-on, wide Gulf. Why would there be a tidal race? As we got closer and closer, the swell got bigger and bigger. And bigger. And bigger. It was Hawaii 5-0. Tim was hanging on to the tiller and surfing us down giant breaking waves.

The seas were confused, wacky waves, coming at us from all directions, requiring vigilance and agility at the helm. I kept muttering, "Stay your course! Stay your course!" as we slipped sideways to a wave and nearly broached. Eventually...eventually...we made it through the other side and into a safe cove in the lee of the headland. I won't repeat Tim's first comments. Tim, who never gets riled up.

After doing something like that, we often try to compare it to a whitewater rapid. Rapids are rated. These headlands are not. I asked Tim, "OK, compared to Lava, what would you rate this?" Lava is one of the biggest rapids in the Grand Canyon. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's rated a 10. Tim said, "Jeez, you run Lava in like three minutes. How long were we in the bad part, coming around this cape?" I said, "An hour." So...like running 20 Lavas. I've been thanking my saints and guardian angels ever since.