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.