It is about 8 PM on Tuesday September 17 here in Puerto Don Juan, the best hurricane hole in the North Sea of Cortez. Click here to Puerto Don JuanThere are eight boats here right now, all but one having arrived since yesterday afternoon. Tropic Depression 12E has become a Tropical Storm and will be a Category I hurricane by mid-day tomorrow. She is about 500 miles south of us, too far away to directly affect us, but close enough that we are experiencing 25 to 30 knot winds from the SSE.
This area of the Sea experiences regular afternoon winds of 15 to 20 knots. For the last couple of days there has been a 1007 MB low pressure trough over the southern California/Nevada border in the Colorado River basin. There is also a 1012 MB high over western mainland Mexico, just south east of us. That pressure gradient is being reinforced by the counter clockwise circulation around Iselle.
The forecast on Monday morning was for SSE 15 to 25 knots in the North Sea and 25 to 35 in the South Sea, with increasing swell. The anchorage at Caleta de la Cueva on Isla Salsipuedes is wide open to the South and Southeast. Kathy on Ryakosha convinced me to pull up anchor and follow them over here to Puerto Don Juan on the Baja Peninsula. I had planned to wait at Salsipuedes to see if the wind and swell did increase. There were still caves and lots of underwater walls, and rocks to explore.
However, Kathy reminded me that we would have to cross the Canal de Salsipuedes (Salsipuedes Channel) to get to Don Juan. She also pointed out that the south going ebb current against the predicted SE wind would make it impossible to cross the channel anytime between 3 PM and 10 PM. My hesitation was caused by the lack of any specific weather feature on the then current weather faxes that would indicate 20+ knot winds for the North Sea of Cortez.
Boy, am I glad I let Kat talk me into leaving at 10 AM! By the time I had made the 33 mile trip into Puerto Don Juan the wind was gusting into the high 20 knot range and the swells were getting to be five feet. Mirador sailed the last 15 miles of the trip under a full main with no head sail, never making less than 6.5 knots and often exceeding eight knots, with a little help from the tide.
But, the real reason I am so glad to be here in the Don Juan anchorage is the GREAT BOARD SAILING.
I was able to sail from noon today till I got tired about 3 PM. Even better than that – I was overpowered most of the time with my 5.5 meter North Prisma sail. To me that is heaven, 95 degrees, warm water, 22 to 28 knots of wind and a sand beach. I would have kept sailing but I tweaked my knee a little as I came into the beach after one outstanding session on the board. My left foot had gone too far into the aft footstrap so when the board settled down into the water as the wind diminished I couldn’t get the foot out. I slowly fell backwards and sideways, but the foot couldn’t move. My left knee has been repaired four times but there are still lots of bone spurs in there. One of those little bits of bone is now floating around in the joint making it somewhat painful to bend my knee more than 70 degrees. It will heal in a week or so.
Allan from SV Good Neighbor is also a board sailor and took over for me when I twisted my knee. It worked out really well having the two of us because the person on the board could sail more down wind and not worry about getting back upwind to the beach. After about 20 runs back and forth across the ½ mile wide bay we would just drop into the water near shore. Then the other person would bring the dinghy over, pick up the board sailor, board, and sail and return upwind to the sand beach. Worked out very well.
The Puerto Don Juan anchorage is almost landlocked. You have to make two 90 degrees turns to negotiate the channel coming into the bay. There is very little chance any swells from a storm could get into the anchorage. There are also 2000 foot mountains rising directly from the beach to our south, west and northwest. The only direction that the wind that can blow directly into the anchorage from is North or SE and even then it has to come over 100 foot hills.
On the way over here, I was towing the Portabote behind Mirador because, when I left Salsipuedes, I really didn’t expect there to be any significant wind before I arrived in Don Juan. The forecast was for the wind to pick up later in the afternoon and I planned to be around Punta Don Juan and sheltered from the SE wind by 1:30 PM at the latest. Sometimes things just don’t go the way they are planned. The trip over here from Salsipuedes was flat calm for the first 10 miles and then a slowly increasing SE wind and wave pattern. By the time I had crossed the Salsipuedes Channel and was approaching Punta Animas the wind had increased to SE 14 knots with two or three foot wind waves.
I decided that I had to hoist the dinghy onto the foredeck because the wind waves were causing it to shear back and forth and it looked like the bow might bury in some of the wave troughs. I had never tried to pick up the dinghy while underway. Mirador was making seven knots, dead downwind with a full main and engine running at 2200 RPM.
My first problem was that the hoisting harness was lying in the bottom of the dinghy and was not rigged for lifting. Additionally there was a 3.5 and one gallon gas can, and the small propane tank in the dinghy. I couldn’t lift the dink with all that stuff in it.
In order to slow Mirador down I headed up into the wind and dropped the mainsail. I then set the autopilot to keep Mirador head into the wind at about 3 knots, the minimum speed that it would keep enough steerage to stay on course. I had to pull the dinghy up alongside Mirador, on the leeward side and then climb down into the Portabote to rig the lifting harness and get the heavy stuff out of it. After that, all I had to do was attach the 4:1 block to the spare main halyard and lift the 80 pound dinghy onto the foredeck - while motoring into three foot seas and 18 knots apparent wind. That was way more fun than I needed for the day!
I guess the moral of the story is to do all your preparation before leaving the anchorage. I should have had the dinghy on deck before I left Salsipuedes, but, it was so calm and so flat, and I didn’t believe the weather forecast, that I felt it was a save gamble, towing the dinghy.
After getting the dinghy on deck and returning to the
cockpit I realized that the much greater danger had been the course I had Mirador on. I set the autopilot to take us directly into the wind, not
realizing that it was also taking us way too close to Bernabe Rocks. The rocks are just below the sea surface at
high tide and are 1.5 miles offshore, 4.5 miles south of Punta las Animas. My GPS tracks shows that I was within 600 yards
of those rocks at one point, based
solely on a GPS waypoint published in Charlie’s Charts.
It is impossible to
tell, with any accuracy, where you are by comparing a GPS position with the
Mexican chart. The smallest error I
have seen in a Mexican chart during the last four months is ¾ of a mile. The chart I am using in this part of the sea
is off by about 9/10 of a nautical mile.
I try to check this occasionally by taking hand bearing compass sights
or radar bearing lines to distinct topographical features and triangulating them on the paper chart and then comparing
that with the latitude/longitude read off the chart.
This part of the
Sea of Cortez has lots of what are called “Pinnacle Rocks” which, stick up to
just below or above the surface but are in deep water, often miles from
shore. Bernabe Rocks are an example,
1.5 miles from shore where the water is 250 feet deep just 200 yards east of
the rocks and over 500 fathoms ½ mile east and north of the rocks.
Bahia de los
Angles, where I am headed next, has several of these pinnacle rocks. One of those rocks is in the middle of a ½ mile
wide channel between two islands where the water is 40 to 120 feet deep. The rock is just below the surface at mean
low tide in 45 feet of water. Unlike
the US waters, these rocks are not marked with buoys or lights and most do not
even appear on a Mexican chart.
I didn’t get this page done and sent off
this morning so here is another update
Tropical Storm Iselle did not intensify into
a hurricane and now appears to be headed off to the cold waters of the Pacific
Ocean where she will dissipate by Friday morning.
We went snorkeling for
clams this afternoon and found a few!
The clams are so plentiful that, in 6’ of water, we quit looking for
clam holes and instead would just swim to the bottom and stick on hand in the
sand. The most I got in one dive was
three, but Paul scooped up five clams in one dive to the bottom. We found chocolates, amarillas, and blancas.
All very tasty.
I have to decide if
I want to leave for Pueblo Los Angles in the morning. The once a week fresh produce
truck delivered its goods this afternoon and most of it will be gone by
tomorrow afternoon. The village is
about six miles from here and there is a decent anchorage just off the
village. Tackless II just arrived back
here after making a veggie run to meet the truck. They also found a place that served good, greasy American style
hamburgers and French fries so a trip to the village sounds OK.
I’ll let you know
what I did in the next update.
