Leaving Bahia Concepción

[Kyle]The leg from Playa Coyote was past a fairly long stretch of Baja coastline with no suitable anchorages. For this, we would either need a forecast for strong tailwinds or we would need to leave super early in order to make the anchorage in daylight. The forecast we had was for almost no wind for a day and then big tailwinds filling in the following afternoon. We decided to break the trip up into two legs: The first would be to an open roadstead anchorage of Santa Domingo at the entrance to the bay. The second would be the fast trip down the coast.

Ugh! another early start, thank goodness for those beautiful sunrises

For the first leg, we got a fairly early start, which gave us plenty of time to tack our way veerry slowly up Bahia Concepción. There was such a calm sea that there was no clear sense of motion on the straight legs, just a gradual change in scenery, like being in a revolving restaurant that only goes around once an hour. We occasionally wandered into a flock of grebes or a pod of fishing dolphins, but neither paid us much heed since we were sneaking up on them basically at the pace of driftwood. The grebes were particularly interesting. We would see a tightly packed flock of maybe a couple hundred swimming along. We’d look away and then look back and they would all be gone. They all seemed to dive and surface in unison, or a rapid wave of motion. We had several comical episodes of one of us saying, “Hey, look at all of the Grebes” to the other, who would then look out to see a patch of calm water. We’d wait and wait, give up, look away and, BOOM! - two hundred grebes.

Great flocks of grebes that generally vanish as you approach with a beautiful dolphin-like leap and dive
we think they are Western Grebes

Even with us being so slow and all, we still had the anchor down by noon. The long beach had no signs of humanity other than a ranch a mile or so away that looked like it wasn’t in current use. Across Bahia Concepción in the distance was the coastal outskirts of the town of Mulegé, which sits back from the sea on a river. Even though we’ve never been to Mulegé, it became one of our beloved towns because of its not one, but two gleaming cell phone towers perched atop the hills above. We had four bars of 3G! I forgot our phones even went up to four bars. Looks like we’ll be catching up on phone and internet stuff this afternoon.

A slow sail to this remote point of Santa Domingo

But first, since it was a nice, sunny day and we had the whole place to ourselves, we decided to try having a swim/bath. Maryanne went first and essentially bounced. I guess the water is still pretty cold. I lasted a little longer, but I didn’t bother to venture any farther than the front of the boat. I guess we’d better keep going south.