Ensenada Los Muertos is beautiful and protected from the seas produced by the strong north winds. Still, enough wind blows through the anchorage to keep the air cooled down. However, we stopped at Buenavista along the way to Los Muertos to visit Shiela and Andrew. Their new home on the beach is now completed and it is very lovely with additional garages for cars and lots and lots of toys.
Anyway, the coast looked a wee bit rough so we opted to ride in on the standup paddle board instead of risking flipping the dingy or kayaks. We had a very nice visit and dinner and paddled back to Desert Vision just before dark. The boat action was pretty violent for sleeping so we motored up the coastline about half of an hour toward a slightly more protected beach at the foot of a headland. It proved to be only slightly better but, the bars on the beach blasted music all night. At 4:30 AM the music was still blasting. We weighed the anchor and left in the dark for Los Muertos at 5:00 AM with the music slowly fading away behind us.
The stars were bright and it was a stunning sunrise on a razor sharp horizon of sea, a new sight I am not used to seeing having grown up with only sunsets on the west coast. Shortly after sunrise I was called below deck to remove a pretty black moth from the master stateroom. Large and menacing in appearance, they have beautiful markings with eyes that glow in the dark when a flashlight is directed at them. Plentiful and about the size of bats, they are strong and very friendly, like to land on you and will perch on your fingers. I much prefer them to bats.
We took the dingy to the beach and snorkeled yesterday. In the evening we joined seven or eight boats for dinner at a very tropical style restaurant on the beach. In years past it was called the Giggling Marlin and I don't know that it has a name now. The food was wonderful with a tremendous verity and the large, open air, palapa roofed building was clean and first class all the way. Not many customers except for us cruisers though and I'm not sure how they can stay in business out here in the middle of nowhere with an hour or more of dirt roads to the nearest anywhere.
Today appears as though we will just be hunkering down on Desert Vision. Twenty knot winds gusting to twenty five have begun howling through the anchorage. I believe this is predicted to continue for a couple of days. So, I spent an hour napping while swinging in a hammock between our mast and our head-stay and although we are pitching around a bit, the wind is from shore and the abundant small whitecaps are not able to build much height in the quarter mile stretch between us and the beach. Even if our anchor was to drag, there is comfort in knowing that we would be blown to sea instead of onto a lee shore. I am very thankful to be here now and not on the coastline of Buenavista or with the boats that left a few hours ago to bash up the Cerralvo Channel bound for La Paz. I am listening to them on the VHF and they are fighting current with large chop and thirty knot winds on the nose and will not reach moorage before sundown. We will ride out the storm here and head back down to Buenavista on Wednesday for Thanks Giving. Then bash back up here for a night and on to La Paz when we get a good weather window for the run against the currents between Isla Cerralvo and the Baja Peninsula.