Andante had arrived in Los Freiles earlier than I. We’d chatted a bit on the radio after I set anchor and had made a pact to confer on our next destination in the morning. I awoke before them, surprisingly rested for having such tribulations getting to sleep, and found time on my hands even after sipping my coffee away. I filled it with an experiment in anchoring, setting a stern anchor to hold Mabrouka’s hind quarters toward the shore and adjusting her bow anchor to hold her head to the swell. That proved to be much more comfortable and not too much work if executed with forethought and patience, and I wished I’d had the foresight and fortitude to have done it when I first came into the bay.

It was all for nought, though, since we soon decided to abandon rolly Cabo de los Freiles and head north to Ensenada de los Muertos another 40-some-odd miles up the coast. The name Bay of the Dead doesn’t make it very appealing to a burgeoning cruising clientele, so there have been attempts to rename it Ensenada de los Suenos, or Bay of Dreams. Though suitable for the scenery, I don’t think it's sticking.

Andante dropped Zach off on Mabrouka, sharing his crewman-ship and companionship with me for a few days. The transfer was fun. Kevin nosed his 50 foot power boat up to Mabrouka’s bow sprit where they handed over Zach’s gear and some provisions to keep his 6 foot 6 frame in beer and eats, then Zach himself dove off their bow to swim over and come aboard.

We started out motoring, but soon turned a corner that put the 9 knot breeze far enough off the starboard bow to give us a very nice close reach directly on our rhumb line to Los Muertos, so we raised the sails, saw how the mainsail set, and put out the fishing line for several hours of trolling under sail. Soaking up the Mexican sun, but cooled by the breeze, it was more than once that one of us would turn from admiring the arid landscape drifting by on rippled blue water to say to the other how amazed we were that this was only the beginning of our cruising in the Sea of Cortez.

As the day passed we each enjoyed a couple of cold cervezas, Zach turned fresh tuna into open faced, tuna fish tortilla sandwiches, and we basked in the hot sun. Naps were in order at various times while Mona Laguna steered under sails that needed relatively little attention. Our only disappointment was from the waters’ failure to live up to its reputation of teeming wildlife. The fishing line trailed us in silence and only the occasional frigate bird circled far overhead.

Eventually, the Sea of Cortez came through in spades, though only in seeming typical form at first by drumming up a small pod of large dolphin for our entertainment. They were darker than the creatures I’d become used to in my years of Californian sailing, but they liked to slide along in the bow wake just as much as their smaller, grey cousins did. Zach and I were leaning over the bow lifelines enjoying their play when our attention was drawn aft and to starboard by a loud whooshing sound. The display we saw there not twenty feet away was immediately described by Zach as @%$#ing AWsome and now makes me wish for some sort of Borg-tech optical implants so that I could have recorded it instantly to share with you. Though it happened too quickly for me to count, I’d say that six, maybe eight dolphin had hurtled themselves six, even eight feet out of the water all at once. Their huge, shining dark grey shapes arced through the air to silhouette against the bright blue sky, diving gracefully back into the sea. Again! I missed a third aerial display as I rushed back to the cockpit for my camera, but they’d finished their acrobatics by that time and left Zach and I to stare at each other and share amazed expletives about what we’d seen.

Though beautiful, the rest of the leg to Ensenada des los Muertos was quiet. We did get a small skipjack on the hand line, but let it go back to the sea to be a meal for someone else. We arrived in the anchorage as the evening was turning truly dark and chose a spot as the westernmost of the boats to keep from fouling others’ anchors. We heated up left over stew and settled in for the night.