Whom can one trust when traveling as we are? Can we trust ourselves? Are we up to the task? We are often quite alone out here: On the forty-two-hour trip from Ensenada we saw only two boats, and one of them looked too swift to be anything but a drug runner.

We try to be self-reliant, carrying tools and charts and supplies and books like "First Aid Afloat" and "The Boatowner's Mechanical and Electrical Manual" and we have done so very many things to the boat that we can fix lots of things on the spot. But self-reliance gets wearing: One's jaws get tense and shoulders knotted, and four-hour watches make one's eyes water and mouth dry. Just machines, the radar and the windvane are only so helpful. They can't give you advice and they only work as well as you know how to use them.

So it was with an enormous and enduring sense of relief that we went beyond the mechanics of moving our boat southward and came to rely on the kindness of strangers.

We are now inside Bahia San Quintin, more than 150 miles south of the border. The guidebooks tell us that if we could enter this bay we would find a town, the Old English Cemetery, The Old Mill restaurant, and some ramshackle fishermen's villages. There are groceries to be had, and diesel fuel at the Pemex station off Highway 1. But then they warn us we can't enter this bay because of its tricky shoal-water entrance, and offer instead a barren alternative just inside Cape San Quintin, between the breakers and the black rock reefs.

The trip from Ensenada took us two nights and Thanksgiving Day. Our rather bleak Thanksgiving dinner comprised potato-leek soup out of a can, with a clove of garlic squeezed in to prevent scurvy. The first night out of Ensenada we thought we stay at some islands just offshore, but the wind was in our faces and it was squalling rain, so we were forced to move on. Then we'd planned to spend Thanksgiving night in the lee of Cabo Colonet, fifty-five miles out of Ensenada, but the remains of the same southerly storm made it windy and exposed, with four-foot swells rolling right into the anchorage. So we couldn't stop but had to continue forty miles southward, motorsailing slowly through the second night so we would arrive at Cabo San Quintin just after daybreak. We hove-to for a couple of hours before sunrise and waited for enough light to find our way. It is not surprising that we were lacking somewhat in imagination when finally we arrived at our destination and anchored just where the books told us to, amid the reefs and kelp, not too far from the breakers.

After we'd had a nap Sarka began cooking her very first Thanksgiving meal. Corn and mashed potatoes and string beans with garlic and baked butternut squash with black beans and onions made it a genuine feast. We opened a bottle of wine and had begun to relax when we learned from the only other sailboat nearby--a Bristol Channel Cutter called "Mandy"--that they'd had a visit from a local fisherman who told them that the weather was changing, this was a bad anchorage, and to move into the bay or move on. Although we were relieved that we'd gotten our naps we weren't too thrilled with the prospect of continuing so soon. The next leg of our journey is pretty long--at least thirty more hours--and we had broken a sail track slide on the trip down and wanted to repair it before continuing. And besides, we had a slightly belated Thanksgiving meal cooling on the table! We resolved to finish our food, at least, and to start packing up for a long trip. "Mandy" headed on south, sounding on the radio even more abject than we were.

While we were getting ready to go, the same fisherman who'd talked to "Mandy" came by and we waved him down. Carlos--aboard "Pelicano"--told us the same thing about the changing weather and the poor anchorage, and we asked if he could guide us into the bay. He said they would, so although it sounded risky we decided to take his advice.

And so we weighed anchor and followed his boat in. In between the breakers and the rocks (there are five hat-shaped volcanic mountains to pilot by), over the very shallow water (seven feet: our boat draws five), straight toward the volcano with the deep cone, with sand dunes on the left and a low, bird-strewn sandbar on the right. As we motored along, watching the depth sounder with our hearts in our throats, Carlos talked us in on the radio, telling us that up ahead where he was it was 54 feet deep, and not to worry.

Near the sandbar on the right I saw a whale. Sarka, who was steering, didn't believe me when I said so. But soon it became clear this bay is rife with gray whales, slowly surfacing, blowing and disappearing again like momentary islands. As the depth sounder began to register twelve feet, then fifteen, then thirty, we could see the spume from blowholes all around the bay, and "Pelicano" waiting for us up ahead. After a bit we anchored timidly near an old and ragged sailboat, off the beach at Point Azufre, in 17 feet of smooth water. Carlos wished us well and told us how to get further up into the bay and to call him if we needed anything at all, that there was the Molino Viejo restaurant up the bay, and the Old English Cemetery and groceries if we needed them.

Then we were alone again, surrounded by whales, in this calm, beautiful bay protected by volcanoes and sand dunes on all sides, and we could really rest. But this time we could let our shoulders loosen and our jaws relax, having learned that we could begin to rely on more than ourselves.