Thirty-six hours of Santa Ana winds was enough. Thirty-six hours of thirty-five knot winds, the sky dark with blowing dust, and waves and wind tossing the boat around. We hid below, reading "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" out loud and looking at logs from the trip thus far. When we emerged, cabin-feverish and hoarse, we found the boat coated in yellow-brown powder. The windward faces of every object were stuck with it: The rigging wires, the liferaft, the canvas, the winches, the halyards, the railings all had a layer of dust on one side. Where the wind had kicked up waves strong enough to splash onto the deck in the height of the storm, the dust took the form of salty mud. It will take us weeks to get it all off, but as soon as it passed our spirits lifted and we were happy to be in Baja again.

Turtle Bay is far from anything. The village has no natural source of freshwater to nourish its 3500 inhabitants, so water is piped 85 miles from a desalinization plant. It is 135 miles of gravel road from Highway 1, which is itself no superhighway. It is 20 hours by car from Ensenada and the same distance from La Paz.

The guidebook calls Turtle Bay village "coyote-ugly," which we think underestimates the place. It's a dusty town of very narrow, unpaved streets. Most of the houses are made of wood panels, single-story, with faded, sand-blasted paint. They have enclosed gardens and little fences and a lot of character. On the outskirts people build ziggurats of sandy earth to build fancier houses on, an improbable task. When the wind comes up, which it does often, the air swirls thickly with fine brown dust. When the Santa Anas come the village disappears in the dust.

But dry, dusty and remote as it is, virtually every yacht traveling up or down this coast stops in Turtle Bay. Unlike most places, here you can moor where you can sleep comfortably overnight without too much fear of your anchor dragging, and if your engine cooling water pump is busted or your diesel tanks are dry or your liquor cabinet is empty there are places where you can get help. There are restaurants and Internet cafes and ice and a bait shop run by the only American living in town. There's a primary school, and a high school overlooking the beach, and a defunct-looking college of fisheries. There's a wobbly blue pier extending into the bay, and boats come out from it to sell you fuel and taxi services to and from the shore. There are two Catholic churches and a Pemex gas station and some red radio towers projecting right from the middle of town. There are the remains of the only real industry in town, a cannery that closed ten years ago. We didn't plan to spend an entire week there, but the Santa Anas kept us holed up.

While we were in Turtle Bay Sarka had a birthday. To get ready we washed one another's hair on the foredeck the evening before, so we felt really spruce when the day came. We had eaten at a really pleasant little restaurant above the beach called La Palapa ("GOOD EATS TRY US" is painted on an outside wall where sailors will see it), and the kindly proprietors took us to get Sarka a birthday cake. They drove us into the middle of town, to an anonymous, wood-paneled one-story house with a little gate, and took us in. Inside was a woman who, it turns out, had gotten a government grant to purchase a commercial oven, and had converted a bedroom into a professional bakery. The walls were white enamel with pink trim, and she had the oven and a display case without any cakes in it, and an ordinary household stove. She confessed that when she has cakes in the big oven and bread in the little oven it can get pretty hot inside. Her customers must pass along one end of her lavish living room to get to her bakery. We ordered a two-layer cake with banana custard inside, and white chantilly cream on the outside, with pink decorations reading "Feliz Cumpleanos Sarka", to be ready the next day.

This is the kind of thoughtful service we encounter so often in Mexico: When we went to pick up the cake they told us they were afraid we wouldn't be able to find her shop, so they'd taken the cake over to the restaurant. We went to the restaurant, and there was the cake in *their* living room, and they made us coffee and we drank coffee and ate cake together and looked out at Turtle Bay. On the wall was the steering wheel from a sailboat wrecked a few bays to the south. A couple of northbound cruisers were there, and we gave them cake too, and chatted about Baja. The cake was outrageously good.

We are now halfway down the Baja peninsula, more than 1000 nautical miles from home. The logs show we've used 36 gallons of diesel fuel since San Francisco, and spent half our nights in marinas. Seven out of eight of our meals have been on the boat. Five loaves of bread have been baked in our little oven. Our average speed is a little over four nautical miles per hour, which suggests that we have spent 250 hours underway. We carry water for three weeks. We have broken and repaired one sail track slide and the fiberglass waste holding tank. We have four hundred miles to Cabo San Lucas, and then three hundred more to Banderas Bay on the mainland. These are the kinds of statistics that emerge when one is holed up in Turtle Bay, taking stock.