The Feast of Santa Maria began yesterday with three fisherman asking for batteries. When they motored up to us here in Bahia Santa Maria asking if we had any, we were happy enough to oblige. We chatted with them a little, asked about the fishing and the weather, and they told us they'd bring us some lobsters when they had them.

It was about midday today when they appeared again, the chatty handsome one still up in the bow, the round silent one in the middle, and the one with the mustache tending the engine. They insisted that we take three lobsters and one of the smaller yellowtail they'd caught, about twelve pounds. We gave them some leftover Halloween candy and a couple of packages of crayons in exchange. They told us that there are fish pirates who come over at night from Puerto San Carlos, inside nearby Magdalena Bay, and steal lobsters from their traps. The navy and the fisheries service try to protect them, but the fishermen living in the camp here are very much on their own. So they shine enormous flashlights off the point at night, and some of them carry rifles in their boats. When they talked about it we could tell that it hurts.

After a bit they left, and we found ourselves alone with three live lobsters in a bucket and a very fresh twelve-pound yellowtail in the cockpit. It took us at least one anxious hour to figure out what to do. We consulted The Joy of Cooking and our fish cookbook and learned how to boil the lobsters and scale and clean the fish and fillet it. We discussed giving some of it away to the other cruisers, but it was very windy in the bay and we didn't want to row around in the chop. So we were forced to prepare the Feast of Santa Maria all for ourselves.

Sarka scraped the scales off the fish and I cleaned it and filleted it. It was wonderful to see so close the beautiful silver, yellow and blues of this beautiful animal, and at the same time tragic to tear at its flesh and expose its innards. It is strange to consider that neither of us had ever done those things before. Life is so wonderful and so sad.

When evening came we boiled a pot of seawater and heated up the grill, and I installed the poor lobsters in their pot. In minutes the boat smelled like Fisherman's Wharf. When the barbecue was hot we grilled the fish with olive oil and rosemary. Rice with sauteed onion accompanied the fish, and we had lots of lime squeezed over everything.

When we were done Sarka and I were delirious with food. She doesn't eat lobsters, so I was stuck with three of them. In my experience it is unusual to have too much lobster, but today we also had too much fish. The two fillets completely covered the surface of our grill, and we just couldn't eat more than one of them. Tomorrow I suppose we will have to suffer through the leftovers.

We enjoyed this feast in Bahia Santa Maria, a beautiful bay tucked in below Cabo San Lazaro. The 140-mile, 30-hour trip from Punta Abreojos was really long. Our new mainsail has been troubling us so we were sailing slowly downwind on jib alone, and the seas rocked us mercilessly most of the way. When finally we arrived we were very tired and it was very dark. We thought moonlight would help us anchor, but the moon didn't come up for an hour and a half after we entered the bay, so we motored very slowly in, watching our radar, chartplotter and depth sounder carefully. Eventually we anchored in twenty-four feet of water, ate some soup and went to bed just after midnight. An hour and a half we were out of our bunks again when a strong easterly wind came up, bringing with it a steep chop and making us nervous that if our anchor dragged we'd wind up on the beach. We stood anchor watches until 0400, when the wind died down and we went gratefully to sleep.

Bahia Santa Maria is just outside of Magdalena Bay. Magdalena Bay is nearly as big as the main part of San Francisco Bay (not including the riverine portions), but has hardly any population around it, just a village and a fish port and a tiny navy base. Bahia Santa Maria is sort of a rest-stop, sheltered by a couple of steep mountains that form Cabo Lazaro on the NW side, and has a low, yellow-sand beach wrapping around to the east and southeast. It's very tranquil, uninhabited aside from a tiny fishing camp of perhaps seven or eight structures tucked in under the mountains. Our fishermen stay in the camp during the season and return to their homes for the holidays. Rusty shrimp boats ply the waters of the bay, taking their catch into Magdalena Bay. There are two other sailboats at anchor here, one from San Francisco.

Last evening we spent some time with the couple from San Francisco, on their 38-foot Hans Christian. We'd met them in the marina in Ensenada and it was nice to see them again. Over a bottle of wine we lamented the problems of maintaining marine toilets, shared adventures in the boatyard, and reminisced about The City.

It's a lot warmer--Eric hasn't worn shoes in a couple of days, as the temperatures are in the 70s--but the weather is fluky with strong breezes from various directions and occasional five-minute rain squalls. Even though we're almost in the tropics, and there are frigate birds overhead and bright glowing phosphorescence in the water at night, we still haven't quite arrived where we want to be. We want to be south, where it's warm and there are coconut palms and mai tais. This is still a rugged coast.