2008 Baja Ha Ha 11.02.08
02 November 2008 | Turtle Bay to Bahia Santa Maria
Author: Paul; Weather: warm
November 2, 2008 - Sunday
This is a "sea day" without much news to report. The wind has remained steady at about 18 - 20 knots and has held its direction as well. As such, we have not changed our direction (tack) either. However, it looks will have to do so two more times (at least) before we get there.
The refrigeration is still out and the ice is gone, so we are trying to stay out of the refrigerator and freezer as much as possible. On the other hand, we are trying to eat as much of the refrigerated stuff as possible so that we don't loose it. The freezer is well insulated and it seems to be holding things pretty frozen. Sometime during the night Stan made a deal with a boat with an ice maker to exchange our beer for its ice. Ordinarily not a good exchange, but good under the circumstances (I personally argued that we could live on dry oatmeal and peanut butter sandwiches, and keep our beer, but I have been overruled).
Occasionally we have to make a "sweep" of the boat deck to clean off fish and/or flying fish that have landed on board. The front (bow) of the boat sometimes dips into the water after coming down the face of some of the bigger swells some small fish end up on board from time to time. As to the flying fish, well you can figure out how the end up on deck.
There WAS a little excitement about 1:00 p.m. or so: a HUGE, and I do mean HUGE sailboat approached from behind. We could see her from 8.5 miles off, so we knew she was big as normally all but the biggest ships are over the horizon at that distance. She had three masts and a bunch of sails on each mast. She closed fast (remember, the fastest Serenity can go is about 9 knots. We figure this boat was doing at least 15, and capable of at least double that) and we figure she must have been 180 - 200' in length. One of the sails had a black falcon or similar type bird and the others on Serenity recognized her. Apparently she was owned by Danielle Steele's husband and is called something like the falcon (go figure). Stan and Jackie saw the boat as the subject of an episode of a show about luxury yachts and they say she was bought by a woman who after spending 100 million or so to buy the boat, put in another 100 million or so to refit her. I guess she has Renoir paintings, marble bathrooms, complete computer run rigging (the lines, poles, mast, etc. that make a sailboat sail) system, etc. She came out of her way to get within a couple hundred yards of our starboard (right) side and 4-5 people came out on deck and waived, took our picture and were generally very nice. She then peeled away and headed back out to see. I got lots of pictures and it really is a gorgeous boat.
Back to the refrigerator thing, so it does not spoil, we ate the Mahi Mahi tonight. That will likely be the highlight of the day as there is not much to report. Alison prepared it by dicing a green and yellow pepper, part of a red onion and a little garlic, she heated some olive oil and then blackened the fish with the above ingredients. We had mashed potatoes with it and it was great.
In case you haven't figured it out, I write these things throughout the day, thus I may change from current to past tense. Anyway, it ended up that we did indeed have the same wind conditions all day and just had to make those two tacks and then were able to do a fairly long jaunt (about 45 miles or so) straight to the entrance to Bahia Santa Maria and it is 9:00 a.m. I don't know if I mentioned it or not, but to keep everyone on the same page, we are ignoring the change back from daylights saving time. We can do this because the fleet is pretty isolated from the outside world and so long as we all call things the same time, it works. However, once we leave Bahia Santa Maria, we will again, alas, return to civilization so we will need to coordinate with the outside world. As fate would have it, however, Cabo is one time zone ahead of San Diego, so by not changing the clocks, we kept the correct time!
By the way, we sailed the entire way and when we got in, it looked like we lost some ground as I think more of the fleet got in ahead of us than will come in behind us.
We got anchored fine and will be here today and tomorrow (today being the third as I am a day late in sending the emails. Tomorrow is the beach party day and today we will clean the boat (it is pretty caked with salt and a few dead fish), do some work and, finally, go swimming. We just took a reading and the water temperature is 83.7 degrees! By the way, other than the hills around the bay being much greener, the bay looks the same. I'll let you know if the hurricane changed the approach to shore.
Take care and I hope everyone is doing well.
Paul.