Wow—I am finally ontop of posting and actually am updating with today’s events so you guys are current! Until now I have been running about a week behind in posts from where we actually are. Yay! So let’s get you all quickly up to speed to present day (today is Feb 28)

Left Cabo and traveled a short day sail to Los Frailies. As I shared the anchorage in Cabo wasn’t the best and actually was one of our least favorite. Super swelly and very, VERY loud. There were many times I heard a jet ski come inches from our boat, run up on deck and see them taking off, likely near missing our boat from not paying attention or having no clue how to steer and operate it (not like those aren’t little death machines or anything). Not our cup of tea and didn’t want to wait around for some moron to actually hit our boat on a jet ski.

While in Cabo, Jay and I also discussed and made plans for the next few weeks of our trip. Prior to leaving, we had planned our trip up to Cabo, and then would re-assess once we got there which direction we would go—hop to mainland or go up into Sea of Cortez. We decided that it would probably be a mis-step to not visit the Sea of Cortez (which to many of you might be shocking that we weren’t all about planning to visit it as it is famed to be absolutely gorgeous and heaven on earth. In fact, many cruisers make plans to travel far and wide, then get to Sea of Cortez and 4 years later they haven’t left!) With our sights set on making it to Panama and potentially going thru the Canal—we have been focused on trying to make it further south/southeast more than travel in “The Sea” But again, we discussed more and figured we should head up and check out some of the more southern islands as well as La Paz—which is well known to being a boaters/cruisers paradise. Best likely place for us to get items we needed for the boat…AND we are now dead set on getting ourselves some dive gear! Too many anchorages we are passing by that have KILLER and I mean killer, dive spots (and the whole rocks and anchor thing....yeah)

So with this decision, we are planning to leisurely make our way around the trip of Baja, stopping at two anchorages (Frailies and Muertos) before heading into La Paz. From there we will check out Isla Espiritu Santo anchorages and then make the hop over to mainland Mexico…or so is the plan right now :)

Los Frailes was a quick 45nm sail south/southeast from Cabo. We had decent winds coming from the north, around 10-15 so we had a fun day tacking back and forth with some silence from our motor. Enroute to Cabo we unfortunately lost Señor Mexico (the kickbutt lure we caught our first Mahi with!) Sadly, some big fish or shark nabbed him off, so while in Cabo Jay picked up a bunch more similar lures. I of course named my two favorite:

Pancho Villa and Don Quixote (I realize wrong region and actually Spanish, but they seemed suitable names for these pair)

So we busted one out for our trip to Los Frailes and wouldn’t you know. We caught two more Mahi! I caught the first one and Jay caught the second, slightly larger one. Video and pics for you:


Hilariously, you can hear me dry heaving in the very beginning, trying to avoid watching Jay remove the hook. I’m such a weenie!

and the prized catch:


While I have gone offshore fishing with Jay a few times before, the deckhands or Jay always helped get my fish on the boat as well as filet the fish for us. I wasn’t having any of the holding the fish up for a photo op—shoving my fingers up in their gills and pretending to not be throughly grossed out (I actually am dry heaving thinking about it right now—GAH, cough SHAKING HEAD, cough)

We kept the smaller fish and gave the larger one to our friends on Lamanee. Made a delicious ceviche and almond meal encrusted dinner that night (Almond meal mixed with Italian spices and Parmesan cheese in substitution for breadcrumb crust—wow it is so good!!!)

Los Frailes is a smaller bay that is supposedly, per our travel book, protected from N, NW wind. However, it was very windy and pretty swelly. By comparison to Cabo, much calmer, but not exactly heaven on earth. Los Frailes is also a popular anchorage for boats making the hop to Mazatlan, so it was also somewhat crowded (about 5-6 boat, maxed out around 8 boats one evening)



The beach there is teaming with campers: their tents, VW Vans, Airstreams/other such campers, and oversized cars packed with assorted camping gear all covering the beach. Also, like any other small beachside town, its a popular spot for local fisherman to head to work from. Fun watching them “commute” to work each morning and return at dusk. A great dive spot is also around the point to our north. Sadly, with a cold and constant wind, it was hard to get out of my sweatshirt and layers, let alone wanting to bust out the wetsuit and jump into the cold water. Seriously, SoCA and Hawaii ruined us from being spoiled brats when it comes to diving/snorkling. Unless it's bath water, I’ll sit in the dinghy, hanging out with just my facemask on to look at the fish. And unless there are waves or body heat inducing activities I can do to stay warm, I don’t want to float around shivering my butt off in my wetsuit.

We stayed at Los Frailes for about 5 days. With cold windy days and overcast weather, we hermited ourselves on the boat and dove into projects/tasks we had on our list from prior to leaving. Jay converted our aft shower into a pantry so we would have better storage for food AND allow us to redistribute our weight (we are a bit starboard heavy and with only storage on our starboard side, made it hard for us to move items around to equally distribute weight.) And oh my god, an OCD dream come true the new pantry is everything I had hoped for and more! I was able to pull all the food stored under our seating, freeing that up for lightweight items and now we have easy access to all our dry goods. Crap we originally had out in our forward cabin and spare parts that didn’t fit elsewhere now all have a home! Organization on BOAT is finally taking shape and I cannot be happier with neatly having things stored away. Jay and I have gone to great efforts to have things stored and a rightful place for everything without excess crap on our boat. I don’t know why but so many boats I had visited in the past, just seemed to be cluttered with knick knacks and crap, giving a cramped feeling, disarray and a mess. I was determined to NOT have our boat looking like that. So to finally have this storage is HUGE!

Meanwhile, I deep cleaned (dust bunnies and mold prevention and removal), polished all the Stainless (it was in desperate need) as well as deiced the freezer and cleaned out our fridge. OH! and reshuffled all of our stored foods to the pantry and reorganized a nice and clean forward cabin (we have our second bedroom back—whose coming for a visit?!?!) All these projects took the better part of a week. Once we were done, we were antsy to leave and get to a better anchorage, now having finished our “chores” and ready to enjoy more sightseeing and exploring





Temporarily saying goodbye to our friends on Lamanee, who were traveling straight to La Paz and needing to get their boat up on the hard, we headed a short 47nm around further north into The Sea to the next anchorage, Ensenada de Los Muertos. Wow this is a beautiful anchorage! I will share most of our time here thru pictures versus telling as likely will tell a better story



Muertos is similar bay set-up like Los Frailes, protected from northerlies with sandy bottom and great holding. Much calmer seas, so a much better anchorage with a beautiful white san beach. To the right is a restaurant catering to the local fisherman and cruisers.

To the left is what was suppose to be a luxury resort, which has largely failed (for what reasons we have no clue) We took a walk to check out the resort, which was just surreal in that it was mostly abandoned, midway thru building (huge expanse of land was cleared for what was to be a golf course, complete with paved golf cart trails and irrigation system, but all half done)



Walking up past the villas we come to an open air restaurant which we are greeted by one of the workers…?! He invites us in and tells us to take a look around and yes the resort is open…? Odd as the grounds look abandoned and unkept with the exception of this main restaurant area….There are cooks in the kitchen prepping food, bartenders running in and out stocking the bar. Grounds keeper washing the pavement by the pool….but the rest of the property is completely dead….like its not even part of the same resort.

Check out the inside of this incredibly cool restaurant







and this video of the top floor complete with an old model trainset-oh my god childhood!!



What I find totally hilarious and extremely ironic about this entire place is that its originally named “Ensenada de Los Muertos” which translates to Bay of the Dead, right?



Well the developers of this new luxury resort renamed it to something a bit more appealing “Ensenada de los Suenos” (Bay of Dreams).



So, chuckling to myself as the irony of it now should be renamed Suenos son Muertos (Dead Dreams) since clearly this resort, with all its hopes will never be….

After this adventure we then took off on our dinghy to check out to the north of us, where we could see some large private homes perched ontop the cliffs overlooking the water. And Oh my god, this was a trip! Check out these ridiculous homes:










Crazy, right? I made a joke about the second property with the obnoxiously brightly colored buildings and weird Easter Island heads being the house of some Mexican drug lord and to not go to close...Jay didn't seem to find that funny.

We are now enroute to La Paz (20-25kts winds passing thu the San Lorenzo Channel wooo!!!) and will likely check in some time later with stories. For now, you are all updated and current on where we are and what’s been going on.

Maybe Jay can take over for a bit..and write a few?!

xx until then
C

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Last Passage Distance: 45nm (Cabo -> Los Frailes) 47nm (Los Frailes -> Muertos)
Cumulative Distance to Date: 1,067.6 nm
Days since last donating to Posideon: 2
Items donated: Toe ring, rug (it needed to go anyway and was all cotton so fish friendly) and a rag (All in Los Frailes, it was a bad day) Also almost lost my short board with a big gust of wind, when I was taking off the SUP from the board rack. THAT wasn’t fun as the current was pretty strong as well. I took off on the SUP chasing after it and it took me a good 20 minutes to get back to the boat fighting the winds and current. Hilarious after the fact, no so much at the time. Still chuckling thinking about a rug at the bottom of the ocean, nice decor for some fish, you know spruce things up a bit for them.