As much as we were enjoying the relaxed pace and the magnificent scenery of our explorations in the southern Sea of Cortez, when we reached San Evaristo we knew that it was time to turn around and start heading south. Our incentive was that in early February we were due to meet my brother, Mike, in Mazatlán which is on the mainland coast, about 200 nm to the southeast. Most other cruisers visiting México for the winter had already headed in this direction, finding the Sea of Cortez too disturbed with the frequent “Northers” and too cold for comfortable swimming and snorkeling.

We wanted to sail over two days and nights to Mazatlán using the leading edge of a norther, when we would have the benefit of following winds but before the waves had grown uncomfortably large. Just such a weather system was predicted to start on Friday (January 24th) so we wanted to position ourselves on the previous night in an anchorage further south from which it would be easy to exit the next morning and be quickly heading southeast across the Sea of Cortez. With few suitable anchorages on the east side of Espiritu Santo, we decided to aim for Ensenada Grande on the west side of Isla Partida, from where it would not be far to loop around the north end of the island, inside Los Islotes, without having to negotiate the potentially strong currents in the San Lorenzo Channel at the south of Isla Espiritu Santo.

Hoping to benefit from any northerly breezes that might pick-up during the afternoon, we delayed our departure from San Evaristo until mid-morning before which we prepared Tregoning for the upcoming overnight passage (clearing the decks, setting up jack-lines, etc.) As it turned-out, the light afternoon breeze that developed was from the SE, directly on our nose, so we ended-up motoring all the way to Ensenada Grande. This large bay has three lobes and we finally decided to anchor on our own in the small northern lobe where the breezes sweeping across the island seemed a little less gusty, leaving one boat in the middle cove and three boats in the larger southern cove.

Between the southern and middle coves, the rocks on the island had a very unusual appearance. Smooth, rounded, salmon-pink, vertical sides of the rock were undercut from a lacy, fragile-looking crust that, in places at the water’s edge, appeared to be dripping over the edge of the smooth rock. Further up the slope, the crust projected beyond the smooth walls to create thin overhangs that appeared to form a mass of small shelters/caves up the hillside. It made an extraordinary landscape that was pictured but not explained in our cruising-guide and we offered ourselves various, no doubt inaccurate, speculations as to how it had arisen.

By the time we had anchored, it was too late to go snorkeling especially as we needed to deflate the dinghy for the overnight crossing. However, we were not completely deprived of any wildlife interactions. Throughout the evening and early morning, we saw many manta rays jumping further out in the bay and this created surprisingly loud reports that reverberated through “our” cove. We also watched a sea lion swimming and diving around our cove with two pelicans flopping around it, apparently looking for any scraps that escaped from its jaws.

Friday morning was calm enough that we could clearly hear an osprey squeaking overhead, sea lions braying along the rocks, and manta rays slapping throughout the bay. A silent turtle would occasionally poke its head out of the water and while on deck, after going through our Tai Chi exercises, we noticed a large school of golden cownose rays swimming near the sandy bottom around Tregoning. If we had not been leaving so soon, I would have jumped in for a better look. Although with a maximum wind-span of only 3 feet (1 m), these rays are considerably smaller than the typical 6 – 12 feet span of Pacific manta rays (maximum 22 feet: 2 to 3 m up to 7 m), seeing this large school did make me wonder if all of the leaping and slapping fish we had seen and heard were actually mantas. Regardless of which species were the aerial acrobats, the many rays and other wildlife made us keen to return to Ensenada Grande when we have more time.