Soulstice on the move north in the Sea of Cortez!

Abbreviated Blog story - just some good pics and keeping the verbiage down this time

July 16 Left for Santa Rosalia from Santa Domingo Bahia Concepcion - 40nm -highlights: caught 2-foot roosterfish and threw him back ( hear they don’t taste yummy but great sport fish). Great swim in anchorage and great shelling beach. Great downwind sail entire time too.  In Santa Rosalia less than 24 hours. Industrial but neat historical town. Due to COVID kept visit quick and without touristy stops. Got fuel - only 5 gallons ( better to stay full when can!), gasoline, dumped trash, and celebrated 1st Dorado catch ever with amazing dinner-freshest Mahi tacos for us! Wahoo!!! Heard Museum is cool but passed due to social distancing. 

July 17 -July 19 left Santa Rosalia in am 7/17 for Isla San Marcos, arrived in the afternoon to the northwest anchorage. Had 2 different large dolphin pods come for a visit. Caught some video and did Whats App a few folks with that great experience. 2nd dorado hooked on the way. Big convection on our way over with some noted thunder - yikes. Fun sea-caves, nice terrain for hiking, and some great visibility with cool bathymetry for snorkeling. Another great sail close-hauled at times making 7 knots. She can sail upwind:)  

July 7/20 leaving at 0001 to plan for a sail to Bahia San Francisquito 88nm away. This assures a daytime arrival for anchoring. Should be great SE wind tomorrow. 

Not the best pic to appreciate my roosterfish but he went back to nature. 

From the book The Incredible Voyage by Tristan Jones. His crewmate, Huanapaco, is a Native Indian from the Andes by Lake Titicaca. An implied lesson on how to spend your time... Read below. The funny part for us it that it has been very HOT cruising in July in Mexico and we can appreciate feeling curt with responses to one another. 
This book was truly a one of kind sailing adventure story and fun read! 

This was a tinier cave that we went through and caught some fun video. Next year I'm going to have to have a better blog platform for video uploads. 

Crystal clear water. We were enjoying just sitting in these tiny pebbles and cooling off by the shore. 

Que hemos estado haciendo?

What have we been doing? 

Que hemos estado haciendo

Ground Hog Days on Soulstice!!! 

We spent quite a bit of time in Nautilus cove, an anchorage we found very homey, just south of Agua Verde. It provided us with the opportunity to long-distance swim, spearfish, paddleboard, and have evening bonfires. The water clarity got to 60ft for several days and we even postponed leaving due to the Blue Planet feel we were getting daily! Not to mention the Snapper, Pargo and Cabria we were spearing for dinner daily. It was hard to leave but eventually, we did and timed it for the end of the month. Good time to go get some internet, check accounts, and check-in with family. 

We made our way to Puerto Escondido with the usual chores in mind: wash the boat, fresh water rinse dive/snorkel gear, get fuel, get food, laundry and get some WiFi. We accomplished all these tasks in addition to getting our fuel injectors serviced and a spare pair sent to the lab as well for servicing. Our valves got adjusted and our heat exchange got a cleaning too. We serviced our windlass ( for the anchoring system), 3 winches and Stephen laid 3 coats of cetol on our exterior wood during our stay too. Oh and we got in touch with family, studied celestial navigation, I arranged for my HAM general exam to be on 8/22 in MD when we head back for a visit.  We saved a small black kitten from death we found hiking and he was placed in local home and we trolled with the dinghy scoring a big eye tuna just outside the marina. Pheewww!! Busy!! I also forgot we got daily one hour swims in the bay until an 9ft Bull Shark was spotted by another cruiser. Damn!! We did announce to be funny on VHF the Puerto Escondido Swim Club was closed for the week. Thank goodness there is an excellent trail system in the peaks just behind the marina that we used daily instead for exercise. We would be dripping with sweat afterwards ( Stephen looked like he came out the shower), then really rinse off in the shower and then continue to cool off with a lovely pool dip and soak! Oh did I mention IPA beer at the marina on tap!! Holy wow! It was hard to leave but also an insidious decline to the bank accounts. The marina has a small store and it was easy to pop in, get a beer, a snack, etc…  It was time to scoot and boogey!! 

It was nice that were no COVID cases in the marina but still we were surrounding ourselves with more people. We were social distancing and wearing masks but it is still a risk. Luckily the marina is quite small and the staff is excellent and the cleanliness of the place shows that. We were ready despite the comforts to move on and get back out on the hook. Again, time to scoot and boogey!!

After a good 2 weeks in PE, we made our way to Los Candeleros, an anchorage just outside the marina. A whole 5 nm away. This was our plan as that morning we made the big decision to head north to Puerto Penasco and haul out and shrink wrap the boat and not return to Mazatlan. We had already purchased tickets to return to the US out of Mazatlan in August but after following the summer time weather we felt it was too risky to cross the sea at this time of year and head to a more southern destination. Our reasoning included that it goes against the summer time southerly winds, Mazatlan is often experiencing high rates of convection daily and more concern for exposure to chubascos ( the summer time squall in Mexico that can bring 60-70mph winds) and has a very shallow and narrow channel that we felt could be challenging with big southern swell! Our preference is to leave the boat in the water but we were going to haul out when we returned anyway next year to apply some more bottom paint. So once we found out Penasco does shrink wrap, we said yep! that will protect Soulstice on the hard, lets do it and head north! 

We are both excited now because we were not looking forward to the crossing! It would have been sporty for sure, the challenges of squall encounters and a tougher ride on Soulstice. A good experience for us but why take the risk if you don’t have to. We were really going primarily because we loved our boat watcher, Raul! He did a magnificent job of watching Soulstice last year and we wanted that same care for our home again. Raul understood our decision making at this time of year. To head north meant we would be getting downwind sails (always better), seeing the mid to North part of the Sea of Cortez which we have not and getting Soulstice out of the hurricane belt. Win, Win, Win!!! Mazatlan was always a risky choice due to its latitude. Stephen watched the NHC (National Hurricane Center) like a hawk all last summer! Puerto Penasco at 31 degrees N  is out of the hurricane belt! Additionally, it is cheaper to keep her on the hard then in a slip. One more win!  

So that was a lot in 2 weeks to include some hefty decision making. Oh and jeezers, we both talked to work and will be returning in September for work. To return to the States actually has been our biggest decision. It was weighed heavily and despite our decision to return we are still very anxious and unsure about this decision. We are doing it based on a future goal of attempting again to do the S. Pacific next year with an eventual destination of New Zealand. We work in the hospital -very risky, I am on enbrel -risky, flights home and routed via Phoenix -risky, we will be around many more people by default of how it is to live in that way ( using a car, going to the grocery store more often, etc…). Risky, risky, risky!!! We still are unsure! Too bad we don’t have pensions but we don’t. ‘Nuff said except ANALYSIS PARALYSIS - UGGH!!!!
did I mention we are still unsure about this decision……..and I know I have overused the word risky on this blog post but it is apropos.

Back to Cruising fun!! While in Los Candeleros, we took an am trolling session in the dinghy and caught 2 decent cabria! We actually caught 3 and the tiniest guy we through back. I have come to enjoy troll fishing. We cast our lines, let it out a bit more, check our drag on the lines and then cruise around on the dinghy! It is our most successful out of water fishing:) I also was net controller on the Amigo net so we got to share our good news by 8:10am! 

Net controller? These are gatherings of cruisers on Single Side Band radio at scheduled times: The Amigo Net is on 4149USB at 1410 Zulu and Sonrisa 3968 LSB at 1530 Zulu.  Yep, you got talk GMT / Zulu in that world as well as in celestial navigation. This is an opportunity for cruisers to check in, give locations/destinations, weather info and anything else pertinent to us cruisers. Stephen does the Sonrisa net, a HAM net 2 days a weeks starting this month and I do 2 days as net controller on the Amigo Net, a marine net, so you don’t have to have your General HAM license. We have enjoyed the ritual of listening to these nets every morning as well as participating as net controllers. These are different then the nets in marinas on the VHF which occur daily in the am as well. We did mention we are loving the SSB and we have made contacts with folks from as far away as New Zealand, El Salvador, Hawaii and Croatia. It is all about propagation folks! We are radio nerds:) 

In Canderelos we put the dinghy away and back on deck and even the paddleboards got deflated. They had been out so long they had barnacles on their underside and I needed to some cleaning before they were bagged up. We were heading north with a plan to get to Bahia Concepion, about a 100 nm away from where we were. The first day we went back to Isla Coronados, a gorgeous island, that I posted pics from in my last blog and just spent the night. The next day the wind was supposed to be southeast with gusts up to 25 knots so we took that news and decided to push for 60 nm in a day to get to the Santa Domingo, an anchorage on the northeast side of the Bahia Concepion, just around the point. We did it!! It was a 12 hour sail and was awesome!! In the beginning we had some cross swell and that ruined our speeds but at the end we were easily getting 6-7 knots and few 8 knots with nice rolling seas pushing us forward. 

We had 3 hand lines out for the first half. We passed Isla San Ildefonso and more and more boobies started to dive bomb our hand line lures. They would occasionally do a fly by and I figured they could see they were fake and then take off but they persisted and even tried going after them. Initially it was only 2-3 birds but then became a frenzy of boobies!!! We probably had 20 boobies swirling around the stern of the boat, flying back and forth and dive bombing the lures. They kept missing and so we left them out because they were way off from getting to close. But once more and more birds appeared, their inaccuracy turned to accuracy by luck, competition and I feel just statistically proper. 2 got caught in our hand lines. Initially, the first one we hauled up to the boat and I was hysterical. It caught in its wing and Stephen picked up the frightened bird. I then attempted to pull in the other 2 hand lines seeing this was getting out of control when another bird got caught in the beak! AAAAhhhhhhh!!!! Now I started to pull that bird in and was thinking this is truly a disaster and now we are going to have 2 wild birds with very large hooks in them in our tiny cockpit. Oh by the way, the seas were fairly decent but thank got we were going downwind, no breaking swell and the autopilot was doing great! 

Stephen says to me, take this bird and I’ll get that other one in the rest of the way. I am not a wild bird handler and was like what??? but that is what I had to do. This bird was trying to peck at me and him. I tried to calmly hold it and in a way its beak could not peck at me. Stephen was able to get the hook out of the 2nd birds beak rather quickly thank goodness and then he was able to assist me. It took more effort to carefully remove the hook from this birds wing without doing any additional harm. The bird did get Stephen a few times with its peak but luckily they don’t have any teeth. Small abrasions were noted. The boobies were not the blue footed kind but they did have beautiful blue eyes. They are fairly large and bigger then seagulls. Luckily the bird was released and flew away!! Boobies catch and release!!! NOW lets put those hand lines away for the rest of the sail! We just wanted a dorado!!! not a boobie!

Around 930pm just at dark we arrived into the bay. We saw another boater on AIS that we knew from a net check in and called him on VHF. We usually don’t like arriving in the dark but it was only an hour after sunset. He gave us the scoop on the bay  and in addition to what we read in the guide book, we set the hook. As I had the spot light out checking our surroundings in the bay, I saw very clearly a red and yellow sea snake as well as flying fish! Always visitors to greet you when you arrive:)

Adios Amigos
Until Next time……

Net Controller Amigo Net

Net Controller Sonrisa

Nautilus Cove that we love!

Celestial Navigation study time! 

New joint read - great book

Cabria ( aka grouper/sea bass in US-) one of my favorite tasting fish

Thanks Stephen for letting me use your Euro 110! Scored a cabria and snapper for us for dinner!

Injectors - these got serviced!

Trails behind Puerto Escondido

Marina and mooring field - gorgeous setting! Loreto in Baja is 14 miles north of here. 

Forgot to mention we got a tiny rooster fish on a troll one day we threw back. cool looking fish! 

Winch cleaning/lube 

Modelo named after Negro Modelo - guessing 4 weeks old and placed in a home of one of the workers from marina

Troll fishing in Los Candeleros! Yummy