The weather forecast has been flip flopping each morning and evening, one good for sticking around in the Baja longer and the other saying “Leave Now!” Ultimately, the need to get to Mazatalan before the 13th dictated leaving today.
Not wanting to short Jean and Vicki of more time exploring Agua Verde, we headed off to hike the petroglyphs fairly early. That done the bottom was in serious need of a cleaning, so back aboard I rigged up the scuba equipment and dove into the work. Vicki joined too and in less than an hour we had a good looking smooth bottom to help with our 300nm passage.
Anchor up around 1:00pm and we were motoring off. It was a chill first day with calm seas and five knots of wind from behind. I’m never one to complain about motoring across the sea if it means low wind and comfortable seas. Reaching the 24 hour mark, we had covered a 136nm, not great but fine.
The forecast was for some wind to kick up overnight and true to form around 1:00am the jib was unfurled, unfortunately by 2:30am it became quite uncomfortable. The remainder of the night was very sporty. Not so much pounding but the boat would roll violently. We had to stuff towels in the kitchen cabinets to keep things from slamming around. The wind peaked at 25 knots but those damn short square waves made it rough. About four hours later things improved, both in sea state and in wind direction and at 6:30am it was motors off and we were sailing!
That was all good for a few hours before the wind started ramping back up. First we swapped the screecher for the jib and twenty minutes later we had to go to reef 2 on the main. Half hour later we reefed the jib (true wind 28 knots apparent 22 knots). It was comfortable with the wave from behind, speeding us up to 11-12 knots as we surfed down. We managed to sail all the way to Stone Island and dropped the main just after turning into the anchorage. The anchor was down by 2:30pm, whew quite the way to finish this leg of the season.
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