San Carlos to Isla Partida

We pulled out of slip B24 at 1120, two and one-half weeks after entering it. We accomplished almost everything that we had planned: amazing, really.

Lovely Conni had created her usual impeccable job of planning the route and we spend the first night in Ensenada Julio Villa, a tiny cove on the mainland. Ensenada Julio Villa is a one-boat cove with an entrance to match, ensuring that no one else was willing to take the chance. Hurray for forward-looking sonar! The evening was hot but cooled enough so that I spent the night in the cockpit.

Sunday was a LONG day: 11.5 hours moving as fast as conditions allowed. In the afternoon, a nice breeze from the west arrived and we moved smoothly and quickly for the remaining time. We dropped the hook at 1730, much as we had planned but not as we had feared. A morning of slow speeds with current and heavy seas against us had dashed our hopes of arriving before dark.

With only forty-five miles to travel on Monday, we were able to leave a bit later, even though we were up at 0630 for the Sonrisa net and its exceptional weather reports. It remained dead calm all day, although that meant that it was HOT! We arrived at Isla Partida in time for cocktails in the last of the sun. What a lovely place!

Las Tetas de Cabra or the Goat's Tits, flash goodbye as we leave Marina San Carlos.

The beach in Ensenada Julio Villa was small and had a coast road that stretched behind it, but it was quiet and protected.

A lone cactus survives, somehow, in a spectacular arena of red rock. A deserted structure peaks from the beach further away.

Bahia de Los Perros, the Bay of Dogs, was inviting after a very long day of travel. We arose at 0500 and didn't arrive until 1730. This bay is on the Southeast side of Isla Tiberon, the largest island in the Sea and the home of the Seri Indians who developed a taste for their fellow humans. No landing without permits....and courage.

Hard working Mexican Cameroneros, or shrimp fishermen, sleep all day in the heat and fish all night for shrimp. The large wooden "doors" are rigged so that they glide away from the boats and keep the submerged nets open at the front end.

Lovely Bay of Dogs is surrounded by beautiful Isla Tiberon, Shark Island.

If you weren't aware that the entire Sea of Cortez was volcanic, these tuff cliffs would inform you. They look like ash and are.

The dry, hot, Sea of Cortez is beautiful in its harshness. Poorly charted, one must always be on the watch for rocks and shelves that are not charted.

The trip to Isla Partida was uneventful and calm. This water is almost 2000 feet deep and is over a submerged plate boundary. Further north, this rift is named the San Andreas Fault. We didn't see a single boat after we left Isla Tiburon.

For Don Smith: my rope "standoff" for the SSB antenna. I thought that it was pretty clever, but not exactly by the book. I'll do better.

Ground Truth. For grins, I turned on the radar to illustrate which of the charted islands was real and which were just figments of someone's imagination. Amazing, isn't it? The fuchsia color marks were hits from the radar. No fuchsia, no reality.

The welcome view of Isla Partida off our bow. It's so calm! We dropped by this south side but elected to drop the hook in the north side of the "col" or low spot.

Our wake marks the smooth Sea of Cortez as we move toward Isla Partida.

Otto the autopilot steers without back-talk or beer. We are seeing the cockpit through our new middle section of bimini that's fabricated from PhifferTex, an agricultural cloth that shades 80% of the sun but allows ventilation.

Lovely Conni searches the Sea as we close on Isla Partida.

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