BAJA HOPPERS: San Telmo/Punta Prieta – April 4-April 5, 2010

After an absolutely calm night with cool temperatures, we left San Evaristo at 7 AM for a fairly long day's run to Punta San Telmo. It's also known as Punta Prieta, but there are two or three places by that name that we've seen so far, so we'll just use San Telmo. It's only a mile past Puerto Los Gatos, a very popular anchorage, but it seems everyone goes to Los Gatos and we had San Telmo to ourselves. Well, except for Manuel, but we'll get to him later.

We enjoyed a peaceful motorsail up the coast. We passed cliff after cliff of the Sierra de Gigante mountains. We passed broad alluvial fans where the rains are slowly washing the mountains down to the beach and where giant cacti grow to 20 feet. We saw the remains of old ranchos and a few houses scattered on the shoreline.

We anchored in our usual 20 feet over sand and set about to enjoy the solitude. Phil (in his wet suit) snorkeled around the bay for an hour and learned that the middle of this bay is basically an underwater desert. It's gently sloping and sandy, and you can see the occasional puffer fish trying to hide in the sand ripples, but nothing else, not even a plant or a rock. The edges of the bay, however, are teeming with life. Between the sandy beaches are rocky out-croppings of volcanic rock that lead to reefs in 6 to 10 feet of water. There you'll find huge schools of fish rushing along in streams like they were on the freeway. Some of the fish even turn to look at you. Every now and then the school goes nuts and splits into a thousand directions as a large grouper darts in for his lunch. It's your basic "Wild Kingdom" moment, and you have a front row seat. There are smallish clumps of coral, sea fans, starfish, sea urchins, etc. - all in 10 feet of water. The Cap'n eventually swam ashore and walked up one of the arroyos to see what he could find. The only tracks he saw were from lizards and coyotes. Did I mention that while he was frolicking ashore the anchor alarm started going off which meant we were actually dragging our anchor in the bay. When I waved to him on shore and then started using a flash light to do morse code for SOS, he just waved back. He finally realized something was going on and came back to the boat.

We were originally anchored in front of these rocks and then we moved around them to be behind them after the anchor dragged

The area on shore where Phil was wandering around

More of what we saw from the boat

The dragging of the anchor coupled with the wind starting to pipe up from the southeast, the only direction from which this bay had no protection..... . . let's review the bidding: we've got the wind coming up, the swell building, shallow water, the anchor dragging slowly through very soft sand, and a rocky, lee shore just 100 yards behind us. OK, time to move!

Up came the anchor for a 15 minute trip around the point, where we anchored on the backside of the rocks along a gravel beach where we were more sheltered from the wind and swell. It's a bit of a pain to haul up the anchor and move once you've settled in, but this one was a no-brainer. The story has a happy ending though: Manuel (remember him?) and his son were just getting ready to leave a beach shack in their panga when they spotted us dropping the hook. Well, well, well, what do you know, Manuel had a few lobster to sell to the yachtistas. Let's just leave it at this: the kids now love lobster as much as we do. The night ended up being quite pleasant and we had a great day before we set out north for Agua Verde.