Agua Verde – April 5- April 8, 2010

We set out for Agua Verde on Monday and got in about noon. This is another one of the “must go to spots” in the Sea of Cortez. Pictures from this location grace the covers of several of the cruising guides we are using here in Mexico and everyone tells you that you must stop here.
Agua Verde - whether it really means "turquoise," "green water," or something else, we ended up staying here for three days. At first we anchored off the main beach. We arrived from the south, which meant we had to choose either the inside passage between the shore and the reef, or the outside passage around the mile and a half long reef. The various guidebooks all give different directions, of course, but if you decide to take the route inside the reef, be sure to hug the coast - like within 100 yards of the rocks on shore. If not, and, like us, you try to "eye-ball" about a third of the distance between the reef and the shore, you may find the water a tad "skinny" - like 20 feet, going to 15 feet, then to 12 feet, all in less than 30 seconds. Yikes! Time to turn back and head outside the reef! This is definitely a place when local knowledge helps, or at least watching some folks take the inside passage before you do. The outside passage around the reef adds at least an hour and 1/2 to the trip. (We found this out when we came back the other way on the trip south and it took us a whole 15 minutes to take the short cut rather than go around the island.)

However you get here, Agua Verde is desolate and beautiful. The water is every bit the blue and green you picture in your mind, and you can see the sand and the rocks on the bottom as you anchor. (Even though you can't see it in these pictures.  I'll get some with the good camera when we stop here on the way back south.)This really is "the desert meets the ocean" as the steep brown hills navigated primarily by the goats that are kept to make all the local goat cheese and sprinkled with cacti remind us every day. And it never fails to amaze when, on one cactus, you see a turkey vulture and, on the next cactus, you’ll see a seagull or a pelican.

The spit of land at the north end of Agua Verde

 

The north end of the bay where you tuck in when the wind blows out of the north

Ryan on the road above the anchorage

We spent a pleasant night off the main beach before the north winds cranked up and combined with the swell that curled around the point to create a rolly anchorage. On our second day, we moved over to the northwest cove for some shelter from the wind and waves. We weren't the only ones with that idea as we were joined by 4 or 5 other boats. Luckily, everyone was extremely considerate of the each other and left plenty of room to swing at anchor. You may be surprised at how close you can get to shore and still have 15 feet of water under you.

The "town" consists of a few dirt roads, a few houses, and lots of cacti. All the guidebooks mention "Maria's Tienda" and tell you that you can re-provision there, including the local, fresh goat cheese ("queso fresco"). Maria's is still here, and she does have a decent, if small, selection of stuff. We bought some drinks for the kids, but what the Cap'n really wanted was the fresh goat cheese since he's such a sucker for it. Maria keeps a nice block of the cheese in her cooler and you just cut off as much as you want. It was more the texture of firm tofu than the soft, creamy cheese you probably get back home, but it was still pretty good. In fact, it tasted even better the second day. Sadly, there won't be a "third day" since Phil ate the last of it this afternoon.


There's also a small, blue house with a front porch and a fence with a hand-painted "Restaurant" sign. We wandered in and were served cheese quesadillas and frijoles refritos. They were pretty good (yeah, lard really does make the tortillas taste that much better!), but some might wonder whether they were really worth the $5 (US dollars) per plate that we were charged. We'd heard from other cruisers that prices were a bit steep here, so maybe it was to be expected. I guess that's the price of paradise.



I'll bet that we've hiked more here than we have since we got to Mexico. There are goat trails up into the hills, an old graveyard to visit, and a deserted beach over the hills to wander. We followed the goat path over the hills past the graveyard to get to the beach and found it wild and deserted. The only living things we saw were a few crabs and a baby calf that was wandering in the brush. We hiked for a couple of miles to the end of the beach in search of some caves with Indian petroglyphs, but, unfortunately, never found the paintings. I guess local knowledge might have helped there too. Still, we had a great time searching for shells, sea glass, and drift wood, and arrived back at the boat 4 hours later, tired, but happy. Who would have guessed that flip-flops make such great hiking shoes on the goat trails?

On the way to the graveyard

We made it over the goat trails to the old graveyard

The kids playing with driftwood they found on the north beach

The last night we were in the anchorage a boat ran aground trying to make it through that skinny passage I talked about above. The single-hander actually fell asleep at the wheel – yep it happens on boats more than on cars since that rocking motion lulls you to sleep a lot faster than speed-bumps. The six boats that were in Agua Verde when it happened tried to help but to make a long story short, after a week of trying, they managed to get the boat off the rocks – there was a hole in the bottom that had to be patched – but the mast was snapped in the process of trying to drag Little Fawn back into the water. The boat is now in dry dock in Puerto Escondido.

When we left Agua Verde we headed north to Puerto Escondido, the nearest anchorage to the Loreto area unless you want to anchor in the open in front of the town where the cruise ships used to drop anchor and tender people ashore. We plan to make this a short trip as we expect to be back in Puerto Escondido for "Loreto Fest" at the end of April. That said, in order to see all that we want to see, we need to keep moving north. With any luck, we'll still make it to Santa Rosalia, with its old, French copper mine and Eiffel-designed church from the World's Fair just before the turn of the 20th century. Apparently, the building was built in France, exhibited at the Fair, then dis-assembled, stored in Brussels, and ultimately, shipped to Mexico and put back together. Can you imagine anyone doing that today?

There is so much to see down here and so little time to see it.