The art of relaxing

The prevailing wind blows from the north at this time of the year. We rode that very northerly all the way down the Baja Pacific coast, but now we need to go *up* the Sea of Cortez coast – unless we wanted to stay in Cabo for a couple months, which I’m sure would cause our collective untimely demise. I had been keeping a watchful eye on the forecast during our stay in Cabo. All our hopes rested on a single day. A day that the wind would turn enough to give us the possibility of sailing out of Cabo and towards our next destination of Los Frailes. That day finally came, and while the wind situation wasn’t great, it was better than the norm, so we took it.

Sailing in 20+ knot winds was nice, but if you look closely at the map, we were still headed the wrong direction (south-east-ish) for two hours before we tacked and made the slightest amount of ground up the coast line. it wasn’t comfortable sailing, and we would take two days to get there beating against the wind. By the time we completed that second tack, we were hailed on the radio by an online-buddy-boat that had some of our mail since Ensenada, putting us out of our sailing-misery. Since they were arriving into San Jose del Cabo, and ha dour mail, we dumped the sails, turned on the engine, and aimed Meriwether to the marina. Once there, Kerri jumped from the boat, ran to their slip, grabbed the box, ran back, and jumped back on Meriwether all while I was circling in the marina to avoid paying the $140 USD fee the marina was demanding for a few minutes of dock use. With the mission accomplished, we were back on our way to Frailes, which took another seven hours of motoring. We arrived just after the sun had set.

Photo of us, taken by Melissa from SV Fern, just before we gave up sailing that day.

Los Frailes did not have much to write about on land. It is an active fishing outpost for the locals, and vans and other small RVs lined the long crescent shaped beach. Beyond that, it was just a peaceful anchorage out in the wild – exactly what we needed after Cabo. Beauty did surround us in all directions. The cliff and rocks to our north-east, the teal waters under our hull, and white sand beach in front of us with it’s beckoning palapa, and we made sure to sample them all. Kerri and I got out for a dinghy tour to the rocks, and even an afternoon on the beach in which we did a wee-bit of snorkeling before Kerri picked a fight with a jelly-fish. But, for the most part, we just started to relax a bit now that we are finally in the zone of Mexico we (or maybe it was just me) have been seeking for so long.

The main event of our stay at Frailes was getting the MaliMish family – who decided to come camp on this beach for another meetup – out to Meriwether. It took a couple trips back and forth in our tiny dinghy, but all five of them made it aboard Meriwether where we all set about having a great afternoon swinging from the halyards and generally playing in the water. It is the first time since we have owned this boat that it has been used for a day of fun and games. Heck, we even inflated our new-to-us swim platform, which turned out to be a whole lotta work.