The sailing adventures of SV Meriwether and her crew
Isla Espiritu is the larger of two uninhabited islands and part of the Archipiélago Espíritu Santo National Park. They are an easy destination from La Paz as they are a mere 20 miles from the big city and come with numerous anchorages with protection from all but westerly blows. The water and beaches are straight out of a travel brochure....
Well, we made it. To La Paz that is. This is the largest city on the Baja peninsula, and one that we have driven through a couple times but never stopped to explore. It is also a huge cruiser’s town, with many long time cruisers using it as home base for years or a launching pad to cross the Pacific...
We thought we would be done with these full-day jumps once we reached Mexico, but the lack of anchorages way down by the tip of Baja is still forcing us into very long days at sail. The next two legs would fall into that category, with full-on sunrise to sunset days on the water. Heck, it isn’t like we are...
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...
Our final leg of the Pacific side of Baja was finally happening. When we completed this voyage and anchored, we would officially be at the tip of the Baja peninsula and point Meriwether to the North for the first time in well over a year. The trip would cost us just over 40 hours at sea again, including two overnights....
Our sights have been set on visiting Magdalena Bay for some time. It is known for the visiting whales, and the geography of the place looked like we could explore it for weeks. That was the plan, but we threw it out as usual. First, we had to get there though. From our last anchorage at Bahia Santa Maria, Magdalena was...
It was to be another multi-day passage to get to our next destination further down the Baja coastline. There is a couple spots to have stopped along the way, but we both preferred to knock out some serious distance southward. Bahia Magdalina – a large protected bay where whales frequent with their babies – was our real destination, but just...
We coulda-woulda stayed in Tortugas longer. We may even shoulda. We both thought we had already toured the town during one of our two previous visits to Baja in the van but we found that to be false only after we had already left. Us leaving, was dictated by incoming weather. A seriously foul system was moving in by Thursday,...
We were anxious to leave Ensenada after a three week stay. Sure, we are in Mexico and that has been a goal for some time now, but Ensenada is “barely Mexico”. It has been nice but we still want to get further South, fast. While there are a few options to day hop down the coast line, we chose to...
We entered Mexico at some point in the middle of the night, during a 15 hour, overnight-sail from San Diego to Ensenada. Nothing of note happened. In fact, it was our usual, boring, motor-all-the-way sort of sail, but it didn’t matter to me – we were in Mexico! The morning was spent dealing with all the customs paperwork, none of...
