Turtle Bay to Bahia Magdalena

There is a saying, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans for tomorrow." So the plan was to go from Turtle Bay to Cabo San Lucas. The first morning was beautiful smooth sea, no wind and visits from pods of dolphin. We had our coffee on the bow, enjoyed the sunrise, it was very pleasant. 

Later in the day when Lynette was sleeping while off-watch, I saw a flash from a flying fish and then noticed more flashes underwater. What unfolded was pretty astounding, we had dorado, tuna and other fish all swimming with the boat. Hundreds of them on each side. You could see them over 100' out on the port with polarized lenses. We got our fishing licenses, but Lynette was sleeping and I did not know where my lures were packed away. I went down below to see how sound asleep Lynette was, and she did no budge. So I decided to just enjoy the moment. The fish stayed with us for over an hour and when Lynette got up, I asked her to just look out over the rail on the port side. Hundreds of fish swimming with us. So I got all I had which was a couple of pink spoons from catching salmon in WA. 5 seconds after it hit the water, fish on! Out goes my line and snap! I have a deep sea rod and reel with 30 lb test line. Wow, those are big fish. I heard they liked big flies, so I had the biggest fly from my river fishing gear. 5 seconds in the water and boom! Fish on! I fought this one longer with a lot less drag. It went on for about 15 minutes when the line went slack and when I reeled in the hook was straightened out. OK, last pink spoon with a big hook and a few minutes later, fish on! I fought it for about 20 minutes and had Lynette slow the boat down by trimming in the main sail. She got the net and we landed an 8 lbs Frigate Tuna. See the pictures for details. 

We knew the sunrise would be a sign of degrading weather, and it did. The wind picked up and clouds rolled in by nightfall. After 12-14 hours of constant rolling, with the wind behind and large quartering seas, rolling of 15-20 degrees each way gets exhausting. A moment came at 3am when Lynette was on watch, the winds were shifting quite a bit. The autopilot was set to adjust to the shifts. We had the jib poled out and a preventer on the main to ensure we did not have an accidental jibe, which can be very dangerous. Tim was sleeping down below when the boat came off a wave and spun around 180 degrees, The combination of the wind shift and large waves got Lynette totally spun around and disoriented. So we got it back on course but quickly realized the increasing winds and confused seas were going to put us in for a very long sail. We decided to head for Magdalena Bay to hide from the wind, get some fuel and sleep. That was about 7 hours away. Then our autopilot did a few crazy things where it lost course. We knew there was something strange at about 127 degrees magnetic and had planned to recalibrate the compass before we left San Diego, we decided that it was fine and continued on; that was a bad decision since the course to Magdalena Bay was about 127 degrees. We had to hand-steer in very rolling conditions for about 3 hours. We have a video here to show you what we were dealing with. We were able to get the autopilot into the wind-steering mode and leveraged the wind to keep us on course; what a relief. ​

We ended up getting in as the wind was really building. We read in Charlie's Charts about the bay. "It's well protected from all wind directions except SW" Well, update Charlie! We were getting pounded with a Northerly trying to get to the "protected" anchorage, it was a 5 mile stretch of open water which allowed about 2 foot, steep waves to build, at times stopping us down to 3 knots. Finally we got to Man-O-War cove and anchored there with very windy conditions. We were fried and ready to sleep. 257 NM in the books for the last 48 hours.