24.8N 112.2W. Punta Hughes, BCS, Mexico.On 26 October 2007, we pull up anchor and sail off hours before sunrise. The much anticipated Baja-Bash with strong North winds and swell was simply … not! It was a dream passage ... a gift given the potential for anything but … a light headwind with moderate swells. In spite of the fact that we ran the motor for half of the thirty-plus hour passage due to light winds, we were very pleased with the passage.
Going back a bit in our passage, we have been sailing since leaving La Paz. It has been wonderful...just the sound of the wind in the sails and the waves against the hull. We are even setting down anchor under sail...like real sailors. We ended up spending an extra week anchored at Ensenada de los Muertos waiting out
Kiko. Once the coast was relatively clear, we sailed to Los Frailes and then to Cabo San Lucas and then set sail northward along the Pacific Coast of Baja.
Punta Hughes is at the northwestern tip of Bahia Santa Maria. This place is remote and quite austere. The bahia is surrounded by long, low stretches of sand capped at either end with dramatic rocky points jutting up out of the ocean.
Less than a day at anchor and a second sailboat arrives … asking if we “want some fish?” Of course! Steve stops by the next day and finds that the
Drifter landed a fifty pound Wahoo along with some Dorado. Steve returns to
Gitano with almost twenty pounds of fish. Aaah...the good life!
There is no real access by car though a vehicle can make a run to and from a ferry access point when the tide is very low. Primary access is by boat. Believe it or not, people actually trek in … for the surf, the fishing or the whales … by flying in to Loreto or La Paz, bussing or trucking in to San Carlos, taking a panga across part of Magdalena Bay, walking or trucking across a sand spit and then taking another panga across the bay to camp out in a tent on a windy spit of land for around $1,000 USD a week (the cost only covering the travel from La Paz, the tent and meals…beers and sodas are extra at $2 a can). Worth it? ... perhaps, time and money being less fleeting than the existence of such land as this left like it on our planet…
Punta Hughes needs a south swell to break and our late-October arrival was out of season but there was still some surf about. A surfer buddy from Todos Santos told Steve that the wave was substantial but he was beginning to believe that Hughes was the “mushy” wave that two other sailor/surfer types had described to him the season before. In spite of the odds, however, a “freight train” rolled in for a few days and Punta Hughes showed her true colors. Great for the few surfers that showed up for the swell ... but bad for the almost two hundred sailboats that sailed in to the bay as part of the Baja Ha Ha run from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas. Long story short, monster rides for a few surfers and a long night for the seventy-plus Baja Ha Ha party-goers stranded on the beach after dark due to the big surf and low tide.
By 16 November 2007, the weather and water is steadily getting colder and there is no more hope of surf. It is time to set sail southward. The weather and swell predictions are positive for this day and we pick up anchor and set sail southbound on the Baja coast. In reality, however, the swell is much bigger and more confused with the winds much more mild than predicted … not a very comfortable start. After rounding the point, Steve catches a twenty pound Yellow Tail. Great to have fresh fish … but in the swell conditions the whole process of catching and cleaning and packaging the fish is quite a struggle. “Why is this turning in to such a hassle? Oh, wait, is it Friday????” There is a mariners’ rule that says “never to begin a passage on Friday.” uh-oh. Technically, we were looking at this as an extension of our original run out of La Paz … but it was beginning to look like fate was looking at it differently. Another, “long story, short,” the passage “sucked” … Steve cut his finger pretty seriously while catching the fish. The wind intensified way past prediction, and while remaining downwind, it was strong enough to produce five to six foot face wind waves pushing our boat forty-five degrees off course as they passed off stern. By ten that night, Steve had the boat as balanced as possible with less than a half-gib out. We were under sail power only but the boat was surfing. It was a wonderful site to see both a diminishing of the wind and the sunrise. The following day was a rather nice motor sail but as we were getting ready to continue on with the next two days’ passage to Banderas Bay, the autopilot froze up – most likely due to the prior night’s workout on the system – and we were faced with spending the next three hundred nautical miles hand-steering the boat or putting anchor down at nearby Cabo San Lucas in order to get the system repaired. Not as easy a decision as you would think … but we set down anchor at San Lucas.
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