December 15, 2019
We’re here- so excited…..in Mexico at last. We pulled in to Ensenada harbor early yesterday morning after another 40 hour passage
We left Oxnard early afternoon on Friday the 13th. No mariners leave on a Friday. I worked hard to overlook the day and the date but once midnight arrived with no mishaps, I felt relieved. We were intending to head out to Anacapa Isle and Santa Rosa Island. The weather reports were for a small craft advisory starting the next day on the outer limits of the coastal area but already the winds and seas were building. After an hour of bashing into the seas with the wind on our nose, again, we decided that we could miss the beauty of these Channel Islands in favor of keeping our breakfast down. We will have to return to those islands in the future as we have heard so much about them.
We turned south along a somewhat coastal path to keep the weather further out at bay. The winds were directly from the south again but started shifting around to the north. We raised sail and turned our engine off. Everything shifts when you turn off the engine- especially the sounds. This is what we came for! Just us and the boat and the wind and the sea.
The seas were pretty large but as hard as we tried, we could not capture a sense of them with our camera. It is more about the feeling. Before the moon rises at night and the seas are big and lumpy, there is the moment of shock as you notice the horizon changing in the dark and then realize it is the waves building against the night sky. A dynamic horizon is not something I have ever experienced before. The dark water shifting against the dark night sky is beautiful. The foam catches light even when there appears to be none.
The second day I stayed up for a double shift of 12 hours as Paul was not feeling well. The night was only mildly cold and I had Rosie and then Isabelle’s company as they came up for they successive shifts. I saw both the sunrise and the sunset that day. The closer we got to the Mexican border, the more US military activity there was: warships and flights overhead at regular intervals.
The next morning before dawn we were within a few miles of the entrance to Ensenada harbor. There were cruise ships and tankers, fishing boats and other sailboats. It was hard to hold a line to the harbor while staying out of the way of the cruise ships and commercial traffic. Many of the boats were not on AIS and little dots on the radar materialized as boats nearby. One fully lit fishing boat suddenly appeared on our port beam and seemed to be charging at full speed straight towards us. Rosie noticed it first. We had a moment of disbelief “Is it coming straight at us? Has it seen us? How fast is it going- is that it’s bow wave?”. I took the engine out of idle straight to full throttle and Rosie ran down below to put all our deck lights on. There was no time to call them on the radio. There was no way to alter our course as we were hemmed in by commercial traffic. They altered course. Drama over and we got our moment of feeling like we had done all the right things.
Arriving in Ensenada itself brought the usual sense of relief with a new sense of excitement at having arrived in a foreign country. The combination of the harbor and the hills and cliffs above remind us of the northeast of England. Our neighbors on the dock at Baja Naval Marina welcome us warmly and another sailor with toddlers wanders over to ask about the sea conditions out on the ocean.
It is Sunday and appears to be a big fiesta day. The music is joyful and deafening and a giant Mexican flag dwarfs the jetty. Despite all the spanish tapes and practice, our Spanish seems completely inadequate to the task of communicating. It will take a while to get our ear in. For now, we can’t even seem to get off the dock without having to resort to hand gestures. We will need to clear customs tomorrow and are already planning where we will go next as we the Baja peninsula calls us.
Sailing Tomten 