Isla San Francisco 4.17 – 19

4.17

Paul’s birthday…..a beautiful day with good winds forecast for our trip North to Isla San Francisco from Caleta Partida, approximately 22 nautical miles. We start the morning with BLTs on fresh bread and two of our last frozen croissants.

Rosie sails with Hellmuth today- they leave the anchorage earlier than us with Rosie at the wheel. Tomten is slow but steady. We have enough wind, 11-15 k, to mostly sail all the way which is a gift.  Rosie and Hellmuth report being escorted into the bay of Isla San Francisco by dolphins, including a mother and baby.

In the evening Hellmuth serves us stew made from his grandmother Elise’s recipe with bread fresh from Tomten’s oven. It is delicious. We drink Champagne and eat almond cake for desert. The Coromuel wind comes up so fiercely that although we are anchored very close to Hellmuth we do not feel confident to row our dinghy back -we left the outboard on Tomten. We take up Hellmuth’s offer of bunks for the night. It is a pleasure to be on a different boat, especially such a beautiful one as Ocean Echo.

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4.18

We spend the day hiking and exploring Isla San Francisco. This is our third trip here in the last few months. It is a breathtakingly beautiful anchorage and as a result, very popular. There are maybe 7 other boats but there is plenty of room for everyone. We say hello to other cruisers on the beach but keep our distance. No one exchanges news of the world which we are grateful for. We live in suspended time.

The hikes up the ridges surrounding the crescent shaped bay are breathtaking and a little nerve wracking with plunging drops hundreds of feet down to the more exposed easterly shore below. Between our southwest anchorage and the northeastern bay across from us is a wide expanse of salt flats with a few old salt ponds dug out and still retaining their rectangular shapes. 

At the top of the cliffs we spend one afternoon scrambling South and the next day head North. The rough seaward outcrops far below are littered with enormous precarious looking nests that look as if they would be occupied by pterodactyls. The largest birds we see in the skies are vultures with their wine colored heads-perhaps these are their nests.

The swimming here is fantastic- perfect white shell sands, high salt content, perfect basking temperatures. I like to float- the salt allows me to stay at the the surface without any extra effort.  

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4.19

Sadly, Hellmuth leaves today- heading north to Puerto Escondido. We have enjoyed our time getting to know him in the varied anchorages we have shared- Los Gatos, Agua Verde, Pto Escondido, La Paz and then these more recent anchorages. We have learned some valuable sailing techniques from his sharing of wide experiences. We decide to take one more day to play and plan an early departure for Ensenada Grande tomorrow. We see sea turtles constantly, observing us with their periscope heads. They are very shy; as soon as we get in the water, they disappear. 

We spend lots of lazy time on the beach collecting shells. Paul spends time working on primitive ways to shift the weight of the dinghy up the beach without wheels- using a spare fender to roll it like ancient stone carriers. He also experiments with different dinghy anchor arrangements (twice we have had the dinghy start to float away). 

I climb back up to the ridge for sunset with the frigate birds and vultures overhead. When I come down I walk through the salt flats and pause at the rectangular pits dug between the two shores. Although the ground is hard and crumbly underfoot everywhere, the area beneath the salt pits is deep sucking ooze and feels as if you could be slowly sucked into the earth. I’m not testing it.

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