Magdalena Bay, Baja California, Mexico

Posted 8 November 2010

We arrived in Magdalena Bay on Thursday 4 November in the afternoon. There was very little wind most of the way and we only managed to sail for about 5 hours. We saw lots of fishermen buoys for lobster all the way. This was quite stressful as they tied a line between 2 buoys, which can get stuck around the propeller. At night time this was even more of a pain as it is very difficult to see the buoys. We changed our course to deeper water to avoid the shoal areas where the lobster traps are.

Magdalena Bay is huge. We anchored off Point Belcher which is about 4 nm from the entrance to the bay. There is a small fishing community there. The tides are quite strong and it reminded us of going up the Frazer river back in Richmond. It is just picturesque. We stayed for 2 days at anchor and with the fishermen's help and technique we manage to catch 12 mackerel fish. Dinis and myself are not much of fishermen, but we getting the hang of it. The only problem is cleaning the fish. After scrubbing the boat for 2 days we are still finding scales. We promised ourselves that the next time we will go to the beach to clean the fish.

Saturday afternoon 6 November we made our way to San Carlos city, which is about 15 nm north-east in the bay. We needed diesel as again the weather forecast predicts no wind. We spend Sunday at anchor and visited the village to get some fresh provisioning. San Carlos is not geared up for sailing boats, more of a commercial boat facility. If we knew this we would have filled the diesel up in Turtle bay. We did manage to take the diesel containers to the dock by dinghy to filled it up on Monday morning. There was no way that we would be able to tide the boat to the docks, unless we tide next to a fishing boat.

With the diesel tanks full, we made our way back to Point Belcher on Monday afternoon. We will leave tomorrow morning (Tuesday 9 November) for Los Cabos (Cabo San Lucas), which is about 165 nm miles south. It should take us about 34 hours if we motoring, but all fingers crossed that we will have some wind.

We have not managed to get any internet since we left Ensenada. San Lucas is a much bigger city and we have to do quite a bit there. By now I have a bundle of washing that will keep me busy for a whole day and we need to make a major provisioning as well. I will also upload all the photos and videos from there.