Heading South From Ensenada

October 22, 2022  

At 08:15 we started our engine at the Ensenada Cruiseport Village Marina and untied our dock lines.  It was time to start heading further South.   

The only place that sold fuel at a dock in Ensenada was the Coral Marina, which was outside of the city harbour and about three nautical miles along the edge of the bay.  By 09:45 we were topped up with both diesel and gasoline, and we headed out of Bahia De Todos Santos, and by 11:50 we were sailing south!  

Although we towed our fishing lines for all of the daylight hours, our bad luck of fishing in Mexico followed us and we had no action.  Thankfully we had left Ensenada with a freezer full of food.   

Although it was nice having the distant glow from little towns off of our starboard side through the night, sailing at night close to land presented a lot of hazards that needed to be watched out for.  Many fishing boats did not show up on AIS, and it was not uncommon to see little Panga style boats out fishing even at night.  They seemed to usually only have one small light on board, and sometimes even no light at all, so a sharp eye had to be kept constantly in order to avoid them.  There was also the risk of encountering unlit buoys that were marking fishing nets or lines that were out at sea.   

Jason and I had decided to change up our watch schedule for our trip down the coast, and we also maintained about a 10-15 nautical mile distance from shore with the hopes of avoiding the majority of the small fishing vessels.  So, with sunset being at around 18:30 I headed to bed at 20:00 to begin our night schedule of three-hour watches.  We found that this schedule worked well for us, but still, night time remained our least favourite time of the trip.   

We sailed through the night, and after watching the sunrise over the land at 06:50 we changed course and headed in to San Quintin. 

San Quintin was our first anchorage in Mexico, our first anchorage anywhere other than British Columbia, and it was about as opposite as we could possibly get from any anchorage we had ever used in BC.  Approaching the shore, the land was low and it was very hard to tell distance.  As we passed the outer point of the bay there was a long shallow bar that stuck out from shore, straight out into the main bay.  Here, we watched as a massive breaker formed, crested and rolled across the shallow bar before it reached deeper water on the other side and continued on towards land as a swell once again.   

We kept our distance from this intimidating area and motored our way into the bay.  By our standards, from what we were used to in Canada, calling San Quintin a bay was very generous.  It was very large, 4 nautical miles or 7.4 kilometers across, and completely open to the open Pacific Ocean to the South West and South.  It was, however, sheltered from the prevailing North Westerly winds and swells, but those swells had an amazing ability to wrap around the land and completely change direction.  This was how there was such a large breaker along the shallow bar that was in behind the point.  

The area to anchor in, which had a depth of 20-30 feet, was massive and easy to anchor in.  It was a flat, sandy bottom, and although we anchored relatively close in to shore we still felt like we were anchored out in the middle of the bay.  With large swells rolling in towards shore it was a very strange sensation being at anchor and yet still moving in the swells as if we were out at sea.  With the constant sound of large waves crashing up on shore it was an eerie feeling, especially as the darkness of night fell around us.  Luckily for us, compared to the motion out at sea, the movement of the swells felt smooth and even, and we had no trouble relaxing on board.