Cruising Adventures of the Red Witch

December 1, 2022   The north-western side of the harbour of La Paz is a long spit of land called El Mogote (the mound), which stretches out from the mainland of the Baja Peninsula.   It is very narrow at its start, but widens out the further out the harbour it goes.   The shoreline is a mixture of mangroves, mini estuaries, and sandy beaches, and closer out to the end of El Mogote, just out beyond where we are anchored, starts a very long, sandy beach.   This beach wraps around the entire tip of El Mogote and wraps along the outer shore all the way back to mainland Baja.   The start of this beach is just a very short row in our tender, and we frequently go there for swims and long beach walks.   One thing that we often find washed up on shore is a dead Porcupine Puffer Fish. They are almost always puffed up with their spikes sticking out and their cute little faces.   Most of them are fairly small, but we have been very surprised at the size of a ...

November 15, 2022     The harbour of La Paz is a very unique anchorage, different at least, from any other that we have ever been to.   Because the harbour basin is very large, about five nautical miles long, four nautical miles at its widest point, and only 0.5 of a nautical mile wide in the area of our anchorage, and even though there is only about a six-foot tide change on the large tides, there is a lot of water moving in and out.   This massive entering and exiting of water every day creates a lot of current, and we have measured over 3.5 knots flowing past our boat.   It is like being anchored in a river that switches directions.   The curious part comes on the windy days.   In most anchorages, if it is calm all of the boats will point into the current and swing somewhat in unison on the turn of the tide.   And, if it is windy, all of the boats will point into the wind.   Here, however, because the current is so strong, all of the ...

November 8, 2022   On the morning of November 8th, as the unpleasant rocking of the previous night was slowly dying off, we started our engine, pulled up our anchor, and motored the 8 nautical miles to the start of the channel into the harbour of La Paz.   There are a lot of sandbars through the large harbour of La Paz so it was very important to follow the 4-nautical-mile long, narrow channel that was well marked.   The channel has a depth of about 20 feet, which is plenty of water for us, but too shallow and too narrow for large vessels.   The commercial port of La Paz is out at the mouth of the channel, and large vessels anchor outside of this area.   Once inside the harbour we anchored on the city side.   The main harbour area of La Paz is divided into two by a shallow, but unseen, sand bar that runs down the middle, there is a channel across this sand bar, but we chose to anchor on the city side at first.   We launched Kiki and headed into to...

November 7, 2022   This was our first time since leaving Canada that we moved from one anchorage to another without being out overnight.   We left Bahia de Los Muertos at 06:15 and we were anchored in Bahia Balandra by 14:10.   It was such a treat to be able to move from one beautiful anchorage to another in less than a day.   Our day started with a beautiful sunrise as we motored up to Punta Arena de La Ventana and rounded the corner into Cerralvo Channel, the point that many consider to be the official start to the Sea of Cortez.     We had some beautiful beam reach sailing up towards Lorenzo Channel and were visited by a pod of six dolphins.   These dolphins had no white on them and they were larger than the other dolphins that we had seen on the outer coast of the Baja, but they came over to play at the bow of our boat and we could clearly see them in the perfectly clear water.     We arrived at Lorenzo Channel at a good time as the ...

November 6, 2022   By the morning of November 6th we had rounded the second corner of the Baja peninsula and were headed up towards the Sea of Cortez.   With the morning sun brightly shining, looking down into the beautiful, blue water was like watching the most spectacular ocean display of the aurora borealis.     By 12:45 we were anchored in Bahia de Los Muertos, and as we anchored in 25’ of water I watched as the anchor landed on the sandy bottom.   I then watched as our chain laid out across the sand.   The water was crystal clear and sparkling blue. After anchoring, our first priority was to go swimming, and we immediately changed into our bathing suits, grabbed our masks and fins, and jumped in.   Wow!   The water felt like bath water.   We happily swam around pointing everything out to each other.   The Red Witch's keel, rudder, and swim ladder.   The puffer fish, now the second type that we have seen in Mexico, were the...

November 4-5, 2022   At 08:15 on November 4th, as the wind gusts were finally dropping below 30 knots, we pulled up our anchor, raised our sails, and sailed out of Bahia Santa Maria.   We had a beautiful day of sailing, downwind with about 15-25 knots of wind.   It was perfect.     Early in the morning we spotted our first, for sure, turtle sighting, and after that it felt like almost non-stop turtle sightings.   We kept a running tally through the day and counted up to 22 before the evening.   It was so cool to get to see so many turtles.   For some of them we only saw the tops of their shell as they rose over the swell off to our side, but others were much closer and would lift their cute little heads to look at us before diving down.    As evening approached we saw a mysterious fin cut across in front of our bow.   It swam out away from us before turning back and coming towards us.   Several minutes later, as Jason was ...

November 3, 2022 We spent two more days anchored in Bahia Santa Maria, and one of them was spent out enjoying the beach and exploring the sand dunes.   One cool thing about the beach was all of the crabs.   The crabs seemed to live in the sand, in holes that they maintained above the recent tideline, but they could also be seen scurrying around on the sand around the waterline.   Their holes were clearly marked by being surrounded with little balls of sand, which the crabs roll up and carry out of their holes and place in very unique patterns out from the hole.   Sometimes we would catch a crab off guard as it was coming out of its hole and it would immediately dart back inside.   Often we scared them as we approached and then they would take off running at full tilt either into the water, or up on to shore towards the safety of their holes.   One time, however, instead of running from us a crab froze.   I took a picture quickly, thinking it would run ...