Joining the daily fishing boat exodus from Bahia San Lucas.

Gordo Banks. The place where the world-record Dorado (mahi-mahi) was caught. The fabled location where a 1300-pound marlin was caught just last year. Nobody fishes off Gordo Banks and comes up empty, if one is to believe the fishing guides and websites. Winds were too light and the swells were too weird for sailing, so we motored away from Cabo San Lucas and made our way to a guaranteed fish dinner.

Believe it or not, we were only a little disappointed not to hook anything. The bigger catch was a tremendous whale show! Two big whales swam back and forth across the seamount, came close to our boat, and then breeched, tail-slapped and fluke-slapped their way parallel to our course for 15 minutes or so.  Awesome.

Still glowing from our whale sightings, we left the Banks and continued our way northeast around the bottom of the Baja peninsula. A few miles ahead, we could see whitecaps, and understood why the swells had been large and rough that day and the night before. The winds quickly changed from gentle, to urgent, to fierce, and soon it came on to blow, from fourteen to twenty-two knots, right on our nose. With staysail and a double-reefed main, we tacked far out toward Mazatlán.  Later in the night, we tacked back to shore, but it was too early to approach an unfamiliar harbor with unlit hazards at each end, and so back out to sea we went.

Carla was tired from not sleeping at Cabo for three days, so the winds and swells may have seemed stronger than they actually were. But we have read that conditions along this part of the coast can be strange, where the whole stretch of the Pacific and the southeast-bound California current runs into the southwest-bound Gulf current pouring out from the Sea of Cortez. Regardless of why, the waves were short, steep, and coming from two directions, all while we were hard on the wind. The Monitor windvane handled it very well on one tack, but not on the other, so we were still obliged to hand steer half the time. Pelican Moon did beautifully, maintaining a steady motion as she cut through the breaking swells. It was a relief when the dawn finally allowed us to enter the bay at Los Frailes (The Friars), where a handful of boats bobbed peacefully at anchor only a few hundred feet from the frothing sea outside.

Rubbing the salt from our faces, we looked around in wonder. We had arrived in paradise, just like that! Thirty feet from shore, the cerulean deep water changed abruptly to the turquoise color of the tropics. A gentle wave pattern washed the shore, and a string of small palapas on the upper beach sheltered a few campsites. Our toes could already feel the grit of the curving, white sand beach. We saw two whales spouting at the entrance to the bay, saluted by ethereal el cardo’n cacti on the hillsides raising their arms in hallelujah to the warm sun and cool breeze. We hugged each other in sheer happiness.

We had thought this would be just a one night stop, a break on the way to La Paz and all the delights waiting in the Sea of Cortez. But now that we are here, we might stay awhile. Maybe we can even catch a fish. Or open a can of salmon. . . What reason can there possibly be for ever wanting to leave a place such as this?