From there, we motored overnight to San Diego to prepare for the Baja HaHa, a cruiser rally of about a hundred and twenty-five sailboats, plus two power boats, from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas. The first event in the HaHa was a send-off party in the West Marine parking lot in San Diego. Now, I'm not much of a party animal, but that was a good party. I'm especially not much for costume parties, such as this one, but I have to admit to having a good time.
The first leg of the rally started off October 28th, a rainy, cold morning in San Diego. Again, I'm not much for crowds, but the sheer number of boats parading out of the harbor together, and then massing for the start, was rather impressive. The sailing conditions were great at the start, but quickly deteriorated to light-air and motoring. Good winds eventually arrived, though, and we had some truly fine sailing along the way.
The HaHa fleet made two stops down the Baja peninsula, first in a place called Turtle Bay, and further down at Bahia Santa Maria. Big parties at both places. Turtle Bay has a small remote village, but Santa Maria has only a tiny, seasonal fish camp. Both places see only occasional yachts most of the year, but a huge fleet with this annual event. At night, the anchor lights of the fleet made the bays look like small cities. The party at Bahia Santa Maria deserves special comment. For 364 days of the year, there is nothing there except a few fishermen and their families. For this one day each of the past twenty years, there's a party with several hundred people and a rock and roll band. This is a really remote place, and the party was just a little surreal.
The last leg of the rally ended in Cabo San Lucas, often called San Diego del Sur (San Diego South). It strikes me more like Las Vegas: noisy, touristy, with few if any redeeming features. Another huge beach party, and a final awards presentation. We took third place in our division, but so did everyone else except first and second.
Many boats fished along the way, but some must have had large freezers considering the number of fish they caught. We caught several nice tuna, only fishing again when we had eaten all of the previous catch. One boat reported catching some three dozen tuna. The fishing prize, though, went to the boat that caught a great white shark. They hauled it up part way out of the water for pictures, and estimated its weight at six hundred pounds.
Bronson and Maggie left us in Cabo, and we continued on to here by ourselves, finally on a schedule of our own choosing. Winds were generally light those several days, so we did a lot of motoring, but now we're here, relaxing and enjoying the warm, sunny days in an old favorite place.
We left San Diego with sixty-seven gallons of water in our tanks, plus two five-gallon jugs of emergency water on deck. After two weeks with four people on board, then another week with just the two of us, our tanks ran dry the night before coming in to the marina here. That averaged about a gallon per day per person, for all drinking, cooking and cleaning. We do have a water maker on board, but it was pickled, and I wanted to modify the plumbing before using it. We've used more water per day backpacking in the Grand Canyon.
One of the fun aspects of having crew is seeing things through their eyes. Things that seem common to us are big and new and exciting to them, which makes them so to us again. We've seen countless dolphins, and while we never tire of them, Maggie's squeals of delight at every one reminded us of our earlier encounters.
Mintaka is an unusual boat in some ways, very different from every other boat in the HaHa fleet. Even different from most, if not all, other Ingrid's. The most obvious difference is in the sails. Most ketches flying four working sails, the main and mizzen, and two headsails, the jib and staysail. If they have a light-air sail, it is most likely a spinnaker. We have a third headsail, a jib topsail, and our light-air sail is a mizzen staysail. It is unusual to have just the right wind conditions to fly all of these sails at the same time, and a bit of work to do so, but we had such an opportunity at one point. We also had the astounding good luck to do so at the precise moment that another HaHa boat was right next to us and taking pictures.
Landing on the beach in a dinghy can be challenging, even dangerous, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. When a heavy surf is pounding, good timing, speed and steel nerves are essential to a safe landing. Launching back out is even more tricky. We've never rolled the dinghy in the surf, but we've seen it done. After an absence of ten years, I was feeling a little rusty. So, I uncharacteristically employed discretion in Bahia Santa Maria, turning back from the surf, and paying a fisherman for a ride in.
Approaching La Paz, and especially Marina de La Paz, engendered some difficult-to-describe feelings. This was, once at least, a very familiar place. Now we felt like strangers where we should feel like locals. People dinghied up to welcome us and offer advice about local anchoring hazards, as we used to do, but, while overtly friendly and grateful, I felt a little put off being treated like the new kid on the block. Now that we're in the marina, getting settled, and having chatted with the owner, who we knew back then, those feelings are fading, but not completely gone.
One of the salient features of the cruising life, and perhaps the one I love the most, is living in contact with the people around us. We lived in the same house in Salt lake for over twenty years, and barely knew our neighbors. Here, people stop to talk so much that it inhibits chores. I love it.
Life on a boat has a rather basic quality to it. Little things, like running water and clean sheets mean so much. After three weeks sailing, the boat is pretty salty. Simply rinsing the deck and the cabin sole (floor) gives a pleasure that hardly compares with washing the kitchen floor. Coming in to a marina and having unlimited fresh water is a value that is difficult to measure. Having laundry facilities and hot, unlimited showers is the acme of desires.
The sailing between San Diego and Cabo San Lucas was a mixed bag. Because of the schedule, we motored more in light air than we might have, but we also had some truly fine sailing. We made some big changes to the rig in the last refit, and I'm still experimenting with different sail configurations for different purposes. I had envisioned a new downwind configuration for passage-making in the Trade Winds, and was able to test the concept pretty well on this trip. I am pleased to say that it was a great success. Mintaka seemed to enjoy it, sailing at good speed in the prevailing conditions, and well enough balanced that when the autopilot inadvertently shut off, we didn't notice. She just kept steering herself merrily along. Not many boats will do that.
