Bahía Concepción – From Fury to Fantasy in the Sea of Cortez

June, 2011 - Two days before we left the Loreto area, at the very

end of May, we enjoyed a perfect evening in Isla Coronado,

drinking sundowners with a group of cruisers in a friend's cockpit on

flat calm water.  The air was still as the sun slipped from the sky.

We chatted about the north winds due to arrive the next morning,

because we were all anchored in a cove that was totally exposed to

the north.  Everyone agreed it was way too late in the season for a

real Norther where the wind would howl for several days, but no

one could make sense out of the forecasts which had ranged from

15 knots of breeze to 35 knots of wind, and from 12 hours to 24

hours duration, depending on the forecaster.  We all decided to wait

until morning and see what happened.  This anchorage was way

too pretty to leave, if we could avoid it.

On the opening pages of The Log of the Sea of Cortez John

Steinbeck writes:  "The Sea of Cortez...is a long, narrow, highly

dangerous body of water.  It is subject to sudden and vicious storms of great intensity."  His description is right on target.  After

a perfectly calm night, at 4:00 a.m. the boat turned and began to rock gently.  At 5:00 a.m. a breeze began to blow.  At 6:00

a.m. the rigging began to make noise and the wind was up to about 18 knots.  We took a peak around the anchorage and all

but three of the boats had left for safety on the south side of the island, two miles away.

How much more would it blow?  The weather sites we had relied on for 7 months both predicted nothing over 20 knots.  No

problem.  We stayed and began our customary wobble dance as Groovy began to roll and bounce.  By 10:00 am the wind was

up to 28 knots and our gyrations were like the death throes of a rabid animal.  Groovy pitched violently from side to side and

from front to back, and the waves poured into the anchorage relentlessly.

We were backed up to a lee shore whose white sand beach looked like a soft landing but whose crashing surf looked like it

could pummel anything to dust in minutes.  We were confident that our ground tackle would hold us firm, but it was unnerving

to watch the fierce action on our the bow as Groovy yanked the anchor chain this way and that like a wild beast.

Finally we could take it no more, and at about noon we decided to make the two mile trek around to the south side of the

island where life might be equally blowy but a lot less jumpy.  We hadn't traveled a half mile when the waves suddenly became

vertical walls of water.  I have never seen such steep waves so close together.  Groovy valiantly climbed and fell over each

one, alternately pointing her nose at the sky and then nearly burying it into the troughs of the waves.  All around us the waves

curled over and broke like the tunnel waves you see on TV surfing shows.

A spray - not a wave - caught the kayak and bent the stainless steel racks supporting it like they were made of thin wire.  That

was all it took to send us back into the anchorage.  Bumping around for a while longer was better than risking life and limb to

get to smoother water.  Once settled back on the hook we resumed our windy carnival ride under the mocking, blazing sun.

Who would ever guess this usually gorgeous anchorage could have such a mean streak?  Such is the Sea of Cortez.  As one

cruiser told us:  "For every two days of paradise you get in the Sea of Cortez you have to pay with a third day of hell."

A fishing panga had crept ashore in the early hours as the wind was

coming up, and we watched two people huddle under a beach palapa all

day.  They had overnight gear with them, and as the day ended and the

wind showed no signs of simmering down, they set up camp and spent

the night.  By first light the next morning the wind had blown itself out

and the sea had flattened to a lilting roll with barely a ripple scuffing the

surface.  Life was easy again and the little fishing panga disappeared

around the bend.

In the early days of June one online weather forecasting website wryly

noted:  "Winter just refuses to let go of Baja."  The winds which usually

turn south in the spring/summer continued to come out of the north until

mid-June.  However, they were mostly light breezes that made for

pleasant sailing, and every night the wind and waves stopped all

together, letting us sleep in peace.

Except for its unpredictable bad temper, the Sea of Cortez is a dreamy place, and

as we settled into the pretty bay of San Juanico 20 miles or so north of Loreto, we

fell out of contact with civilization and the internet once again, and nature

overtook us.

Steinbeck noted in his Log, "One thing had impressed us deeply on this little

voyage: the great world dropped away very quickly... The matters of great

importance we had left were not important."  And such were our days in the first

few weeks of June.  Out of touch with everything but our immediate surroundings,

our world shrank to just the coves around us.  Bahía San Juanico is a small bay

outlined by short beaches and punctuated by craggy rock towers.  Osprey were

nesting in the peaks of several rock pinnacles, and their cries filled the air

mornings and evenings.

We took a hike up one of the mountains and were

rewarded with sweeping views.  The anchorage lay

peacefully on one side of us and waves of brown,

scrubby, cactus covered mountains lay on the other

side.  When not hiking or kayaking or snorkeling, we

rested, losing all track of time and days.  Was it

Thursday or Monday?  Was it noon or 4:00 pm?

Darkness didn't come until well after 9:00 pm, and we

woke only when the sun came in the windows and

forced our eyes open.  Naps came easily.

Steinbeck also fell under this area's spell some 71 years before us, saying after a morning's snooze:  "Sleeping late... has its

genuine therapeutic value," noting that with good rest he could work more effectively.  Like us, however, he seemed to feel a

little bit of guilt as he melted into delicious lethargy:  "We wish we could build as good a rationalization every time we are lazy."

Sailing another 35 miles or so north, we entered Bahía Concepción whose many charming anchorages swallowed us up for

the next ten days.  This long slender bay runs along the Baja coast for 25 miles, and embraces several smaller bays along the

mainland shore.  The region is cherished by nature loving gringos who drive down from the north to camp on its calm shores.

Palm thatched palapas offer shade for campers, RV parks offer hookups, and beach homes lie cheek-by-jowl along the sand.

Playa El Burro is the most popular among cruisers, and it is also home to Geary of

Single Side Band radio weather forecasting fame among sailors.  His beachfront

home is the one covered with antennas.  We later met Geary in October, 2011.

We enjoyed a terrific hike up a zig-zag route

that gave us stunning views of these

beaches.  At the base of the hike is a large

collection of petroglyphs, cryptic notes from the

Ancients carved into the rocks.  It seems they saw

many of the same things we've seen in this area:

striped fish, stingrays and sea turtles.  A little

lizard kept a close eye on us as we passed.

A stop at the Estrella del Mar beach bar in Playa

Coyote saw Mark testing out their stripper's pole.

This is actually a very tame bar with a great group of

locals that we got to know over the ensuing days.

The community here is tightly knit, and we were

welcomed in as "los veleros," the sailboat people.

Playa Coyote boasts many lovely gringo homes

peaking out from beneath a canopy of tall palm trees, and we were

invited to a terrific chicken barbecue at one home.  All our new friends

from the Estrella del Mar bar were there, and we felt like one of the bunch.

We enjoyed listening to them talk about the challenges of living and

running businesses on the beach without electricity, as we have lived

without electricity in the fifth wheel and boat for four years now.  There is

electricity "in town" in Mulege 15 miles away, but the beach homes and

bars of Bahía Concepción operate on solar power and generators.

After a few days we slipped away from the crowd to see some of the less

visited places where the languor of Bahía Concepción overtook us

completely.  Nature became our entertainment.

Five whale sharks, docile 25 foot long plankton eating fish that are neither

as imposing as a whale nor as fearsome as a shark, had taken up

residence in Bahía Concepción over the last few months.  Cruisers and

shore visitors alike had enjoyed dinghying and snorkeling among them,

although we had not seen any yet.

As we pulled into the small, scenic cove of Playa Santa Barbara I kept seeing

radar returns on our chartplotter like that of a small boat in the middle of the bay.

Mark was on the bow and reassured me there was nothing there -- until he

spotted a whale shark.  It must have surfaced a few times just high enough for

our radar to pick him up.  We dropped the anchor and the whale shark reversed

direction and came over to check us out.  What a thrill to see this enormous

spotted creature so close to the boat.  Unfortunately he didn't stay long enough

for me to get a photo, and we never saw him again.

For several days there was just us, the desert and the sea in the tiny cove of

Playa Santa Barbara.  Each morning we were awoken by the haunting calls of

quails and the shrill revving engine noise of cactus wrens in the thick grove of

cardón cactus on shore.  The caws of crows and sing-song trills of cardinals

rounded out the sounds of the desert and brought a little bit of Arizona into our

cockpit.  Mixed among these desert noises were the piercing cries of ospreys the

splashing water -- like kids at a pool -- from pelicans diving all around us.

We watched groups of creatures traveling together.  Huge schools of tiny fish

swarmed Groovy, and when I jumped in to snorkel with them they were like a

thick dark cloud around me.  Small jumping schools of fish pranced across the

water in leaps and bounds like steeplechase horses or skipping stones.  Birds

commuted in well-formed lines, and for the first time I saw mixed flocks.  A line

of boobies drafted off a pelican, like cyclists drafting off the lead rider, and

another time a single gull got an easy ride trailing at the end of a line of

pelicans.  The days slowed down so much we noticed these things.

There was a single travel trailer parked

down by the beach and we kayaked

ashore to talk to the fellow living there.

His life was as simple as ours but more

permanently anchored to the beach.  He was

bolstered by a huge cistern full of water and an

enormous propane tank.  He turned out to be a

watchman for the owners of a resort that is being

built on the beach, and every Saturday he and

another fellow switch off spending a week in the

trailer overseeing the grounds.

The resort is currently comprised of several tent

houses that look like an ideal getaway place for

an eco-tourist vacation.  There is a beautiful,

upscale beach palapa with an ornate thatched

roof, well crafted chairs on a large wooden deck,

and an enormous barbecue.  Under a tree you

can pull a chain and get a fantastic fresh water shower.  The resort's construction

supervisor arrived in a pickup and told us of plans to put a hotel on the hill and an 18 hole

golf course in place of the large stand of cardón cactus.  So Baja California slowly

transforms, trading its wildness for gentrified beauty, one beach at a time.

A few miles south lies

Playa Buenaventura and Isla Requesón, a tiny island

hanging off the mainland on a sand spit.  We tried to anchor

in this area twice but were blown out each time by

unexpectedly high afternoon winds.  Sailing there at 2 knots

in a whisper of breeze the first time, Mark thought he saw

pelicans diving in the distance.  It turned out to be a swatch

of whitecaps, and in a few minutes we were engulfed in 20

knot winds.  The anchorages here are not protected, so we

ran back to hide at Playa Santa Barbara.  We repeated this

exercise again two days later.

Finally the third time was

a charm, and we got the

hook down at Isla Requesón for

several days near its pretty, remote

beach.  Giant angel fish outlined in

neon blue with brilliant yellow stripes

across their bodies came up to us as

we snorkeled, and the reef fish were

plentiful.

Camped on the white sand we found

a wonderfully friendly family from

Arizona who had set up their rugged

tent trailer just steps from the warm turquoise water.  It was refreshing to

be with a family again, kids, parents and grandpa, and we shared a

pleasant afternoon together.  But it also made us a bit homesick.  All this

immersion in Arizona type desert and family campers made us long for

our trailer and family and friends back home.

Our days on the Groovy boat in the Sea of Cortez were drawing to a close, but our thoughts lay ahead of us in the crazy

logistics of transferring from 18 consecutive months on a sailboat to a brief summertime land-based life, while trying to tackle

the immense list of boat-related and living-related tasks that had mounted over the past few months.  It wasn't until many

weeks later in our trailer at Bonito Campground / Wupatki National Monument in Flagstaff, Arizona, that we were finally

able to take a deep breath and ponder the impact on our lives of four years of traveling by RV and sailboat and the shock of

going home again.

Find Bahía Concepción, Playa El Burro, Playa Coyote, Playa Santa Barbara and Isla Requesón on Mexico Maps.