La Paz to Mazatlan

November 20, 2012

El Cid Marina Mazatlan

La Paz - Mazatlan

We left Costa Baja Marina and bade farewell to La Paz on the afternoon of November 13^th.

All systems were operating except for the watermaker but we had plenty of freshwater on board for our crossing to Mazatlan. John and Jane had arrived safely on the afternoon of the 12^th and the weather window was favourable for the crossing. Because of our late start, we opted to enjoy a nice sail out in the bay and an anchorage in Los Lobos for the first night. The following day we set off at 0730 and were able to set sail once we had cleared through San Lorenzo Channel and were headed SE down Cerralvo Channel. Winds from the NW at 10-12 k provided us with great down wind sailing for several hours but abated in the mind afternoon at which time we put the engine on. This provided Jane and John with an opportunity to become familiar with our normal downwind sail plan, which is to pole out our genoa on the windward side and sail wing on wing. We were visited by a pod of dolphins adding a touch of magic to a perfect day. We arrived at Los Meurtos anchorage at 1730 under power and anchored in 16 ft of water. The anchorage had several other boats, most of them on their way north to La Paz. 

There was time for a refreshing swim in the anchorage before the sunset.

Johnny G, Jane and John - Happy to be underway

Dolphins visit us enroute to Los Muertos

The winds picked up again the following morning and by 12 noon they we were blowing 20k in the anchorage. Our plan was to leave between 1900-2000 Nov 16 for the 38h crossing to Mazatlan. We expected this small front to pass through on Friday so we were not concerned. We decided to go ashore for lunch. Our dinghy motor refused to work (another story) so we rowed ashore (read Johnny G) against the wind to have lunch at 1595 restaurant, formally known as El Cordon Bar and Grill. The wind continued to pick up but as we would have the wind blowing us back to the boat we were not too concerned. After lunch we took a walk along the beach and as I cleverly pointed out to Jane and John how to recognize Sea Reach in a full anchorage (there is a wide white band on her maroon colored genoa leach) we noticed that she was facing away from the wind rather than into it. She looked further out AND she was definitely in a different position to where we had left her. She was dragging anchor with no one on board and heading offshore. As we started a dash towards our dinghy we noticed someone had boarded her. Another cruiser had noticed she was drifting, had raised the alarm and someone else already in a dinghy motored out to try to reset the anchor. They couldn’t figure out how to work our windlass so jumped back into their dinghy to come get us. We are now rowing frantically towards our boat but with Johnny G power only.  He may be a horse of a man – but that still only has us on 1 horse-power with 4 people in the dinghy.

Johnny transferred to their dinghy as soon as they got to us and then they high-tailed it back to Sea Reach. The further out of the anchorage she dragged, the more she picked up speed. They got to her fairly promptly and before long had the anchor pulled up and were starting to motor back into the anchorage. The rowing squad made contact, boarded and we proceeded back into the anchorage with both the rescue dinghy and our own dinghy in tow.  We soon were re-anchored – this time with the additional scope that we should have let out when the wind came up.  The lovely young couple who came to our rescue are Terry and Sabina from Sea Raven.

They joined us for supper on board Sea Reach before we set sail later that evening as the winds settled to 12-15 k.

The crossing itself was quite pleasant. We sailed through the first night maintaining our 5 k projected average passage speed.  The wind continued to abate and by 1000h on the morning of Nov 17 with speeds below 3 k we took in the genoa and started the engine. We had completed 62 nm under sail; the next 132 nm continued to be under power. It was during this prolonged period under power that we discovered that the engine was not charging our batteries. We were relying totally on solar – which would have been fine – except that during the night because we thought we had lots of electrons being pushed into the batteries from the alternator we left the radar on when we didn’t need to and were generally less careful about our amp hour usage. Consequently, when we pulled into the dock at Marina El Cid and checked our batteries at sunset we were at 67% instead of our usual 90% at sunset. We plugged into shore power but the AC was not charging our house batteries. Gabriel from Cariba came over the following morning to trouble shoot and diagnosed 2problems; A failed switch to allow the engine to charge the house battery while under power and a failed AC charger. The switch was recent but who knows how long the AC charger had failed as we hadn’t used shore power more than once in the last 12 months. We plan to be here until Nov 30 so that should give us enough time to get things sorted. El Cid is very nice with two pools and a friendly cruising community. There are lots of excursion possibilities in the Mazatlan area so –“it’s all good.”-

Sunrise enroute to Mazatlan