Home at last, and I couldn't be happier to walk in the door, flick on the minisplit air conditioners and stand under the shower without worrying about using up a meager tankful of water. I was so contented even the three scorpions in my kitchen couldn't ruffle my feathers.
The crossing over the Sea of Cortez was for the most part a train ride, with no wind, flat seas and a steadily rumbling diesel that never let us down. Of course, that meant also the inescapable smell of diesel in the cabin, which brought on a low-level queasiness and discomfort that I could only escape by sitting out on the foredeck in the hot sun. But I just kept swabbing myself with fresh water and Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap, and reminding myself I'd be home soon.
Since it was a weekend, San Francisco was swarming with big motor yachts loaded with families and their water toys: kayaks, inflatable floaters of various descriptions and one jetski...um, personal watercraft that wound its noisy way around the little bay like an angry hornet. "What if we all had one of those?" I muttered. "What would this place be like then?" What I liked was the rocks along the shore that looked like pillars of ancient ruins carved out of peach-colored sandstone.
Next stop was Puerto Los Gatos (Port of the Cats) with its characteristic colorful stratified rocks. My camera didn't do justice to all the colors — peach, green (copper), cinnamon, dark red, pearly beige. I also spotted another feature that always intrigues me: little grottos along the water's edge. But late in the afternoon after our siesta we found dozens of bees in the galley, attracted to our fresh water. Using mosquito coils we drove them out, then put up our screens, and that was the end of our time outside. It was a siege that lasted until after dark.
A short hop further up the coast we landed at Agua Verde (green water), one of the anchorages I'd never visited and always heard about. It's aptly named, with its agua as verde as it gets in Baja! But when we went ashore we found beetles of some kind that bit our ankles and drove us back to the boat. The yachters' guidebooks don't mention these pests, so perhaps it's a seasonal thing.
We had talked of going on to Escondido for ice and to top off our water tanks, but decided neither was important enough to delay the 24-hour run across the Sea of Cortez and home. I think the boat was starting to close in on us a bit. So early Monday morning we set out for the overnight crossing. With no breezes, the temps soared and we were only able to keep our cool by training our 12-volt fans on ourselves and keeping our movements slow and minimal, like a couple of oceangoing sloths. I managed to get all the way through Wilbur Smith's "Men of Men," part of the Ballantyne series about Africa in the Victorian era.
At sunset we sat on the foredeck and I marveled at the colors of the sky and the sea and tried to capture them with my camera. To our left where the sun was setting, the water and the sky was gilded with breathtaking gold and pale pink, and to our right it was all blues and lavenders and silver grays. We watched for the green flash, but a haze along the horizon may have obscured it from our view.
The most exciting event was when a superpod of dolphins passed us, stretching out for miles, and several came to take a ride on our bow wave. I've been trying for years to photograph them and only succeeded in getting gray dolphin-shaped blurs, but this time I found the right setting and was thrilled with the results! Thanks, Sue, for the tip.
