A Tale of Two Cabos

I made it! Prior to heading out from Los Angeles I had read about the trip a bit, and was worried about the last leg that they said was almost 200 miles from Magdalena Bay to Cabo San Lucas with no good anchorages. Turns out, that was the easy part and what I should have been worried about was the 15 miles from Cabo San Lucas to San Jose del Cabo. By the time we got to Mag Bay, we had already done two other overnight transits of about the same length as the remaining distance to Cabo, so that part was just another day (and night) in paradise. However, after spending one night in the zoo that is Cabo San Lucas (think Vegas with a beach, which was especially jarring after 3 weeks of deserted beaches, tiny towns, and the occasional fishing boat), we left in the afternoon to make the short jaunt over to San Jose del Cabo where we had a slip reserved for a month. Little did we know that a storm was blowing in, so what should have been an easy 3 hours turned into almost 6, bashing against waves crashing into the bow, watching the sun set, getting wet and cold from the spray, and hoping that the San Jose harbor was easy enough to navigate after dark for the first time. The transit hadn’t started out badly, though. The first five miles were pretty pleasant, and even included seeing a whale breach twice.

And we may have been a bit too distracted by the whale to notice the ominous clouds and increasing wind and waves. As we pulled away from the group of boats that were watching the whale, though, we started noticing how slow we were going despite the engine running at its normal RPMs. Since we still had cell signal from Cabo, we were able to pull up the Windy app, which brought us the bad news: 20 knots of wind right in our face between where we were and San Jose with no relief in sight. We might have been able to sail and go faster, but I didn’t trust our ability to bring up and down and sails in this wind so we stuck to motoring slowly ahead.

Fortunately, the entrance to the harbor wasn’t too bad and we had some friends from another sailboat who we had met earlier in the trip to help us dock, so we made it in without too many issues (only almost hitting the beautiful trimaran docked behind us). The Duck is now bedded down in San Jose for the month and I am looking for last minute plane tickets back to Austin that aren’t exorbitant, maybe my most challenging task of the trip. I’ll post more details about the rest of the journey down over the next week or so.