(Note: a lot of this stuff happened before Otis. I'm a little behind on blogging.)
We spent a couple days of days anchored off a vacation village at the southern end of Bahia de Los Angeles known by the local yachties as SoBLA. One of the boats which spends time in this area during the summer has a little place there (a micro trailer with an attached porch and small storage unit). They invited us all ashore for a game of dart. Yes, 'dart', singular. They have a dart board hanging off the porch roof but over the years all but one dart has been lost. So we took turns throwing it at the board until Lance saved us all by announcing that he'd brought his set of darts. Fun as it was, 'dart' was a little boring. Darts was far more entertaining.
After leaving SoBLA we were fortunate to get to spend a couple of nights in a little hole between two small islands. Pata and Bota (foot and boot) are about 100 yards from one another and the gap forms a 1/4 mile long anchorage aligned almost exactly east and west. This seems really nice until you know that sometimes the wind blows very hard from the west at night. The forecast was good so we decided to risk it. It turned out to be everything we were looking forward to, isolated and a little wild. We had all sorts of wildlife to watch including sea turtles, osprey, sea lions, and several birds we hadn't seen in a long time like a kingfisher. The fishing was excellent - in one morning I caught 5 yellow tail, 4 sierra, a dozen barracuda and a few trigger (I kept two yellow tail). After two nights we figured we had just about used up our luck in this risky spot so we decided to go up to a place called 'Las Rocas' where we planned on meeting up with friends.
The next morning the forecast was for light northerly winds, and while the anchorage at Las Rocas is not the best in north wind it should have been fine. If the forecast was accurate that is. We're getting the idea now that we can't really rely on any forecast in the Sea of Cortez. Anyway we started out in light north winds and by the time we got the anchor down in Las Rocas it was blowing 15-18 out of the NW. THe anchorage wasn't bad, so we settled down to have breakfast. 45 minutes later, the wind was blowing 25 with much higher gusts and it was clear we were going to have to move. Getting up the anchor in gusts over 30 was pretty exciting, but we did it and got out in the channel where the waves were pretty big and nasty. Luckily, we only had to go three miles to get to our backup anchorage (La Gringa), so we only had to put up with the rough water for 45 minutes or so.
We stayed at La Gringa, hanging out with Stan and MJ, until the whole Otis scare started up. You know the saga of that.
John and Linda