The first leg of the Baja Ha-ha, from San Diego to Turtle Bay, was the longest one, lasting three days and three nights. Over night, we (Suzana, Wes, and Harry) did watches of three hours each, with half hour overlaps, which seemed to work well for us — enough time to get a couple four hour sleeps each night, but not terribly long stretches on watch. During the day, we didn’t do formal watches, but as it’s pretty boring being below, someone always seemed willing to take the wheel.
Unfortunately, this year, there was very little wind, so most of it was done motoring. And even when there was some wind, it was pretty much dead behind us, not the best point of sail for a boat without a spinnaker.
Anticipating this, we had set up preventers on both our main and Hoyt boom staysail, letting us do wing-on-wing without worrying about accidental jibes, and allowing us to use the Hoyt boom as a pole to keep the staysail out.
We arrived in the middle of the night. Not wanting to go into a strange harbor full of a hundred other boats in the dark, we sailed back and forth for a few hours, and went in right after sunrise.
All these boats were with the Ha-ha:
As advertised, the bay is large enough for the entire Ha-ha fleet to anchor and then some. Local fishermen provided a shuttle service to shore ($2-3/person) with their small fishing boats (pangas), so we didn’t even bother to deploy our dinghy. A lot of other people did, though:
There was a party on the beach, seen in the background above.
Suzana took a panga to shore and went for a run one of the mornings. Unfortunately, the five other people who said they’d come running at 9AM all slept in. But Suzana enjoyed her run anyway.
We also wandered around town (about 4,000 people), and stumbled quite accidentally on a religious service taking place outdoors in the local cemetery, on the Day of the Dead. It was very interesting, even if we could’t understand a word of it. At one point, everyone turned to the people nearby, shook hands and said “la paz,” including with us. Afterward, everyone was setting up food near their relative’s graves. We slipped away.
