Some of you have seen me refer to the “dreaded Baja Bash,” and wondered what I meant. Some of you have done the Bash and don’t dread it at all. Time to explain.
Sailing down the outside coast of the Baja peninsula is fairly easy, as it goes with the wind. It’s so easy that the annual rally of 150 or so boats doing it is called the Baja Ha-ha. We did that one last Fall.
Sailing up the coast generally goes against the wind, often against the ocean waves, and is usually much, much harder. Hence, people call it the Baja Bash. That’s what we’re about to do.
We’re doing the Bash for two main reasons: 1) We want to stay on the boat this Summer, but don’t want to cope with the 90+ degree heat here in Mexico — no air conditioning on the boat… 2) It’s a great shakedown trip for us and the boat — after all, we may be going across the Pacific next year, and may run into much worse.
The Bash is one of those sailing things that everyone has opinions about, whether they’ve done it, plan to do it, or wouldn’t ever want to do it. Those opinions cover a wide range of options: “Wait for a weather window.” “Wait until July.” “Don’t go if the wind is orange.” (Makes more sense if you’re looking at a weather app that color codes the wind speeds.) “Hug the coast.” “Get well away from the coast.” “Go 400-500 miles out from the coast.” “Eat ginger.” “Just do it!”
We’re heading out tomorrow in a weather window best described as “not terrible.” But later in the week, things get genuinely terrible (26 knots wind, 10′ waves at 6 seconds, for those of you who know what terrible means). So if we don’t go now, we may not go this month. We expect things to be difficult, we expect the boat to go slower than usual (fighting the wind and waves), but we expect to get to the next anchorage (Bahia Santa Maria) within a couple days.
Why are we willing to do this crazy thing? 1) We trust the boat. She’s proved herself before in rough conditions, and we believe in her. 2) We trust ourselves. We’ve done enough passages to know that we always get there in the end. 3) We’ve done our homework, reading about the Bash and preparing for contingencies*. And 4) We’ve arranged with two other boats to head up at the same time (roughly), so we’ll have others to call for help, or at least for commiseration.
The tentative plan is to stop in Bahia Santa Maria and Turtle Bay, just as we did on the way down. But weather and sea conditions (and more) will dictate what we actually do, and whether we make additional stops along the way. The final destination, though, is Ensenada, getting there in something between ten days and three weeks. If you’d like to follow us on the journey in detail, click here.
So, this blog entry is the “before the Bash” post. I’ll do another one after we’re safely in Ensenada. It will be interesting to see if my perspective changes.
(*) Re contingencies: Yesterday, we discovered that our emergency manual bilge pump was not working. This is something you really, really want if you’re doing something like the Bash. We had visions of trying to find parts for it locally, where there are few chandleries, and poor availability of parts. This morning, we took it apart, expecting an unrepairable mess within. Instead, we found just gunk that was wedging an important internal mechanism open. We cleared the gunk, reassembled the pump, and now everything is working 100%. We were very proud of ourselves.
