Cabo San Lucas

Que paso?

It’s time for a dreaded fishing update.  Frequently trolling with two lures (an effort to improve our odds), we have logged an estimated 1,000 fishing miles since leaving Alameda and have little to show for it.  On our way to Bahia Santa Maria, lady luck finally smiled upon us and we hooked a little yellowtail tuna on a cedar plug.  Half the fish was cleaned and served as sashimi (raw fish) with soy sauce and wasabi.  Excellent!  Trisha cooked the remainder of the fish and served it over rice.  Nice!  But the crew was not satisfied.  While at anchor, a fellow rally participant got on the radio and offered dorado (mahi mahi) in exchange for wasabi.  We jumped in the dinghy and raced to the fisherman’s boat where we traded a dollar’s worth of wasabi for about three pounds of mahi mahi.  Sometimes it pays to be in the middle of nowhere.

The prize catch!

Finally, it was time to start the last and shortest leg of the Baja Ha-Ha to Cabo San Lucas.  We estimated that we would arrive back in civilization by early afternoon the following day.  Just one night at sea is a piece of cake.  There was little wind when we motor sailed across the starting line at 0700.  In the afternoon we had five to ten knots of wind and spent six hours sailing.  Early the next morning we approached Cabo Falso and the finish line in the company of about a half dozen other boats.

The start of Leg 3 of the Baja Ha-Ha

So much for the little secluded bays we had been enjoying.  Now we were near a city with lots of vacationers enjoying the water.  There were jet skiers, para-sail boats, pangas, and party boats blasting music racing through the anchorage in all hours of the day and night.  All the traffic kept the water churned up and the boats at anchor rolled violently.  Working on deck was difficult.  We rigged our handy flopper-stopper, which is a piece of equipment that cuts the rolling of the boat in half.  A boat rolling at anchor is much more tolerable when the surrounding boats are a little worse off.

With Rick and Rosanna of Tension Reliever at the Cabo Beach Party

We went into town and found a bank where we could get some pesos and had lunch at a great little family restaurant we found well off the beaten path (best chile rellenos ever).  It was time to clear into Mexico (Port Captain, Customs, Immigration, etc.) and we had planned to walk through the administrative process on our own.  However, Chuck offered to pay the fee for an agent to process all the paperwork.  The next day we had our six-month tourist visas and we were legally visiting Mexico.