Bahia San Francisquito

Interabang was ready to make the eighty mile passage from Santa Rosalia to Bahia San Francisquito on Friday, July 27. The plan was to leave late at night expecting to arrive at our destination in the middle of the afternoon the following day. We shared our plans with Tom and Jeanne on Eagle and they wanted to buddy boat with us with one stipulation. In order to avoid the bad luck associated with leaving port on a Friday, we would postpone our departure to just past midnight, thereby technically leaving on Saturday morning. Bill and Lisa on Beyond Reason just happened to be leaving at the same time so we had three buddy boats. The passage was uneventful until the last four or five miles. The guidebook warned of strong currents possible in the channel outside of San Francisquito and we found this to be an understatement. As we neared the channel we noticed big waves with whitecaps ahead. Upon entering the rough water we found confused seas with large waves, some as high as eight feet, coming at us from multiple directions. Navigating the channel was slow going with the boat bucking and rolling wildly for about thirty minutes. Once through the slop, it was a short two miles to the anchorage where we joined three other boats. Our friends Kyra and Rick on Nyon and John on Time Piece arrived a couple of days later.

Unfortunately, we arrived at San Francisquito with a water maker problem. The feed pump had burned up during the trip and we would soon be out of fresh water. I studied each of the spare and installed pumps on the boat trying to find one that would meet the specifications but had no luck. Remembering that Tom on Eagle was a water maker service guy, I gave him a call on the radio. Lucky for us Tom had a spare pump that would get us by. Awesome! We fired off and email to Rick and Pam on Hotel California. They were visiting family back home in California. They saved the day again by agreeing to pick up a replacement pump and bring it back to Mexico for us.

San Francisquito presented us with the first opportunity to use the spear gun. On my first time out, I came home with three opal eye. The friendly fish are available in large numbers and are an easy mark. Comparing notes with other cruisers, we learned that the opal eye was essentially a 'B List' fish. "Good for tacos" someone said. Trisha encouraged me to target more tasty species and leave the opal eyes. With coaching from Rick on Nyon and Tom on Eagle, I was soon able to identify and hunt the fish on the 'A List.' I bagged twenty fish during our stay including chubs, grunts, porgy, and three of the highly prized and delicious leopard groupers.

San Francisquito also provided us with our first chubasco experience. A chubasco is a big thunderstorm with scary high winds that come at night. As we have learned, the flashing lightning generated by the chubascos can be seen coming from far away warning of their arrival. We had a rather light chubasco with winds peeking in the mid-thirty knot range. The winds were a little scary and the continuous lightning was amazing. We saw any form of lightning you can imagine from large bolts shooting straight to the ground, to long streaks across the sky, to wide fans of little bolts that filled the sky like fireworks. It was a scary night with an amazing show.

After a little over two weeks in San Francisquito our stay abruptly came to an end when we had a part fail on our generator.

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