I left Caleta San Juanico at 5:30 AM bound for Bahia Conception. I needed to leave early because I had to cover about 55 miles and be safely anchored before darkness fell. A Norther is expected tomorrow and I need to be in a protected anchorage before it arrives. Northers can last from two days to a week, so I may be there for a while. Bahia Conception is said to be a good place to take shelter from a Norther. Bahia Conception is also about as far north as I plan to go by boat, which was another factor in choosing it.
Bahia Conception is right on the main north/south highway for the Baja Peninsula. That will allow me to visit Mulege and Santa Rosalia which are north of here by bus, car, or taxi.
The trip from Caleta San Juanico to Bahia Conception went especially well. The wind was initially blowing at about 10 or 12 knots from the west, so I could use the sails to help move the boat north. The sea was relatively calm so the boat moved along nicely at about 6.5 knots. I could not have asked for better conditions. Later in the day the wind shifted to the northwest and eventually the north, but the seas remained calm so the engine pushed the boat along at over 6 knots. In the afternoon I appeared to get a favorable current that helped the boat attain a speed of 6.3 to 6.7 knots. The sky was filled with fluffy white clouds. It was one of the most pleasant days I have experienced thus far in the Sea of Cortez.
While the boat is under power, I use the reverse osmosis water maker to make fresh water from salt water. The water maker is essentially a high pressure water pump connected to a cylinder housing a very fine “filter”. The filter is actually a plastic membrane containing very small holes that permit water molecules to pass but blocks the large salt ions. Since the membrane is so fine, it also blocks viruses and bacteria, so the resulting water is very pure. The water molecules and salt ions don’t like being separated so it takes a lot of pressure to force them apart. The water maker’s pump pressurizes the salt water to over 800 pounds per square inch before sending it to the membrane for filtering. Achieving such high pressures takes a lot of energy. My system runs off of the 12 volt battery system and consumes about 25 amps of power each hour. That is a lot of power, so I normally only run the water maker when the boat’s diesel engine is running and powering the alternator. The water maker then consumes almost ¼ of the power coming from the alternator while the remainder goes to the batteries. The water maker only produces about 6.7 gallons of fresh water an hour, so I try to use fresh water judiciously. Since I needed to run the engine so long today to make the long trip north, I could afford to use more water than normal and still have time to replace it. As a result, I was able to take a long hot shower in the cockpit. That is a rare luxury. Normally I can only take long hot showers when I am ashore at a marina. The shower felt wonderful and had the side effect of washing down the cockpit with fresh water. Both the boat and I looked better afterward.
I met a young couple from Mukilteo Washington just after I anchored here at the Santispac anchorage in Bahia Conception. They are on a sailboat called “Aeoli”. Matt Negilski is a structural engineer at Boeing who worked on the Dreamliner. He is taking a two year leave of absence from Boeing to go cruising. His wife Rachel is originally from Canada and she is also a structural engineer. She works for a software company that builds structural engineering modelling software. Boeing uses the software that Rachel’s company wrote and she was assigned to Boeing to help them use the software. Matt and Rachel meet at Boeing, got married, and Matt persuaded Rachel to join him on the cruise. They came to Mexico in their 32 foot Camper Nicholson sailboat in November of 2012. They spent last winter cruising the Sea of Cortez. They then stored the boat on the hard in Guaymas for the summer. They came back to the boat in October of this year, had the boat painted here in Mexico, and are now working their way south to La Paz and eventually to the mainland. They plan to take the boat back to Seattle by way of Hawaii in March. Matt, Rachel, and I had dinner tonight at “Ana’s Restaurant” on the beach here in Bahia Conception. The food was OK but the company was great. I really enjoyed talking with the two of them.
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