We are in Bahia San Franscisquito, on the west side of the Baha, about 75 miles north of Santa Rosalia. We made a safe, uneventful night passage from San Carlos. It was rather unusual in that it rained for a lot of the passage. Last year we had maybe 10 minutes of rain in 6 months and it rained continuously for 10 hours, very weird. Maybe not though, we were not in the Sea of Cortez at this time last year so perhaps this is par for the course.

We managed to sail for about 9 hours of the 22 hour passage so that was nice. We did 3 hour shifts so wec each slept for about 6 hours in total. The trick is to be able to go to sleep when your shift is over, just let go and fall asleep. Our radar is still inoperable, we have been unable to repair it after cutting the wires in preparation to taking down the mast. There is one wire that is just a hair's width, that Barry thinks is the one which the radar signal passes through which we think is not working. We may have to restring whole new cable which is not impossible but will be very tricky to try and attach to the electrical bus. Anyway the long and short of that thought was that we did not have radar on the way over and there was an island that we were in danger of hitting. Barry plotted it's position and at about 0300 said that we should pass 3 miles south of it. The wind vane was steering and I was reading by headlamp, when I decided to check to see if anything was around and there was the island, appearing out of the gloom. It was just the faintest of shadows in the dark against the horizon, it gave me a bit of a start, even though I knew it should be there. I had scary thoughts about how a person could easily just run into something like that in the middle of the night if they were not vigilant.
This morning after making some yummy eggs and coffee (with Baileys of course, I broke down and bought some more after that disaster with the bottle in our luggage)I took over the helm and as we approached the coast I saw water spouts. Two or three whales were feeding in the general area we had to pass by. They would surface and then go down to feed for about 5 -7 minutes so you would not have a clue where they were going to surface. They got quite close to the boat and I just thought, "Do you know how much money people pay to see this?" It was a little worrisome though, after hearing horror stories of whales bashing into boats and breaking them in two. These must have been boat broken whales ( kind of like house broken puppies), or friendly, or just plain hungry because they ignored us, crossed either under us or 30 feet in front and they were gone. Whew!!
We have anchored in a lovely little spot and there is supposed to be a couple of good blows in the next few days so we should get some exploring done. Hopefully the rain will stop and the sun will come out and we can go ashore.