TURTLE BAY (Bay Tortugua -baja california)

OH MY GOD....... we made it this far.

Sorry about the lack of report from San Diego it took every moment to be ready for the 9:30 monday morning start in San Diego. The sail down from Los Angeles included a stop for the night at Avalon on catalina Island then onto San Diego with a extreme stressful time pulling into a enormous port late evening not knowing where our reservation on g dock #36 was exactly..... to complicate things our courtesy call into customs took 3 hours. and put us looking for our slip 9:30 at night not to mention the Warship hailing us on the VHF requesting a 5 mile radius due to the live amunition firing practice.

4 days of running around for things that wecould not find in Los Angeles and fresh food provisioning, mandatory fishing licences, customs clearence la, lal la ......

Our trip down was exciting until the seas increase to 12 ft .... 8ft is okay other than a little queasyness. later that night the wind picked up to 25 knots. We decided to tuck into San Quintin for the night another late night anchorage. in the morning most of the fleet continued. We were late with a few repairs when the winds picked up and started to really blow some reported 40 knot winds that afternoon. some of the fleet tucked back in 25 miles lower. Our selves began to get dragged around the bay with our anchornot holding on our 3rd attempt at anchoring we switched to our newly purchased Bruce 66 anchor and it held super. Learning... learning.... learning..!

In the morning on US coast guard channel on our SSB radio (newly purchsed)  we heard one of the fleet deployed their EPIRB (distress signal) later found out 5 on board rescued from thier life raft (ours is newly purchased 8 man) (thanks Jay)
Thier ship sank due to a whale attack repeatly ramming the hull 50 miles off shore (we were 30 miles the night before). they were rescued 2 hours after in life raft by a chopper.


We  left  San Quintin thursday morning after roll call had good sailing and went through the night at on point we crosssed a large bay which put us offshore 40miles in the middle of the night a fishing vessel surprised us right across our bow at 3:30 am  had a tleast 2 other boats in sight at most times the odd cruise ship. after 32 sailing we made it to The bay of Tortuga (Turtle Bay) as usual at night.  Coming in after navigating through all the Lobster traps the wind pick up to 20 knots we were surfing the swells at over 9 knots the Boat was rated for only 8 Gypsy Wind has been an amazing boat. and everyday we fall in love with her more. We missed the ha ha beach party bash so Nikita is mighty anxoius to get going. So as we sign off we pick up anchor and head for Santa Maria a 250 mile sail. divide 6 knots of wind average were looking at approx.40 hours undersail.

We will post pictures when we arrive at the next port lets hope...

over and out this is Gypsy Wind..