Fubar Trip - San Diego to La Paz by Randy

The FUBAR Rally, that's "Fleet Underway Baja Rally", concluded this week with our successful arrival at La Paz Mexico.  The trip was fantastic, beautiful, mostly calm, sometimes bouncy and not without a couple of moments of panic.  We traveled over 1,000 miles on Antipodes at 8 MPH, imagine doing that with a car!

We left San Diego on a beautiful morning, no wind, light seas and a great sunrise.  This was one of the many sunrises and sunsets we got to see while traveling over the following days.

Paul Russo joined our crew of three to assist in the journey as well as catch some fish.  We had some success in the latter, more on that later.

The initial leg of the trip was to Ensenada a mere 64 nautical miles from San Diego.  We got in the beautiful Marina Coral in the afternoon and we surprised that we still needed to go to immigration to complete our paperwork.  In addition, we needed to buy fishing licenses and others told us that they were sold out in town.  Edgar to the rescue, our friend and manager of the tackle shop had three licenses left and we got them.  We could fish!  Immigration was fun, not, but we got it all done.  We're now officially checked into Mexico.

Later we joined the first of many Fubar parties.  We had planned on fishing the next day but the mood never struck us and we hung around until the evening.

Our travel plans for the next leg were to leave at 10 PM to make the 38 hour trip to Turtle bay.  We were traveling with another large steel trawler named Odyssey.  Unfortunately, as we were having dinner, a large and thick fog bank rolled into the bay.  We could only see a few dozen feet across the marina but we were not concerned as we have traversed this marina entrance many times at night.

At 9 PM we get a call from Odyssey, they heard a rumor that the port captain was going to close the port.  Time to leave now!  We both fired up our engines and headed out of the marina.  I had already mapped out our course once we cleared the jetty, apparently Odyssey did not.  They headed straight out of the marina and towards the rocks!  We stopped to watch, called them on the radio but to no avail, they kept heading for the shore.  Finally we heard their engines go into full reverse and they made the turn to follow us out.

The fog broke an hour later and we had a smooth first night at sea.

Day 2 to Turtle Bay - fishing!  We found the magic kelp patty and started catching all the Yellowtail we wanted.  Adam was the first to hook up and he landed the biggest fish of the day, his first offshore fish!  Very exciting.

Another beautiful overnight run was punctuated by a half moon.  We saw many shooting stars and the night sky was spectacular.  Amazing what you can see away from the city lights.

The morning found us right where we wanted to be, on the inside of Cedros Island.  This is a famous fishing spot, particularly for big Yellowtail.


We trolled deep diving lures called Rapalas and got a double about midway down the island.  My fish felt strong while Paul's not so much. Paul's ended up being a nice sized Bonita which we released.  Mine still fought hard but did not come to the surface throughout the fight

Both of us were surprised when we got the fish to the boat.  It was a 20 lb. Dorado that was hooked by the dorsal fin.  This kept the fish below the surface as Dorado are known for their acrobatics.

We headed straight to Turtle Bay after that as the area was filled with lobster pots and dodging them got irritating.

We found a great spot in the bay and settled in for another beautiful sunset and fresh fish dinner.  

 

                

 

We did a bit of exploring and some hiking the next day.  Found an excellent restaurant and had a good traditional Mexican meal as well.  Overall, Turtle Bay was OK but not our favorite stop on the trip.

We buddy boated with a group of Nordhavn boats on the way out of Turtle Bay, the same plan as the last trip leaving at 10 PM at night for a short overnight to be followed by a day of fishing and then another overnight run.  This run took 40 hours, longer than the first because we stopped many times to fish.

First Marlin!  

Paul took the rod when we got a good strike on the trolling rig.  No sign of the fish at first but Paul thought it was a good one.  After several minutes of fighting we get this show:

Nancy took over the boat while Paul fought the fish, she loved it!  I barked out orders to Nancy, hard left, more throttle, full reverse as the fish continued to circle the boat and put Paul's hard work in jeopardy. Finally, after a full 60 minute fight, Paul brought the 150 lb. Striped Marlin to the back of the boat and just as I was reaching down to cut the leader, it self released.  Nice, we brought our first Marlin to the boat and saved the lure.

We added a couple of nice Yellowfin Tuna after that to round out the day.

     

We had yet another smooth overnight trip and were greeted by a most spectacular sunrise over the Theitus Banks, another famous fishing area.  We fished for a couple of hours, hooked up a couple more Marlin and Wahoo but couldn't bring them to the boat.  We did land another nice Dorado however, muy delicioso!

Stop #3 - Magdalena Bay - this is the bay where the grey whales go to mate and raise their young.  We didn't see any whales in the bay but we were treated to so many cool sights it is hard to describe.  The bay itself was huge, larger than San Francisco Bay and full of life.  We saw many marine animals coming into the bay including porpoise, blue whales, osprey, marlin, frigates and a sea of sea turtles.  The bay was flat calm the two days we were there and sleeping was easy.

We had lots of fun in Mag Bay, Adam will tell more in his upcoming first blog post.

Leaving Mag Bay was exciting, we left our hydraulic pump on and had an overheating situation.  We run everything with the hydraulic pump and had our original pump blow up a few weeks back so we were a bit concerned.  All was good in the end and the ship is running good again.  There is an old boaters saying, "Cruising is comprised of hours of boredom sprinkled with moments of shear terror."  So true.

Of course, we left to another stellar sunrise.  Getting tired of these yet?

Flat seas again were the order of the day.  We fished our way down to San Jose del Cabo without much luck catching.

We passed right off the famous Land's End at Cabo San Lucas but it was just getting light and pictures did not come out as hoped.



Stop #4 - San Jose Del Cabo - what a cool little town!  We truly enjoyed our short stay in this area.  We made the mistake of visiting Cabo San Lucas one day.  If you like Vegas you'd like Cabo, shots of Cabo below:

      



On the other hand, San Jose del Cabo was quaint and quiet.  We enjoyed the village and the marina. The bad part (muy malo) was that we had to leave our crew and friend Paul here to travel back to San Diego. His companionship and guidance on the trip were immeasurable.

On to La Paz!

The last section of the trip is the East Cape of Baja California.  This is some of the best fishing grounds in the world.  Unfortunately, when we turned the corner to head norte, we were greeted by 25 MPH winds on our bow.  This made for uncomfortable conditions and a very bumpy ride.  We estimated 5-6 foot waves that were very close together creating a banging effect on our steel boat.  Nothing dangerous, just a lot of bouncing for a long period of time.

We took a break in a small marina half way up then finished the trip to La Paz the next day in much better weather conditions.

We are staying in a fancy resort marina for a couple of days until we move to our more reasonable marina closer to town.  Stay tuned for more on La Paz in future posts.