Cruising in the Northern Sea of Cortez April 2024

 

It has been 2 years since my previous post about sailing adventures with Etoile du Sud, my Benford 34 junk schooner.  Due to problems in finding crew for an ocean voyage and the near impossibility of getting insurance for a plywood-epoxy-fiberglass composite home-built vessel in the US, time passed by and spring 2024 found Etoile and me still in the boatyard at San Carlos, pursuing various small projects and planning a voyage across the Sea of Cortez to Santa Rosalia.  After installing a propane system with a 2-burner cooktop, figuring out problems with a VHF installation, and resolving some engine starting and stopping issues, I had the boat launched using the "low-boy” hydraulic-arm trailer at Marina San Carlos.  This is a really low stress operation.  The low-boy pushed by a large tractor shows up in the boatyard (Marina Seca San Carlos – the “dry” marina), the boat gets lifted by hydraulic arms and the keel is lowered onto wood blocks on the trailer.  The tractor driver then pushes the trailer a half-mile down the road to the “wet” marina, known as Marina San Carlos, and down a launching ramp into the water.  No hanging a 7-ton boat from the straps of a travel-lift as I am used to in the Pacific Northwest due to the much larger tidal ranges up north. 

A few days after the launch, I was joined by crewmember Robert McWilliam from Canada, and the two of us set out to cross the Sea of Cortez (72nm) to visit the small town of Santa Rosalia.   I had heard of a metal walled church there that had some connection to Gustav Eiffel, the architect whose name graces the famous Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, and I wanted to find out what that was all about.

We left San Carlos and its iconic Mt. Tetakawi in the late afternoon, and sailed for a couple of hours, after which the wind totally died, and I decided to lower the sails to avoid the clanging of wood battens on aluminum masts that previous crew had greatly disliked in windless conditions out in the Pacific.  We motored on through the night in calm conditions, with no clanging, hand steering due to a broken autopilot.  Stars and the moon served as convenient targets to aim the bow of the boat.  Then, early in the morning, still totally dark, while Robert had the helm, a swell suddenly appeared, followed by maybe 8 knots of wind on the nose.  So instead of battens clanging against the mast, we had furled sail bundles sliding fore and aft despite my efforts to secure them.  I did not want to try to raise the sails in the dark as we had had some problems in daylight sorting out halyards, yard-hauling parrel lines, running luff parrel lines, lazy jacks, and a spare halyard on each mast. Raising sails in the dark, given our inexperience with the boat, seemed like a really bad idea.  Instead we carried on under power and I kept adding to the spider web of temporary lines trying to prevent the sail bundles from surging fore and aft.  In the future I think my policy will be, “Are those battens clanging again? – oh well, the sail is up because we will surely see wind before we reach port, and I want to be ready for it!"  We eventually reached San Carlos and entered the harbor in the early daylight hours, pulling into an empty slip in the small marina. 

Once the office opened up and we got the boat registered with them, we set out to explore the town, and discovered that it is a small town of wood-walled houses[1] nestled into a small valley behind a defunct copper mine established by a French mining company in the 19^th century.  The famous metal church turned out to be an early example of a factory built building, designed in fact by Gustav Eiffel, he of the Eiffel Tower, and purchased by an employee of the mining company during a trip home.  The families of miners had followed their breadwinners to San Carlos, thus resulting in the town, and these families requested the assistance of the mining company in arranging a facility for them to practice their religion.  The unusual metal-walled church, manufactured in France and shipped to Santa Rosalia on the Baja peninsula, was the result. 

The town has one other notable work of architecture,  a small library set on the edge of a charming municipal park with trees and picnic tables, named for none other than Mahatma Ghandi.  I heard no stories about how this came about.  Peaceful resistance to colonial rule does not seem to be part of the Santa Rosalia story.  It took a long war to get Spanish and French rulers out of Mexico, and that was definitely not a peaceful resistance scene, but the Mexican Revolution happened well before Santa Rosalia was founded.  The library itself was full of old books, and some computers from the early days of the internet provided access to online resources.

We eventually made it back to the marina, finding it well guarded by two local residents:

With some protest we were allowed to pass by the guards and return to the boat.  In several following days, we sampled many varieties of local tacos, including camerones (shrimp), langosta (lobster), pastor (marinated pork), and pollo (chicken), got our laundry done at a lavenderia (drop off in the morning, pick up in the afternoon, everything nicely folded and stuffed into a bag), and went down to Bahia de Concepcion (whose conception, I don’t know, but we did donate an anchor to Davey Jones Locker) and eventually made another overnight passage back to San Carlos.

My overall feeling about San Carlos is that it is a really charming place to visit, a blast out of the past with a visual appearance that reminded me of my youth in a small town in Idaho, USA, and it has everything needed to sustain a comfortable life, as proved by one final picture:

 

With tacos from paradise, and good espresso next door (with excellent free WIFI), what else does one need?  Adios, amigos!

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[1] Wood houses?  In Mexico??  All buildings are concrete in my experience, everywhere in Mexico, except in Santa Rosalia.  It is a scene reminiscent of some small town in the 1930s  in the US.