The sun came up at Frailes, but so did the wind. We knew that we wouldn’t be doing any snorkeling, so off we went to our next anchorage….Los Muertos. As we were leaving our anchorage we saw something jumping off our port bow. It was black and white and about a foot or two across…..what? As we got closer we discovered some type of ray (found out later it is a Mobula ray) leaping….many of them! What a cool sight!
Winds calmed, but remained on our nose, with waves 2 feet at 3 seconds. Bumpy ride! We were joined by a bird that decided we were the new flock and spent quite some time following us.
In the early afternoon the sun came out and the waves died a bit. The winds shifted to about 40 degrees off our bow and we pulled our sails. Ahhhh…..the beautiful sound of nothing but Slow Dancer slicing through the water! We enjoyed this for a while as the winds gradually died to 5 knots and shifted around in front of us. This meant that we had to tack back and forth to keep the sails full of wind. This was doing nothing for our forward progress. It was then 3 p.m. and we were about 2 hours from our anchorage. We knew that we had better turn on the engine to get in before dark. Entering a strange anchorage in the dark is not a good idea.
10 minutes into our motoring, Ken went below and shouted “cut the engine!!” Yikes! The entire cabin of the boat smelled of diesel fuel. Upon investigation, Ken realized that it was leaking from somewhere. While he looked for the source of the leak, we bobbed up and down on the waves not making any progress as the clock ticked on. A few minutes into this and not knowing how long it would take, Dale pulled the sails (first time alone!) and eased Slow Dancer toward the anchorage. We were making progress, slow progress, but we were inching closer. Meanwhile, Ken continued to investigate. About 5 minutes into the investigation, Ken determined that the secondary fuel filter had a pinhole leak in it. Whenever the engine was started, diesel spurted into the engine compartment. Fortunately, we had a spare so he proceeded to change it. After priming the filter, flooding the engine and cleaning up all of the spilled diesel we were ready to start it. Meanwhile we continued to make progress, but it was now 4:30 and the anchorage was at least an hour and a half away! It took a few tries, but old faithful sputtered to life and we were off! We coasted into Ensenada de los Meurtos just as the sun set and we plunked our anchor into the nice sand and finally took a breath! We are truly blessed!
This is a nice anchorage. Plenty large for the 8-10 boats that we shared it with. There were beautiful haciendas surrounding the bay with a nice little restaurant at the shoreline. The wind was calm and we bobbed at anchor for the night.
The next day we lowered our dinghy, “Tiny Dancer” into the bay. We pulled our little outboard from it’s resting place on our back railing got it on the back and took off to the beach and that lovely little restaurant, that hopefully had wi-fi to look at our next few days weather. We spent three nights at this calm anchorage and enjoyed buzzing back and forth on Tiny Dancer.
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