Agua Verde

It was a wonderful, hot night at San Evaristo. The water stayed like glass but there was an ever so light breeze to keep the sweat evaporating.

We woke fairly early and had about 44 nm to cover today to arrive at Agua Verde. It was still hot with no wind and 6-7 hrs of motoring sounded unappealing so we lifted up the anchor and moved the boat to a slightly more exposed bay for a quick snorkel to cool off.

It was a pretty spot for a snorkel with plenty of fish about. We came out of the water rejuvenated and inspired for a long summer of snorkeling.

It was only minutes after we got the anchor down that we were getting the snorkeling gear out. We were way too hot to waste any time doing anything other than jumping in.

Agua Verde is made up of three bays, and our bay was fairly tight, offering close snorkeling on either side of the boat. We swam to the closest point where tons of fish greeted us. The pelicans were further out on the point and the fish didn't mind us coming in close. All our boring freediving practice in La Paz was starting to pay off.

It was so nice to be able to dive deeper for longer than ever before! We’re diving about 30 feet pretty comfortably. But we would love to get better. We aren’t able to stay down for a minute yet, maybe one day soon.

As we came back to the boat we noticed a super yacht had pulled into the bay. They were just luanching their runabout. We packed away our snorkeling gear and were starting to get organised for dinner when they motored over to us with a huge garbage bag of ice to help us beat the heat. Whilst our freezer was working perfectly we wouldn't say no to an offering like this. We chatted for a few minutes, they were asking about where we had anchored. I think they will probably steal our spot when we head out in the morning.

The moment they left we packed the ice into smaller bags and made ourselves an ice cold Limonada.

It stayed hot all evening. I spent another night in the hammock on the bow. It was beautiful at night, the stars were amazing. A light breeze started to blow as we were heading to bed. It was warm but refreshing, bringing the heat off the dessert out to us. The Milky Way could be seen across the whole sky - and it’s all so bright.

Unfortunately the wind changed direction and continued to build. It was just enough to keep me awake in the hammock, so I moved back down below. I am not sure if this was more comfortable though, we had left the dinghy tied down on the bow so we could get away early in the morning again. With the dinghy on top, that means there's no breeze down below. I just had to try and get some sleep.

I don’t think either of us slept great, but luckily we had an easy sail on Sunday, so we could sleep in.

Between La Paz and Loreto is a beautiful section of coast. The sandy dunes we had grown accustom to as we had headed up from Cabo San Lucas was replaced by cliffs that had curving layers through out them.

We had heard nothing but good things about San Evaristo and Agua Verde, but unfortunately we were only going to be able to spend a night in each. We will definitely plan to go back this way and try to visit all the islands we are passing right now! Someone even described this area as sailing through the Grand Canyon, and I can definitely see that! But for now, we need cell coverage. We knew that there was some phone coverage in Puerto Escondido, but we were hoping we would be able to pick it up a little further south, but without knowing we would have to give ourselves the time to explore.

We only had 15 miles or so to do, but it had been hot all night so we had a quick breakfast and I caught up on the “Log from the Sea of Cortez”, I’m reading along as we go to the same places that Steinbeck visited decades before us. After breakfast we needed to have a long snorkel to cool down.

There’s a big rock separating our little bay and the big bay next to it. It was about 200-300 meters from the boat so we swam over and had an amazing snorkel. I saw 2 turtles! We finally swam with turtles! There were heaps of fish, but mostly I don’t know their names yet. We saw the red fan coral - I think that is special to the Sea of Cortez. There are always puffer fish under the boat. And lots of triggerfish. We saw schools of smaller bait fish. We found the smaller fish in the rocks that led out to the point. It was mostly less than 15 feet of water so snorkeling was easy, but as we got to the end of the point it got deeper quickly. The bigger fish hangout here and it was cool to try and swim down after then.

We wanted to stay and snorkel for longer, but we needed to get going. We were able to get the sails up immediately after pulling the anchor up. But this didn't last long. We ended up motoring for 2 hours before getting close to Candeleros Bay.