The Taco Traveler

San Diego - Cabo Photoshare

I don't think I could have scripted a better scene than the 24 hours that passed after turning around in the entrance to Mag Bay. The winds, the boat, nature. Everything was perfect. The sunrise you see here is actually from the morning we arrived in Ensenada, but I hadn't yet downloaded the images to my computer, and this sunrise has to be seen.
 

Anyway, we left Mag Bay on a broad reach to the SSE, apparent wind about 100-120 degrees off our starboard quarter. We raised the cruising spinnaker and instantly we were making 7-8 knots under full main and spinnaker - absolutely cooking... with buttah. There was a decent swell from the NW, but Chemistry ate them up; they were barely noticable at that speed and at that angle of heel. After 2 1/2 hours, it was time to gybe and reduce sail for the night. So we took down the spinnaker and gybed to the SSE, and found ourselves - with just a slight wind shift - on a rhumb line to Cabo. I calculated that on that leg, for that 150 minutes, we averaged 8 knots. Yes, with a waterline of 35' 4", that's pretty much Chemistry's maximum theoretical hull speed, but there was a lot of surfing, too.

Our SSE leg to Cabo started with the wind at 150 degrees off the port quarter (180 degrees being dead downwind), so we just had the full main up (with preventer, of course) because at that angle in only 8-10 knots of wind it would have been difficult to keep a headsail full. But still, through the night, surfing down the NW swells, we made great time and direction.

By morning we were approaching Cabo, and the hills were visible at 25 miles away. Sometime around 11 am, my fishing line, loaded with the Cedar Plug, hit hard. This time it wasn't seaweed. I fought that fish for about 10 minutes and contemplated having Denali stop the boat and lower sail, which would have meant pointing the boat to windward (blowing about 20 knots), hitting some big, steep swells, and bringing in the main. It just seemed like - with full mainsail and 6-7 knots with surfing - it felt like a 400 pound marlin on the end of that line; I couldn't imagine why it wasn't leaping out of the water and giving us a show. Eventually, though, I started making progress as the fish tired, and in the pic you see the absolutely beautiful 15-20 pound yellowtail tuna. What followed was a bit comical, as Denali read to me from my new The Cruiser's Handbook of Fishing on how to kill, bleed and gut the fish. I'd done this with salmon before, but I wanted the meat to be sushi-grade. The photo you see has a 200 lb monofilament line sticking out of the fish, which is used to finish the him off by putting the line down his spinal column. It's called the Tanaguchi Method, and it's how to get the best-tasting tuna. It's called "Pithing," and the point is to stop biochemical reactions (which decrease meat quality) from originating from the intact spinal cord by destroying it. Probably TMI. So I thanked the fish and took a small bite, but there was no time for lots of sushi as we were approaching the cape.

Not 2 minutes after getting the cleaned fish into the icebox, Malavika and Denali got excited about a whale breach, so I grabbed my camera and went back up in time to catch the whale's next breach, which you see here. So cool.

When we rounded the arches into the harbor, that's when the craziness started. I felt like an old lady at a rock concert as maniacal fishing boats blasted in from sea toward the marina, me chugging along at 5 knots. This continued all the way to the fuel dock, being overtaken by jerks going 8 knots in a marina with a 45-foot sportfisher. Nice. Welcome to Cabo, and as one person said recently on a cruiser's forum: Miami Beach with Tacos.