SV Luna Moth

On December 7th, we went to bed early and got up at midnight to head out of San Diego Harbor to sail south to Ensenada, Mexico, our first foreign port of call. While we don’t love departing in the dark, leaving was pretty easy as we had a near full moon, a clear sky, and a channel wide enough for two aircraft carriers to pass each other. Happily it was also pretty warm.

When coastal sailing between San Diego and Ensenada you have two route choices, either inside or outside of the Coronado Islands, which lie about eight miles off of the coast of northern Baja. Between the islands and the mainland the water is relatively shallow, which can make waves a lot more unpleasant, but more significantly means a lot of lobster pots and active fishing vessels. It’s also home to numerous wrecks, the charting of which is questionable. The outside route is in deep water (deep water is safe water in our opinion) and gave a little more hope for good sailing wind, but adds five or six nautical miles to the passage. We opted for the long route to avoid the stress of finding a crab pot with our propeller in the dark.

At 0215 we crossed into Mexican territorial waters to the sound of Jimmy Buffett’s cover of “Mexico” playing on the speaker. While the more wind thing didn’t exactly work out in our route choice, as we passed the islands and saw the lights of all the fishing vessels nearshore, we were pretty happy with our choice.

As the sun rose, the land breeze picked up and we found ourselves with enough wind to sail. Yay! We’d popped a couple of rivets on the boom and didn’t feel great about loading it up with the mainsail, so we happily puttered along on just the Genoa (larger headsail on our forward most furler).

Since we purchased Mexican fishing licenses online before our departure, we decided to once again give fishing a go. This time instead of catching kelp, we fished all morning only to find our lure had been bitten off along the way. Our theory is we caught something and it got snapped up by a shark before we realized it. We’re not doing great on the fishing front. The dolphins entertained us again, which makes up for a lot.

Entering Bahía Todos Santos, the bay were Ensenada is, is a cake walk compared to past harbors we’d entered. The marina also made things extra easy with a clear map, well marked docks, and Riccardo, who met us at our slip to grab lines and get us settled in.

We arrived too late in the afternoon to check into the country, so we had our mooring snaps, got settled a little and checked in with the marina.

While other countries may require you to tie up at a customs dock and remain in your vessel until your checked in, in Mexico, you go to the various offices and do paperwork there. In Ensenada it was particularly easy as the immigration department, the port captain, customs, and the bureau that handles vessel imports are all in the same building. Our marina made it extra easy driving us over to the office and by shepherding almost all of the paperwork through for us. They even took us to an ATM on the way back.

The downside of our marina is that it’s also a port for cruiseships, with most days seeing at least one of the behemoths tied up to a nearby pier. As we headed into town to do what every person arriving in Mexico does, go for tacos, we got caught up in a wave of tourists all headed for the waterfront restaurants and trinket stalls. They turned left, we turned right, ending up at a little locals place specializing in smoked marlin tacos.

We spent the next week exploring Ensenada and recovering a little from our run down the coast, but we’ll talk more about that in a coming entry…