Wahoo!

We made it back to La Paz!  After 3 1/2 months exploring the Sea of Cortez, we rolled into Marina Palmira in La Paz yesterday afternoon.  It was a bit of a strange feeling as we felt like we were coming back home.  We had only spent six weeks here earlier this summer, but we had made friends and fell a bit in love with this Mexican town.

When I last wrote, we were en route to Punta Pulpito.  From there, we went to Puerto Ballandra on Isla Carmen, Caleta Candeleros Chico, Puerto Los Gatos, San Evaristo, Isla San Francisco, Caleta Partida and then La Paz. Whew!  It was a lot of miles to cover, but we averaged about 30 miles a day (about 6 hours sailing at 5 knots) and were able to stop each night in a beautiful anchorage.  We had to do quite a bit of motoring as there wasn’t a lot of wind, but we made it work.

You may recall that we had complained a bit that we hadn’t had much fishing luck in the southern part of the Sea earlier this summer.  It didn’t seem like the fishing got good until we got north of San Francisquito.  Now back down south, we weren’t too optimistic about our fishing prospects.  We had gotten a bit spoiled eating fresh fish every night up north and we were now reduced to eating frozen hamburger patties and questionable chicken I found at the bottom of the freezer!

Mike, ever the fisherman, always has the trolling lines out.  We had pulled in several skipjack over the previous few days that we threw back.  So, when we were just a couple of miles out of San Evaristo and the line started to zing, Mike was sure we had another feisty skipjack on the line.  We slowed the boat down and Mike started fighting the fish into the boat, but we couldn’t yet see him.

Suddenly, as the fish got closer and must have seen the boat, he took off like a bullet peeling out line and creating a huge splash at the surface.  Mike turned to me with a huge grin and said “that’s no skipjack!”  It was a few minutes later that Mike got him close enough to identify him, and it was a wahoo!  We were both shouting wahoo! and jumping up and down.  This was the first wahoo we had caught, and this was a big one!

We measured him at 50 inches, and Mike says he was at least 50 lbs.  He wouldn’t even fit on our filet table!  It took Mike a couple of hours to clean the fish and the mess left on the boat.  Thankfully, we got all the fish in the freezer right before we pulled into Isla San Francisco.  We shared a bunch of the fish with our friends on Adios who were also in the anchorage, and we’ve now given more fish to some friends here in La Paz.  Even eating wahoo for lunch and dinner everyday, it is a lot of fish for two people to eat!

We’re in La Paz for a week to do some serious cleaning of the boat and a couple of maintenance projects.  Next, we will be crossing the Sea of Cortez to Topolobampo on the mainland.  Our plan is to see the famous Copper Canyon there that is four times a big as the Grand Canyon!  I hope to have a lot of great pictures to share with all of you.

~katie