Bahia Concepcion

El Burro Cove and one of our sisterships

We left San Juanico at dawn headed for Bahia Concepcion.  We figured the trip would take 8 to 10 hours depending on conditions.  Our hope was to use the forecasted south wind to actually sail there.  Of course, the wind only came up during the last hour of the trip.  We dropped anchor in El Borro Cove, home of Geary the famous ham radio weather guy for Baja.  He lives in an off the grid palapa on the beach with a few other ex-pats nearby and about a dozen other palapas.  Bahia Concepcion is a huge bay about the size of the San Francisco Bay south of the Bay Bridge.  And it is hot!  It is always about 10 degrees hotter here than anywhere else in Baja.  During our stay, the daytime temps ranged from 96 to 105 in the shade.  The water temperature was 85 deg.  Despite the heat, we did manage to make some shoreside excursions.

One morning we decided to find the ancient indian petroglyphs that were reported to be in the hills above Berthas Restaurant on the beach.  So off we went with some water, climbing through the lava rocks again.  Although we initially went the wrong direction, we finally did find the petroglyphs.  They were spectacular.  There were hundreds of drawings.  Once again, a national treasure forgotten beside the road.  Although it did appear that a small amount of the pictures may have been recently put there by pranksters, the vast majority appear to be the real deal.  There were some on rocks that were pressed up against 100 year old trees, so they certainly were not recent.  The old river bed here looked like an area that had been inhabited in the past until the water dried up.

Turtle

Fish

??

Cathy found one that matched her shirt!

View of the anchorage

It had been awhile since we checked our email, and we heard there was a trailer park up the road that had a restaurant with free wifi.  So off we went looking for Estrella del Mar.  We inadvertently found ourselves hiking through the town dump, but at least it was a good dirt road.  The restaurant and bar were very nice, and occupied with a few trailer park locals.  However, we could not get the wifi to work properly.  Another guy at the bar tried to get his computer to work and verified that it wasn’t working.  That was it.  No one knew how to make it work, and no one seemed to care, not the owner, no one.  Maybe they should take down the big “Free WiFi” sign?  So we borrowed another cruiser’s computer that came into the bar later and checked our email on his.  He had a cable to plug into the router directly.  The food wasn’t too bad and the beer was very cold, so not a total waste of a hike through the desert.  We only did a little fishing and kayaking here as the temps during the day were too bloody hot to be out in the sun.  We did spend a lot of time just floating in the water until our fingers looked like raisins.

El Burro Cove condo