splendid isolation: ABREOJOS

Abreojos

12/2 - 12/4

Pulled up the anchor at 8:30AM and pulled out of Hipolito for another day sail south to Abreojos which translates to “open your eyes” due to the fact that coming into the bay you have to be aware that there are quite a lot of reefs, shoals, rocks, and breaking waves. We had a pretty shifty morning sail with good speed steady 6-7kts. The swell kind of choppy and uncomfortable. ‘sweet dreams’ broke their boomvang and had to jerry rig it. But once the afternoon set in the wind calmed down for the rest of the day. We had a beautiful sail with the most dolphins ever chasing our boat. We also came within 40ft of two HUGE whales. Caught another Mahi but didn’t have ice and threw it back. We cut it really wide and got into Abreojos at 16:00. We anchored a lot farther offshore than ‘sweet dreams’ because the water was only 20ft. deep and I was weary of possible breaking surf at low tide. The surf was breaking along the whole coast for at least 5 miles. 12/3 we went to shore in the morning and explored the tidepools. I brought my skimboard and surfboard. Got a few rides about thigh high. Nothing too exciting but you could tell that this place goes off with a good swell. We liked the beach so much (reminded me of Hatteras) that we decided to pack up our camping gear and spend a night on land. We came back to shore and hitched a ride into town. Not much to offer except tequila and cervezas. We had to walk back, at least 4 or 5 miles. When we got back noah and christina from ‘sweet dreams’ had a bonfire going. We explored all the abandoned fish camp shacks and found a lot of good wood. We had the fire going all night cooking fish and ashcakes. Popped the tent and slept cold. 12/4 we’ve been getting better at timing our sails so we can get into the bays while its still daylight and get the anchor down before dark. It was 65 miles south to San Juanico so we decided to pull up the hook at 16:30 and sail all night, that way if we took a long time we would get there between sunrise and noon. Well we got going on a great sail. Over 8kts sometimes. By 22:00 the wind was howling and we needed to drop the main sail (which I would have preferred completely down or at least reefed, but when you’re sailing on shift watches everything can’t go your way) We had a nasty time bringing the mainsail down in all that wind and got thrown around for quite a few tosses, of course exploding our whole home. Once we got the main sail down we kept going with just the jib and motor on. A lot more stable and consistent.