Warm Water, Tropical Birds

Finally, we have reached the Baja Mexico that haunts the winterbound Oregon imagination: brilliant sunshine, warm dry air, and water temperatures reading about seventy degrees. We are in beautiful Bahia Maria, a big, calm water anchorage sheltered from the Pacific by a mountainous peninsula called Punta Hughes. Just south of here is the entrance to the much larger Magdalena Bay.
We arrived in Bahia Maria in the mid afternoon yesterday after a thirty-one hour downwind passage, more than half of it under sail. We used every combination of downwind rig: spinnaker; wing on wing with the jib poled out; jib alone, and mainsail with a motor assist. So, even though this was a shorter passage than some we have made, we ended up bone-tired last night, and were asleep by 7:30.