Bahia Algodones

Friday, June 24, 2011

027-56.900 N
111-5.900 W

Ahoy from Bahia Algodones!

I'm happy to report that our passage to Bahia Algodones went off without any issues. No more fuel related drama. I've gone back and re-calculated our fuel consumption and I think that I may have swapped 2 digits on the engine run hour meter. For example, instead of 4034 hours, I put down 4043 hours at my last fill, which is a difference of 11 hours and at 1.2 gallons per hour, that would be 13 gallons less fuel. Also since I've been running the generator hard, I've increased it's consumption from 0.25 GPH to 0.33 GPH. If you make these changes, then guess what? We were out of fuel. That hasn't happened since 1999 and it won't happen again!

Anyhow, it was quite the shock to come around the point at Bahia Algodones and be confronted by high rise hotels, cell towers and houses blanketing the beaches and hills of the bay. Considering that we've been traveling through areas devoid of virtually any civilization for weeks, the contrast was amazing.

Once again we had bashed our way into 3-4' SE seas on our way here and we were very happy to find that the anchorage was nice and calm. We were also happy to see that s/v Moon Drifter was there. We had met them in Puerto Escondido and they were a delightful couple who have been cruising down here for something like 17 years. We went out to lunch with them and had a nice time catching up and picking their brains about cruising around here and issues associated with storing the boat.

Bahia Algodones is a strange place. The beach is lined with houses which are wall to wall with each other and there's no access to the road other than through the marina. Even if we could get to the road, there doesn't appear to be any stores or restaurants in the area. So, other than a nice anchorage in shadow of an extinct volcano, there's not much to do here. As a result we only spent a night there and headed on to San Carlos, which was only about 8 miles away.

-- Geoff & Sue

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For the cruiser:

Bahia Algodones is a huge bay. Depending on wind conditions you can either anchor in either the NW corner or SE corner. We anchored 15' MLW over sand in the SE corner near the marina entrance.

We checked out the marina and noted that the finger piers needed a lot of work as many of them were not level which would have made walking difficult. The pilings were also quite short and I have to wonder what would happen if there were a tidal surge.

There's supposed to be a very good restaurant next to the Soggy Peso bar in the NW corner, but there was too much surge for us to be able to safely land the dinghy. The restaurant is named Bonifacio's Cotton Club Gourmet Restaurant and Beach Club and gets great reviews on trip advisor.

Log ID: 1461