As we worked our way down the outside of the Baja a cruiser who was headed North told us the above. At the time we wrote it off as just a bit of idle complaining from an 'experienced cruiser.' It didn't completely fit with our experience of the Pacific side of the Baja, where long stretches between safe anchorages, and a lack of services, made sailing a necessity rather than a luxury. However, as we passed Cabo San Lucas and moved into the Sea of Cortez, things have changed a bit. With anchorages more closely spaced, and more opportunities to re-fuel, we have definitely seen boats under sail entering into the minority.

We've talked quite a bit about this phenomenon, and we've looked closely at our own decisions over the past few passages and tried to analyze for ourselves what was driving our decision in those instances when we fired up the engine rather than sail.

In a sense what the engine provides that sailing doesn't is an element of predictability. You know what speed your boat goes under power, and you can more or less assume you will be able to make something close to that directly towards your destination. This becomes more and more appealing when you are talking about a series of anchorages spaced 60 miles apart (just on the line of what most boats can comfortably do during daylight hours if pushed at a good clip). If you motor all or a good part of the trip you can leave one anchorage in the early morning and be at the next anchorage before dark. If you sail...all bets are off.

For us, we've seen the 'predictability' element cause us to motor in two different types of circumstances. When headed into Los Frailes we were getting slammed by a nasty headwind and chop, and the choice we faced was to motorsail a decent portion of the afternoon, continue sailing and arrive in the anchorage after dark (possibly risky and definitely nerve-wracking), or continue sailing and spend the night out in the weather. We chose to motorsail and be assured of a comfortable and quiet night at anchor.

The other circumstance was from Los Frailes to Muertos. The weather pattern we had observed was calm winds during the night, light or calm winds all morning, and building winds from the NW in the afternoon. We had 60 miles to cover to windward, so we left the anchorage at midnight and motored until the morning, at which point we were only 20 something miles out from Muertos. We then sailed on the light winds into the anchorage, comfortable that if the winds died or picked up to an uncomfortable degree we would be within close striking distance of the anchorage.

In retrospect, both of these decisions were totally reasonable and served us well, the only problem with them is that they left us motoring significant portions of our passages rather than sailing. This was brought into sharp relief by our recent buddy-boating with Tao, who essentially haven't used their engine at all (anchoring included) since somewhere around Cedros Island (about a third of the way down the Pacific side of Baja). Julia and I are both totally impressed by this piece of seamanship, and we would be lying if we said it didn't make us feel a little sheepish at our reliance on our engine.

Digging a little deeper into why having a 'predictable' passage has equated in our minds to a 'good' passage, we realized that we just haven't gotten completely comfortable yet being on the boat underway. When on passage we both carry a good deal of tension about what might happen next, we lose sleep, and our bodies are tired from the physicality of it. This has unconsciously led to us treating the passages as something to be minimized, treated as a necessary evil. As we look back on this it is very disappointing, as one of the reasons we decided to take this trip was our love of sailing. In the whirlwind of new experiences and being stretched far past our comfort zone we had lost sight of that.

Our self-imposed challenge now is to push ourselves to not become complacent with the scurry from anchorage to anchorage approach to cruising, continuing instead to build the experience and confidence necessary to enjoy the passages as part of the whole experience. In support of this we are trying hard to identify how to make the boat easier to sail, continuing to learn what sail combinations are best for Pisces under different wind conditions, tweaking our watch schedule to find what works best for us, and generally pushing ourselves to continue sailing when the temptation to motor arises.

We are happy to report that we had the ideal start to this new approach on our passage from Muertos to Isla Partida. We left the anchorage an hour or so before Tao and Kaalelewa (sorry about the spelling!), and had a beautiful sail. We flew downwind all afternoon with the poled out jib and staysail, had a couple of monster fish bites and broke a fishing line, spent a night drifting in a calm West of Isla Espiritu Santo, and then a fresh breeze in the morning leaded to a fun upwind sail to Isla Partida trading tacks with Tao.

We are now anchored at Ensenada Grande at the northern edge of Isla Partida, an amazingly beautiful uninhabited nature preserve. Tao and Pisces have had the anchorage more or less to themselves, and we have been exploring partially submerged lava caves , hiking across the island to view the rugged Eastern coast, and enjoying the sort of silence that you don't even realize you haven't been having until you come to a place as deserted as this.

24 33' N, 110 23' W