Puerto Escondido

Tags: Baja, Isla Carmen, Loreto, Mexico, Puerto Escondido, sailing

Date: April 20, 2024

After one night at anchor at Timbambiche we continued north towards the marina Puerto Escondido. Here we would be able to buy provisions for the first time since leaving La Paz. There are only four places to provision the boat on the Baja coast and the town of Loreto, a short distance from Puerto Escondido, is one of them.

On the way there we passed this steep little islet covered in bird poo:

Puerto Escondido means Hidden Harbor in Spanish and it is indeed almost invisible from the sea if one doesn't know it's there. It has a very narrow entrance and opens up to a quite large basin with the marina piers at one end and the rest of the basin filled up with mooring buoys that belong the marina. We had booked ahead and tied up to one of the buoys.

Here is the view from the tied-up boat towards the steep mountains in the background:

Another mountain view, with the marina buildings in the lower left corner:

In addition to buying food, we also went for a short hike a little distance from Loreto. We found a river bed with actual water running in it! A first on this trip:

Compared to the surrounding hills the river bed was very lush:

We saw a couple of hummingbirds drinking nectar from the flowering plants:

After leaving Puerto Escondido we sailed a short distance to Isla Danzante where we anchored for three nights. These six stingrays splashed around in the surface around the boat for quite a while one afternoon:

We continued on to a large island called Isla Carmen and anchored for just one night at Punta Colorado with a steep mountain the background:

The next day when we were getting ready to leave we saw something strange floating on the surface. When we got closer to get a good look, we saw this:

A dead moray eel! It looks like there is a fish tail sticking out of its mouth. Maybe it got too greedy and choked trying to swallow a fish that was too large.