We arrived at 0730. Coming in we could tell this place was going to be “wild”. Thousands of seabirds were soaring the winds above the island and in the last 5 miles coming in at around sunrise, we must have seen half a dozen whales breaching and otherwise jumping around. Ann swore she saw one do a back flip. I told her she was nuts until I saw the same thing later in the day from our anchorage.

As we approached the island, I woke up in the middle of the night and heard Ann talking up on deck. At first, in my sleepy haze and not knowing exactly where I was, I just assumed she was on the phone. Then with full consciousness coming on I remembered we were about 50 miles off the coast of Mexico and thought; “Has all this sailing sent her over the edge?” Climbing out of the bunk at around 0230, I slipped out of the quarterberth and up the companion way ladder, hearing a lilting voice; “Where are you? Come on out. Come back and play some more”. What the heck? The answer become clear in a couple seconds when I heard a splash and ‘whoof’. Dolphins playing by the stern. The dolphin whisperer was back.

Ann is the only person I have ever seen who can in fact, talk to the dolphins. During the day, when she laughs with joy at them, they jump out of the water in response. Now at night her lilting voice got them to spin around Charisma and talk back. They were chattering at her. Her voice must have a frequency that they like.

(From Ann) Actually they frightened me at first. I am on early morning watch and keep hearing puffs and smelling fish. I look around and because the moon as set already I see nothing. I even stand up on the deck and look, sure that something is about to get me – like a pod of killer whales! Then I realize that we are just off of the penal colony island where I read about an escape just as we got to La Paz. Now I’m really concerned. I think to myself, if it were dolphins I would see their phosphorescent trail in the water, right? And suddenly there it was! There were lots of trails as the dolphins played around the stern! My friends were back. (I tried to keep it quiet but found that both keeping my voice down and keeping on course became a problem. Oops!) BACK TO BOB…

This leg was about 90 miles and turned out to take us 21 hours. Of that time, we motored one and a half hours out of Mazatlan and ran under very shortened sail coming into Isabel, slowing from 6 knots to 3 knots for about 4 hours, in order to delay our arrival until after sunrise. All in all, this was a nice passage with fairly light winds most of the way. For the most part we were seeing 8 knot winds, but they went from 17 gusting to 25 for a couple hours just after sunset, to about 2 knots for a couple of hours on Ann’s watch around 0100. We didn’t see any other boats closer than 7 miles and those were probably fishing boats nearer the coast than we were. Overall a nice sail.